Free Fiction Monday: The Whispering Tree

Strong language and adult situations, for those of you who find such thing appealing.  I was thinking…I particularly like those stylized black and white covers.  Here’s a version that fits my short story template.

A writer torn between two genres, two worlds…and Horror always cheats.

If only the best writer of his generation, Richard O’Shea, had come down clearly on one side or the other between the horror and fantasy genres, none of this would have happened. But he didn’t, and now both worlds play dirty to get his soul.  The fairy lands send their queen:  a lusty, foul-mouthed punk with glitter and sex in her eyes.  Hell sends something darker.

The two worlds won’t share him.  They’re getting old, and need fresh meat, as it were, to revitalize their realms.  Richard wants to believe that the punk charms of Fairy have won him over…but Hell doesn’t need Richard to like it in order to win.

Now the only thing between Richard and Hell’s dark charms is Victoria, his editor.  An editor who carries both pens and swords…and has very sharp teeth…

“The Whispering Tree” will be free here for one week only, but you can also buy a copy at B&N, Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, Kobo, Powell’s and more.

—

The Whispering Tree

The love of my life had just told me that the reason she’d been holding herself back was that she wasn’t human, but a Fairy. A real one. And that, if I had went to Fairy with her, according to the rules of fantasy, we would be setting inevitable machines of tragedy in motion that would work to keep us apart forever after.

I’d just told her that I intended to find a way around the rules. It was what I did, after all. Not break rules so much as just…weasel around them.

“But the rules—”

“When you have the rules figured out, it’s time to change the rules,” I said, more bravely than I felt.

She put her hands on the small, round table…and headbutted me. Oh, I don’t think it was intentional; in her next movement, she grabbed both sides of my head and kissed me. “Then run away with me,” she said. “To Fairy. And we will change everything.”

I saw stars and the inside of my skull felt as though it had a nosebleed. “Didn’t you just tell me that if I loved you we’d have to live here forever—”

She kissed my forehead tenderly in apology. “Fuck living here. It’s dull.”

I didn’t dare move lest I pass out. “What about Victoria?”

Celia had just finished telling me that Victoria, my wife and editor, wasn’t human, either, but a member of Celia’s court—the fairy court. It was hard to believe Victoria a fairy, with her blunt, steel-gray hair and little purse lines around her lips. Easier to believe it of Celia.

“Fu—” Celia burst into the loudest, coarsest, manliest type of laughter. “No. Not her. Me. Fuck me.” She kissed me again.

I discovered, after half a year of anticipation (and now that the excruciating headache that she’d given me had faded somewhat) that I rather liked it.

Celia pulled out a hand-rolled cigarette (when I’d met her, she’d claimed she had virgins roll them for her and lick the papers shut with their hungry mouths; it was a little more believable, now) and lit it. She blew smoke to my left, then offered me a drag, her lips doing that thing where they sparkle in the light like they’re covered with glass. “They can’t possibly find you that quickly. We’ll go in and get out before they know about it.”

“They.” I took a drag on it. It was good enough that it reminded me of the first cigarette I’d ever had, or the first time I’d fallen in love, before I’d fucked everything up.

“The legions of Hell. You can’t think that Fairy is the only land that wants you. Yes, you have a gift for fantasy. But…” She let her eyes linger on me, making me feel like quite the bad boy for once in my life. “You have a gift for horror, too.”

“Um,” I said. It was one thing to know that the personification of your favorite genre wanted you; quite another to know that the genre you tried to avoid but that kept creeping back into your stories would be after you, too.

“It’s us versus them, baby. They want you at least as bad as I do.”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “For…”

She cackled. “Oh, yes. But they certainly won’t make you eggs and toast the next morning.”

“Is there breakfast in Fairy? And if I eat it, will I have to stay there forever?”

“Most do,” she said. “I make a mean french toast. But fuck it. Let’s go.” She stood up from the table. She was tall; in her impossible shoes she was taller than I. Her eyes glinted at me through a curtain of black lashes.

I made one last effort at resistance, knowing that it was meant to serve the same purpose as a negligee on a bride. “But what about Victoria?”

Celia’s smile widened. “She doesn’t go for romance…adventure…sex. Except in books. As I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

—

I knew it the moment they decided to cross into Fairy, the moment he kissed her. A hole was punched into my heart, letting all the blood drain away until I was cold as ice.

