Night: Kendra and the Gunslinger Girl (Forever)_Days of Blood and Roses: A Magical Girl Thriller

> Where'er I roam, whatever realms to see,

> My heart, untravell’d, fondly turns to thee: . . .

> —Oliver Goldsmith,

> “The Traveller”

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When Roy Dolan finished his eulogy for his fallen partner and friend, Detective Edmund Tellerman, he had tears in his eyes. For most of his life, even during his childhood, he was never much given to crying over spilled milk, or anything else for that matter, but deaths were a different story. Not since the deaths of his mother and father had he cried as much as he did during his eulogy to his beloved comrade in arms.

It was enough to make many in his audience, most of them hardened veteran cops, tear up in their chairs and wipe their eyes, but when he looked to the front of the congregation at Edmund’s orphaned fourteen-year-old daughter, Kendra Tellerman, he saw no tears.

“Like father, like daughter,” he wanted to say, for even though he could tell she was in mourning, Kendra was not obvious about it—just like her father. When Kendra’s mother died, Kendra’s father never showed her his tears, preferring to stay silent whenever Kendra mentioned his mother in Roy’s presence, for which he had asked him if it was the right thing to do.

Roy Dolan had said, “She’s your daughter, Tellerman. She’ll understand.”

And, indeed, when he looked at her somber tearless expression as she walked up to the podium to give her eulogy for her father, he knew she understood. Though, when he thought about it later that night as he was filling out the paperwork to transfer Kendra’s guardianship from Edmund Tellerman to Roy Dolan, he figured it might not have been the best way to do it. Then again, Roy surmised, Edmund did his best with what God gave him.

That eulogy, though, the one Kendra gave for her father, had haunted Roy since then. During Roy’s eulogy, she unzipped her backpack and took out a giant stack of papers and passed it along the rows of seats, telling the pairs of officers to take one and share it between them and pass the rest on. As she continued passing out packets, she seemed like a school teacher passing out assignments to her students during a class recital. And when Roy passed Kendra by on his way to front row, he was given his own packet and sat down looking over the stanzas of Alfred Tennyson’s Maud, then noticed some of the pronouns changed from the feminine to the masculine gender in brackets and looked up at Kendra at the podium as she got herself ready. Save for the changed pronouns, this was the same poem Edward Tellerman recited for his wife, Ramona Tellerman, over a decade earlier when Kendra was just a toddler and Roy was just a rookie cop fresh out of the Shad-Row University Police Academy.

But as Kendra recited the poem, she was crying by the fifth stanza and couldn’t continue.

So Roy Dolan stood up from his chair and recited the next stanza for her, saying,

> “And the soul of the rose went into my blood,

> As the music clash'd in the hall;

> And long by the garden lake I stood,

> For I heard your rivulet fall

> From the lake to the meadow and on to the wood,

> Our wood, that is dearer than all;”

Kendra looked down at Roy from the podium, wiped away her tears, and said,

> “From the meadow your walks have left so sweet

> That whenever a March-wind sighs

> He sets the jewel-print of your feet

> In violets blue as your eyes,

> To the woody hollows in which we meet

> And the valleys of Paradise.”

Then Kendra and Roy recited the next stanza together, saying,

> “The slender acacia would not shake

> One long milk-bloom on the tree;

> The white lake-blossom fell into the lake,

> As the pimpernel dozed on the lea;

> But the rose was awake all night for your sake,

> Knowing your promise to me;

> The lilies and roses were all awake,

> They sigh'd for the dawn and thee.”

Then rest of the congregation joined, one by one, and then in a multitude of voices, young and old, men and women, from rookie intern to retiree, all them adding their tears to the Kendra’s eulogy, all of them adding their strength for Kendra to continue, all of them honoring their fallen comrade:

> “Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls,

> Come hither, the dances are done,

> In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls,

> Queen lily and rose in one;

> Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls.

> To the flowers, and be their sun.

> “There has fallen a splendid tear

> From the passion-flower at the gate.

> [He] is coming, my dove, my dear;

> [He] is coming, my life, my fate;

> The red rose cries, ‘[He] is near, [he] is near;’

> And the white rose weeps, ‘[He] is late;’

> The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear;’

> And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’

> “[He] is coming, my own, my sweet;

> Were it ever so airy a tread,

> My heart would hear [him] and beat,

> Were it earth in an earthy bed;

> My dust would hear [him] and beat,

> Had I lain for a century dead;

> Would start and tremble under [his] feet,

> And blossom in purple and red.”

To any outsider, there was a lot to be said about Roy’s decision that day, that he had become his own man and taken responsibility and all that highfalutin mumbo jumbo. For Roy, though, when he stood up and spoke that day, he had won Kendra’s trust. And ever since, he struggled to measure up to the man he was that day, wondering (like Kendra’s father) if he was doing the right thing and setting a good example for Kendra to follow.

When Roy woke up at 6:16 a.m. to the sound of his alarm clock, he woke up crying and raised a forearm over his eyes, shielding the incoming dawn seeping through the bedroom blinds from reaching his eyes and blurring the anomalous afterimage of a man in the white suit standing behind the back row of the congregation during his eulogy. He then coughed at a hitch in his throat and gulped down a wad of phlegm, then took several breaths through his mouth to quell the heartbeats drumming against his chest at that anomalous afterimage.

He turned over on his side and sat up over the edge of his bed, saying, “Rise and shine, Kendra. Time to wake up.”

He heard no rustling in the bedsheets.

“Come on, wake up,” he said, turning around, only to find his bedside empty. “Kendra?”

No reply.

“Kendra, where are you?”

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Just ten minutes before sunrise, Ronald Hamilton (in the form of Colbie’s body double) took out a smartphone and called Lt. Frank Shaefer, asking for a phantom SWAT unit to pick him up at a designated location within a ten-block radius of the Oriental double doors. Lt. Frank Shaefer asked him if he had a beacon with him, but Ronald said he lost it on his way, so Shaefer asked for a description of a designated landmark where his phantom unit could pick him up. Ronald looked out across the skyline and spotted a radio broadcast tower with its light beeping against the westering sky and informed the lieutenant of its location before hanging up and replacing his smartphone in his dress pocket.

Afterwards, he doubled back and approached the balustrade of the roof and saw the party of masqueraders emerging into the street around the corner, looking for Colbie. Many of them went in pairs in phantom rickshaws pulled by yokai runners, one of which he remembered when he and Colbie almost collided with him a few blocks back.

“Shit!” he cursed, and doubled back away from the balustrade, but that sharp-eyed yokai runner pointed up towards the roof, saying something to his masked passengers and leading their gazes up towards his location. So he sprinted towards the other end of the roof and swung himself over the balustrade into the street below amidst a flurry of screams from passing pedestrians, collapsing the canopy of an outdoor cafe and overturning an empty table and some chairs, sending the late night patrons scattering away.

“Sorry about that!” he said, looking around, his voice much higher in Colbie’s vocal range and sounding almost cartoonish to his ears.

“Hey, kid, are you all right?” a patron said.

“I’m all right, don’t worry,” he said, and he picked himself up and dashed down the sidewalk towards a crossing where he tried to hail a phantom rickshaw into pulling over, but he had no such luck. Everywhere he looked, he saw none available on the sidewalks, and the ones who passed him by on the street probably thought he was a crazy teenage girl who had caused a major ruckus, anyway.

Just then, two phantom rickshaws carrying pairs of masqueraders came rattling towards him at foot runner’s speed, closing in fast.

“Shit!” he cursed, and turned the corner and dashed down the sidewalk into another street, where another phantom rickshaw (the one that had spotted him on the roof) rattled around the corner and closed off his exit. “Jesus H. Christ, you’ve got to be shitting me!”

He juked to his left and ran into the first doors he saw, breaking them off their hinges and startling early diners breakfasting on dim sum dumplings and pork buns.

He ran through an aisle past rows of seated breakfasters and nearly ran into a waitress, who shouted after him, “Watch it, shabi!" (cunt!)

To which he yelled back, “Dui bu qi!” (I owe you!)

He continued running before turning left into another aisle past more rows of breakfasters towards a side exit, where a big beefy noodle master with a machete knife threatened him in a Chinese dialect he couldn’t understand, so he repeated his phrase, “Dui bu qi!” (I owe you!) and baseball-slid between his bowed legs and banged the door open, scrambled to his feet and ran down the sidewalk away from the rickshaws before the masqueraders spotted him.

Turning the corner, he checked his watch, which showed 6:28 a.m. on the dial, and kept walking, keeping his pace as steady and relaxed as he could manage to blend in with the surroundings.

He then cut into a clothing store entrance and headed down the center aisle towards the men’s changing rooms, when a store lady said, “Hey, miss, that’s the men’s changing area.”

He almost cursed, but caught himself just in time and said, “Oh, sorry about that.”

He entered the women’s dressing rooms where he shut the door behind him and said to himself, “I need a new job description.” Reaching into his dress coat, he pulled out another small vial and placed the vial to his forehead, thinking of the broadcast tower he had seen on the roof of that building overlooking the balustrades, raised it aloft above his head, and shattered it on the floor between his feet.

A swirling kaleidoscope of ever-shifting images manifested below him and took him to his destination—

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By a row of zelkova trees hedging the perimeter of the radio broadcast building right below the designated landmark of the broadcast tower, where he waited for the phantom SWAT unit to arrive at his location.

As sunrise broke over the eastern horizon, he kept loitering by the zelkova trees on the sidewalk, attracting four rowdy Chinese male ghosts (drunk after a night on the town during the festivities) who began whistling and heckling him with catcalls and come-ons.

“Gun dan!” (Fuck off!) he said.

This only raised their curiosity at this lone dreamer girl loitering for some reason, so one of them said in Chinese, “Hey, don’t be that way, little lady. We can keep you company, if you want. There’s no telling who might turn up in this town, so be careful, little lady.”

“I said, fuck off, biantai!” (creep) he said.

