Page 35 of Escaping Wonderland

The king yanked his hand back, narrowly avoiding her chomping jaw. His features contorted in fury, eyebrows angling down and nostrils flaring. With a snarl, he grasped her hair and jerked her head back, brandishing that finger in front of her nose. “You’re going to pay for that, Alice. I’m not going to kill you, not right away. You’re going to suffer for a long, long time. People can survive a lot of punishment here, but they feel”—he trailed the back of his finger down her cheek—“everything.

“Winters failed to condition you as I instructed, but that’s all right. I think I’ll enjoy breaking you. I’ll enjoy making you learn.”

Alice glared at him with her teeth clenched and lips pressed tightly together. Anger overrode her fear, and she didn’t bother to hide it.

The king yanked her head back farther, tugging hard on her hair, and she hissed at the flare of pain on her scalp.

“Like I said, girl, you’ll learn. One way or another. I guess if you don’t…you’ll just have to be part of the culling, won’t you? Just like our friend here.”

Releasing her, the king stepped back and turned toward Jor’calla, who was squirming in his captors’ restraining arms. “You’ve always been a nuisance, bug. Always caused issues.Because you knew there wasn’t anything we could really do about it. What do you know now, Jor’calla? What do you see?”

“The mandate,” Jor’calla rasped. “The culling.Death.”

“Truedeath.” The king reached forward and patted the side of Jor’calla’s face. “True death for any I choose. And you…well, time’s come for you to stop being a problem.” He swept aside his coat, revealing a knife strapped to his thigh, and wrapped his fingers around the grip.

Alice’s eyes widened, and she threw her weight forward. “Don’t! Leave him alone!”

The robots holding her didn’t move so much as an inch.

Jor’calla twisted his head to look at Alice. “He is deathless in Wonderland! End him beyond, only beyond!”

“Pull his head back,” the king spat.

The robots complied, forcing Jor’calla’s head up to expose the soft-looking skin of his throat. The alien’s mandibles twitched and writhed.

“The Red King knows the way,” Jor’calla cried. “He travels between worlds! He?—”

The king plunged his knife into Jor’calla’s throat, cutting off the alien’s words.

“No!” Alice’s stomach churned; she was sickened and horrified but unable to look away.

Settling his free hand over the butt of the knife, the king dragged the blade downward, opening a huge gash down Jor’calla’s chest. Thick, blue blood gushed from the wound, bathing the king’s hands.

Jor’calla spasmed, his mandibles flaring wide, and Alice watched in silent horror as the alien’s entrails spilled from the gaping wound.

The king pulled the knife free and plunged a hand into Jor’calla’s chest. He tugged on something inside; there was awet, squelching sound, followed by a long, slowly fading hiss from Jor’calla. The alien sagged in the robots’ hold.

Stepping back, the king pulled something out of Jor’calla’s chest—aheart. He raised it high, like a grisly trophy, and grinned. “One less problem for the future.”

One of the robots walked forward, holding an open sack, the bottom of which was glistening and dripping with dark liquid that could only be blood. The king tossed the heart into the sack as if it were nothing more than a measly pebble and flicked droplets of blue blood off his fingertips.

Numbly, Alice turned her face back toward Jor’calla. Though she’d only just met him, she mourned his death. He must’ve suffered so much—both here and in reality—but, rather than beg for his life, he’d used his final breaths to try to tell her something. He’d been trying tohelpher. He hadn’t deserved this. She doubted any of the king’s victims deserved this.

The king stepped back over to Alice and took firm hold of her jaw, smearing warm, blue blood over her skin. He wagged the knife toward the robots, and they released her. The king took hold of her in their stead, wrapping his arm around her and drawing her close with seemingly as much strength as his mechanized minions. He pressed the flat of his blade along her spine.

Alice stiffened and forced herself to meet his gaze, narrowing her eyes as disgust, hatred, and anger rose in her throat like bile.

“Now that I’ve concluded my business with Jor’calla, I have some time to spare for you,” he said, brushing his finger over her bottom lip in a way that, like his voice, was frustratingly familiar and unsettling—but which she could not place. “Shall we begin your lessons?”

His mouth descended upon hers.

Though the Red King was not nearly as predictable as the Hatter, he had certain habits that Shadow had learned to recognize and exploit—the most interesting of which was, perhaps, his tendency to make unnecessary displays of force.

No one was quite sure where the king’s army of automatons had come from; nobody was quite sure where anythingin Wonderland came from, in fact, but there was nothing else in the whole world quite like the king’s minions. There’d always been something familiar about the faceless, unfeeling soldiers that Shadow couldn’t place, but he never let himself dwell upon that notion for long.

All that mattered was that he knew how to take advantage of their weaknesses.

He’d gone outside ahead of Alice and Jor’calla to deal with the black-armored machines, knowing they’d pose the greatest threat in this situation—the king alone was easy enough for Shadow to handle. The automatons’ eyes—or sensors, or whatever it was they were called—had always had difficulty detecting Shadow, especially when he didn’t want to be seen; that allowed him more than enough space to work.

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