Huntsman's Prey
Authors: Marie Hall
Rumors abound in Wonderland, of a dark princess named Chrysalis who bears the Moon's curse. Her beauty is beyond compare, and her madness… even greater than her father’s, The Hatter. Death follows wherever she roams, and Danika—fairy godmother of all villains—knows this task is too great for her to handle on her own. She has no choice but to seek out the one they call Huntsman, his mission is simple: Find the creature, and destroy it.
But nothing is ever so simple in Kingdom. The moment the hunter Aeric steps foot in the mad, twisted realm he's enveloped in a reality that is neither wholly true nor fantasy. The key, the Cheshire explains, to ending the madness is for one to become mad themselves. The Huntsman has one chance to figure out the riddle before the beauty destroys them all…
Copyright February, 2014 Marie Hall
Cover Art by Croco Frauke of Croco designs
Formatted by
Author’s HQ
Edited by Victory Editing
Kindle Edition
This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.
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The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patent Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.
Published in 2013 by Marie Hall, Honolulu, Hawaii, United States of America
Table of Contents
To all of you who love fairy tales just as much as me…
The rustling of leaves sounded like the rattling of dry bones. Trees—their trunks twisted and distorted from the magic imbued within the very soil of Wonderland—reached long, gnarly branches out toward Danika.
The stars shone a brilliant silver, winking from within the navy blue sky. A sickle shaped smile of sharp teeth gleamed from inside shadow and somewhere a voice howled. The haunting sound raised goose bumps on her arms and the fine hairs on the back of her neck.
She flew within the shelter of a hollow, staring at the ground below littered with the twisted, distorted bodies of sightless carcasses. Hundreds of dead animals, with limbs torn off and throats ripped open. A brutal slaughter that brought tears to her eyes.
It’d been eighteen years since she’d married off the last of her Bad Five, eighteen years of peace and quiet, eighteen years of being lulled into a false sense that all was well within her world.
But all was not well. She’d suspected this time was coming, had seen a glimpse of the future first time she’d laid eyes on the child. Danika had tried to deny it, tried to wish it away, to hope that desire could stop reality.
Her heart bled to hear the sounds of the lonely, constant cries shuddering through the woods. The teeth returned, floating right in front of her face.
“Cheshire?” Dragonfly wings buzzed softly behind her back.
A face materialized around the teeth, a ghostly distortion of fur and stripes. Then a body followed suit, until finally, a fluffy tabby stared back at her with eyes the color of an inkwell.
“Godmother?” His lazy drawl echoed with laughter. “What are you doing in my woods?”
She scoffed. “Your woods. You wish you fat alley cat. These woods belong to the Hatter.”
Cheshire did a strange rolling shoulder lift while he licked his paw. Danika shook her head, much as she loved Hatter, his woods were one she rarely visited and dreaded staying inside of for too long. The sensuous curl of white fog wrapped itself around the cat’s body, as if he were readying to vanish into the ether once again.
She may not like the cat, but she preferred his company to being alone in this warped portion of Kingdom.
“Have you seen the creature?” she asked quietly, heart thumping loudly as she strained to hear every creak, groan, and whistle surrounding them.
“Mmmm. I have,” he purred, long and loud and low, the rumbling vibrations of it causing his fur to stir and fluff. “Beautiful madness.”
“Where is it?” She hugged her arms to her chest, the howls had stopped, which meant
it
could now be anywhere. She wanted to leave, wanted to leave now.
“It? You mean she. Do you not?”
She closed her eyes. To think of it as anything other than an
it
would make this task impossible. Oh goddess, this wasn’t supposed to happen. Not to Alice and Hatter, they’d gone through so much, this shouldn’t have happened. How she wished she had Miriam’s wise guidance once again, her truest and best friend would have known what to do, how to fix this.
“I meant exactly what I said. Where did you see it last?” She lifted her chin, voice stern, refusing to allow an ounce of sympathy to leak into her words.
His smile stretched from ear to ear, full of nothing but sharp, little teeth that made him look frighteningly macabre. An impossibly long tongue licked at the fur around his eyes.
“Silver girds her loins, fire ripples at her feet.”
