Splintered

As if in slow motion, he resumes walking, broad shoulders tense and wings low.

“You made a vow!” I screech, wrestling for control of my mind. “Not to leave me heartbroken and hurt again! You’ll lose everything!”

Morpheus stalls at the threshold, his back turned and head hanging down. “I would give up all my powers to have you in my arms. Your love is the only magic I need.”

Red forces me forward a step … then two.

“I’ll be a corpse in your bed!” I try to get through to him, one last time. “You’re killing everything that makes me who I am. The girl you taught, your playmate … the one you claim to love will be gone, with a puppet in her place.”

The leafy veins in my legs jerk on another unwanted step as if in demonstration.

Just as Morpheus reaches his hand to unbar the door, Red snaps out her vines and reaches the crown.

“Good-bye, Alyssa,” my one last hope says, his wings drooping in resignation. “I’m afraid neither of us is strong enough to defeat her.”

“We’ll see about that, Morpheus,” I hiss back, then turn my attention to the vines possessing me.

I’m done letting everyone else dictate what happens to my life. I’d rather be dead than an eternal pawn.

Exerting the last of my will, I force my hands to grip the vines that are dragging the crown toward me. Slamming to my knees, I tug against the ivy, holding it taut where it joins my skin. Queen Red’s scream rattles my brain. She drops the crown to concentrate on me. Her ivy winds around my palms and fingers until they’re covered with leafy mittens. She forces my arms together and binds them and follows with my legs and torso, incapacitating me just like the flowers did on the begi

The only way to stop hurting is to go limp … give up. She’s won. I’m finished … I close my eyes and whimper.

I think of Jeb, Jenara, my mom and dad—all having to pick up their lives without me. It pierces my heart with a pain more acute than anything I’ve ever felt. And I’m glad for it. The intensity of the emotion proves I’m still alive … that I’m an individual. That I’m me.

Red has my body, but she doesn’t control my heart or mind yet. That’s where my magic lies.

Three of the elfin knight corpses lie only feet away. One’s arm is severed, one’s neck is buckled, and the other has a twisted leg, all from their encounter with the bandersnatch. They might be broken, but I can still use them.

Concentrating on their bodies, I picture them alive: Their brains become computers, hardwired to my thoughts; their hearts made of putty, pumping in time with my own; their legs and arms are pliant like pipe cleaners, moving on my command.

Shaky and awkward, they stand. Limping and swaying, they drag themselves toward me. Their fingers clamp around the vines and heave against Queen Red.

My ivy cocoon unwinds, spi

I gurgle a scream and strangle on the taste of blood, losing control of my macabre marionettes. They droop, almost releasing their hold on the vines. Driven by the desire to be free, I command the knights to yank harder.

Crimson streams spurt from my wounds and puddle on the floor. I grit my teeth, using my body’s anguish to drive me, to give my creations the strength to fight until they’ve ripped Red out, until she’s co

I collapse, and my trio of knights crumple into a pile, inanimate and dead again.

I’m so weak, I barely realize Morpheus is at my side. Vorpal sword in hand, he severs the leafy stems from my fingers, then slashes the vines away. Another piercing screech jars my skull as Morpheus works off the crown and hairpin to disco

Without a body to inhabit, Red’s spirit writhes in the ivy on the ground, dying like a mass of eels out of water.

Morpheus tucks the vorpal sword away in his jacket. I slump in a fetal position, drained of blood and energy. My wrists and ankles gape open, a thousand times worse than the wounds that slashed across my palms as a child. I wonder if I’m dying …

A black haze dims my surroundings.

“Brave, stubborn girl,” Morpheus whispers into my ear as he tenderly cradles me in his arms, lifting my body. “You were the only one who could free yourself of her possession and win the crown. I knew you would be victorious. All you needed was a push to anger. And who better to drive you to the edge of fury than me?”

“Liar,” I mumble, swimming in nausea and coughing up blood. My arms and legs feel weighted, and sticky streams ooze out of the gouges in my skin. “You left me.”

“I’m still here, aren’t I?” Morpheus guides me down beside Ivory and exposes her birthmark, touching it to mine. Heat flashes along my body. “I’ve always believed in your power. For the queen I saw in you even as a child … for the woman you could never see in yourself. My faith is as unchanging as my age.”

“I don’t believe you,” I murmur, half-conscious. My veins refill, healing my skin. The agonizing lacerations both inside and outside my body ease to numbness.

He strokes my head. “Of course you don’t. I’ve given you no reason to.”

I snap open my eyes as a roar breaks from the bandersnatch’s pen. The gate hangs off its hinges, the padlock crushed and useless as the monster rises over Morpheus’s shoulder with Queen Red’s ivy illuminating its veins. She found another body to inhabit …

“Morpheus!”

He leaps toward the monster to defend me. Two tongues and a lasso of vines cinch around his neck, jerking him high into the air. He loses his hat.

Still weak, I struggle to stand. “Fight back!”

But it’s over even before I say it.

Morpheus clutches his throat. “Better to take my medicine, luv,” he chokes out. “If you try to outsmart magic”—a strained cough breaks his words—“there’s always a price to pay.”

The creature swallows him whole. His wings slide down last—a flash of glistening black grace.

The creature is about to charge me but instead falls to the ground and rolls around, wrestling itself. Morpheus is still defending me from the inside.

When the bandersnatch rises to its feet again, it runs into the closest wall. Slamming its massive body against the rock until it crumbles and breaks open, the monster bursts out of its chain and leaps through the hole, escaping into the wilds of Wonderland.

I sit and stare at the giant gap in the castle wall—my hooped gown encircling my waist like a velvet globe—for what seems an eternity. As I breathe in the night air, I know it really can’t have been more than a few seconds.

The pixies arrive to gather the dead. They first appear in the distance, mining lights bobbing in the darkness before they clamber in over the rocky ruins and set to work.

I scoot forward to pick up the tiny caterpillar carving from the floor and tuck it into the top of my dress. I stop to look at Morpheus’s fedora, and a pang of regret stings my heart.

Crawling to Ivory, I tap her face to wake her so she won’t be mistaken for dead.

The pixie brigade passes us, sniffing as they go. “No smellum deadses. Move longish and wide.”

While they gather the corpses, Ivory and I help each other stand. I tell her everything that happened when she was unconscious.

I’m numb … my emotions rubbed so raw, I’ve become desensitized. “It makes no sense,” I whisper, holding my chest where the carving, cold and lifeless, presses against my heart. “Morpheus defeated Red’s Deathspeak, then gave himself up to the bander-snatch, the very fate he’d been ru