The Mad King (The Dark Kings #1)(8)

But Danika was slipping from me. Her tears were so thick I knew she could not see me. And though my claws had now broken skin, her entire body quaked beneath my hands.

Four words whispered on the winds before I lost her completely.

“Honolulu. Mad Hatter’s Cupcakery.”





Chapter 4


Alice


I lay in bed, surrounded by those I loved, calling out to him until my throat bled raw.

He never came.

Beep.

Whoosh.

Gasping breath.

Rattling lungs.

Fingers weakened as I gripped the sheets.

He’d promised me.

At thirteen.

My Hatter. My truest and only love. I’d thought he’d been real. Believed he’d been as real as me. At thirteen, it’d been the memory of his coming to me that’d caused me to fight that tumor then. To try to get better. And he had come.

Or at least I thought he had.

I’d seen an image of his smiling and far more handsome face than I’d ever dreamed possible after reading his story in the book.

My parents hadn’t believed me when I’d told them of my miracle. They’d sent me to a psychiatrist, and for years I had forgotten all about him. I’d moved on. Until the tumor had returned a few months ago, and with it the clarity of memories buried under years of denial.

“Are you real?” I mumbled in my fevered delirium, floating in a numbed haze of morphine and pain as I once again floated back to that time when I’d called and he’d answered.

I am...

I shook as I heard the deep and sonorous treble of his words echo through time and space. The words the devil-eyed and gorgeous man had once whispered to me so long ago.

“You’re. So. Beautiful.” Each word was excruciating to push past my lips, each one ending on a desperate gasp for air. But I was caught up in the past. Caught up in the moment that the Hatter had come for me.

Voices echoed around me in the room, yanking me, reluctant, back into the present, into the pain of the now. The heated whispers of my mother. Father. Sister. And my best friend Tabby.

I was only twenty-four. Leaving them all far too soon. I hoped they’d forgive me for this. Hoped they’d understand.

Footsteps pounded out the door as someone’s breath caught on a violent sob. At a guess, I’d say Tabby had left. I was surprised she’d stayed as long as she had. My best friend had never done well when around illness, let alone near death.

“Who is she talking to?” My mother’s voice?

I wanted to tell her it was okay. But I’d used all the breath I’d had left in me. I had seconds left, and I knew it. Being lucid, being here with them, it hurt too much.

I’d fought for as long as I could, but I could no longer stay. I had to let go, and they had to let me go.

“She’s lost herself in that book again,” a man’s voice said. Maybe my father’s. Maybe not.

Everything has beauty. But not everyone sees it...

A tear leaked from the corner of my eye as my heart broke into a million bitter shards of pain and regret. Those had been the words Hatter had whispered to me when I’d only been thirteen and had confessed with a youthful heart full to bursting with love how beautiful I’d thought him to be.

Hatter. My Hatter. You never came for me... And now I must go into that long cold night. It was senseless, this overwhelming aching, loneliness I felt for a fictional character in a fictional story.

But I knew I wasn’t crazy.

Or maybe I was.

He had come for me once.

Or maybe he hadn’t.

He’d ruined me for all men.

At least that part was true enough. Hatter had been all things to me in life.

Wherever he was now, whether real and living or merely ink upon the pages of a book, I hoped he was happy. And though I knew he’d not come to me this time, I whispered to him upon the breeze, pushing the magic of belief into each pain-filled thought, knowing in my fevered delirium that somewhere in the eternal vastness of reality and fiction, he’d hear me and know, feeling as if my heart truly shattered with my parting words.

And with those final thoughts, I released the very last breath my body held and slipped into the void of infinite darkness.

*

Hatter

Rolling over in bed, I gathered the lumpy body pillow tight to me. My dreams tonight were restless. Painful.

My breathing heavy.

Alice and I shared a room, but for many years now we’d stopped sharing a bed. We now slept in separate beds on opposite ends of the room. Even so, my tossing and turning had irritated her throughout the night. She’d thrown no less than three pillows at my head, demanding I shut up and stop moving or she’d kick me out. Finally she’d made good on her threat. I’d been forced to move into the living room, to the too-small couch before the hearth, staring at the dancing flames until sleep had claimed me once again.

I grunted, kicking out a leg. My chest began to ache, and I rubbed at it. Gently at first, then with more pressure. Was I dying?

Was that possible?

And yet I knew something was terribly and horribly wrong with me tonight. My skin crawled with beads of sweat, shivered with the rush of electrical sparks. And then, just as I took my next breath, I felt the breath of fire consume me.

Excruciating and unbelievable pain shot through me. My eyes were open, but I did not see my home. Instead, I heard a voice.