“Hey, don’t talk to me that way, jian nu ten!” (bitch) he said, grabbing both of his hands. “I’m just trying to be nice, but if you–”

Ronald had had enough, so he kicked that ghost in his astral groin, dropping him to his knees on the ground, and said in Chinese, “Listen, buddy, if you and your friends stick around me for too long, I can’t guarantee your safety. I’ve got a bunch of mask-wearing knife-wielding psychopaths trying to find me right now, so if you don’t want to get mixed up in that shit, I’d suggest you get out of here. Gun dan!” (Fuck off!)

All four ghosts hightailed themselves away from him, one of them shouting back at him, “Cao ni ma!” (Fuck your mother!)

With that out of the way, he checked his watch again and cursed, because it showed 6:37 a.m. “Come on, guys,” he said, “when the hell are you gonna get here?”

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Though Connie Davis didn’t know it upon waking, her nightmare began when the smartphone buzzed by her wallet on the bathroom countertop. She looked at the screen and saw Roy Dolan’s telephone number, so she swiped the screensaver and pressed the call button, pressed the phone to her ear and said, “Connie here. What’s going on? Why are you calling me this early?” She then noticed heavy breathing on the other end of the connection and said, “Hey, are you okay?”

“I’m not okay!” Roy Dolan said. “Listen, have you seen Kendra?”

“No, I haven’t,” she said. “Why? Isn’t she at your place?”

“She’s not! That’s what I’m trying to say!”

“Okay, okay, okay,” Connie said, “calm down. You need to calm down, okay? What happened?”

“I don’t know what happened,” Roy said. “She was sleeping in my bed last night, and when I woke up, she was gone. I’ve looked all over the house, and I’ve called her cellphone, but she’s not returning any of my messages. Connie, did you see her in your dreams or anything like that?”

“No, I haven’t,” Connie said. “What’s going on, Roy?”

“I had that dream again,” he said.

Connie paused in thought, then said, “You mean . . . the one about your partner?”

“Yeah,” he said, his gulping audible over the connection. “I saw Edmund’s funeral in my dream, and Kendra was placing roses on his casket. She recited that Maud poem, too.”

“The one by Tennyson?”

“Yeah,” he said, then paused for a spell, but Connie waited for him to continue. “First, the dream, and now she’s gone. . . . What does that mean?”

Now it was Connie’s turn to pause, as she thought over his words, thought over the symbolic associations of caskets and roses and songs in the contexts of dreams, and said, “I’m not . . . Listen, are you sure you want to hear this?”

“Just tell me your thoughts,” he said, “plain and simple.”

Connie considered her thoughts on the matter as anything but ‘plain and simple,’ but she played along and said, “Caskets can refer to your fears of death, but they can also symbolize the womb. If we take these ideas together, it’s not just about your partner, Roy. It might also be about Kendra’s mother, too. Kendra’s an orphan, so maybe she’s trying to find them.”

“Maybe,” he said, “but they’re both dead. Anything else?”

“Roses symbolize a lot of things from love to joy to passion,” Connie said. “The number of meanings are too broad for me to figure out. Did you notice anything about those roses Kendra put on the casket?”

“Yeah,” he said. “They were withered roses.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Why do you ask?”

Again, Connie thought of the associations of such roses in the context of dreams and felt a stab of horror worry beating through her heart. Nevertheless, she gulped down her fears and said, “Withered roses can symbolize parting ways or the absence of something or the lack of a presence, but they can also mean the end of something.”

“Death, you mean?” he said.

“Yeah, but I’m not certain,” she said.

“Do you think Kendra’s in danger?” he said.

Again, Connie paused at the question and thought of her next words, knowing that Roy was already anxious enough as it is. She didn’t want to put words in his mouth or lead him on to horrific conclusions, if she could help it, so she said, “Maybe, but I’m not certain. I need something more concrete to know for sure.”

Through the phone, she heard Roy breathing in and breathing out in a long sigh. He then said, “You’re right. What else?”

Again, Connie paused in her thoughts over the last dream symbol and said, “Songs in the context of dreams might refer to a spiritual or psychical outlook, but it depends on the lyrics. Roy, did you remember the words Kendra was reciting?”

“Not really,” he said.

“Did you get any impressions from it?”

“Wait, what do you mean by that?”

“When Kendra recited it during the funeral,” Connie said, “how did it make you feel?” She waited for Roy’s on the other end of the connection.

“I was . . .” But he paused over the phone, as if he was struggling with something hidden inside him, and said, “God, I don’t know!”

So she made it easier on him and said, “Just say what you felt, Roy. You don’t have to go any further than that if you’re uncomfortable saying it.”

“I felt,” he said, then paused again. “I felt like I was about to cry. Like I was yearning to meet someone before parting for good.”

“I see,” Connie said and changed the subject: “Did you see Kendra crying?”

“Yeah,” he said, “but that’s not what worries me.”

“What worries you, then?”

He paused for several moments, and Connie waited, till he said, “I saw someone else there, someone I didn’t recognize.”

“What do you mean?”

“When Kendra and I visited her father’s funeral that day,” he continued (and she heard him gulp over the connection), “I saw a man in a white suit standing behind the congregation when I gave my eulogy. After the funeral ended, I tried to look for him, but he wasn’t there. Do you think that means anything?”

“I’m not sure,” Connie said, rolling this new information through her mind, “but I don’t think it means that Kendra’s in any immediate danger. Maybe it means she’s looking for someone.”

“You mean, her father?” Roy said.

“Maybe,” she said, “but I don’t know for sure just yet. I need more concrete data to know what she’s looking for.” She then added, “Roy, I know this is difficult, but try not to think of it, okay? I don’t think it’s what you think.”

“Okay,” he said.

“We’ll find her,” she said. “So have faith, okay?”

“I’ll try,” he said. “Keep me updated when you find out something.”

“I will.” When the connection cut off, Connie dialed Leslie Amame’s home phone number, but she didn’t pick up and the phone beeped in her ear. She dialed it again, saying, “Come on. Pick up already,” and again the connection timed out and the phone beeped. She cursed, then dialed the home phone of the Hearn sisters, saying, “Come on. Pick up. Pick up!” But the connection timed out and beeped in her ear, so she redialed again and prayed for one of the sisters to pick up the phone.

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Colbie’s kiss had reanimated Cooley and shimmered the mirror on which she pressed her hand in a flash of light, counteracting Leslie’s counter spell and dispelling the original curse of her key over everyone else in the underground vault. When the flash faded, Cooley and Leslie took their hands off of the mirror, the mirror cracking into a spiderweb of cracks and Leslie’s omamori charm floating for a moment in front of her before dissipating into thin air. Blaze, who had been caught off guard with the flash of light, singed the bedsheets just behind her into a smoldering mess of burnt cotton. And Nico (the first Nico) fell on her butt, making her cry out.

Leslie and Cooley and Blaze turned to the younger girl, reaching out and raising her back to her feet (with Cooley saying, “Hey, are you okay?”), but Nico was not okay.

Nico grimaced in agony, feeling a hot sharp burning sensation across her stomach and a wave of nausea and a concussive shock ripping through her head like a lightning strike. She lost her footing and fell to her knees, pressing a hand to her stomach that was now bleeding out through her fingers, while rivulets of blood poured out from the back of her head, till she teetered over and fell on her face.

The vault erupted into a flurry of voices, the trio of women calling out Nico’s name, Cooley and Blaze shaking Nico by her shoulders, trying to rouse her, but to no avail.

So Leslie picked the fallen girl up in her arms and rested her on the bed and said, “Get bandage wraps and a medical kit!”

Cooley and Blaze headed into the pantry area, Cooley taking water bottles and rubbing alcohol and Blaze taking a set of bandage wraps from an old medical kit.

Both women returned and found Leslie propping Nico up on a stack of pillows, then summoning an omamori charm in her hand and pressing it to the back of Nico’s head where the blood had gushed out, pressing her forehead to Nico’s and saying, “Apokalýpto,” (reveal) but the spell didn’t work. “God damn it!”

“Tell us what to do, Leslie,” Cooley said.

“Cooley,” Leslie said, “help me clean the blood out of her hair. Blaze, do the same to her stomach.”

Cooley handed Blaze a bottle and took off the lids and poured water over Nico hair, washing out the blood for Leslie, while Blaze removed Nico’s over-dress and shirt, raising them past her stomach and slipping them over her shoulders and discarding them on the floor, and poured water over her stomach.

“Wait a minute,” Blaze said, “there’s no wound.”

“What?” Cooley said, looking over Nico’s stomach and pressing her hand over it, trying to feel any swelling or mushiness, but found nothing. “You’re kidding.”

“Quiet,” Leslie said, “I need to concentrate.” And she repeated the motions, summoning another omamori charm and pressing it to the back of Nico’s head, pressing her forehead to Nico’s and saying, “Apokalýpto!” (Reveal!)

And the horrors of the battle in the ballroom flashed through her mind, taking on the second Nico’s perspective atop the chandelier, from the first shots and clangs of engagement to her last desperate act of blowing the double doors of the grandfather clock before falling to her demise on the floor.

Leslie raised herself from Nico’s face in wide-eyed horror, cupping her gaping mouth and saying, “Oh my God!”

“What happened?” Cooley and Blaze said.

“It’s bad,” she said. “Kendra’s in danger. Cooley, Blaze, look after her while I’m gone. I need to check up on Kendra.”

“What happened to Kendra?” Cooley said.

But Leslie didn’t have the heart to say what, only saying, “I’m not sure, and I hope it’s not what I think it is. Look after her for me, okay?” And without waiting for a reply, Leslie sprinted towards the door leading to the closet under the stairs, but it wasn’t there.

“Cooley, I need your mirror!” Leslie yelled, running back.

So Cooley summoned another mirror and pressed her hand to the surface, saying, “Let us know what’s going on, okay?”

“I will when I can,” and Leslie pressed her hand to the reflection, thinking about the door to the closet under the stairs, manifesting that same door in the reflection, and walked into the mirror and opened the door—

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Into the closet space, where she found Colbie sleeping on her side on the floor, crying and murmuring in her sleep, with Leslie’s key clutched in her hand.