I looked at my hands on the keyboard. They had turned from a repulsive light-peach color to a flat gray. I grinned helplessly, feeling my teeth sharpen into dogs’ teeth. As expected, O’Shea had decided to break his promise to me to stay on this side of mortality until he’d committed to a genre. I had two proposals on my desk: one horror, one fantasy. Both, to be honest, sucked—his heart wasn’t in either of them. He wanted to write both.

Men.

His career was in the balance, and Celia was trying to sway things her way: Come with me to Fairy and I’ll have sex with you… As though Hell would let him go without a fight.

Someone gasped. My armor and armaments were coming back to me as I lost my mortality, and my secretary, Mikaela, was getting an eyeful of a gray, sharp-toothed knight coming out of her boss’s office.

My buckles jingled. I strode across the room.

The security guard stood next to the elevator door.  “Ma’am?”

“I am going out, Charles,” I said, lowering my visor.

He pushed the elevator button for me.

I called over my shoulder. “Mikaela? Hold my calls.”

She had followed me and was standing behind me on her tiptoes. “Victoria? What’s going on?”

“Family emergency,” I said. I reached out with my gauntleted hand and held her quivering chin gently. “Fear not. I shall not abandon my list. I shall return soon to ensure your book is published.”

The League of Viciously Spiteful Cows, mid-list at best, although I had enjoyed it immensely. It might take off at the chain stores, I thought, if we could get it in the book clubs. She wasn’t a talent like O’Shea, just a normal girl with a good sense of humor. It would be a relief to work with her.

Mikaela nodded tearfully, confusion fighting with loyalty in her eyes.

The elevator dinged and the door opened. I stepped aside to let the mail cart pass, then joined two smirking men in suits on their way to the ground floor. I did not kill them.

O’Shea was in deadly danger, and I had sworn to protect him.

—

I followed Celia out of the café. She stepped into the street and was nearly hit by a conveniently-empty cab that screeched to a stop an inch from her hip. The driver’s hands were shaking as we slid into the seat behind him and he moved forward with traffic.

“That was just the damnedest thing—”

“To Fairy,” Celia interrupted him.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. I know where that is. Yeah.” After another half-block, he said, “Wait, what?”

Celia rolled her eyes. “It’s a nightclub on Eighth and Fifty-third? The Pickled Fairy? Lots of fags?”

“Oh. Yeah,” the driver said, and we were on our way.

I spent the rest of the drive with her twined between my legs. We kissed. She fondled me through my trousers. I rolled my tongue over her half-covered breasts in what must have been full view of the driver, and didn’t care.

Eventually, we reached The Pickled Fairy. Celia waved at the driver, and he said, obviously against his will, “Never mind the fare. Sorry about almost killing you back there.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, and we skipped off.

It was midmorning, and the air was still cold enough to curl the hair in my nose. The front of the place was covered with abstract purple and green shapes that reminded me of Mardi Gras masks—but with insect eyes staring from the holes. Celia walked up to the front door; it was locked. She glanced up and down the street—it wasn’t exactly abandoned—took off her pump, which looked like a steel-tipped prostitute’s shoe or something Bowie used to wear, and used it to smash in the glass. She had to pound at it a few times to push the wire mesh apart, but nobody seemed to notice.

She reached in, fiddled around a bit, and opened the door out toward us. I followed her in. Well, it was her club. We went through the entryway, where the old theater had sold popcorn and Celia’s fairies now sold condoms and feather boas and wine out of boxes, and into the club itself.

Only a few of the lights were on. Most of the theater seating had been removed, the floor was covered with some kind of tile that looked gray but shimmered with color as I walked on it. Glass booths had been built into the walls on platforms, with gauzy curtains covering the inside—for concealment or enhancement, I had never been sure which.

She put her hands on her hips and pursed her lips. Her hair was a tousled mess strung with Christmas tinsel. She was wearing a teal corset and a miniskirt made out of what looked like feathers but felt like satin. I stroked her ass. She bent over at the waist and grabbed her shoes at the ankle.

After a few moments, she stopped me. “Not here. Over there.” She pointed at the old stage, hung with swings and cages.

“Er,” I said, suddenly uncomfortable. Her sense of balance was legendary among her customers, who always caught her in time; mine usually involved looking British and apologizing profusely.

She grinned with perfectly-formed teeth. “What, swings too kinky? No. We’re going to Fairy.” She led me up the ramp to the stage, swinging her hips as she walked on her impossibly stacked shoes. “I don’t just want to fuck you,” she said. “I want to fuck with your head. I want to show you what you’ve been imagining all your life. I want to—“

She screamed.

