She looked at the little fairy. “My mother always told me it was uncanny. I’ve seen the pictures. We look exactly the same.” Deflated, she leaned her head against the wall. No wonder Hatter had been so cruel. She understood it, didn’t mean she forgave him, but she understood it now. “Why in the hell would you bring me here? He’ll never be able to look beyond...” Alice traced a hand down her body.
Danika grabbed Alice’s numb fingers and gave them a gentle rub. “You must make him see you, Alice. You.” She shook her finger for emphasis. “The moment I saw your grandmother my body shot with sparks of right. But I know now it wasn’t for her— it was the bloodline, the eventuality of you. He’s never responded to any of the Alices the way he did her. But how he responded to her is but a drop in the bucket to the way he feels for you. I know my Hatter and I know you’ve completely disrupted his narrowed worldview. I believe the only reason why he got swept up in that Alice was because he sensed as I did the tremblings of your coming.”
Alice snorted. “Oh yeah, cutting up my heels was his way of showing his undying devotion.”
“Does he not show any warmth toward you? Any sort of spark?”
Alice remembered his touch, his eyes... how they’d gazed at her, as if seeking to slip into her soul and she shivered.
Danika smiled. “Aye, you call to him. You are his, Alice. I know it. Now we must convince him.”
Alice crossed her heels and shook her head. “What if I’m not ready? Huh? What if I don’t want to?” A part of her totally did, but another part, the rational side of her was afraid. She had a life back home. She couldn’t be expected to stay here forever. Could he come back with her? Did she want him to?
Danika alighted on the end of her bed. “He’s dying, dear.” The fairy’s words echoed with anguish so thick Alice’s throat tightened.
“Dying?” she whispered.
The fairy looked around the room with a sad smile and as she did the walls literally seemed to vanish into mist, revealing the outside beauty of nature surrounding his home. “He is Wonderland. This beautiful madness? It’s all a product of his deliriously wicked mind. It’s lovely chaos, and it’s consuming him. Surely you’ve noticed his preoccupation with riddles and gibberish?”
Alice bit her bottom lip, rocking backwards. Dying? The Hatter? The beautiful, sexy man who made her want to scream and throw herself on him? “You’re lying,” she hissed, her lungs heaving for oxygen as the images conjured made her want to weep.
Alice might be upset with him, might even want to hurl sticky buns at his head every once in a while, but she couldn’t imagine a world in which he didn’t exist.
“I wish that I were.” Danika’s lip quivered.
Alice swallowed hard. “But, how can I save him?”
“Love.” Danika smiled. “True love. He must find his mate, his perfect match and equal. She is the only one who can pull him from the ever increasing insanity of his mind.”
The enormity of that burden was daunting. How could she do that? He didn’t even like her. “What if I’m not the one? What if you’re wrong again?”
Even saying it hurt. Did she want to be? She’d never been so angry, or so aroused by anyone else. For years Hatter had been her constant thought. What if he could never get past her looks? She couldn’t help who she was and she’d never be content in a relationship if he wasn’t as wildly in love with her as she was with him. Especially if he only considered her a replacement for the one he’d really wanted.
“You are. I know it,” Danika said, cutting into her thoughts.
“Oh yeah, how? He thought he was in love before— you said that yourself.” She lifted a challenging brow. “He might still be in love with my grandmother.”
Danika pressed her lips together. “Wonderland did not accept her and Wonderland is not just a place in a book, Alice. Wonderland is an extension of the man himself. Wonderland will open like a flower to the sun, the land will roll and the wind will hum when the true Alice is found.”
Her heart sank like a rock. “Well there you go,” she muttered, “it hasn’t done that. Obviously, it’s not me.”
Danika shook her finger. “Your time is not yet up. You’ve only just met; it takes longer than a mere night for true love to bloom.”
Alice rolled her eyes. “Well if that’s what you’re basing it off of, it sure as hell takes longer than three days.”
“Not so, dear. True soul mates know. They always do.”
Alice couldn’t stop the nagging thought that she had known. Even at 13, she’d fallen in love. As much in love as a child could be. But he didn’t remember her. That much was clear, because he’d made no mention of that earlier meeting.
In all her years, she’d never once heard her great-grandmother speak of the Hatter. Alice would have guessed the woman hadn’t even known of his existence. And yet she did and when Alice had spoken of Hatter in her hospital room, her grandmother had been there. It’d been her great-grandmother who’d insisted her mother take Alice to an asylum. That spiteful wench! Alice ground her molars as fire burned in her gut.
How could he ever see beyond that?