Leslie crouched and took the key and pocketed it, then shook Colbie by her shoulder and said, “Colbie, wake up! Come on, wake up!” But her daughter failed to rouse from her sleep, so she raised Colbie up by her shoulders and rested her head atop her thighs, wiping tears from her cheeks and saying, “Colbie, I’m here. Please, Colbie, I’m right here!” And she grabbed her daughter’s hand and kissed her palm and pressed it to her chest, letting her daughter feel her heart beating against her palm. “Listen to Mommy’s heartbeats. Try to find me. I know you can!”

And she waited and waited, then put her other hand to Colbie’s cheek, blinking back tears welling up in Leslie’s own eyes, and said, “Colbie, darling, please! I need you! Mommy needs you!”

And for a spell, Leslie stayed in that position of suspense, when she felt the touch of her daughter’s hand caressing her fingers over her face, and she breathed a sigh of relief, saying, “Thank God!”

“Mommy, are you crying?” Colbie said.

Leslie wiped away eyes and attempted to smile, then kissed Colbie’s palm and said, “Thank God, you’re safe. I thought I lost you.”

At her words, Colbie sat herself up and cried more tears, so Leslie scooted herself to her daughter’s side and said, “Honey, what’s wrong?”

But her daughter couldn’t stop crying.

“Honey, please, tell Mommy what’s wrong,” Leslie said.

“What they did to Kendra and Mara,” she said, “it was horrible! And I couldn’t do a Goddamn to stop it!”

Colbie bawled anew, and Leslie wrapped her arms around her daughter’s shoulders, commiserating with her daughter with comforting words, saying that everything was gonna be okay, that Kendra and Mara were gonna be okay, letting her daughter cry her baptism of tears.

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Just after Leslie left through the mirror, Nico (the first Nico) began grimacing and turning on her side on the bed and pressing her knees up against her bare stomach, all of which drew Cooley’s eyes to her stomach. Looking from the grimace on her face to her stomach, Cooley reached out and put her hand on Nico’s forehead and felt heat there.

“She’s burning up,” Cooley said, and held Nico’s forearms in place beside her head. “Get her legs off her stomach. We’ve gotta see what’s going on there.”

So while Cooley kept Nico’s upper body immobile, Blaze took hold of Nico’s calves and pulled in little tugs and nudges, so as not to wake her and cause her more pain. While Blaze held onto the girl’s legs, Cooley held down Nico’s wrist with one hand and placed her other hand up against the girl’s stomach and closed her eyes, visualizing what had happened to Nico with pure intuition.

“Do you see anything?” Blaze said.

“Not yet,” Cooley said. “Just give me a minute.”

So a minute went by, and at first, it was only a suggestion of something sharp, like a glancing nick across the stomach, before it flared into a knife wound and a wave of pain began spreading from there like a forest fire.

“She shows symptoms of getting stabbed there,” Cooley said, “but it’s indirect.”

“What do you mean by ‘indirect?’” Blaze said.

“That’s as close as I can figure it without Leslie here to look into it for us,” she said, looking at Blaze beside her. “All we can do now is dull the pain, so she can recover in her sleep. You know where the poppy seeds are?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Get them and grind them up,” Cooley said. “We’ll mix them into the incense burners and place them around her.”

“We only have strawberry incense left,” Blaze said.

“Then use that,” she said. “I’ll keep watch over her.”

So Blaze went to one of the overhead cabinets and pulled out a jar of poppy seeds and a few incense bowls, then opened another cabinet under the counter and pulled out a stone grinding bowl and a stone grinder. She then opened a drawer beneath the counter and pulled out incense bowls and strawberry incense packets. She placed all of these on the table and set to work, first grinding the poppy seeds in the stone bowl and putting them in the incense bowls, then opening the incense packets and putting the sticks in the bowls and placing them in three rows before the twin bed on which Nico slept.

As Blaze pinched the ends of the incense stick with her fingers and lit them into smoldering ends, one by one, Cooley left Nico in her side-sleeping position and began chanting words from John McCrae’s war poem,

> “In Flanders fields the poppies blow

> Between the crosses, row on row,

> That mark our place; and in the sky

> The larks, still bravely singing, fly

> Scarce heard amid the guns below.

> “We are the Dead. Short days ago

> We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

> Loved and were loved, and now we lie

> In Flanders fields.

> “Take up our quarrel with the foe:

> To you from failing hands we throw

> The torch; be yours to hold it high.

> If ye break faith with us who die

> We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

> In Flanders fields.”

And as those words hung in the air amidst the fluttering of incense tendrils wafting about, smelling of strawberries, Cooley manifested a fan in her hand and waved it against the rows of incense bowls. And one by one, the crushed particulates of poppy seeds lifted up on the crests of the Cooley’s fan-made turbulence and fluttered around Nico on the bed.

“How long before it takes effect?” Blaze said.

“It’ll take a while,” Cooley said. “We’ll just have to wait till she wakes up.” She then manifested poppy flowers in her hand and put them in Nico’s palm and curled her fingers around it beside her head.

“Is that a totem?” Blaze said.

“Yeah,” she said. “It’ll help her wake up.”

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After a time, Ronald Hamilton saw an armored cash-delivery truck driving down the street past several startled ghosts and dreamers towards his location near the radio broadcast tower, pulling up to the sidewalk in a skid as he approached the vehicle, and he waved his hands at them. The double doors on the back swung open, and four armed men decked out in SWAT gear, helmet, body armor and military boots came out and took up positions around the back with their weapons drawn, ready to fire if need be.

A fifth man, Lt. Frank Shaefer himself, came out and met Ronald halfway and grabbed his arm, saying, “Come on, we don’t have much time! We’ve gotta move!”

So Ronald rushed towards the vehicle and scrambled over the threshold of the double carrier doors, just as several phantom rickshaws came barreling down the street after them.

“Move, move, move, move!” Frank Shaefer yelled to the men, and all four of them boarded the lip of the truck, and then he screamed into his hand-held radio, “Drive, now!”

The vehicle engaged the transmission with a jolt and lurched forward down the street, as a pair of rickshaws with their phantom runners came dashing down the road, trying to overtake them. The pairs of masqueraders were now brandishing revolvers and pistols and firing shots past the double doors, sending lead slugs scattering into the interior like shrapnel.

Shaefer pushed Ronald down against the back wall, saying, “Stay down!”

Two of the SWAT members took up shields and formed a barricade against the oncoming bullets, and the other two members aimed their assault rifles and fired successive three-round bursts at the rickshaws, while Shaefer threw grenades at them.

Ronald squeezed his palms to his ears against the percussive shocks drumming through the interior and squinted his eyes shut against the sting of gunpowder and propellant and curled up into a fetal position, trying to think of anything to take his mind off of the present moment, but to no avail. In the silence of his thoughts, he could only think of the sick moments before a different firing squad raised their rifles up against him and fired, and the last thing he saw was Alice Liddell smiling at him by Rancaster’s side before his lights went out.

So he focused on her face and lost track of time, lost in the secrecy and gun smoke of the Baronetcy War, lost in the fog of his wayward thoughts about Alice Liddell and the moment of pain and anguish he had shared with her, lost in the eternal beta-wave sleep of oblivion in which his last words to her were ‘I’m sorry.’ Here he stayed, till a phantom voice of Lt. Shaefer took him out of his daze, and Ronald found himself carried on a stretcher back to the Secret Room of the Phantom Office.

He said, “Are we out of there?”

“Don’t worry, old boy,” Shaefer said. “You’re safe now.”

So Ronald Hamilton, exhausted by his ordeal, nodded his head and went back to sleep.

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When the other yokai runners came down the road with more pairs of masqueraders in their carriage compartments, the runners skidded to a halt at the sight of two shot-up phantom rickshaws before them. A yokai runner lay slumped over the handles of his rickshaw, draining out ectoplasm from bullet wounds in his head, while his two passengers (both masqueraders) lay slumped in the carriage with clusters of bullet holes just below their throats. The other yokai runner lay sprawled over the pavement underneath handles of his rickshaw, for an explosion had flipped it onto its side and thrown the other pair of masqueraders against the sidewalk, their limbs sprawled in awkward angles.

A pair of yokai runners came away from their rickshaws and approached their fallen brethren with their hands pressed together in prayer, both reciting the Heart Sutra and placing their fingers over the heads of the deceased while finishing their prayers.

After that, the bodies of the fallen yokai runners glowed and dissipated into glowing fireflies shimmering in the sun and drifted away towards another realm entirely.

Upon witnessing this, one masquerader dismounted from a rickshaw and helped the yokai runners take off the bodies of the two dead masqueraders from the carriage compartment and carried them towards the other fallen peers on the sidewalk. Then the yokai runners thanked the man, saying, “Arigatou gozaimashita,” (Thank you) and took up their rickshaws and walked back towards the city with their heads bowed and their pace slow, like that of a funeral procession.

The other masqueraders looked back at the man who had helped them, then approached and crowded around their fallen comrades and looked upon these unfortunates with cast-down eyes beneath the slits of their masks, for these fallen comrades had died their second deaths. All of them said their prayers in silence and crossed themselves, all except the one who had helped the yokai runners pick up the dead, and the bodies of their fallen comrades glowed and dissipated into glowing fireflies shimmering in the morning sun, while the bloodstains sank into the grouting of the sidewalk and through the gutters of the street.

The lone masquerader who had not crossed himself then broke away from his peers and faced them, saying, “How dare you cross yourselves and act all goody-goody!” And he drew his sword and backed his compatriots away from him in a widening arc around him as he backed himself along the street the way he had come on the phantom rickshaws.

“What’s the meaning of this, brother?” a masquerader said.

“My meaning is clear,” he said. “I intend to defect.”

“You know not what you’re saying!”

