“You will never go home, cancerous little polyp!” Queen Red screams.
I almost don’t catch what happens next. Rabid’s hands move faster than a shock of lightning, slipping out a blade that magically slices through Queen Red’s metal chains. It happens so quickly, no one else even notices until the queen flaps her wings and grabs Alice by her shoulders, lifting her into the air. The judge’s stork snatches the blade from the floor and follows Queen Red as she flies with Alice out the courtroom door, along with everyone else.
The minute they’re gone, I strain against Morpheus’s hold. “Follow them!” I demand.
“Follow them yourself,” he says, and releases me. I scream, somersaulting in midair, my stomach bobbing into my throat. An itch begins behind my shoulder blades, as if something is scratching to get out; then it’s gone as soon as it started. Inches away from striking the floor headfirst, I flip around and drop into my chair, teacup in hand. The chess pieces lie scattered on the table’s surface, as if the re-enactment never happened.
I know better.
Morpheus sits across from me, spinning Queen Red’s chess piece as my stomach sinks back into place.
“How does it end?” I ask.
“Your nightmare knows.”
I place the Alice figure upon a black square. “The stork and the queen fought in midair. Alice escaped and came looking for you.”
“But I couldn’t do a bloody thing for her because I had already begun my metamorphosis. I was locked in that cocoon for seventy-five years.”
“So how did Alice win?”
Morpheus rolls the statue of the red queen across the board, knocking over Alice. “She didn’t. As you know very well, her lineage was cursed.”
“And that’s why you brought me here.”
He nods once. “To set your family free and reopen the portals back home, you must fix all the messes that caused Queen Red to be exiled and lose her crown: drain the ocean, return the gloves and fan to the duchess, make peace with the clams and the tea party guests. Only you can break Red’s magic bonds.”
A weighty silence follows, broken only by the sound of the cascading waterfall around the bed. I reach for the caterpillar figurine, but Morpheus’s hand catches mine. Warmth seeps through his glove and into my bones.
For an instant, I see him so clearly as the teasing child he was when we spent time together in my dreams. I understood him then, why he collected moth corpses, because their wings represented freedom, something that he’d been without while locked inside his cocoon … why he loved flying, especially in storms, because outrunning the lightning gave him a sense of power. Just like he understood my quirks: my fear of heights, my hunger for security. But here, he’s tortured, seductive, and unreadable. All grown up with just as much baggage as me.
“That’s why you’re involved,” I mumble, testing a hypothesis. “To appease your guilty conscience for failing Alice.”
Hissing, he stands in a rushed flurry of wings and leather. Gusts from the movement flit through my hair. “My guilt for what happened with Alice can never be appeased.” He snatches up the Cheshire Cat figurine and paces the rug. Despite his impressive height, he’s as graceful as a black swan. “And don’t delude yourself. I’m not quite that unselfish.”
“I know you too well to think otherwise.” I lift an eyebrow, toasting him with my teacup.
He looks at me briefly, almost smiling. “In her fight with the stork, Red managed to get the blade. I might’ve been unreachable in my cocoon, but Chessie was there. He dived for Alice before Red could behead her. He took the strike that was meant for the child.” Morpheus balances the cat figurine on his fingertip, holding it up to the light. “Chessie is of a rare strain—not one part spirit and one part flesh but both at once. He can vanish and reappear in midair and twist himself into any shape. Such a being is nigh impossible to kill. When Red cut him with the vorpal sword—the one blade that can slice through any magic in the nether-realm—it cleaved his magic in twain. Split in two, but still alive.”
“So he didn’t die?” I set my teacup aside.
“Not exactly. His head rolled toward the bushes where Alice was hiding. He managed to catch the vorpal sword in his mouth and spat it at her feet. Chessie’s bottom half was captured by Queen Red, and in one last act of defiance, she fed it to her pet bandersnatch before she was captured and banished from the kingdom.”
Morpheus shakes the box that earlier held the chess pieces. Out falls the biggest figurine of all: a grotesque creature with dragon’s talons and a spiked tail. Its gaping mouth and jagged teeth send a shudder of terror up my spine. When I was little, I used to hide this one while we animated the other pieces.