—

My horse, Lord William Falcon, was waiting on the sidewalk, snorting hot steam from his nostrils. He stamped a hoof as I pushed through the revolving door in the lobby, scratching the glass with my gauntlets. I whistled, and he charged gleefully though the crowd, pushing passersby aside with his enormous chest.

I swung up in the saddle, checked the seating of my sword, Holiday, to make sure it wouldn’t catch in a strap, and patted Falcon on the neck. “Ho, noble steed.”

“Welcome back, mistress,” he said. “To Hell and back.”

“To Hell and back,” I confirmed.  “We defend O’Shea from demons this day.”

“As you predicted,” Falcon noted. “Celia cannot resist her mortals, can she?”

“Indeed not. I had hoped for a peaceful changeover, but—not with this Queen.”

“Peace is for the mortal realm, mistress. It has no place in fairy.”

I sighed. I complained about the ways of mortal writers…but for the life of me, I loved their comma mishaps so. Falcon was right.

We galloped down the street, leaping over shrieking pedestrians and food carts redolent of garlic and tongue, wheeling to a halt in front of the Pickled Fairy, my Queen’s nightclub.

I slid to the ground, then spat on the sidewalk.  “Phaugh!” I hated the place, but it was the nearest place to Fairy in the mortal realm. I remembered when it had been as used bookstore, as was right and proper.

I drew Holiday and slashed through the front door, then charged past the glitter and sparkle. Richard O’Shea was standing just on this side of mortality with his mouth open and his eyes fixed on Celia.

Celia was impaled on the spikes of a demon, who casually ripped off her beglittered arm and gnawed on it. Celia gasped, “Save Richard! Hell shall not have him!”

“My Queen,” I said. I grabbed Richard, threw him over my shoulder, and ran back with him to the sidewalk.

In the daylight, he finally regained the power of speech and the illusion of bravery. “Put me down!” he shouted. I tossed him across Lord Falcon’s back. “Take him to safety,” I said, slapping Falcon on the flank. Falcon, ever melodramatic, reared (while not allowing O’Shea to budge an inch on his back—magic) and galloped away.

I ran back into the club. Demons were swarming from behind the curtain at the back of the stage; Celia had disappeared. I hacked them down as they poured toward me.

Aside from redlining, I live for days like this.

—

Snatches of conversation rang in my ears as the horse galloped willy-nilly with me through Manhattan.

“Girls with jobs. Girls with money—”

“A three million investment will get you—”

“I’m so used to Laurel taking minutes—”

The conversations usually ended with some kind of exclamation as the stallion charged into them.

I was unable to move from the back of the horse, even to lift my head; it was as though I had been glued there. The sound of his hooves echoed through my skull.

“Let me down!” I shouted. My words came out somewhat garbled, as part of my face was stuck to the skin on the back of his neck.

“Be patient, my Lord,” the horse said.

“Where are we going?”

“A place of safety. Back to the editorial offices, where you can make a reasoned decision between genres, as My Lady Victoria requested.”

“At least let me sit up.”

The horse chuckled. “Nay, my Lord.”

Another conversation: “In a spiritual context—”

“Help me!” I screamed. But we passed the voices in a split-second.

The sound of the horse’s hooves changed from the ring of steel on pavement to dull clomping. The horse slowed and stopped. His skin twitched under me, as if I were a particularly pesky fly. He danced in place, whickering nervously and turning in place. He froze and almost stumbled, then whinnied in fear.

I caught a glimpse of something green and hideous as he wheeled, full of spikes and sharp edges. It looked unlike and yet like the thing that had attacked Celia. I whimpered. The horse’s muscles gathered under me, and it leapt forward. I almost fell, even though I was glued to his back.

“But dude, like, the homes are really old, like thirty years old. Holy shhhhiiiiiiii—”

Something hooked into my back, and I screamed as I flew off the horse’s back…

—

I chopped, and I chopped, and I chopped my way forward through demon flesh until I reached the curtain that, at my Queen’s will, would open the way to Fairy, but had been hijacked by the guards of Hell.

A massive quartskuller was guarding the way. I attacked with an overhand cut. The quartskuller’s treelike, wooden arms jerked forward and grabbed me around my torso.

When fighting a quartskuller, always attack with an overhead swing; it’s the only way to keep your sword free for fighting, because they will grab you. The demon slowly began to crush me to death. My breastplate, forged out of a warding sprite being punished for insulting the queen at a party, resisted the pressure as best it could.

