Garnet 2 - Black Queen Checks White King

She came downstairs, and everything in me relaxed. Part of me cringed because she should have been coming down those steps with me, but if I'd stayed in that room with the former White Queen a second longer, my control would've snapped. My teeth would've ripped through Lily's carotid. And Alyssa would have been... I didn't actually know how Alyssa would've been. Furious, certainly. But would she hate me for killing the White Queen? After everything Lily had done? After everything she’d made me do? I wasn’t sure. Alyssa had made it clear weeks ago that killing our enemies unless absolutely necessary wouldn’t be tolerated. But I couldn’t believe she'd choose the former White Queen over me—her King. The guy who loved her. And Lily deserved to die…

"Is there a problem with what I'm wearing?" My Queen demanded from halfway down the staircase, shaking me back from my red-washed fury and uncertainty.

I blinked, trying to process what she'd asked. "Pardon?"

"My shirt," Alyssa grumbled, crossing her arms across her chest. "Lily said there was something wrong with my shirt."

My first instinct was to disagree with whatever Lily had said, simply because she was the one to say it. Then I got a good look at the monstrosity draped around Alyssa's torso and winced. Where did she get some of these things?

"Great," she muttered, seeing my expression. "What the heck should I wear, then? They're lucky I even agreed to this. Now I have to dress up, too? Yeesh."

"I don't see why you dislike wearing nice clothes to school." It had been like pulling teeth to get her to wear something other than blue jeans and combat boots to Homecoming, despite it being a semi-formal event and the most important night of our lives thus far. Only Julie had been capable of getting Alyssa "girlified." And she'd still worn the combat boots with her dress. Her concession to prettifying her footwear had been to replace her normal black laces with sparkly, golden ones.

"I don't like it because I feel like crud when I put on nice clothes and then they get ripped on barbed wire or covered in blood." My Queen flopped onto the black leather couch in the living room, backpack and all. The frayed canvas-and-duct-tape book-bag had seen better days, but she wouldn’t let us replace it. "Pee is even worse," she added.

"You've been peed on?" Chantal, the werecat who'd been lounging on the back of the couch like the felines she took after, perked up. Running a hand through her thick pelt of magenta-streaked black hair, she asked, "When? By who?"

"Jimmy Byron, first grade. He hit me in the head with a rock, beat me up, dumped me in a trash can, and proceeded to pee on me."

Alyssa glared up at the ceiling, arms tightening across her chest as color crept into her face. The bright flush of blood in her cheeks made my teeth twitch. The way the muscles in her neck flexed made it worse. No matter how well I'd fed—and I'd dined on a coyote just yesterday—being around Alyssa made me hungry all over again. It had to be her demon blood.

"Then he did the Tarzan yell and ran off," she said with a scowl. "I pushed him off the jungle gym the next day. Accidentally broke his arm."

So she could take out her tormentors without even trying. And what sort of six-year-old peed on a girl after beating her up? "You've led a fascinating life."

"I'll take that as a compliment, but I'm still not dressing up."

I raked a hand through my hair. Sometimes I could get Alyssa to see reason if we sat down and talked things out, but we had approximately ten minutes to make the bus. We were being very careful today—not taking Mouse's van, since it was indirectly Darren's van and Darren was a sore subject with Geneva; not taking my Firebird, either, because the fire-engine red paint job might upset the Red Queen or her Court. So we actually had to maintain a schedule.

"At least wear a shirt that's in our Court color," I pleaded. Her mulish expression had me biting back a sigh. My second set of teeth ground against each other until my jaw ached. After three months, didn't she understand she had to make an impression? Even after the battle against the White Court, she didn't seem to care about impressing anyone.

"This isn't a formal occasion," Alyssa said, eying me from the couch. "It's not like prom or a funeral. We're sitting down out under the Ramada at school and talking during lunch. Whoopee. Why do I have to wear black?"

"I thought you liked black," Chantal said, cocking her head.

"I do, but I also got stabbed right after I rolled outta bed," Alyssa replied, and my temper spiked. I curled my fingers into a fist behind my back and tried to remember why attacking Lily was a bad thing. "Since I'm not one to throw pity parties, I want to wear my Greymon shirt."

