Chapter 18
Chapter
Eighteen
Istood up while the floor shook and cracks grew in the ceiling and walls above me, like a cracked teacup in pale porcelain.
Divinity hit my chest, and I barely didn’t fall down, what with the shaking floor and the fact that my devil was gone.
Did telling him I loved him break Wonderland?
Impossible, but that was what it felt like.
What had I done? My stomach tangled while I clung to his soul.
As long as I had his soul, everything would be okay, right?
The floor shook hard then started tipping, until I fell, slipping across the marble like a slip and slide, holding onto Divinity as I crashed into the wall with my feet.
The wall tore like paper, and I fell through, but I was falling slowly enough to look around and see everyone else falling in a swirl of stripes and pottery shards. Were we all small? Big? Drunk? Maybe the elixirs at the ball were drugged.
I spread my wings and beat my way down to the spiraling floor, landing on my bare feet instead of sprawling like most of the Wonderland occupants.
There were people in pajamas with hair dyed various Wonderland shades, looking irritated, and Rawley, who dropped next to me in her enormous blue saber-toothed tiger shape.
I was nearly crushed when a floating man in full-bodied, red-and-white striped armor tried to fall on me. I kept an eye on the ripped ceiling until everyone had landed. The walls were rounded, like we were all inside a large teapot.
“Does this happen often?” I asked Rawley, but then she bared her teeth at me and I backed away. Right. The cat killed people by accident.
“Does everyone have their contracts?” a voice like wind chimes and rainbow sprinkles called, bringing my attention to the far end of the teapot, where a creature of such luminous beauty that I’d never be able to forget it stood on a mushroom, a sparkling wand that matched the loveliness of her wings in one hand, while in her other hand she held a small dark clock that looked like a clockwork heart.
A poof of sparkles and glitter brought my contract to my hand, just like all the other people there. Ah. We’d all made deals with the devil.
“Excellent,” the magical fairy creature said.
I blinked and peered through her glamour. What I saw was even more terrifying. Beneath the glorious beauty was inhuman perfection, ice-cold and brutal. An enchantress. A fairy enchantress.
I held very still and tried not to hyperventilate.
Fairies were scary enough, raging and mad most of the time, but a fairy enchantress?
Enchantresses were notoriously cruel, and I was in a teapot with her.
Where was the devil? When would he show up and fix this mess?
We were in his pocket world. What had she done to throw him out? He’d come back. He’d save me.
The fairy enchantress waved her wand, and someone screamed while lines of light raced over their skin. “You haven’t been keeping your side of the bargain.” She tsked and smiled sadly. Or sadistically. Her face was so perfect, it was difficult to have much expression.
The person, a woman in pajamas with bright-red dyed hair while the rest of her was normal skin-color, because she wasn’t painted while she was sleeping, cried out as she was raised into the air, covered in white lights. Then, with a pop, she vanished with the scent of ozone and burned hair.
The enchantress strolled to the edge of her mushroom, waving her wand gracefully.
“So many good children, carefully following the rules outlined in the deal you’ve been dealt.
Such good children.” She pursed her lips, pouting because she couldn’t blow anyone else up.
Wait. Why was she bound by the devil’s contracts?
Had the devil signed all his contracts over to her? Impossible.
“Back to work with you.” She made shooing motions with her wand.
I turned and started toward the far door where everyone else was going, but then something wrapped around my waist and spun me back around.
“Except for you,” she said, staring directly at me. She was so beautiful. So powerful. So absolutely terrifying. And I had no idea what she’d used to turn me around.
“Do you need something baked?” I asked, trying to sound polite instead of terrified out of my mind. Where was my devil?
She floated over to me while my heart pounded faster and faster. She raised my chin with her wand and stared into my eyes. “I don’t see it.”
I couldn’t see it either. Her eye color. It was too beautiful to be real, something between sugar crystals and falling stars.
“You don’t have to see it,” a man said, floating down, large silver wings barely beating to keep him aloft because his fairy magic was so strong.
His face was scarred, stopping him from being the most handsome creature in the entire world but making him much more interesting.
The two would have matched except the fairy enchantress was pretty boring without any scars.
Except for her hand squeezing the clock heart.