I brought Holiday’s spiked pommel down smartly on the quartskuller’s head and twisted the quillons. Luckily, I hit the soft spot on the first try, and the demon’s brain fluid welled up around the spike. I jerked Holiday free, and the demon’s head deflated with a spurt.

This in no way should be taken to imply that it released me. However, now I was able to chop its arms away from its chest without it being able to think of any way to stop me. Eventually I freed myself.

Despite what other knights may say, the only real danger in fighting a quartskuller is in the inevitable delay in removing at least one of its arms. One really must clear all minor enemies from the area before engaging. With enough time, even the most mindless demonling can find a gap in one’s armor into which to insert its razor-sharp tongue.

I charged through the portal.

—

I awoke in Hell. I will not describe the tortures I experienced, witnessed, and became there; suffice it to say that I have been assured that in no way could I have prevented what occurred.

Especially the parts of it I enjoyed. Hell has its temptations.

—

I do not care for Hell-spawn, but they serve a higher purpose than anything in Fairy. Hell is the skin of the world, its first barrier against the Outer Dark. Some in the Fairy realms laugh nervously when the subject arises, and defend their prejudices against the Hell-folk by saying the demons have spent too much time on the edge of the world and have started to become the formless monsters against which they defend, which is so much manure; I have told them so.

What is a demon but a kind of monster?

What is a monster but a twisted reflection?

What is the purpose of a reflection but to cause us to reflect, to become self-conscious?

The demons of Hell are twisted, but they are twisted in our service, so that we might be ashamed of ourselves if we should happen to recognize ourselves in them. Also, they are (for the most part) formidable warriors, able to transcend matter and spirit and attack the Outer Ones directly. It is true that battle changes them, but not for the worse. I salute them, when they do not abduct my husband and Queen for their own foul purposes.

When I stepped into Hell, which could have been an instant later or an eon, time being what it is in the mythical realms, a gaggle of demonlings called lebensmen had hold of O’Shea and Celia in an antechamber of Hell. Apparently, O’Shea hadn’t made his choice yet, for which I was grateful.

The antechamber appeared to be a bureaucratic office of some sort, filled with the waiting dead in grisly condition. These were the ones who, in life, had glanced up at atrocity and returned their gazes to their magazines and their cell phones; in death, they would be called out of one waiting room and escorted into another—until they chose to see and to act, which of course they would not. Personally, I would rather have been damned from something from which redemption might be gleaned, like mass murder or working as a street mime.

Celia had died but recently; O’Shea was standing over her, bending her backwards over a coffee table covered with dental magazines, holding the knife quivering in her breast with a loathsome look on his face, with thin red tendrils leading away from his ankles. The master lebensman, lounging in all its lobster-red, sluglike glory, was lecturing its juniors on the proper way to wrap a victim, so that it neither could escape nor know that it had been wrapped and made to dance. The master had, in a fit of delicate insight, taken possession of O’Shea rather than Celia. The master was letting him howl and struggle against the control, making him think himself a coward for both attacking Celia and being unable to ameliorate the attack by stabbing himself.

Celia had died knowing what had been done to her. She had a frustrated scowl on her face and clearly was glaring at the master, who stood a good deal of distance away from Richard. The younglings had withdrawn from her, leaving bloody trails between her body and their master.

“Unhand him,” I yelled, drawing Holiday. With two swipes of the sword, I cut down three of the juniors and a handful of do-nothings on a nearby bench, leaving only two juniors left. “Withdraw!”

The two juniors squealed and slithered away in fright, moving no faster than a crippled snail. The master looked up absentmindedly, adjusted his spectacular on its frame over his head, and said, “Oh, pardon. I hadn’t realized you were in such a hurry. One moment.”

It took what seemed like hours, but there was no rushing him, or it would have left irreparable damage. Meanwhile, I carefully, lovingly (but not gently) cut Celia into pieces, cleaned her as best I could with glossy magazine paper from one of the damned, and stuffed her into a large mail bag, which I tossed on the ground next to Richard. While he writhed in pain and horror as the master withdrew its nerve fibers, I ate a golden apple, offering a slice to the master as he worked.

“Thank you. I hate these rush jobs,” he said, oozing his tail over the slice.

“May I ask why?”

The lebensman shrugged, inasmuch as it could, the slime on its face rippling. “It’s all just a game of Satan says to me. Satan says, ‘Convince Richard O’Shea that he is a monster.’ And I say, ‘Yes, Satan.’”

