Chapter 20
We stopped.
The entire world stopped.
Only the scream remained.
Suddenly March was in front of me, on his feet again, hands on my face, looking down at my mouth like he was making sure that I wasn’t the one screaming. But I wasn’t. I’d caught my scream, and if I hadn’t, it would have been a different scream, one full of pleasure.
This was full of terror.
“Russ,” March breathed, and I had no idea how he could tell whose voice it was, but the next second he was off me, moving for the door.
I had only one second to remember to pick up my jacket from the floor and put it around my shoulders before I followed.
Most doors on the hallway were already open, and the other Hands were running to Russ’s room, and Russ was standing in the middle of his bed with his hands over his forehead, screaming still.
Seth and Anika were trying to calm him down, to tell him that he was okay, that he was safe, but he kept shaking his head, refusing to even sit down.
“Shut that door!” someone screamed, and Levana, who’d come in behind me, slammed it shut with her foot before moving closer. I backed away, pressed my back against the door to make sure nobody else could get in, just in case.
What madness. What loud, loud madness.
Eventually the others got through to him, and Russ stopped screaming. He kneeled on the bed, his face pale, his eyes glazed over as he looked ahead but didn’t really see what was in front of him.
“It was her,” he repeated. “It was her, it was her, it was her—”
He’d seen the Red Queen, too.
March, who was standing at the side of his bed, looked back at me as if he wanted to make sure I hadn’t disappeared. I stayed put and I tried to think of a way to make sense of the fact that all of us now had seen the face of the Red Queen doing something to us in our dreams. All of us.
“It cannot possibly be a coincidence,” Seth was saying, and I agreed.
“It was her face, though, wasn’t it? Red lips, dark eyes? Curly hair?” Erith asked Russ, and he kept nodding without ever looking at her. He looked positively traumatized.
“It was—who else could it be?” said someone.
“What do you think she did to us?”
“What if it was her?”
“What if she cast some kind of a curse on us?!”
“What if she’s the one who won’t let the White Queen come see us anymore?”
“What if she knows?!” This from a terrified Mimi.
A tick of silence.
“What if it was her doing, and the Spade wasn’t a traitor at all?”
There.
That last part was something that had been in my head since the very beginning, and I hadn’t dared to voice it even when I was completely alone.
“What if we were taken by the Red Queen, and she somehow cursed us instead?”
“But where is the boy, then?”
“Is he really dead, or did they just lie to us?”
“Because they’ve lied and lied and lied…”
“Who was he?!”
Another tick.
“Silas.”
My voice echoed in the room. Suddenly every pair of eyes turned my way, and even Russ seemed perfectly focused.
I usually hated it when I had to speak to the other Hands, but I didn’t hate it this time.
This time, my hands shook as I reached for the pocket of my jacket, where I’d hidden Silas’s drawing.
I moved forward, feeling awkward in my own skin, feeling like another person altogether, something I’d strangely gotten used to by now.
And as I walked, I unfolded the page. The others who’d been by the bed moved to the sides to make way for me, and I put the drawing over the sheets where they could all see it.
I looked at March. He was full of suspicion, as always, but he was also curious enough to lean closer, see better. They all were.
“I believe his name was Silas,” I said.
Mimi reached out her hand but didn’t touch the page. “I…I know him."
“Where did you find this?” asked Helen, and when she leaned closer, she traced the lines on the paper that made the tips of Silas’s hair with her fingertips.
“I think I made it. I drew it,” I reluctantly said.
“So, you just made it up?” Levana demanded with a raised brow.
“I…don’t think so. I drew all of you. Wrote your names at the edge.
” I pointed at Silas’s name written there in cursive.
“You all look exactly like you do in real life. I think Silas looked exactly like this, too.” I knew my work.
I knew when I drew from my imagination, rather than when I was trying to replicate something that already existed.
They took the drawing, analyzed it, one then the other. I moved back, watched in silence, part of me hopeful that they would believe me, which was silly. I didn’t need them to believe anything I said because I needed to figure out what was happening here, and what had happened, same as them.
Why would the Red Queen show up in all our dreams? It was most definitely not a coincidence, and something told me that this was all connected to that boy in my drawing.
“I think I…I think I know him, too.”
When Cook spoke, we all turned to him, our lips sealed. He was the one holding the drawing now, his hands shaking as he analyzed it.
“He was…he lived near me at one point when I was a kid. I remember his face. His name really was Silas.” He looked at me. “I think it’s him.”
Suddenly all the others surrounded him, asking him questions, impatient for answers.
Apparently, Silas was a quiet kid; didn’t exactly hang out with others in his neighborhood or anyone at school; lived with his mother and his grandmother somewhere east in the Court of Spades, and they moved when Cook was fifteen.
He never saw him again, but they did share classes in school.
All Cook could say was that Silas was always the best at everything, knew all the answers, that the teachers adored him—and he could repair broken clocks faster than anyone else he’d ever seen.
That’s it.
March brought the drawing back to me with a strange look on his face. He was suspicious, but not only. He was also confused, and a lot more curious.
“You’re very talented, I’ll give you that,” he told me, and he didn’t come close to me at all, like he hadn’t been on his knees in front of me just minutes ago.
The reminder sent heat to my cheeks, and suddenly I wanted to hide somewhere—anywhere in the world but here.
“It’s just a drawing,” I muttered, folding the paper again as fast as my hands allowed.
“It’s a face we all know, and we don’t,” he said. “You put an incredible amount of detail into it, too. Much more than the other drawing you showed me—like you knew him.” He paused. Looked at me. “Intimately.”
I could have laughed.
Good thing he hadn’t seen my drawings of him!
“Tomorrow is the trial,” I said, trying not to drown in embarrassment. “I’m going to bed.”
I turned around and pulled the door open, and the others were preparing to leave, too. March walked out into the hallway after me, his hands in his pockets as he watched me leave.
“Goodnight, Velvet,” he called after me when I opened my door.
That I didn’t fall on my face right on the threshold was a miracle. “Velvet?” I barely breathed, the memories of us together in my room just now washing over me with a brand new fire.
He nodded, as sure of this as he was of everything else. “I don’t like calling you Spade.”
And I should have argued, should have insisted that my name would have done just fine, but I didn’t. Instead I gave him a halfhearted nod, slipped into my room—and only after I closed the door, I whispered, “Goodnight, Heartling.”
Then I slammed my head against the wall a couple of times until I could breathe normally again.
I meant what I said about going to bed—I did.
I took the jacket off, left everything as it was on the coffee table, and I lay down and closed my eyes, begged sleep to take me, but it was impossible.
He was everywhere—on the inside of my lids, in the center of my mind, on every inch of my skin he’d kissed and touched that was now burning like his hands were still there.
I considered—truly considered knocking on his door, making him finish what he started. I considered calling for him at the top of my voice, too, to get him here, in bed, between my legs.
So much energy rushed through my body. If I didn’t get release, I was going to lose my mind. That’s why I found my own hands all over my body, tracing the lines he’d traced with his lips, playing with myself the way I wished he’d played with me.
My hand slipped under my panties, and in my mind, I saw him kneeling there before me, his tongue out, licking me like he’d done it a million times before. My fingers were no match for his tongue, but my imagination was perfectly vivid.
My hips moved and it only took me a few seconds to jump over the edge. I came with his name on my lips, and his eyes in the center of my mind.
Sleep took me soon after.