"Your what? Never mind," I hastily amended before she could explain anything anime related. They ought to teach classes in anime literature, I thought as I struggled to condense a very long explanation into two minutes. It was the only way to understand most of what Alyssa was talking about past the words, Have you ever seen? She loved anime, which was fine, but most of her t-shirts looked like the dregs from Goodwill.

"It's close enough to a formal occasion that you ought to be a little dressy," I said aloud. "We're trying to open negotiations with the Red Court so we don't have a repeat of what happened with the White Court. We don’t want to have another battle when Winter Formal rolls around." I certainly didn’t. I'd had my arm broken and been kicked in the groin, for one thing. And there had been that utterly terrifying moment when I'd been positive Alyssa was dead…"We also need an ally against Gavin Whitmoor. What better ally against the White Knight than the Red Court? So please, put on something else."

"Can I wear one of your shirts?"

I blinked, thrown by the question. "Pardon?" I did not trust that guileless expression as far as I could throw its owner. She had some kind of nefarious scheme cooking. At least I knew she wasn't plotting out various methods of slicing me up while keeping me conscious. That was one of the things I loved about her. It was one of the things that had tricked me into falling fast and hard before I’d even realized what was happening.

"Yeah. If you let me wear one of your shirts, I'll dress up."

"That's not dressing up," I protested, but I might as well have tried to huff and puff a brick pig-house to the ground for all the good it did.

"Oh, it so is." She smiled now, the smile that reminded me why I fought so hard to keep her alive despite herself. The smile that made me keep trying to get her to follow at least some of the rules. When the time came that everyone found out what she was—and it would come, I had no doubt—it would all matter then. It was the smile that made me grin like a loon, and even though I knew I probably looked ridiculous, I couldn't keep that answering smile off my face.

She got up and walked over so she could throw an arm around my shoulders. Her arm barely reached all the way around. I smiled, and laid my cheek against her hair. The bus would be coming in just a few minutes, but I didn't care. Not right then. I didn't want to force my way into Pillar Prep and deal with witch politics all day. I just wanted to stay here, with Alyssa and the others, and rest. We still hadn't had a chance to really rest. We'd been busy putting in appearances at school.

How did she handle it all, day in and day out? How did she handle all the stress and the fatigue and the emotional exhaustion? She had to be on drugs. Well, I wanted whatever happy pills she was taking. Though kissing her always raised my spirits. Maybe I could squeeze one in right now…

"Wearing one of your shirts totally counts as dressing up. You don't own a single article of clothing that doesn't have a designer name attached to it," Alyssa said, foiling my attempt at a kiss by moving. "I think the cheapest thing in your closet is seven hundred dollars. I don't own anything that costs that much."

"Well, they were designer sunglasses."

"Sometimes," she replied, "I cannot believe I know you." And she kissed me on the cheek and went to kidnap one of my black silk shirts. The spot where her lips had brushed against my cheekbone burned pleasantly. When she did that, it seemed everything would turn out all right.

But then I remembered that Alyssa was the Alice of the Haydn’s prophecies, the prophecies coded into Lewis Carroll’s "children’s" classics, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. And that meant that she would bring on the breaking of the Treaty of Jubei, which was keeping the human world (mostly) safe from the Ayza, the demon royal family in Faerie, and the rest of the Fayre. Alyssa was the Alice, which was basically a death sentence. The girl I was in love with—the only girl I had ever loved, the only person who'd ever selflessly loved me—had a death sentence hanging over her head.

Things were not going to turn out all right. We just had to hold out long enough to rip out the root of the darkness poisoning the Faerie Courts here and then get the heck out of town.

Could we hold out that long? If Alyssa had anything to say about it, we would. I just hoped she was right.

§

I stepped back into my room after snagging the shirt I wanted to see Lily still staring at herself in the mirror. If she'd been primping, I would’ve made a snarky comment about breaking the glass…but she wasn’t. She was just staring at her reflection. Creepy…

Even though it was my room, I knocked on the doorframe so she didn’t freak out in surprise and attack me. I knew that would result in a bloodbath because my entire Court would run up here, attack first, probably kill in the process, and ask questions later. Lily jumped when I knocked. Glared at me from the vanity. I offered a jaunty little finger-wave as I stepped into my closet and shut the door to change.

