Page 28 of Escaping Wonderland

He’d found her while she was asleep? Alice frowned, but now that he’d mentioned it… She recalled the light touch of velvety fingers on her face and a whispered voice from just before she’d woken fully.

You’re going to be mine.

That had been Shadow, even then? Though she’d first glimpsed him when she’d entered the Hatter’s place, that apparently hadn’t been his first look at her—and itmust’vebeen him she’d seen in the mirror while she was being dolled up. Her memories after the drink was forced down her throat were hazy, but sheknewthe shadow she’d seen in the mirror had been more than a trick of the light.

He’d been there, too, in the Hatter’s parlor—and the guard posted at the only entrance she knew of had been unaware of Shadow’s presence until he led her out.

She lowered her eyebrows. “How did you get into the Hatter’s room?”

Shadow shrugged. “Like I said, I always end up where I want to be eventually.”

Suddenly, his arms were no longer around her, his body no longer against her—he was sitting on the fallen tree in front of her, one leg up with his knee slightly bent, reclining on one elbow. Alice jumped back with a startled gasp.

She stopped when her back bumped into something solid and familiar—Shadow’s chest. She spun to find him behind her again.

“Don’t be frightened,” he said, sweeping off his hat and tucking it away behind his back. “This is all perfectly natural.”

Alice swept her gaze over him as though her eyes could somehow stop him from disappearing again. “B-Because none of it is real. It’s…like a dream.”

He shrugged again and took her hand in his, drawing it to his mouth. He pressed his lips to her knuckles; she was too stunned to react.

“And it has been the sweetest of dreams since you arrived,” he said.

Heat blossomed on her cheeks, and a pleasant warmth swirled low in her belly. “How do you do that? Why does no one else?”

His gaze flicked past her for an instant. She turned her head to look—had the figure behind her moved?—but he released her hand and caught her chin with his fingers first, guiding her face back toward him.

“I just do it, Alice. It’s likely because I’m the only sane one in this entire world,” he said with such genuine solemnity that she wasn’t sure how to take the statement.

If this simulation had its own particular laws of physics, he was clearly not beholden to them.

No wonder he’d been all over the place while they were traveling through the woods yesterday.

“You said you found me while I was asleep?” she asked.

“Mmhmm,” he purred.

Alice waved a hand toward the sleeping figures in the mist around them. “Like them?”

He turned his head and scanned their surroundings slowly, his persistent grin making his expression largely unreadable. “More or less. But these are the ones that never woke.”

“Why didn’t they wake? And how did they all get here?”

Shadow lowered his hand from her chin and turned to face one of the indistinct figures off to the side—as though he couldn’t see the one directly behind Alice. The one that looked like him.

He shrugged again. “Maybe they’re still tired?”

“And that one?” Alice asked, pointing behind her.

He turned his head slowly to look past her. “What about that one? Same as all the others, I imagine.”

Alice tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. “He bears a bit of a resemblance to someone I know.”

Shadow lowered his gaze to meet hers. “Are you saying his back looks likemyback?”

She stepped backward. “Do you think his front looks like your front, too?”

His grin changed; Alice didn’t quite have the words to encompass what was different, but somehow it shifted from an expression of unhinged but mostly harmless glee to one of an exasperated parent trying hard to maintain calm while dealing with a petulant child.

---