Chapter 44

**Alicia**

*Four Years Ago*

How is this possible?

“No. You’re dead…I-I killed you.” I stutter out the words as the guard closes the door behind me locking me inside with…him.

The man smiles. “No one ever really dies in Wonderland, Alice.” He tilts his head and laughs. “Actually that isn’t true. A lot of blood has been running through our lands recently. It’s not so wonderful anymore I suppose. That is neither here nor here…now let’s focus on the matter at hand. Please.”

I shake my head violently. “No. I won’t”

He sighs and shakes his head as if I’m testing his patience. “Alice…Alice…Alice…I am not a patient man, and we wasted a lot of time while I healed. So can we move on to the part where I tie you down and torture you and you beg for me to stop?”

“No!” I scream turning and rushing toward the door.

It’s a mistake but I’m too scared. Coming face to face with the man I thought I killed…it’s wrong. His life left his eyes and yet there he is…how?

A scream breaks out of me when pain explodes against my scalp. I can feel several strands of my hair being pulled out as I’m dragged back into the room.

“This could have been a lot easier if you just cooperated dear Alice.” The doctor says as he drags me and throws me down next to the table.

Before I can scream again a hand wraps around my neck and I’m being lifted off the ground. I can’t breathe no matter how hard I try and as my feet leave the ground and I’m looking down at the face of a dead man I stop fighting. My head feels like it’s going to explode from the pressure building but then it's gone and I start to feel sleepy. If I just close my eyes then all the pain will be gone. So I stop fighting and the darkness takes me again.

*The present…*

“So this doctor had been filling you with some sort of poison. It changed you into something else. What exactly?” Rowan asks pulling back from the memories.

“I still can’t be sure. Whatever they were hoping for isn’t what they got. I wasn’t what they were hoping for.” I say weakly.

Stepping into those memories makes it feel so real again. Like it’s happening right now…

“They wanted an army…for what?” Rowan asks.

Cayden answers for me. “What anyone wants an army for…war. Wonderland had fallen into darkness. Violence and death were everywhere. It was as if everything about Wonderland had been snatched away. The magic was slipping away…”

His arms tighten more around me. “Alicia was the last hope for the kingdom of Spades. Just like the rest of Wonderland their power was disappearing, which is why they turned to more…desperate measures. Her body was pumped with concoctions and blood of creatures far more gruesome than any you have seen here. All so that not even magic could stop her.”

“Who were they at war with?” Rowan asks. “What happened that everything changed?”

I look at him and take in the all-too-familiar features.

“The kingdom of hearts had been the one to keep peace among the kingdoms. As the darkness spread…death came to the kingdom of hearts. The Queen died in childbirth, something that had never happened before in Wonderland. Death was never a word spoken there. It was a place of dreams, but it had changed. With the death of the queen, the king fell into depression and guilt. He locked himself away and left his kingdom vulnerable. That was until a beautiful woman snuck in and stole his heart. She manipulated him back to life but not as the king he once was. No, she turned him into a monster.” Cayden goes on.

Those years are still lost to me…

“She sat by his side as he destroyed his kingdom and ruled them with fear. For six years this went on until Wonderland was a shell of what it once had been. We could not understand what had started this not until…” Cayden looks down at me and I see so much pain in his eyes. “Until I saw Alicia again. Then it made sense.”

“What do you mean?” Rowan asks.

“She wasn’t the first to come to Wonderland. There had been others. With them came innocence and life that fed Wonderland. The power inside a child’s imagination and spirit kept Wonderland thriving. It powered everything, but someone had broken the rules. The Alice is free to come and go as their imagination allows, until Alicia. She had been taken…held captive…for six years she was stuck in wonderland. She was stripped of everything good and with her the beauty of Wonderland.” Cayden stops and lowers his head to rest it against mine. “When I saw her, she had gone mad and was no longer the girl I once knew. She was older…too old. No Alice ever came to Wonderland after the age of maturity in the human world.”

“What was happening to her all those years?” Rowan asks.

“I don’t know. I never got those memories back. Everything about who I was until I woke up in that cell is gone.”

“I didn’t know what had happened to her either. None of us knew she was still in Wonderland. Not until I ended up in the same prison as her. Hale was there too, and he told me what they had been doing to her there.” His hand comes up to cup my face and I cover it with my own.

I wasn’t the only one who was hurt during that time. We all were…one by one…they collected us.

“All of us owed something, and Wendell collected with our lives,” I whisper before turning my head to look at Rowan. “We thought we had fought for our freedom, but what he had planned went farther than winning a war against the other kingdoms. He wanted more, and we didn’t realize it until it was too late. By then our fate had been sealed.”

“He brought you here,” Rowan states.

“Yes.”

“How?”

“A looking glass,” I tell him.

*Four Years Ago…*

**Hale**

She’s been gone for hours. What more can they do to her? What I gave them…it should have killed her. How had she survived? One of those concoctions alone could kill three men! They gave her all of them, but something else too. That darkness…it was like a living thing…

The way her whole body went still and her eyes turned black. I had never seen anything like it before. No beasts of Wonderland has ever looked as deadly as she did then, and I have seen some pretty nasty things since things went downhill. Yet when the monster had slipped from her body I saw our Alice…Alicia. Wendell has given her a new name as if trying to erase for good what she once was. Of course, Alice was never her real name either. It had been the name of the first girl to ever come here, and it stuck over the years.

Calling the girls who came after her by another name made Wonderland seem more like another world where they could forget who they were topside. They could be anyone here…and that person was Alice. This Alice though…I knew from first meeting her that she would be different. The rest easily fell into the fantasy of this place, but not her. No, she wanted more. She had more questions not just about Wonderland but about us. She wanted to know everything about us, not just what we could offer her.

Then she left. It had hurt more than the other times, but it was just as it ought to be. She had been twelve the last time I saw her, but now…she has to be at least eighteen in human years. Although it is hard to say since time here works far differently…it’s slower. Many more years could have passed topside, but I don’t know for sure. As I said…time is fickle here. Still, she had grown older, and forgotten everything including who she is.

She is beautiful even in her pain. It’s a frightful thing to think but there is still something about her. It’s different…stronger…as if I’m in physical pain at not being near her. There is an energy between us, that feels tight. I can’t explain it, but all I know is I have to get her out of here. Somehow…some way.

The sound of the metal door opening catches my attention and I see one of the frozen-faced guards dragging a barely conscious Alicia back.

“What have you done?” I scream at them.

They don’t answer…they can’t. Once they throw her back inside her cell I watch her. She’s alive, but barely. She won’t survive much more than this…