When I came out, Lily made a noise like I'd stabbed her in the heart. Wide golden eyes stared at me in something that looked like horror. I glanced down at Jack's shirt, black with white pinstripes, then looked back at the former White Queen and raised an eyebrow.

"You can't possibly tell me this shirt isn't up to your standards," I said, crossing my arms. "It costs like, a thousand bucks. It's probably Chanel or something. Seriously."

Lily twisted away from me and glared at the mirror without saying a word. Huh. No snarky comment from the b-with-an-itch queen? That was…unusual. Normally she took the opportunity to jab at me every chance she had. Why wasn’t she sharpening her verbal fork in preparation of some poking? Maybe because she was busy yanking a makeup removal wipe out of a white bag with all the force of someone hauling their filthy stray dog into the bathtub. She dragged the wipe all over her face, scrubbing viciously to remove the makeup she'd literally just spent at least half an hour applying.

"What are you doing?" I demanded, baffled.

Lily actually hissed at me. "Shut up! You have to just rub it in my face, don't you? You act like you're different than me, but you still like sticking knives in people and twisting them around."

I blinked. "You do realize I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, right?" not for the first time, I surreptitiously checked her for Martian antennae. Maybe the signal from her alien mothership was being scrambled by the faerie vibe in my house.

She slammed the smudged, dirty wipe on the vanity hard enough to topple a plastic bottle of perfume Chantal had told me I should try sometime. Giving me the silent treatment again, she yanked a tube of gloss out of the drawer where she'd stashed all her junk and began swiping sparkly pink junk on her mouth. Her hand shook. She blinked rapidly, pulled the lip-gloss wand away, and then squeezed her eyes shut. Her fist crashed down on my vanity like a bowling ball.

"Okay, seriously—what the duck is your problem?" I cried. Her half-glossed lips twitched; she probably thought the "duck" thing was funny. But then the tiny hint of a smile vanished and she just stared at the wood under her hand. "Is this what you do in your spare time?" I added, uncrossing my arms to slide my hands into the back pockets of my jeans. "Beat up my furniture?"

"Did he tell you to wear that shirt?"

"Uh…" I glanced down at the button-down shirt I wore as a jacket. "No…?"

"Are you lying?" Lily snapped. I raised an eyebrow.

"Yeah, 'cause I got nothing better to do than lie to you about whether Jack helps me pick out my clothes." There was no question that was who she'd meant by he. "Why do you even care?"

To my complete and utter shock, Lily's chin quivered for a second. She squeezed her eyes shut again. Clenched her jaw. She was trying not to cry. Oh, man, that was just weird. Normally she pretended to be a cyborg who'd surgically removed her heart and soul.

"Lily?" I asked, taking a step toward her. "What is it?"

She swiped at her face before even a hint of tears could show, then glared at me. "Why you?" She demanded in a voice shaking with suppressed fury. She clenched her fist; the tube of lip-gloss she held cracked in her grip. "What's so special about you?"

Without missing a beat, I replied, "I'm not you."

Lily winced and I had to wonder if my parents would be ashamed of me. That had been one of those catty, cutting remarks they'd forbidden me ever to make. In a battle of wits, with girls trading insults, that was one thing. The occasional snappy comeback wasn’t taboo. But lashing out at Lily like that, striking at the heart of her pain just because I could, wasn’t acceptable according to the rules my parents had raised me with.

"Sorry," I mumbled. She frowned at me. I'd clearly confused her. I shrugged. "That wasn’t…that was wrong of me to say. I'm sorry."

Lily waited a beat, once more eyeing me like I was about to sprout a few tentacles, before turning back to the mirror. She dropped the cracked lip-gloss tube, cleaned the pink goop from her fingers, and began applying the other gloss she'd been using before punching the vanity. I wondered if she might spout anymore pearls of angsty whining. But no, she just finished doing her lips and picked up a pair of tweezers.

"What are those doing there?" I strode forward and snagged them out of her hand. She whipped around, glaring. "They're supposed to be in my first-aid kit. They're for splinters and stuff."