“Oh, but I do,” he said. “My days of deception are over,” and to drive home the point, he took off his mask, revealing himself as John Crane to his peers and dropping it on the sidewalk. “With this act of defiance, I formally resign myself out of your wretched ranks, come what may!”

“You can’t be serious, brother!” another masquerader said.

“Oh, I’m serious, old boy,” John said.

“You’ve gone daft!” yet another masquerader said.

“Maybe I have,” John said and raised his sword against his former compatriots, halting their collective advance as he kept backtracking his way up the inclined road and looking above their heads at an anomalous group of female soldiers dressed in pre-World War I military uniforms and knee-length skirts and high boots and shakos atop their heads emerge from behind the corners of the buildings, all of them aiming their guns at his peers. “Mr. Foster’s not the only traitor amongst you. We are many! We are Legion!”

Another masquerader drew his sword and said, “Rancaster will have your head for this!” And several of his peers drew their own, as well, and pointed the tips of their blades at John Crane. “And when Alice finds out—”

“Do you think doing that will help you?” John said, noticing one female soldier wearing a red shako atop her head signaling her soldiers to get ready to engage. “Alice has already made up her mind about you, and if you had any brains left in your noggins, you’d join me before it’s too late.”

“Like hell we would!”

“Ah, well. Then prepare to get shot,” John said and dropped to the ground, flat on his stomach, refusing to look up as a continuous volley of gunshots took out several of his former peers before him, filling his ears with their cries and the thuds of the dead and dying dropping to the ground. When the shooting ceased, John scrambled to his feet and bolted up the street, till he heard a woman’s voice shouting after him.

“Hey, hold up!”

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

He turned around and saw a trio of these female soldiers running up to him on the inclined street, one in the center with a red shako atop her head, so John Crane sheathed his sword and said, “Who are you?”

When the women approached him, the one in the center removed her red shako, revealing a mop of dark hair cut at the level of her ears, and said, “I’m Captain Imogen of the Quadling Battalion, and you’ve become a person of interest to us.”

“And who’s ‘us,’ ma’am?” he said.

“That’s only on a need-to-know basis,” Captain Imogen said, “but our General knows of your movements, Mr. Crane.”

“Wait,” John said, “how did you—”

“Move along now,” Captain Imogen said. “We’ll take care of things from here.”

Not wanting to test the captain, John Crane nodded and ran up the inclined street before he juked along a side street between two seedy taverns, then juked right and left along a series of lanes and cross streets and alleyways.

Once he thought he was far enough away, he slowed to a halt and walked in step with the crowds of ghosts, ghouls, dreamers, and yokai, who called this part of the Phantom Realms (the Chinatown part of it) their home. Soon he reached the obscure parts of the Limehouse area, wherein other congregations amassed amongst many restaurant patrons debating this morning’s newsworthy events in diners and restaurants and other eateries, of which there were many to choose from as he walked along the streets looking for a place to eat and rest for a bit.

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Kendra found herself back to her fourteen-year-old self on the day they buried her father in the ground. After the recital of her eulogy for her father, she talked little for the rest of the funeral services, shaking the hands of cops she knew and ones she didn’t, receiving condolences all around and thanking people for them. Through it all, she rebuilt the hard exterior of her father’s strength on her face, wiping away the stray hint of tears she had cried during the recital of her eulogy.

When they buried her father, she recognized three of the pallbearers, Roy Dolan and Lt. Frank Shaefer and Officer Todd Curvan, out of the half dozen others helping to lower the casket onto the platform over the grave.

By the head of the casket stood the priest, who pontificated on the virtues of one’s courage amidst the uncertainties of this world and one’s faith in Jesus’ mercy and God’s love in the next. He referred to the First Book of Samuel, wherein it’s written that a young David slew Goliath with his sling and his faith in God. He referred to the Epistle to the Hebrews, wherein it’s written that all things worth living for, all things with fighting for, all things worth suffering for, and all things worth dying for, were achieved by faith in God, the Keeper of dreams yet to be fulfilled in His name. He referred to other examples of Scripture, and applied all of them to the example set forth by Kendra’s father.

Yet through it all, Kendra drowned out the priest’s words with thoughts on her father’s last day with her. It was as ordinary as any other day that afternoon, for death was a stealthy son of a bitch.

It was the fourth Thursday of April, which was Take Your Kid to Work Day that day, and she took Kendra to his work at the Station and introduced her to his partner, Officer Roy Dolan, Officer Todd Curvan, and Lt. Frank Shaefer. Together with her father, they seemed like the four musketeers to her. Her father Detective Edmund Tellerman was Athos, Detective Roy Dolan was D'Artagnan, Lt. Frank Shaefer was Porthos, and Officer Todd Curvan was Aramis (which became a running joke because he was too old to be young and handsome and attractive to women).

That day was the first and only time she saw all four of them under the same roof, for in the middle of her father’s afternoon shift, they received an anonymous phone call from someone saying that he had found a beheaded body in one of the squares of the old Rancaster district.

Edmund Tellerman and Roy Dolan wanted to check it out, but they didn’t want to bring Kendra along with them and asked Shaefer and Todd to look after her while they were gone.

Todd and Shaefer agreed, and Kendra’s father and Roy Dolan went off, and there she waited and waited and waited.

For the next three hours, Kendra waited, till Roy called in over the intercom at 6:01 p.m, saying that they saw a man in a white suit in the vicinity of the first call. Yet by 6:09 p.m. Roy Dolan called again, saying, “Officer down, officer down! Rancaster District, officer down! Oh my God!”

The emergency coordinator pressed the intercom button and said, “What’s the location?”

On the other end of the connection, Kendra could hear Roy Dolan breathing hard, as if he had been running hard to catch someone too fast for him.

“Officer Dolan,” the emergency coordinator said. “Officer Dolan, please calm down. Where did it happen?”

“Richet Square,” Roy Dolan said, his voice wavering over the intercom. “It’s in Richet Square in the Rancaster District. Listen, his head’s cut off—”

The emergency coordinator switched to a private channel when she saw Kendra break down into tears in the reception area, so she asked Officer Curvan to look after her. When the higher-ups ordered a SWAT team to assemble, Lt. Frank Shaefer got going, but not before taking one more look at the sobbing Kendra before heading out. After that, Officer Todd Curvan drove her to his house that night and tried to comfort Kendra the best he could.

But for Kendra, all of that was a blur, and the rest of that night was a sleepless oblivion that she would rather forget, if she could.

For the next month after that, Kendra stayed at Colbie’s house, where she slept on the couch in the family room for the first week of her stay. And when she got to know Colbie’s mother and father a little better, she was allowed to sleep with Colbie in her room in the same bed, where Colbie told her ghost stories and Kendra told her cop stories and both girls filled the night with their imaginations. Then, when Officer Dolan’s paperwork over Kendra’s guardianship got approved, she said her goodbyes and moved out with Roy, who took her to his home in the northwestern end of Grimwald Cove. It was still in the same block as Colbie’s place but was in a different part of the neighborhood, so Kendra and Colbie became frequent visitors to each other’s houses.

The rest, as they say, was history, though it wasn’t that simple for Kendra, because in between her visits to Colbie’s house, Kendra kept thinking of her father at night just before going to sleep in Roy Dolan’s house. And during such nights, Roy kept asking her what she was thinking, and Kendra kept saying that it was nothing, yet Roy kept saying that he would always be there for her if she wanted to talk to him.

After another week of silence on Kendra’s part, she entered Roy’s bedroom one night and waited at the threshold of his bedroom door, waiting for him to turn on the lamplight.

Roy looked over his shoulder and turned on the lamp beside his bed and said, “Ready to talk?”

She nodded.

“Come in,” he said and waved her inside and sat down on the bedside, patting the bedside where he was now sitting.

So Kendra came inside and sat beside him, then said, “You tell me what happened to my dad first.”

Roy just stared at her, wide-eyed, and said, “Are you sure?”

Kendra nodded her head.

Roy paused for a time, collecting his thoughts, and said, “Your father and I were at the Rancaster district for hours looking for the man who called in saying there was a headless body in the area. We were about to head back when we sighted somebody zooming across our way before entering the area of Richet Square, so I called it in with the dispatcher, while your father drove into the premises in search of this person. We then sighted him standing at the entrance of Richet Square and aimed our headlights on him, and your father came out of the car and called out to him. After calling it in with the dispatcher, I joined your father, and we both asked this man where the headless body was.”

Roy paused.

“Did you get a good look at him?” Kendra said.

Roy nodded and said, “He was wearing a white suit at the time and was leaning on a cane when he talked to us. He said something to your father before running off, something I couldn’t hear myself, but whatever he said, it made your father pursue him into the square . . . I followed after him, pulling out my gun, and . . . . That’s when I saw what happened to your father.”

And that’s when Kendra remembered Roy’s call over the intercom to the emergency coordinator and cried, burying her face in her hands. So Roy rubbed circles on Kendra’s back, then wrapped her arms around her, till Kendra wiped away her tears.

“I’m sorry,” Roy said.

“Roy,” Kendra said, “did you ever meet my mom?”

“No,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

“I’m asking,” she said, “because my dad kind of . . . changed after my mom passed away.”

“Changed how?” he said.

“I’m not sure how exactly,” Kendra said, looking down on the floor where the lamplight hit her feet, “but it’s like entering the room when he’s having a bad day. Only it’s ten times worse. Did you ever get that feeling whenever you were with my dad?”

Roy just stared at her for a long minute, then nodded his head and said, “Yeah, quite a few times, actually, but he never told him what was on his mind. Did he ever tell you?”

“Once,” she said, “but only on the condition that I never ask him about it afterwards.”

Again Roy paused for a moment, then said, “Is that why you came to me, Kendra?”

Kendra nodded.

“What did he say to you?”

At this, Kendra took a deep breath and exhaled and said, “He told me that my mom would sometimes help with his cases as a consultant, kind of like the way Amelia Hearn was. In fact, he said that my mom had followed Amelia Hearn’s example and had called herself the Chrysanthemum Witch. Anyway,” she added, smiling to herself, “my mom would sometimes help her in these cases, one of which centered on a man in a white suit. I don’t know if it was the same man you and my dad encountered, but from what you’ve said, it kind of looks like it.”

