The Mad King (The Dark Kings #1)(21)

I hadn’t known what to say or what to think, so I’d simply stared at him as he’d studied me. I’d known of the Greek myths, gone to college, read a few books about them, and had been convinced they were nothing more than ancient fairy tales.

And yet the hulking beast of a man had snatched me away from that blessed darkness as easily as swatting a gnat.

I’d had myself pretty much convinced by the time I’d croaked that all the Wonderland nonsense that’d filled my head had been nothing more than my disease-addled brain gasping its last. My parents had always told me I was wrong. My friends had even occasionally mocked my belief in something more, and eventually I’d come to the conclusion that I really was insane.

The underworld proved otherwise. If this existed, was it really a far stretch to believe Wonderland did too? I didn’t think so.

I should be happy in this new place I now found myself in. Raised with a loose Buddhist belief system, I’d expected my death to result in an eventual rebirth of some sort. But not this. Not an actual afterlife.

My only hope had been that I wouldn’t return to the Earth some kind of disgusting bug. But I hadn’t wanted to be human again either. Being human sucked. It hurt.

My life had been nothing but pain and doctors and illness. Screw that. I’d wanted a nice, safe afterlife. Something badass but simple, where life was little more than eating, sex, and babies. The blessed numbness of being an animal, that’s what I’d been hoping for. I hadn’t wanted to think about love. Lust. Pain. Sorrow. War. Pride. Disease. Fear.

Basically I was hoping for a brain the size of a walnut where none of those poisonous emotions could ever affect me again.

And though parts of Elysium were as beautiful as the name itself, with rolling rivers, blue skies, and lush fields of wildflowers, it did not bring me any sort of contentment.

In fact, my moods were so dark that I’d scared off the other spirits who’d tried at first to get to know me. But I wouldn’t speak to them. Wouldn’t even acknowledge them, and if that was rude of me, I honestly didn’t care. Eventually they’d gotten the hint and drifted off to their safe and perfectly perfect afterlives, murmuring about me behind my back.

Too weird.

Odd.

Mad.

I scoffed, like I cared. They were nothing to me. I wasn’t here to make friends or dance and party my way through the afterlife. In fact, I still didn’t know why I was here. All I knew was the memories of who I’d once been, they were still in me.

The dreamer.

The loner.

The baker.

The lover of all things Alice and Hatter.

My breath caught on a sob. Wasn’t death supposed to cure the hurt? Wasn’t it supposed to make it all better?

There was no way for me to convey just how miserable I was.

How bleak this otherwise beautiful world looked to me. How empty. I sat, surrounded by some of the prettiest flowers I’d ever seen, and felt absolutely nothing as I plucked off one petal after another after another, leaching them all of any sort of beauty, turning them as withered and dreary as I was inside.

And each day that rolled by turned a little bleaker. A little more gray. Literally draining the colors from my surroundings, which had once been so pretty. When I’d first arrived, this place had been heaven.

But it was now becoming my personal brand of hell.

Above, the sky was turning a haunting shade of gray. The winds were no longer calm, but cool and beating at me. The flowers were nearly all stripped. And no life buzzed around me.

Fat flakes of snow had begun to drop.

I wasn’t sure how or why this was happening. When I looked at other portions of Elysium, they were still bucolic and nauseatingly fairy-talesque. It was only where I stood that the world died. I knew it wasn’t me affecting this change; I was pathetically human. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I’d been brought to a place I didn’t belong. I should still be out there, floating in the darkness, waiting to turn into a dung beetle or something else. Anything else.

The truth was, though, I actually preferred this bleakness to the too-perfect, sunshiny place it’d once been. I glanced to the left, my attention snared by a couple dancing and, yes, frolicking together.

Remember those old cartoons, where time seems to move in slow motion and the couple running through a field of flowers never tear their eyes off each other as they run in ways that defy gravity, practically floating on air as little heart-shaped bubbles float around their faces? This was that, times a million.

My upper lip curled with disgust.

The lovers stumbled over into my side of the field, giggling stupidly as they fell into one another’s arms with a loud “oomph.”

“Are you hurt?” she asked, shoving luscious locks of brown hair out of her deep blue eyes.

Smiling up at her from where he still lay, he shook his head. “The only wound I could ever suffer again, Delilah, would be if you were to ever leave me.”

And at first I wanted to laugh at how asinine that line had been. Like c’mon, seriously? That was more pathetic than Romeo and Juliet, and way, way too smooth. And yet I saw the way her eyes softened as she gazed down upon him and how gently his fingertips ran along the creaminess of her smooth cheek, and deep down I knew it hadn’t been a line at all.

Something painful ripped through my chest, made me clutch at it with now-trembling fingers, and I didn’t stop to censor myself, because I was suddenly and profoundly angry.