"What are you, stupid?" Lily demanded.

"Says the blond," I replied, feeling no guilt this time. "No, I'm not stupid. Why do you have these?"

"So I can pluck my eyebrows," she snapped.

My eyes widened and I winced. "Oh, jeez, the humanity. What for? You've got like, supermodel eyebrows. They're like elegantly scripted arabesques. Why would you pluck your eyebrows?"

Her glare suffused with enough venom to drown a rattlesnake. "Because they're too thick. Obviously. Don't act like you haven’t noticed."

"I promise, I don’t fill my hours ogling your eyebrows," I said.

"Shut up," she snapped again, snatching the tweezers back from me. "Like you don't notice the way I look."

"Like a rabid, flesh-eating Hollywood zombie-actress?"

Lily laughed, but not like she thought I was funny. More like she was in pain, and if she didn’t laugh, she'd either burst out crying or stab me in the chest with the tweezers. Tweezer-death was not my ideal way to go. But she didn’t stab me. She just said, "You think you're so funny. Pretending you don't see what everyone else sees."

"I see Homicide Barbie," I replied. "Seeing as how you kill people. Like Larry Jacobson." Larry was the little brother of David, the Knave of Spades. Lily hadn’t killed Larry with her own two hands, but she was the reason he'd died.

"I never…" Lily trailed off, then sighed. "Whatever. You don’t know anything. And apparently you really are so blind that you don’t see it. I always knew you were an idiot."

"What are you talking about?"

"My face."

"You're Posh Spice, I get it. Everyone should worship you. Fine. But in this house, I am the Queen of the Universe and everything revolves around me." Not really, but my little fibs were all for the cause. "So deal with it."

"Never mind. Get out."

"Uh, it's my room," I reminded her. "I leave when I wanna leave. Right now, I'm kind of enjoying bothering you. Like, so much. Words can't even convey how much your annoyance pleases me."

Lily's shoulders slumped. "You've already destroyed everything I care about. How about you go off yourself and cut me a break?"

I sighed and headed for my bedroom door. "Cut yourself one," I tossed back over my shoulder. "Maybe if you weren’t such an ice queen, we wouldn’t clash so much. Maybe I'll get you some Prozac. That should loosen you up. Make you a little friendlier." I stopped just inside the doorway. "There's some of that soda you like in the fridge, by the—"

Before I could finish my sentence, a low buzzing filled the air, followed by the sounds of "Power" by that jerk, Kanye West. I checked my iPhone, just to be sure (though I would've rather dropped dead than have music on my phone by that jerk). Wasn’t me. I glanced at Lily's pearlescent white phone sitting on the vanity. She eyed it like it might grow fangs at any second.

"Who's that?"

Lily swallowed. "My brother."

"Oooh, lemme answer it!" I cried, lunging for the phone. Lily stared at me as I plucked it up and clicked talk. "Hello, Tucson City Morgue, you bag 'em, we tag 'em. This is Kitty. How may I help you?"

Silence reigned on the other end for so long Lily and I both started to sweat before a familiar and very irritating voice replied, "Who the hell is this?"

"The girl who kicked your butt and made you look like a putz at Homecoming," I replied with probably a little too much glee. "Hi, Gavin. What's a psycho like you doing, calling a nice girl like me?"

"Let me talk to my sister."

"How about not? But we can pretend we did that and then you can go chew on some glass." I grinned at Lily's stunned expression. Her lips twitched into the first phase of a smile. One person the former White Queen and I both hated with a fiery, undying passion that rivaled the heat of a thousand blue suns—Gavin Whitmoor, her older, psychotic brother.

"Listen up, human, you don't know who you're messing with—"

"Wow," I drawled. "I can so tell you two are related." Lily scowled at me. "Now, I'm gonna miss my bus if we keep chatting, so we're gonna say bye-bye now. Say 'bye,' Lily."

Her smile came back. "Later, freak!"