The heart was dark maroon with woodgrain stripes.
Ticking. I was incredibly interested in disembodied hearts that may or may not belong to my devil however boring the hand that held it.
“Don’t see what?” I asked, going for polite, but I couldn’t help wanting to stare at the man’s scarred face. It was so unexpected and made his face less terrifying than the fairy enchantress’s absolute perfection. And that heart. Ticking. I had a really bad feeling about the heart.
Seriously, I was trying not to freak out, but how could I help it? The devil was gone, and this clockwork heart was there in his place.
“Give her to me,” the fairy with a scar said, eyes bigger and wetter than most fairies. Like a seal. Or a siren.
I held up my hand, the one with the deal in it. “I’m guessing you’re part of one of the fairy houses that wiped out my mom’s family.”
He gave me a slight frown. “What do you know of such things?”
“Nothing. I’m just a baker. But it seems obvious in retrospect. Otherwise, the pretty fairy prince wouldn’t have come to my shop. The one who’s trying to impress his uncle. That’s you, I take it.”
He inclined his head slightly. “You aren’t entirely an idiot.”
“Oh, I am. Are you going to kill me? I request that you make me bake to death. Set a spell on me that makes me bake and bake until I collapse as a corpse.”
The fairy enchantress stepped forward, giving the fairy king a frown before she smiled at me. “No. We aren’t killing you, however vile you are, and you are very vile. Your contract is absolutely unbreakable. If we break the contract, he won’t be bound any longer.”
“He? Who’s bound?” Don’t say the devil. Don’t say the devil.
“Wishful thinking won’t make it so,” the fairy king said then nodded at the clockwork heart. “The devil is bound. Until your contract is over and your debts are paid, you are safe from me. That was the deal I made with the enchantress, and I always keep my deals.”
I stared at the scarred fairy then at the fairy enchantress. “In that case, I’d better get to work. I don’t suppose the new management is more lenient than the old one.” Not with the way that one girl had been exploded by white lightning.
The fairy enchantress gave me a beamingly lovely smile. “Of course we’re kinder than a devil. We’re fairies.”
He was a fairy-siren, one of the most terrifyingly dangerous creatures in the world, and she was a fairy enchantress, another of the most terrifyingly dangerous creatures in the world. And they’d bound my devil. But why? Did I dare to ask?
I cleared my throat. “You bound the devil just so that you could finish destroying my mother’s house? That’s very…” Psychotic. “Meticulous.”
The fairy enchantress’s eyes flashed. “Ridiculous child. To think that you’re so special you could move the greater forces in the world.
Run along. Keep your head down. Serve your time, and then you’ll be free.
” She gestured at the scarred fairy king, who gave me a smile that sent absolute shudders through me.
“Thank you,” I murmured then bowed and turned.
I was once more dragged back by invisible threads.
The enchantress studied me, head cocked. “Don’t you think she should be collared?”
“She could simply agree to stay and not speak to anyone about the matter,” the fairy king said, both of them looking at me and talking about me like I wasn’t there.
“I’m not making any more deals,” I said quietly.
The fairy enchantress’s eyes flashed then a collar of cold iron snapped around my throat. “Then a collar it is. Iron shouldn’t bother you, not with your goblin blood.”
“Not much. Thank you for your concern,” I said with my best polite customer smile.
“She has no pride,” the king said, his lips twitching into a cruel smile. “She may make an adequate pet once her debt has been paid. It would be more satisfying to enslave Fiora’s child than to kill her.”
That was supposed to be my mother? As far as I knew, her name was Rose. And he was going to enslave me? Perfect. Then I’d kill him. Except that he was a siren and could probably break my mind until I was the perfect pet.
I trembled. “The devil, he isn’t coming back?”
“No, child, he isn’t coming back,” the enchantress said, lips pursed in a mockery of my pain.
My heart squeezed, and my throat constricted. “Is that his heart?” I asked, pointing at her hand. I shouldn’t have said anything, but…
Her eyes grew even harder, something I hadn’t thought possible. “It was. What do you know about devil’s hearts?”
“They should keep them in their chests where they belong.”
Her smile was gloriously beautiful, spite and malice. “But love makes one foolish.”