“What happened, Kendra?” Roy said.

“My dad only gave me the short version,” she said, “but it amounted to my mom and dad reopening the case surrounding Amelia Hearn’s death back when my mom and her friends were still teenagers.”

“Did your mom reopen that case with her friends?” he said.

“Yeah,” Kendra said, “along with someone else. I forgot her name. I think it was something Davy or Davis or—”

“You mean Connie Davis?” he said.

Kendra looked up from the floor and faced Roy, saying, “How do you know her name?”

“We’re acquaintances,” he said. “What happened next?”

“Well,” Kendra said, “my mom and dad and the others looked into Amelia Hearn’s case on their own time, because the facts surrounding it were top secret, and my parents didn’t want the rest of the department to know about it because of the possible backlash from the Phantom Office. So they spent over a month on that case without getting anywhere, till my father got a lead through an anonymous tip from an informant. My parents went to this ‘informant’ in Richet Square, where my dad got out of the car and left my mom inside and went over to talk to this ‘informant,’ who then pulled out a gun and fired on both of my parents, wounding my dad and shooting up the car my mom was in before running off. My mom ran to my dad and called 911 and waited for the ambulance to take him to the hospital. That’s all my dad told me after my mom’s funeral.”

“He didn’t say anything about her death?” Roy said.

Kendra shook her head, saying, “He didn’t tell me, so I asked Lima and Leslie about it. They said that my mom was questioned at the scene before she was allowed to go to the hospital to see my dad, where she stayed overnight. The next day, my mom called Lima and Leslie and Connie over, and they all went to Richet Square in the Rancaster district in the morning, and only three came back out alive in the afternoon. I asked them what happened to my mom, but none of them would tell me.”

“Did you ask your dad about it?”

“Yeah,” she said, “but he didn’t know either. Did he ever tell you about it?”

Roy shook his head and said, “He never told me.”

Silence followed after that, till Kendra started crying again and clung to Roy as if he were the last living connection to her father, because her mother’s memory was out of reach after her father’s death.

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In another part of the Phantom Realms, Ramona Tellerman repeated part of the sequence leading up to her death as it had happened back in 2004, in which she ran ahead of Lima and Leslie and Connie into Richet Square looking for the ‘informant’ that had attacked herself and her husband the night before. In this part of the sequence, however, she kept on running after her target, trying to catch up to the ‘informant’ through the alleyways of the old Rancaster district, struggling to keep up with his inhuman speed through the various turns along dark stretches beneath the lugubrious light of a blood-red moon. She continued her pursuit, till she caught sight of that moon down a long stretch of alleyway for about a block before her, where she spotted it looming just above the horizon like the eye of a vengeful god.

That’s when she stopped and bowled over, putting her hands on her knees and wheezing out raspy breaths, then stood back up and looked at her surroundings. All the shop lights were unlit and all the doors closed and emptied of the foot traffic of a bygone era, yet Ramona still felt the ghosts flooding up her mind’s eye with muddled memories not her own. So she shook her head and closed her eyes, willing these intrusive thoughts from her head, and looked back behind her and found the path she had taken dead-ended in a wall where an open side street had been moments before.

“Lima? Leslie? Connie?” she called out. “Are you there?”

No response came back to her.

“Can you hear me?” she now yelled. “HELLO!”

Again no response came back to her.

She then pulled out her flip phone and dialed the numbers of her friends, one by one, yet all she received was static. She closed the phone and looked at the scene around her and found a line of floating red lanterns marking a path down the long stretch of alleyway. And halfway down the stretch of desolation loitered the outline of her husband, Edmund Tellerman, looking back at her in silence.

So she sprinted down the long stretch, huffing and puffing, and called out to him and said, “Eddie! Eddie, is that you?”

The apparition of her husband raised his hand, as if to acknowledge her without speaking.

When she slowed down before him, approaching the apparition of her husband on tenuous feet, Ramona reached out her hand to him and said, “My God, Eddie, what are you doing here?”

The ghost of her husband took her hand, remaining silent even now, yet Ramona felt his presence filling her soul with a comforting warmth. She wanted to touch Edmund’s face and kiss him, so she put her hand on his cheek and kissed him, breaking the illusion, till she realized she was kissing someone else.

She stepped back and saw none other than Amelia Hearn before her and said, “H-how did you get here?”

“I should be asking you that?” Amelia said with her arms akimbo. “Do you have any idea how hard it was to find you in this dream sequence? I had to create this entire space just to get you to stop running around all over the place, and I had to use your husband’s likeness just to get you close enough for me to reach you, and you have the gall to tell me how I got here?”

Ramona winced, then looked back at her and saw another woman she had not seen before beside Amelia. “Who are you?”

The unknown woman pinked a bit and said, “I’m Bridget Barton Wenger, ma’am.”

“Ma’am?” Ramona said. “This isn’t the 50s, hon’. Just call me Ramona,” and she turned back to Amelia. “Do you have any idea what’s going on?”

“Wait, you don’t know?” Amelia said.

“That’s why I’m asking,” Ramona said. “What’s going on?”

Amelia traded glances with Bridget, then said, “It’s about your daughter.”

That’s when she sucked in breath and said, “What happened to her? Is she okay? Dear God, please, don’t tell me—”

“She’s alive,” Amelia said, “but only just,” and she manifested a mirror before her. “Do you really not know what happened to your daughter?”

“Won’t you just tell me?” she said.

“It’s not that simple, dear,” Amelia said. “Now put your hand against my mirror and imagine a key, a very special key.”

“What key are you talking about?” Ramona said.

“Don’t overthink it,” Amelia said. “Just do as I say.”

So she did, and Ramona felt a wave of energy passing through her, lifting the glamor of her wandering afterlife from her mind and removing the trance of her endless wandering from her eyes. And all at once, the dark and foreboding nighttime of the alleyways around her began to lighten, and the westering sky overhead became visible overhead.

“It’s morning already?” Ramona said.

Amelia nodded, saying, “Just before dawn. I’m gonna have to change how we’ll approach this, Mrs. Tellerman, since you don’t know what’s happened to your daughter.” Then Amelia pressed her hand over Ramona’s and said, “I want you to keep your hand on this mirror, understand?” And when Ramona nodded, Amelia continued, saying, “Now close your eyes and think of your daughter in your mind. Think of her image in your mind as alive and moving as if she were standing before you at this moment.”

And in her mind, Ramona imagined her 4-year-old daughter Kendra at the bottom of a detached staircase looking up at her.

“Do you have her in your mind?”

“Yes, I do,” Ramona said.

“What do you see right now?” she said.

“I see Kendra at the bottom of the stairs,” Ramona said, “but there’s a gulf between her and me.”

“And where are you in all of this?”

“I’m at the top of the stairs looking down on her,” Ramona said.

“Okay, keep that in mind,” Amelia said. “Now close your eyes and imagine yourself inside that very scene with your daughter. Concentrate on her in the scene with everything you’ve got, and I’ll do the rest. Got it?”

“Yeah,” Ramona said as she did just that in the deep black void of her own mind, bringing Kendra to life in her mind as the words of Amelia’s spell merged into a string of syllables she couldn’t comprehend. And along with Kendra was the staircase with the invisible gulf separating mother and daughter like the chasm between life and death, between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead. And out of that chasm emerged a Chinese dragon snaking its way from the depths of her mind and into skies above the sand dunes in the background, till it spotted her daughter at the bottom the steps and swooped down on her with jaws open and fangs bared as Ramona was about to scream . . .

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The telephone kept ringing with an insistence that roused the Hearn sisters, one by one. First, it was Katherine who found herself still clutching Celia’s pink rose that had shriveled up and lost its petals, and now she felt the warmth of Celia’s and Madison’s hands on top of hers.

She sat up in bed and grasped both of their hands, rousing her sisters by her bedside, and said, “Have you been sleeping like that the whole time?”

Both sisters looked up at Katherine in wide-eyed amazement and tears and leaped on top of her, hugging her and kissing her forehead, till she said, “Okay, okay, okay! I get it! You’re really glad to see me wake up,” and she attempted to get out of bed, but they held her arms down to prevent her.

“Nope,” Madison said. “You’re not getting up.”

“Look, I’m fine,” she said, struggling against their hold over her. “Geez, let go!”

“Kathy, please don’t make this more difficult,” Celia said. “You have no idea what we went through last night!”

At her words, Katherine stopped struggling and looked at her sisters’ eyes and saw pain there. “Were you scared when it happened?” she said.

Celia and Madison nodded.

“I’m really sorry, guys,” she said, averting her gaze from her sisters’ eyes. “Guess I made it worse, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, you did,” Madison said and let go of Katherine’s right arm. “Kathy, you’ve got a lot of explaining to do, and I mean a lot of explaining to do.”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“You know what I mean,” Madison said and crossed her arms over her chest and glared down at her eldest sister. “It’s about Mom and Grandma.”

“Oh, God, please no,” she said. “Not now.”

“Then when?” Madison said.

“Maddy, come on!” Katherine said.

“Kathy, we’re your sisters,” Celia said and let go of Katherine’s left arm. “You can trust us, can’t you?”

“Celia, please,” Katherine said, reaching out for Celia’s hand and grasping it. “It’s not about trust, okay?”

“Then what’s it about?” Madison said.

“For God’s sake, Maddy,” she said, “can’t you wait?”

“Why are you not telling us?” Madison said.

“Maddy, I haven’t even checked on her yet!” Celia said and glared at her elder sister. “Can you just cool it for now?”

“Fine, have it your way,” Madison said and walked towards the bedroom door, opening it—

“Maddy, wait!” Celia said.

—and slamming it shut behind her, before proceeding through the second floor hallway and opening the door to her own bedroom and slamming that shut, too. While she was inside, she was fuming to herself loud enough for Katherine and Celia to hear her in the next room over.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me!” Celia said and bowled over, grabbing two fistfuls of her bedsheet and burying her face over it on Katherine's bedside, and groaned into the sheets, till Katherine placed her hand over her head.

