Splintered (Splintered, #1)(66)
Pounding footsteps echo from the adjoining hall. The fight has made its way here.
“Just go!” Gossamer prompts.
Jeb won’t even look at me as he lifts the backpack onto his shoulder, his complexion almost as green as Gossamer’s. I leap through the mirror, more desperate to escape my hurt and confusion than anything Rabid White and the Red army could unleash.
My boots end up on a plate loaded with pastries. Once the dizziness subsides, I lift a foot and shake off some sugared crust.
Before I can explore the table I’m standing upon, something crashes into me from behind. I trip face-first into a pie filled with succulent purple berries.
“Al … I’m sorry.” Jeb lifts me by my elbows, pulling my shoulder blades into his chest. “You okay?”
I refuse to answer on the grounds that he didn’t specify physically or emotionally. With his help, I regain my footing between a plate of buttered bread and a bowl of candied violets. Some of the pie filling coats my mouth.
I lick it from my lips, then flap my fingertips, trying to get the sticky stuff off.
From our end of the table, the landscape we saw refracted in the mirror is in full view. The bunny-shaped cottage sits on a hill—a green and lush oasis smack in the midst of a desert. Sand dunes in the distance look like a chessboard—squares of black and white like the ones I’m always tripping over in my nightmare. I yearn for a canvas and raw materials so I can capture the warped vista forever.
A temperate breeze sways my braids, birds twitter in a mulberry tree overhead, and sunlight warms my shoulders. It reminds me so much of Pleasance that a wave of homesickness crashes over me. I wish I could talk to Dad; even more, I wish I could hug him.
It’s Saturday. At least I think it is. If I were home, Dad would be grilling steaks. I’d fix a fruit salad, because it’s my job to see that he eats well-balanced meals.
What if I can’t pull this off and get back home? Alison will blame herself forever and plunge into the deep end for real. Shock treatments will make her worse. Then Dad will be sitting alone in the kitchen eating cold cereal with nothing but his grief to keep him company. And then there’s Jeb’s mom and Jenara. His job at Underland helps pay the monthly bills. They rely on him. What will they do without him?
If I screw this up, I screw it up for everybody.
Jeb—still behind me—offers a napkin. I wipe my face and mumble, “Why didn’t you land at the other end of the table?”
“It was occupied.” Jeb turns me around.
I nearly choke at the sight of the tea party guests—Herman Hattington, March Hairless, and Door Mouse—all seated at the far corner and frozen solid beneath thick, glittering sheets of bluish gray ice.
“Mothra has a twisted definition of asleep,” Jeb says.
Morpheus has a twisted definition of everything. Shaking my head, I start toward them. As I step over the teapot’s spout, steam licks my calf, dampening my leggings. Hattington and his crew are suspended like glaciers, but the food looks fresh and the tea’s still hot.
“Where’s that pepper?” I hold out my hand. It’s awkward playing at teamwork. My family’s been in upheaval mode since I can remember, but at least over the last few years, I’ve had Jeb’s friendship to count on. Now it’s hanging by some weird emotional thread; I don’t know whether to believe him or Morpheus. It was easier to be mad up in the real world, when I knew for sure that he’d chosen Taelor.
Jeb digs the bag from his pocket. I loosen the ribbon while breathing through my mouth. I won’t chance inhaling any of it. Just the faded scent of the pepper on the fans and gloves was enough to make me almost sneeze.
Sneeze …
That must be what Morpheus intended with this little bag of spice.
“You’re not going to waste it on trying to make the hat guy sneeze, are you?” Jeb asks. “He’s an ice sculpture. There’s not even an opening where his nostrils should be. And there’s only enough pepper for one dose. We have to be sure.”
It’s uncanny how well he reads me at times, yet is so oblivious at others.
Tying the bag shut, I hand it back. He’s right. We’ll never be able to wake Hattington with pepper. He doesn’t even have a nose. I edge closer. He’s holding up a cup of steaming tea, as if he was in the middle of punctuating a point with it.
“Jeb, something’s not right with his face. It’s just a blank space of nothing.” The glittery, bluish gray void reflects my likeness, more unsettling than a stranger’s frozen snarl would be.
“Maybe the ice is so thick, it covers his features,” Jeb says.
“I don’t know. But check out that hat.” It could be a medieval torture device—part top hat/part cage—made of metal pins with a hinged flap at the crown that’s open like a lid. On second glance, the metal’s actually growing out of his head like bones. The cage pokes through holes in his flesh, just like the chess piece in Morpheus’s room.
“A conformateur,” Jeb says, his voice tense. “He’s got a conformateur sprouting out of his head.”
Most people wouldn’t know about a nineteenth-century tool used for customizing hats to fit specific head shapes, but Jenara has one in her room. Persephone ran across it at an estate sale once and, knowing Jen’s love for anything fashion related, bid low on it and just happened to win because no one there knew the value of the artifact.