It was never easy trying to decipher Cheshire when he decided to be willfully obtuse.
“Where is she? It?” She shook her head, realizing her slip of the tongue.
Cheshire’s smile grew wider. “You should not do what you want to do. There can be another way.”
Her nostrils flared. “How can you say that to me?” She snapped, anger whipped through her veins, slipped off her tongue. “Do you not think I’ve thought of a million different ideas, a million different ways to change this outcome? All of them… all of them end like this. You’ve seen the carcasses, it will only get worse. I feared this outcome when it was first born, feared her birthday might trigger the darkness.” She threw up her hands with a defeated hitch in her voice. “I can’t save it. It… she’s gone mad.”
The cat floated into the air, the lower half of its body beginning to slowly fade from sight. “Are we not all a little mad?”
“Hatter was a little mad. What this…
creature
has become, it’s more than a little mad. There is no reason, no soul, it’s slipped into darkness. I know what Jericho has said, to believe and hope that she can be saved, but each year I’ve lost my tenuous grip on it until now there is nothing but a wisp of it left. So you tell me, cat, you say there can be another way, Jericho says the same, show me then. Prove me wrong.” She closed her eyes as her words trembled thanks to the lump building in her throat. Clearing it quickly, she pinned him with a hard stare. “I saw her, gazed into soulless eyes, how can you save something like that? Tell me.”
Cheshire simply stared as his features began to grow fuzzy and distorted, looking like a figure within a fun house mirror. “Not to beat a dead horse, godmother, but aren’t we all a little mad? Deal with it as you deal with me, become mad yourself.”
The cat vanished in a puff of white fog.
Become mad yourself
. That was his best advice? No wonder she never asked the cat for anything. To the right of a her a bush suddenly shook, heavy breathing echoed through the sudden stillness.
Yanking her wand from the pocket of her vest, Danika tore open a rift in time and flew quickly into it, leaving whatever
that
was behind. She needed to talk to Alice and Hatter, needed to tell them the truth, and she needed to find the Huntsman.
But how could you tell someone you loved that in order to save Wonderland they’d have to kill the one thing in the world they loved most?
Howling.
Madness.
Loud sounds and terrible, terrible smells.
Burning. Burning. Burning.
Trembling, limbs torn and scratched, Chrysalis crawled toward the silver pool on hands and knees. A wild face stared back.
A woman with hair like a crow’s feather glimmering in moonlight framing a heart shaped face covered in blood and gore.
Eyes of cerulean sky and beneath one, what appeared to be an inkblot stain, but was actually a bleeding heart tattoo. A mark she’d been born with. It’d started out on her forehead at birth, when the moon had first kissed her flesh, but it’d moved down through the years until it rested where it was now.
Skin the color of dusted confectioner’s sugar reached up to graze the mark, her fingertips tingled with the contact.
Blink. Blink.
The moonlight burned. Anywhere it touched it made her ache. Her skin was tight, stretched.
Leaning over the waters edge, she lifted a hand, poising a finger just above the reflection.
The reflection stared back. It did not lift its hand and now its hair wasn’t black, but a golden shimmering wave of blond so pure it rivaled the glory of the sun. That and the tattoo were the only differences between the two identical faces.
Blink. Blink
. There was madness in reflection’s eyes.
“You belong to me,” the familiar yet unfamiliar face smirked.
Chrysalis shook her head, but words stuck in her throat.
Laughter. It echoed hollowly through the woods. It came out of the reflection’s twisted, cruel lips. “You can think to fight me, Chrysalis, but I am stronger than you, each day you grow weaker and I stronger. We both know how this story ends.”
Chrysalis shook her head, words rolled through her head like marbles crashing into each other, making her dizzy and panicked.
The reflection lifted a thin brow.
Pretty face. Pretty, pretty face
. But the devil was in its eyes.
“Madness is your heritage. Don’t you know who your father is?” Reflection laughed. “You can never escape it. Give into it, Chrysalis. C’mon, you know you want to.”
The serpent beguiled, whispered words she wanted to deny but knew in her heart she could not. The devil was growing stronger. Reflection knew it to be so, but still Chrysalis shook her head.