“Celia, please don’t cry,” Katherine said.

Celia looked up at her, her eyes now wet with tears, and said, “What’s going on between you and Maddy? Did you two fight before you picked me up? Was it something I did?”

Katherine wiped Celia’s wet cheeks and eyes and said, “It’s not any of those, trust me.”

“Are you sure?” Celia said.

“I’m sure,” she said. “Look, Maddy and I have our fights, too. It’s just that we both make sure to hide them from you, so you won’t worry, but yesterday’s been so damn stressful with everything happening so fast, it’s . . . Celia, I promise you, none of this is your fault.”

“Then what’s going on?” Celia said.

Katherine shook her head and hugged her youngest sister, cradling her head over her bosom like a surrogate mother.

“Whatever it is,” Celia said, “I’ll try to understand, and I’ll always have your back, no matter what. So tell us the truth from now on, okay?”

Katherine nodded and said, “I will,” and kissed her sister’s forehead and let her stand up before her.

“Now lie back down,” Celia said, “and I’ll make this quick.”

And she laid herself down, and Celia went to work, pulling the bedsheet down past her thighs and placing her palm in the middle of Katherine’s stomach, and a seal with pink roses appeared, encompassing her entire body.

“Some dehydration and a slight headache,” Celia said, “and residual amounts of adrenaline in the bloodstream. Kathy, did you see anything crazy before you woke up?”

“Yeah,” she said, and Celia allowed Katherine to sit up and swing her legs over the bedside, so she could face Celia. Katherine took a deep breath and exhaled and said, “Colbie woke me up just in time, but when we got out of there, we saw what they did to Mara and Kendra.”

Then cautious footsteps coming back through the second floor hallway towards Celia’s bedroom echoed towards them, till the door opened just enough for Madison to say, “Should I come in or wait in the hallway?”

Celia and Katherine traded glances.

“Come on in, Maddy,” Celia said. “We’re not angry.”

So Madison came in, saying, “I’m really sorry, guys.”

“It’s okay,” Celia said, then back to Katherine: “What did they do to them?”

“Who are you talking about?” Madison said.

“Mara and Kendra,” Celia said. “I was asking her what happened to them?”

“Rancaster and Alice tortured Mara and made her turn herself in,” Katherine said. “God knows what happened to Kendra, but when Colbie and I saw her, she was down and not moving. And that Alice chick threatened to cut Kendra’s lifeline if Colbie didn’t give Mara up to him.”

“To Rancaster?” Celia said.

Katherine nodded, and both of her sisters paled at the name. “I think Colbie will be okay, but Kendra’s the one that worries me,” she said and got up from the bed. “I put my shroud around Kendra before the dream ended, so she must be here in the house somewhere.”

So Madison took off out the door, saying, “You two, wait here. I’ll find her,” and went on opening the other bedroom doors in the second floor hallway, then went down the stairs.

All the while, Celia said, “Kathy?”

“Yeah, what is it?”

“When you saw Kendra,” she said, “was she hurt?”

“Try not to think about that, okay?”

“Kathy, please, tell me what happened to her!”

Katherine was tongue-tied, trying to find a way to phrase it without making Celia worry—

When Madison called from downstairs: “I found her. She’s in the family room.”

Both girls rushed out of Celia’s room and ran through the hall and stomped down the stairs, then juked left and crossed the entrance hall into the family room, where they saw Madison looking over an unconscious Kendra lying on the sofa, wrapped in Katherine’s blood-colored shroud.

Celia ran towards Kendra on the sofa and touched her head and said, “Oh my God, why’s she bleeding?”

Madison said, “Kathy, what happened to her?”

“Guys, I know you’re worried,” Katherine said, “but if you stay calm, I’ll show you. But whatever you do, don’t take off that shroud until sunset; we’ll keep it on her till then, okay?”

“But I need to check up on her,” Celia said.

“You can’t,” Katherine said.

“Why not?”

“Kendra died in her dream, Celia,” Katherine said. “That’s why I put my shroud around her, so she won’t die in this world, too. What she needs now is a lot of rest, at least until sunset,” and went towards the sofa on which Kendra lay and pushed it off of the floor rug and up against the wall, then added, “Celia, Maddy, help me clear out all of this stuff.”

Madison and Celia traded quizzical looks.

“Why?” Celia said.

“If I’m gonna show you what happened to her, we need to make room,” Katherine said.

So Celia pulled the coffee table and end tables across the floor rug towards the cabinet console and slid them up against the TV, Madison moved the other sofa off the floor rug and pushed it up against the bookshelves, and Katherine pushed the divans and recliners out into the entrance hall before coming back inside.

Katherine then crouched and rolled up the floor rug, revealing an enormous trap door inlaid into the floorboards, then stood it up and placed it in the corner of the family room. Then she went to all four corners of the trap door, crouching down and knocking her fist on each corner, till the trapdoor disappeared and revealed a giant mirror inlaid into the floor.

“Wait, what is that?” Celia said. “Did you put that there?”

“Kathy, you can’t be serious,” Madison said. “If our parents find out you’ve put a mirror right in the middle of the family room, they’re gonna freak!”

“It’s not my mirror, okay?” Katherine said.

“Ah, Christ, please don’t tell me it’s mom’s,” Madison said.

“It’s not hers, either.”

“Then who does it belong to?” Celia said.

“This is Amelia Hearn’s mirror,” Katherine said, and both of her sisters went silent, shock etched onto their faces, so Katherine added, “Don’t worry about mom finding out, either. She already knows it’s here. In fact, she’s the one who put it here, and this is how she makes her surprise visits.”

Celia and Madison stood in awe as Katherine again repeated the motions, going to all four corners of the mirror and crouching down and knocking her fist (twice, this time) on each corner, till an exact copy of that same mirror appeared several feet above their heads. And at each corner of both mirrors above their heads and by their feet flashed Spanish doubloons.

Katherine said, “Our mom uses a variation of our grandmother’s reflection spell by using a twinner spell, instead. She taught me how to use it the second time she showed me this mirror.” She then placed her hand atop the mirror on the floor, which showed its ‘twinner’ reflected in the mirror above her head, and thought of the ballroom in which she and Colbie had witnessed just before waking up, which manifested in the reflections of both mirrors. “Oh, and you might want to grab onto something,” she added. “First time’s always the roughest, trust me.”

So Celia and Madison went and sat on the sofa by the bookshelves and grabbed onto the backrest, then Madison said, “Kathy, is this good?”

“That’s good,” she said. “Now hold on,” and she took a deep breath and concentrated on the events she had witnessed in the ballroom in her mind, letting the other events she had not witnessed filter from her subconscious onto the scene, concentrating as the entire family room turned over on the axis of Katherine’s hand, till the mirror overhead translated itself onto the mirror by their feet, whereon the Spanish doubloons matched and fixed onto Katherine’s enormous ballroom. “There,” she said, turning to her sisters on the sofa. “It wasn’t too bad, I hope.”

Her sisters wavered where they sat like drunken blokes after a night on the town and glared back at her, as if to say, ‘Easy for you to say!’

When the girls regained themselves, they got up from the sofa and looked around the giant ballroom in awe, where they spotted Katherine standing over the mirror reflection.

“Stand with me over the mirror,” Katherine said. “You two have got to see this.”

So both sisters joined Katherine, stepping onto the mirror, and witnessed Colbie Amame walking through the ballroom and scaring off all the masqueraders out through the double entrance doors when she opened the grandfather clock for the first time, then witnessed Colbie’s second visit to the ballroom wherein she fought Alice Liddell, then saw Colbie’s third brief visit to the ballroom with Kendra and the Cairns twins, wherein Colbie and Alice and the masqueraders vanished and left her friends to fight the Red and White Queens. They watched Kendra’s wounding in horror and Nico’s fruitless attempt to blast open the double doors of the grandfather clock as she succumbed to the same wound and their subsequent deaths, then listened to Mara mourning over the dead and saw Mara injuring herself when she tried to break through the double doors of the grandfather clock, then bore witness to Mara’s leg injury at the hands of Rancaster and subsequent torture at the hands of Alice Liddell. They watched Colbie’s fourth and last visit to the ballroom with Katherine by her side, both of them checkmated by the cruelty of Rancaster and Alice Liddell, both of them forced to stand down and see them leave with Mara in their custody.

When Katherine dissipated her spell, all three sisters found themselves back in their family room.

Katherine was crying, and both of her sisters came to her and tried to comfort her the best they could, but Katherine went over to Kendra’s side, wrapped in her shroud and unconscious on the sofa. She wiped her tears and said, “Kendra, I promise you we’ll get that Alice bitch and skin her alive.”

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The next thing Kendra knew, she found the same detached staircase leading into footless halls of air beyond the last step, whereon the same toddler of Todd Curvan’s story stood reaching up into the sky in his sleep.

Then there was the same dragon snaking its way above the sand dunes and closing in on the houses below it, spotting the child atop the stairs and swooping in to snatch him up.

And then there was that poor mother screaming her head off, watching it all in horror, probably on the verge of fainting or going insane.

And now there was Kendra running up those same steps towards that boy on the last step, reaching out to him just as the dragon swooped down ever closer like a meteor trailing sparks against the air. Only to see the boy disappear before her eyes and feel the rush of wind billowing over her on that last step, as the dragon passed overhead and disappeared over the sand dunes.

And for a moment, she tottered on that same last step on the balls of her feet, bent over and waving her arms wide, struggling to keep herself from teetering over the edge and into the abyss of dreamless sleep. But she regained control and steadied her feet on the top step, and looked up into the sky.

Nico Cairns was there in the sky, in the same blood-soaked Mandarin dress Kendra was wearing when she bled out from the Red Queen's final attack, bleeding out by the roadblocks in the white section of the ballroom. Now she was floating amid a group of smaller dragons snaking around her like a living idol, or a willing sacrifice.