“Indeed.”

I suppose I could have charged down to the depths of Hell and demanded satisfaction of His Lord Satan; however, it was a long way to go for an enraging smirk and a “Celia started it,” so I crunched on my slice of apple and waited instead, as it seemed that Richard and my Queen would be returned without further struggle, now that Hell had had its say.

“Shouldn’t you have taken him down further?” I asked. “Shown him the sights? Given him the tour?”

The master lebensman rippled. “Satan had, apparently, but it wasn’t convincing enough. ‘Keep it simple,’ Satan said. ‘As banal as you can find. Let his imagination do the work.’”

“Ah,” I said. “Well, I shall take him back to neutral ground and threaten him with contracts until he picks one.”

At the word “contract,” the lebensman shuddered. “Can’t he do both? I’ve never understood.”

“Can’t be on two shelves at once. Is he providing a refuge from mundanity, or is he providing catharsis in the dark? He can cross over, but in the end, he must pick a shelf, or the readers will never find him.”

“Ah,” the lebensman said, clearly not understanding, but literary theory was often beyond the reach of the lesser demons.

The last of the tendrils withdrew, and Richard collapsed on the first level of Hell and sobbed. I hefted the mail bag over one shoulder and him over the other. Magazines snapped in irritation as the exit disappeared behind me.

“Put me down,” he said.

—

Victoria dumped me on the cold floor of the tunnel. “Down, as requested.” She hefted the bag more firmly on her shoulder; it reminded me of my college laundry bag, dripping similarly-disgusting fluids.

“You saved me,” I said.

“I suppose. They would have sent you back to the mortal realms eventually. Now walk. We’re going back to the editorial offices.”

“Why?” I moaned. “Why did you—” I couldn’t say it. I waved a hand at the bag.

“Easier to carry, and she can’t leave part of herself behind this way,” she said. “The last time I lost part of her, it took her forever to rot, and all of Fairy was in chaos for years. We had to withdraw from the mortal realms entirely, or lose the whole place to the demons.” She walked up the tunnel, quickly leaving me behind.

“Wait,” I said.

She didn’t. I limped up the path until I caught up with her; she started walking faster.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She snorted. “Sorry for what? Trying to get into fairy without making a decision, even after I warned you not to?”

“Betraying you with Celia,” I said. I wasn’t entirely sure I meant it.

Victoria gritted her teeth. “I was put there to be betrayed. You were always meant to fall in love with her. That is fairy. No love may be mundane, reliable, or sane. It’s always hopeless and doomed but extremely desirable. You were, however, not meant to cross into fairy without making up your mind.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Why?” she said. “You only get to write in one genre, O’Shea.”

“What about pseudonyms?”

“Then you can write two names’ worth of crap. Both those proposals were crap, and you know it. Until you make up your mind what you’re actually doing, you will continue to write crap.”

After that, she refused to speak to me, and drew further and further away.

—

I hate being dragged into her plots. She got herself killed on purpose so he would feel like he had to save her. They made him kill her so he’d feel like a beast. Why can’t these people just be rational?

—

I struggled up a tunnel made of solidified meat for what seemed like millennia.

How could I live with myself? I had killed her. I should turn around and…no. I would not willingly go back to Hell. Who would? The worst man in the world would not willingly go into Hell, no matter how much he believed he deserved it. Only someone who thought Hell was not real would even joke about going there.

Unless he wasn’t wanted anywhere else.

Unless he knew that in order to find salvation, one had to go through Hell first. Anything else would feel false, I knew. With Hell, you knew where you were: people were monstrous—perhaps salvageable, but monstrous—the bad were punished, the good were found out, you had to admit your lack of innocence (and none of us were innocent) before you could get out again. The point of Hell was knowing when you deserved to be in it, and when you didn’t.

But fairy—

You never knew what you were going to get with fairy, except that it wouldn’t be dull.

As I ruminated, the tunnel became lighter, not that I had had any trouble seeing before. Less oppressive. The walls were made out of silvery skin that almost, but didn’t quite, reflect me. It showed a shadowed man, walking. I could have been anyone, least of all myself.

I could always turn around. I could always turn around later and admit that I was a monster. Every step brought a fresh wave of shame and contempt for myself. I should have fought harder. I should have killed myself, first. I cried, and to my ears, it sounded like a doll’s crying, fake in my own ears, mechanical, my tears running out of a well in my head that would have to be refilled using an eye-dropper. Eventually, I ran out.

