The Mad King (The Dark Kings #1)(22)

“He doesn’t mean it.” I bit out the biggest lie I’d ever uttered.

They both looked over to me in surprised shock, and I curled my upper lip, feeling feral and cranky. “Get off my lawn.”

Jeez, all I needed now was a cane and a hunched back and I’d be the stereotype of the crotchety old grandma. I knew that, and yet I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

“Well, I’m—” the girl started, but again I was in no mood to even pretend at playing nice.

“I said, off!” And this time when I did, they suddenly went tumbling away, head over feet, back onto their side of the field, sputtering as they went. It’d been as if some great big wind had shoved them back.

Blinking, and a teeny bit shocked by their sudden absence myself, I frowned. What the hell had that been? Almost like... magic? Turning my hand palm side up, I stared at it with horrified fascination, noticing the slight tremor to it that hadn’t been there before. Had I—

No.

“Don’t be stupid, Alice,” I murmured, but couldn’t quite get my heart to stop galloping in my chest. Giving my head a good shake, I rubbed at my brow. I was dead, I shouldn’t be capable of getting headaches, and yet I was. There was a doozy coming on.

I’d never been a hateful person in life, but I was quickly becoming a bitter one in death. No matter how many times I tried not to think back to the last thought I’d suffered in life, my thoughts always invariably returned there.

Hatter hadn’t come for me.

Of course, being dead and all, it was stupid to think he ever would have. I’d been so sure of him, even when the rest of the world had told me I was insane.

When my friends refused to be my friends anymore. When my own family had turned on me, their faces angry and their tempers frayed when I dared to make mention of him. I’d been so sure, I’d built my entire self around him and that world.

I’d memorized every line of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Had themed my cupcakery after him. Everything that’d been me had been centered around him.

“A beautiful lie,” I whispered, and my voice sounded like the melodic strains of ghost song. “All a lie.”

And just as they had every day since coming here, my eyes flooded with tears, which clogged up my throat with heat. Everything I thought I’d ever known had been nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

I’d been sick. And I’d denied it for so long. But it had to be true. As much as I’d loved him, had he been real, he would have come for me. I knew that to be as certain as the setting of the sun each night. And so my mind flip-flopped as it always did. Just because Hades was real, didn’t mean Hatter was.

Closing my eyes, I fisted my hospital gown and sobbed bitter tears, broken to my very core. Which was just stupid. I didn’t understand why a lie, or fabrication, or whatever the heck he really was, could mess me up this way.

I didn’t understand why it was that I felt so achingly empty. Like less than half a person. All my life I’d been sure in the knowledge that there was more to me than what the rest of the world got to see.

That it was only a matter of time before I discovered what that “moreness” really was. Even now, a spirit with far too good a memory, I still felt that giant moreness within me. Something buried deep, but very much living and breathing, just waiting on me to remember.

I snorted. God, I was stupid. There wasn’t more to me. This was who I was, a giant failure at life who’d clung to a wasted hope of something that had never been real. I was nothing. No one. Just another human being who’d had her time and moved on and would soon be forgotten by all.

I sniffed at the stupid tears raining down my cheeks again. The wind howled, and icy chunks the size of my thumbnail pelted my head. It stung, but I couldn’t seem to make myself move. I was sinking into an existential crisis of epic proportions right now. God, the afterlife sucked.

And then a memory stopped my morose thoughts cold. A class I’d taken in college as a way to make an easy A, before it’d dawned on me that I had no desire to be white-collar anything and that my real passion lay with baking.

The class had been religions of the ancient world. In it there’d been a section covering Greek mythos, but most especially the underworld.

I blinked, then jumped to my feet and shook my head as that memory guided me as though by unseen forces forward.

There were five rivers in the underworld.

Acheron, the river of woe.

Cocytus, the river of lamentation.

Phlegethon, the river of fire.

Styx, the river of hate and the unbreakable oath.

And finally, Lethe—the river of forgetfulness.

Swiping at the tears streaming down my cheeks, I picked up my pace, moving first at a trot, then a light jog, until finally I was at an all-out sprint. I pumped my arms and my legs as I barreled through the perfectly even terrain covered in golden rays of sunshine and full of perfectly happy, perfectly nauseating people.

I followed the winding trail of the river until suddenly it began to bisect into different paths, turning into two, then three, four, until finally there were five separate branches spiraling off into different locations.

Heaving for breath, I studied the people standing beside each of the tributaries. The river of fire was easy enough to figure out.

As were Acheron and Cocytus when the people who’d drunk from them began to wail and gnash their teeth. Why in the heck anyone would willingly add more woe to their eternal sentence was beyond me; then again, maybe the big guys in black cowls standing behind them and looking vaguely reaperesque while holding those scary-looking sickles to their backs might have something to do with it too.