Kendra waved her hands wide and yelled, “Nico!”

When she saw Kendra on the last step of the staircase, she looked down at Kendra and shook her head. Psychic waves of energy flowed through Kendra's dreamscape, blurring out the house, and now warping the outer edges of the staircase into blurry shapes, shaking her footing on the last step.

“Nico, please, come down to me!” she said, struggling to regain her balance. “You don’t have to be scared! You don’t have to bear it alone!”

But Nico again shook her head, tears trailing her cheeks, and said, “We tried everything we could, Kendra, but it just wasn’t enough. We just couldn’t do it!”

Now the lower part of the staircase warped into blurry shapes below Kendra's feet, and looking back, Kendra knew she was losing time. "I know, I know!" she said, standing firm on the last step through the rush of Nico’s psychic waves. “But we have to keep trying! I still believe in you, so you have to believe me and try!”

Nico didn't budge, though, and shook her head. “I don’t know if I can do this!”

At her words, Kendra now wavered, wondering how she could convince someone so dead set on disbelieving herself. Kendra looked back down the steps and saw the warping of the lower steps continuing slowly up the staircase, blurring into nothing. She looked back up at Nico and noticed her standing in midair, as if standing on something neither she nor Nico could not see.

And so Kendra closed her eyes, and imagined more steps going down towards the top step of the staircase, leading Nico to where Kendra was waiting, waiting for Nico to make that leap of faith.

With the words of Tennyson’s Maud poem now repeating in her mind, Kendra said, “Don’t worry about falling, Nico! Do you hear me? And even if you fall, I’ll be here to catch you. I promise!”

So Nico looked down at Kendra and said, “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” Kendra said, so Nico took one step down.

And then another one after that.

And then another step.

And then another.

And another.

And one by one, step for step, Nico descended the footless staircase, down through her psychic waves of doubt that buffeted her as she went, now reaching for her sister from another mother, now reaching for her with hands of faith, and reaching out for Kendra’s hand.

And just as Nico faltered on the last step, just as Kendra felt that human touch caress her fingers in Nico’s fall, she grasped onto Nico’s other hand in a firm grip and pulled her up onto her level, where she embraced Nico on the last step of the detached staircase, and only then did Kendra open her eyes and look past her should on the steps Nico had descended.

And there they were, each step glimmering in the blurry haze that had clouded Nico with doubt.

"You did well, Nico,” Kendra said, as she felt Nico’s tears falling onto her shoulder.

“Kendra, it’s you who did well,” another woman said.

When Kendra let go of her embrace, she no longer saw Nico Cairns, but someone she had not seen since she was four years old. And as her memories of her came back, she now saw her the way she had seen her when she first laid eyes on her, her mother with tears in her eyes and chrysanthemums in her long black hair. And in that space of recognition, with tears welling up in her eyes, Kendra said, “Mom, is that you?”

Ramona Tellerman smiled at her words, then cupped her hands around Kendra's face and planted a kiss on her forehead and said, “I’ll always be with you, Kendra. No matter what happens, I’ll always be with you.” And when Kendra reached out to touch her mother’s face, Ramona grasped her daughter’s hand and put it to her cheek as she began to fade away. “I have to go now.”

Kendra said, “Don’t go.”

“I’m sorry,” her mother said and faded away from view, dispersing her image into shimmering particulates of astral memories.

Kendra collapsed to her knees at the base of the staircase and cried herself into the slow-wave nepenthe of forgetfulness, forgetting her current troubles for a time. Yet Kendra still kept yearning to see her mother again, reaching out to her mother’s ghost of a memory as she fell down through the rabbit hole of memories—

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Just as Ramona Tellerman took her hand off of Amelia’s mirror, crying after she had left her beloved daughter behind like that. She had wanted to take Kendra with her, but all of her tears and all of her fears couldn’t keep Kendra’s image together in her mind. So she just clung onto the nearest thing she could hold in her arms and cried for a time, which happened to be Amelia Hearn and Bridget Barton Wenger, who both hugged her and rubbed circles on her back as if they were her own sisters.

“It’s okay, dear,” Amelia said.

“I’m sure she’ll be all right,” Bridget added.

And for a time, Ramona stayed this way in cathartic bliss, till she noticed her hand fisted over something long and hard and metallic. When she regained herself, Ramona pulled away from Amelia and Bridget and looked at her fisted hand, then opened it and found a long antique key in her palm.

“Where did this come from?” she said.

“It’s the key to Kendra’s heart,” Amelia said, “and it’s your only connection to her whereabouts. So keep it with you at all times and don’t lose it.”

So Ramona pocketed it in her jeans and said, “I still don’t know what happened to her, though.”

“Neither do I,” Amelia said.

“But you said something happened to—”

“I don’t know the particulars about what happened to Kendra,” Amelia said. “In fact, I got here hoping you’d have an idea what happened to her, but it seems you don’t. Now listen to me, both of you,” she added, looking at Ramona and Bridget in turn. “We’re all mothers here, but we’re all different. You see, we’re connected to our children in ways only we as mothers know. If we work together, we’ll at least find the dreamscapes where your daughters are hidden, but I can only bring you that far. For the rest, you’ll have to find them when we get to those places.”

“In other words,” Ramona said, “you’re depending on me to find Kendra when we get to her dreamscape.”

“Yep,” Amelia said.

“And it’s the same for me, too,” Bridget added, “when we get to where Auna is?”

“Yep,” Amelia said. “Now that you both get it,” and she looked back at Ramona, saying, “are you ready to get out of here?”

Ramona nodded her head.

So Amelia grabbed Ramona’s hand and had Bridget grab onto Ramona’s other hand, making a three-person train, and said, “Now don’t let go of each other’s hands when we go, okay?”

Both Ramona and Bridged nodded.

“Good,” Amelia said, “because there’s one more mother we need to find, and she’s a rather flighty one.”

Ramona traded glances with Bridget, then said, “Who is it?”

“Someone neither of you have met before,” Amelia said and placed her hand on the reflection of her mirror again, making it glow, and passed through the mirror, which shimmered in her passage. And after her passage followed Ramona and then Bridget, shimmering the reflection in their passage before dissipating into nothing once they passed through.

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Connie Davis had given up and was stripping her clothes to take a much-needed morning shower after her thwarted phone calls, when she received a call just as she turned on the shower. She turned off the shower on the second ring and snatched her phone off the countertop by the fourth ring. She looked at the screen and saw Leslie Amame’s phone number, so she swiped the screensaver and pressed the call button, pressed the phone to her ear and said, “Connie here. I’ve been trying to—”

“Connie, I need to talk to you,” Leslie said. “Did you dream of Kendra last night?”

“What? No, I didn’t,” she said, pressing the speakerphone button and setting it on the countertop, so she could dress herself. “Listen, I just got back from Roy a minute ago, and—”

“Wait, you mean Officer Dolan?” Leslie said. “Did he talk to you about Kendra?”

“Yeah, he did,” she said, fiddling with the bra strap behind her back, before sliding up her panties and taking her phone with her into her bedroom and flopping it on the bed, so she could get dressed.

When she picked it back up, Leslie was saying, “Hey, are you listening? What the hell are you doing?”

“I was getting dressed, sorry,” Connie said. “What were you saying again?”

There came a long sigh at the other end of the connection. So Leslie repeated herself, almost verbatim, saying that she was checking up on Nico Cairns (Connie saying, “Wait, what?”) at Cooley’s place and saw Kendra get injured in a fight at the same time Nico got injured (Connie saying, “Are you serious?”), but that wasn’t the crazy part.

“You’re kidding, right?” Connie said. “What’s the crazy part?”

“I got this from Colbie,” Leslie said. “She says there are two Nicos, and that she met the one that was with Kendra, while I met the one that was with the Hearn sisters.”

“You’ve gotta be shitting me,” Connie said. “That . . . that doesn’t make any sense!”

“I know it’s crazy,” Leslie said, “but Colbie swears by it.”

Then a beep came over the connection, so Connie said, “Hang on, I got someone else calling me. Hold on, okay?”

“Okay,” Leslie said.

And Connie checked the phone number and said, “It’s Kathy. Leslie, can you hang on for a bit?”

“Okay.”

She switched to Katherine’s call and said, “Connie here. You just interrupted—”

“Connie, we saw everything. Everything!” Katherine said amid a flurry of her sisters’ voices heard over the static. “We saw the whole damn thing, and we have Kendra with us as we speak!”

“What? Wait, are you serious?” Connie said. “Did I hear you right? You have Kendra with you?”

“Yes, we—”

“How the hell did you find her?” Connie said.

“Long story, trust me,” Katherine said.

Connie was about to reply when yet another beep came over the connection, so Connie said, “Hang on, I got . . . Oh my God, you’ve gotta be shitting me right now! Hold on, Kathy, I—”

“What’s going on?” Katherine said. “Are you okay? Is this a bad time?”

“No, it’s not. It’s just . . . Ugh, I have, like, three people contacting me at once on this phone,” Connie said. “Can we talk this over at your place? I need to take this third call,” and she cut the connection and switched over to Roy Dolan’s phone number and said, “Roy, Kendra’s at the Hearn household.”

“They already told me,” Roy said. “God damn it, where are my keys? I’m on my way there now.”

“I’ll be there, too—”

And Roy cut the connection, leaving Connie back with Leslie, so Connie said, “Leslie, are you there?”

“This is Colbie,” Colbie said, then yelled, “Mom, she’s back on!” There was a spell of silence, then a rustling sound as Colbie handed the phone back to Leslie, who said, “Jesus, what took you so long?”

“Listen, I just talked with Kathy,” she said. “She’s at the Hearn household.”

“Who? You mean, Kendra? Really?”

“Yeah,” Connie said. “I’m about to head over there in a sec. You and Colbie go there, too, and we’ll all find out what they have to say. I’ll catch you later when I get there, okay?”

“Okay, see you then,” and Leslie cut out the connection, leaving Connie almost dead on her feet.

