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I was so busy gasping for air and trying to blink through the pain that I couldn’t remember when the man with eyes the color of freshly spilt ink appeared in front of me.
The scent of oak drifted to my nostrils as it warred against sage, vetiver, and bergamot. Hands cradled my face as I opened my lips to tell him what was happening, but little more than sobbed, half-broken words fell from them.
“Grams . . .devil. . . altar . . . I almost died!”
Rowan stared at me as if I’d gone insane. It gave me hope because cracked was better than the reality of it, and I flung myself into his arms. He’d saved me. His hands pushed the wet hair from my face before he began making soft, comforting noises against my ear.
“Can you walk, darling?”
“I have thorns in my feet,” I admitted through a hiccup. “I think my Grams was going to sacrifice me to some unnamed god. I’d have made the news as some poor girl who’d been murdered by her own grandmother! I don’t understand why she would do something like this? You know, you expect people to change if you haven’t seen them in five years, right? Right. But to come home and have your own grams, who raised you and loved you, try to off you? I didn’t sign up for this shit. Do you know she actually told me her father was waiting for me? And get this! She said her father was the devil! Can you believe that?” I asked, and he paused the heavy petting of my hair and looked over his shoulder. He didn’t seem upset about anything I’d just stated, either.
“He’s actually here?”
I literally felt the blood leave my head so quickly my vision tunneled.
“Oh, darling. Please don’t do that,” he murmured, guiding my head to rest against his shoulder. “I’ll see you in Neverland, and we’ll finish this conversation there. You’re safe with me. For now, at least.” Strong arms hefted me up as the icy claws of unconsciousness pulled me down into blissful nothingness.
Dampness touched my cheek, which forced my eyelids to pry apart. I was lying on the mossy ground of the meadow and birds were singing above me. Moaning at the irony of waking up with birds above my head like aLooneyTunescharacter who’d been KO’ed, I attempted to sit up.
All I had to say about it was, I’d better return home to seven small men cleaning the cottage with animals assisting them. Beneath me, flowers covered the ground, providing a soft mattress for my aching bones. To my left, I found the naked back of the antithesis of a storybook prince. Rowan’s head turned, as if he’d heard me moving.
“You had an exciting day, darling,” he said with a devilish smile playing on his sinful lips. Rising from a crouching position, he turned and edged toward me with slow, easy steps. “I take it the awakening Violet planned for you didn’t go as planned?”
“If you mean my untimely demise, then no. I didn’t stick around to let Grams murder me.” Pulling my knees against my chest, I wrapped my arms around them.
“Your grandmother didn’t intend to sacrifice you,” he murmured as he knelt in front of me. “Violet is a lot of things, most of which I find abhorrent, but I’d bet she’s an exemplary grandmother. Her intentions are good, but her execution needs some work.”
“Nope, I think her execution was spot-on if her goal was terror. There were men and women dancing naked around a bonfire. They were chanting and then their heads did the whole exorcist spiel, spun around and released black clouds of smoke from their throats. I’m smart enough to know that, when there’s an altar involved, a bitch should already be running. So, I ran as fast as my feet would carry me. And then you . . . saved me?” While that seemed on brand for him since he’d saved me the night we’d met, something about that statement didn’t feel accurate. Had their heads spun? Nope, but I was allowed to be dramatic after what I’d witnessed. It was probably the only thing they hadn’t done, and it might have happened that way if I’d stuck around any longer. “How did you save me? Wait, am I dead?” I asked, noting the lack of excruciating pain in my feet.
“I wouldn’t let you escape me by dying, Moira Darling. It wouldn’t be very ‘Peter Pan’ of me, would it?”
I laughed humorlessly. “You’re not Peter Pan. You’re more of a Captain Hook, Rowan. I wouldn’t place you in the category of ‘hero’.”
“Good, because I assure you, I’m not. Villains are much more fun to be with, anyway. Heroes end up playing to the rules of the world, and what would be the fun in that? Damsels need a hero because they think it will make them a princess at the end of the tale, but you? You don’t strike me as someone who’d want to be a princess—not when you could be something far more important in your own tale. You’d prefer to be a witch in a world overpopulated with a princess in need of saving. Then you’d also need a villain willing to sacrifice everything and everyone to ensure you reached your full potential.” He paused before adding, “Unless I’m wrong about you, but I’m hardly ever wrong about anything.”
“That was really smooth, Teivel,” I whispered as a smile lifted my lips. “But I’m feeling more like Alice when she fell down the rabbit hole.” His eyes sparkled with mirth as something ruffled behind his back, before leathery wings unfurled behind him. His skin slowly began swirling with inky tendrils, which pulsed an electrical current into my naked arms. Awesome, he had the same smoking problem the cultists had. Was anyone normal anymore?
“Well, Alice? I guess you’re about to discover that Wonderland’s real and that you’re the Queen of Hearts. Are you ready to discover the truth about magick, learn where it began, and find out what part you’ll play in the game of good versus evil? I’ll warn of this—you and I are not on the same side. Though, I don’t intend to allow the enemies of either of our bloodlines to get their hands on you either. In the wrong hands, you’d destroy us all.”
The End, For Now