But I kept going until the tunnel became shiner and shinier, and I could see my own reflection. I was an old man with a long beard and a magician’s robe. I was a thief stealing a magic lantern from a cavern…and taking a single jewel to call his own. I was a hero, come from humble origins, to save the world. I had chosen Fairy.

—

I got tired of waiting for O’Shea to stop admiring himself, so I sent two mizzerah brownies to bring O’Shea along. He’d made up his mind, and even Hell knew it.

The mizzerah, dressed like extremely short human hookers with knobby green skin and stiff, sloppy Mohawks, dropped O’Shea at my feet. He opened his eyes blearily.

It was time for the paradox.

“Look,” I said, pointing at the throne made out of glass shards and sparkling with blue-green bloodstains. I’d arranged Celia there, tying her various pieces and parts in place with glittering silver scarves.

He took one shuddering glance at Celia’s carelessly-stacked body parts and looked away.

“Look,” I said, pointing at the shimmering nebulae out of which the floor had been made, whole solar systems being crushed and distended every time the Queen summoned us to dance before her. The sins of disco were great indeed, and long overdue for change.

He winced and stared straight ahead.

“Look,” I said, pointing toward the rest of the court, gaily-dressed sylphs in legwarmers and muscled trolls with razor blades dangling from their ears, all of them staring at him very nearly pop-eyed.

I wasn’t the only one ready for a change.

He closed his eyes.

I grabbed him by the chin and turned his face back toward my Queen. “Close your eyes and I’ll rip your eyelids off.”

“You wouldn’t—”

I opened my visor and gave him my best editorial look.

“You would,” he said.

I nodded.

He took a deep breath and watched as Fairy changed. The glitter faded. The glass throne turned to well-worn leather. Heavy tables, divided into carrels, rose from the floor. The walls lost their peacock feathers and grew shelves, then books whose spines read gibberish. O’Shea glanced toward them longingly (he’s a writer, after all), and I jerked his chin back toward my Queen. He had to finish it.

I didn’t change. I never change.

Sitting in a huge, leather-bound chair was a tiny bit of a girl with long, dark hair and thick glasses. She was wearing a school uniform with red embroidery on her shoulder and reading a book.

O’Shea gasped. “Celia?”

I grabbed his shoulder. “Her name isn’t Celia anymore.”

He looked, if anything, even worse than he had in Hell. “I loved her,” he said. “And now she’s gone.”

“Yes,” I said, trying but not succeeding in keeping the irritation at his stupidity out of my voice. “That’s what it means, to be the best writer of a generation. You change everything you touch, and you can never get the old ways back, because you can never write someone else’s story, not really.”

He watched the girl, who couldn’t have been more than eight, reading the book. Tears welled up. He wiped them away with the side of his forefinger, then looked at them in the soft light coming from the green-shaded desk lamps at the carrels. “I should have chosen hell. I should have chosen hell.”

I grinned at him, and he stared at my sharp teeth. “Let us kneel.”

As we knelt, the little girl looked up. Her eyes were filled with stars.

—

I printed the whole thing out. Eight hundred pages. And dropped it on her desk.

Victoria looked up. She was back to being human again, which I found slightly disturbing. We had separated (but not divorced), while declaring to everyone that we would remain the best of friends. I would have liked to stay with her, but she insisted that she refused to be made a fool of, even if her then-Queen had ordered it.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“The project I’ve been working on, wouldn’t tell you about. First draft.”

“It’s a bit long, isn’t it?” But she pulled aside the title page—The Whispering Tree by Richard O’Shea—and started reading.

Emma was a precocious sort of girl who never felt the need to take her parents’ advice, so when her mother (a tall storklike woman named Jascinta) and her father (a stunningly dapper man named Fred) told her not to read under the willow tree in the back of her new Grandmother’s house, she shrugged.

“If this is Grandmother’s house,” she asked, “then whose mother is she? I’ve never heard of her before.”

Her mother and father shared a sweet, smug smile and refused to answer her, which, she felt, justified not only her carrying the leather-bound edition of Through the Looking-Glass from her so-called “Grandmother’s” library and a glass of lemonade to the bottom of the willow, but everything, everything, that happened afterwards.

Her only regret was what had happened to the book.

“Could be interesting,” Victoria said, turning the page with satisfaction. “You know you’re missing a comma, don’t you?”

—

THE END.