With her mind reeling from a confusion of facts and voices fluttering through her head faster than her brain can handle, Connie flopped on her bed and said, “Dear God, this has to be one of those days, doesn’t it?”

Already tired from the mass accumulation of phone calls, Connie dragged herself from the bed and lumbered back to her bathroom to get her keys and wallet and . . .

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The next moment for Mara was a hazy shroud she couldn’t fathom with any sense of comprehension. The things she saw and felt and tasted bubbled up through her mind as she tossed and turned in a feverish miasma of sensations she could scarcely describe. Visions of masked phantoms surrounded her periphery on all sides, and she blinked them back in horror, saying, “No, no, nooooo! Stoooop!” The grip of several hands pinned her flailing limbs on the table, and a pair of hands burned her injured leg, making her buck and scream in agony. Then a pair of hands kept her head still, and another pair of hands forced her jaw open with a funnel, and yet another pair of hands clasped around her neck her, suffocating her till her thrashing limbs went slack and her mind went blank and everything else was smothered into the slow-wave swoon of unconsciousness.

Yet even in a swoon, even in the still blank night that was her mind, she felt a subtle aftertaste of licorice pouring past her palette and down her throat and burbling in her stomach, where it burned like fire and smoldered like acid, eating away at her insides, but she could do nothing about it. Then footfalls approached her, and psychic waves like the weight of the sea pressed down on her, and a hand pressed down over her stomach and clawed its fingers and drew blood, flaring her nerves with a wave of pain and flooding her eyes with tears, yet she was powerless even to scream. She squinted her eyes shut, as breath misted over her face, and the stench of decay filled her nostrils, and her lips parted against other lips, and something warm and slippery and vile snaked its way down her gullet and made her gag and churned up her stomach, and her body convulsed into spasms, and the bitter burn of bile and blood flooded her stomach and throat as she threw up on the table and screamed and screamed, till all was naught but night and living death.

The interim between that time and the time she regained consciousness was spent in a tumultuous sleep, and when Mara woke up, she found a naked Alice Liddell sitting side-saddle over her chest like a succubus.

“Good morning,” Alice said, smiling at her like it was a warm summer day and Mara was her childhood playmate. “Let’s have some fun, shall we?”

Mara struggled to shake her off, but she said, “It’s useless, dear. You don’t move, till I let you move. You don’t talk, till I let you talk. You don’t moan, till I let you moan. You don’t scream, till I let you scream.” She then clamped her fingers on Mara’s jaw and said, “This is how it’ll work, Mara Cairns. I’ll do all the giving, and you’ll do all the receiving. And you, my lovely voyeur,” she added, turning to the man in the white suit standing by the wall, “will do all the watching.”

“And only watching, Bambina?” Rancaster said.

“Quiet!” Alice snapped. “I didn’t give you permission to speak, nor will you speak till I am done. And you,” she added, lifting her leg over and straddling Mara’s stomach and lowering herself till Alice’s lips were almost touching hers, “you are mine.”

Alice slid herself down her stomach till she straddled Mara’s hips, then ran her fingers from Mara’s chin and down her throat and through the parting of her breasts and across her stomach and pubic hairs, stopping on the lips of her maidenhead, while Mara writhed under her touch and clamped her thighs around her fingers, and her breath hitched in her throat, yet through it all, Mara couldn’t scream.

No matter how much she tried, she just couldn’t scream!

Alice slid herself further down till she straddled her thighs and slapped the thigh where Mara had been wounded, making her wince, and said, “Good as new, my lovely! Complements of Lord Rancaster’s expert hands! Oh, wait,” she added, “you can’t even talk, can you?”

Mara turned her head and closed her eyes, tears welling up and falling down her cheeks.

“Ah, dear sister, don’t be afraid,” Alice said, and leaned over her and caressed her cheek in a sisterly way. “You’ve lived a tragic life of pain and fear under a hateful roof, full of endless fights and tears. When Rancaster told me your story, my heart went out to you,” and she grabbed her hand and pressed it to her bosom, where Mara felt the thumping against her palm. “Do you feel that? It beats for your happiness. It yearns for you to accept me as your sister. And together with Rancaster, you and I will have a real family that will never die.”

And despite her resolve to resist her advances, Mara felt her words fill the empty jar that was her soul with mercy, a mercy she had shared with Nico, a mercy she wanted to share with Colbie, even if she had to close her eyes and pretend this imposter was her, just as . . .

> The mind is its own place, and in itself

> Can make a Heav’n of Hell, . . .

And from the present Hell that was Alice arose the promised Heaven that was Colbie. In Colbie she found her solace and her compassion and her love, and in Colbie she found her dreams and desires swimming in her eyes, and in Colbie she found her freedom and escape into another world (a better world) than she had ever known or ever hoped to have.

With her heart fluttering like a dove in her chest, Mara raised her hand to Colbie’s face and ran her hands through her long locks of hair and slid her hands down her waist and squeezed the flesh of her butt cheeks, wanting her like she had never dared to want Nico, wanting her more than anyone in the world, wanting to take her captive in her arms.

Mara clipped her waist and rolled her over on the bed, and fondled Colbie’s bare breasts and planted hungry kisses on her cheeks and lips and went on planting kisses on her jaw and throat and collar bone and the parting between her breasts, eliciting moans from Colbie as she continued down her stomach and into her pubic hairs where she feasted on the nectar of her maidenhead, till she came and her legs parted in the languorous afterglow of cunnilingus.

But Mara wasn’t finished yet. Mara wanted more of her lips, more of her heart, more of her soul, so she raised herself up and met Colbie’s gaze and planted a kiss on her lips, savoring the taste of her lips and her breath and her soul.

And Colbie returned the favor, grabbing her wrists and turning Mara over onto her back, returning every kiss Mara had planted over her body with hickeys on her jaw and throat and collar bone and the parting between her breasts, eliciting moans from Mara as she continued down her stomach and into her pubic hairs where she feasted her maidenhead, till Mara was on the verge, and Colbie stopped just before her orgasm and rubbed her pussy lips, continuing the assault before coming up to her face and letting Mara taste of her soiled fingers.

Yet Mara grasped onto Colbie’s wrists and turned her onto her back and continued the assault over Colbie’s body, returning her hickeys and eliciting more moans from her. And so it went over the bed sheets of Katherine’s private boudoir, turning and turning and teasing and moaning, with each combatant bed wrestling for each other’s soul, till in exhaustion, Mara collapsed into Colbie’s embrace, pillowing her head on Colbie’s breasts and listening to her thundering heartbeats as Colbie rubbed soothing circles on Mara’s heaving shoulder blades and whispered breathy nothings into her ear.

There she stayed in fallen bliss, stayed in the false paradise of her arms, stayed in the naive innocence of make-believe even when she knew that this was not Colbie, but desperately wanted it to be so.

After a time, Colbie said, “Mara, when you make love to me, who are you really thinking of?”

“You, Colbie,” Mara said, and raised herself and kissed her again as though she were breathing Colbie’s spirit into herself, wanting her more than she ever wanted Nico, taking her into herself through her sucking lips and her exploring tongue and her breathing soul, till she was at one with Colbie in a consummation of one body and one mind and one spirit.

But when she looked at her lover once more, she saw another woman other than Colbie, another woman other than even Alice, another image of Mara’s own face looking back at her. Yet in that familiar visage, her mirror image had roving predatory eyes, the eyes of a she-wolf, wearing her own face that was not hers. Those eyes lit up with mischief, hinting at forbidden desires coming to the surface like hellfire from unfathomable depths. And in those eyes, her doppelgänger carried a cesspool inside of bodily sensations that only wanted more, more of Mara’s body, more of her heart, more of her soul.

A slasher's smile stretched across her doppelgänger’s face, and she said, “It only happens when you’re not looking.”

Mara pushed herself away, but Alice grabbed her wrists and yanked her onto her back over the bed, pinning her there with her psychic pressure waves. Mara struggled to free herself, yet Alice’s newfound powers had usurped her own strength, and she was forced to submit in complete exhaustion.

Mara looked up at her imposter from the bed, Alice in Mara’s body, and said, “Who are you?”

“Who I am, I cannot tell you, for I do not know,” Alice said, and leaned over her on the bed and touched the hickeys she had planted on Mara’s body, making her wince with each touch. “We all have our masks, my love, and I’ve worn so many that I have forgotten the name my mother gave me. I am the daughter of Lilith, the daughter of Night, the blight of all women cursed to bear me into their world. I have seen the lights of many a mother’s eyes die out as they held me in their arms. I have seen the hearts of many mothers bleed under the knives of murderous husbands and lovers. Just as they have brought me screaming into their world, I will drag those responsible for their suffering down with me to Hell!” Then she smiled and kissed Mara’s lips once more and said, “But just between you and me, dear sister, call me Alice Liddell.”

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Kendra’s third dream sequence took her from the top step of the detached staircase to the top landing of the double grand staircase in Katherine’s mansion. She descended the stairs past M. C. Escher lithographs and mezzotints, her footsteps echoing down the mahogany steps, till she alighted on the parquet floor to the sound of someone’s voice in the doorway to the library.

There in the library amidst floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a cafe table with chairs, and a salon sofa, stood a giant mirror that anchored her eyes like a focal point in a still-life painting. And the more Kendra looked at it from afar, the more she wondered at the dark swirls in its blank reflection, and she found herself drawn to it as if it beckoned her to come closer. And as she approached it and its presence loomed larger in her thoughts, she saw the image of her mother, and she stretched out her hand towards her and touched its surface.

Then the image morphed, and she saw someone else taking shape, a younger woman around her age wearing a Shad-Row uniform. At first, she blanked out on who she was. So brief was her encounter with her in the hallways that she barely made an impression on her mind.

“Who are you?” Kendra said, looking at the girl’s face that was now shedding tears, and ran her finger across her cheeks as if to wipe them for her. “Have I met you before?”

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つづく

Night: Kendra and the Gunslinger Girl (Forever)

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