"Dad's gonna give you a second chance," Gavin yelled. Lily and I both froze. I watched her, but she just stared at the phone, her mouth hanging open. I clicked the speaker button. Gavin shouted, "He said you can come home if—"

"You're on speaker, doorknob," I snapped. "Stop yelling. You're gonna blow the phone." Not that I cared about the phone. I just didn’t want him screeching like a banshee that close to my face.

"Dad says you can come home, Lily," Gavin said, reverting to the use of standard decibels. "You don't have to stay with that bi—"

"You better not call me anything that rhymes with 'itch' or 'punt' during this conversation," I interjected, "or I am so hanging up on you." I was only allowing this because I wanted to know any potential temptations Lily might deal with in the foreseeable future. I knew she didn’t want to be here. I needed to make sure she wasn’t actually going to do anything about it.

"Just come home, and you've got a clean slate," Gavin said, ignoring me. How rude. But neither Lily nor I were buying this "fresh start" crud.

"Dad will kill me," Lily snapped. The sad thing was, I knew she probably meant literally; one of the reasons I was letting her live in my house.

Gavin tried to contradict her, but I said, "Okay, thanks for the offer. Go rot in a sewer. Get eaten by mutant gators. We're done now. Bye." And I hung up because listening to Gavin talk made me want to break his face with a tire-iron.

It wasn’t just about Lily, though knowing her brother had tried to kill her ever since they were kids didn’t sit well with me, obviously. Gavin was in my homeroom, and the first time I'd ever seen him, he'd been verbally tormenting Chantal, a therian who was now part of my Court, driving her to tears. He'd also tried to sexually assault a witch in my Court and her human best friend, Aoife and Wilhelmina. This was back when they were Red Court, which apparently made them "fair game," but that didn’t matter to me. Gavin had also nearly killed Jack and Harriet, another girl in my Court, during a fight out in the desert. Only Darren's intervention had saved them. And this was all before the Homecoming Battle in the parking lot.

"Thank you," Lily muttered, staring at her knees. I set her phone down on the vanity and shrugged. She took the phone and tossed it a few feet away, as if trying to put distance between herself and even the memory of her brother's voice.

"No problem. He's a jerk. And don't trust your dad. He's gunning for you, and you know it—"

"I don't need you to tell me that," she spat. Sigh. Potential bonding moment now officially over, apparently. "Just because you have this perfect family life, you don’t need to rub it in that I don't. So screw you."

"Whatever. Don't blow anything up or set anything on fire while I'm gone. Yeesh." I left, before I clocked her in the teeth. I didn’t need a fight-bite on top of all my other problems.

As I made my way down the hall toward the stairs, I bit back a sigh. Even just talking to Lily was like trying to pet a cactus—an excruciating waste of time. Maybe she really did need Prozac. Or something. Or a shovel to the face.

The almost-crying thing was weird, though. I never in a million years expected to see Lily that vulnerable. What about this shirt had made her almost cry? Or was it something else and I just thought it was the shirt? Was it just that I was wearing Jack's shirt? Maybe it was a painful reminder that I was Jack's girlfriend and he…well, he pretty much hated her guts. Like, to the point he wanted to make a noose out of them and hang her from the ceiling fan so he could play piñata, with one of her femur bones as the stick.

In the front pocket of my jeans, my iPhone buzzed. The voice of Miss Spider from James and the Giant Peach informed me I had a new text. Gee, who could that have been? For the most part, nearly all my texts came from the same source—my phone-stalker, also known as the Smoke. Popping my phone out of my pocket, I checked the display.

"Your move has been made, little Alice.
You've broken through the first shields of bone.
You've pillaged the White King's palace
So that the White Queen may now atone.

"Time to be asked to a mad, mad party.
Remember that you are the Black Queen.
The reign of bloodied silver is starting.
Look for that which lies unseen.

"Silver feathers fell up the rabbit hole.
Make sure you know who's who.
Never forget the price of the Crown
Now that the wyverns are coming for you.

"Beware the Jubjub bird, my girl."
I sighed. Just another day in my messed up life at this point. I had no idea what any of that meant, but by the time we got home from school this afternoon, Jack and I would figure it out. But before we raced to catch the bus—which would be here in like, ninety seconds—I remembered to snag an omnibus copy of the original Alice books to skim during class. Just in case.