Page 56 of Wondrous

“Jack!” I shouted. “What are you doing?” Had the pain of his injuries driven Jack mad? Had he forgotten who he was, or who he’d been since leaving the Jabberwoods?

Maria helped Alex to her feet, and the two of them stumbled down the streambank, slipping over the stones. Jack, meanwhile, gave a terrible cry like some prehistoric creature and dove at them again. As he sailed past me, I managed to grab hold of his long feathered tail.

“Jack!” I shouted as I sprinted over the sand, trying not to fall. “It’s me! It’s Alice!”

He slipped from my grasp and kept gliding after Alex and Maria. They vanished into the forest, still shrieking, but not before Alex managed to light a firework and aim it at Jack. It went wide, hitting the stream and sending up an explosion of mist and green sparks.

Jack stopped at the edge of the trees and gave a warbling roar. I heard Alex and Maria crashing through the trees, and then the noise of their panic faded away.

Jack gave a huff that sounded a lot like laughter, and then he flew back to me, circling around and around me in crazy spirals so my cloak billowed and my hair blew into my face.

“Jack!” I exclaimed, trying to see through my hair and the vortex of pale feathers. “Have you lost your mind? You scared them half to death!”

He darted away, and I turned to find him behind me—but not in his jabberwock shape. Somehow, he’d changed back into the familiar indigo-eyed boy I’d been traveling with. He was doubled over laughing, his hands pressed to his knees.

“Sorry,” he said. “But I had to—they deserved it, for leading that mock dragon to our camp.” He laughed again. “Their faces!”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, taking a step toward him. I felt breathless and full of too many feelings. “I’m not angry with Maria and Alex, and we’re going to work together now. But how did you do that? How are you”—I waved at him—“this? Are you all right?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He straightened, still smiling, and gazed down at his hands. “When I woke up, I just realized I could do it! Go back and forth, I mean. Maybe I always knew how to manipulate the spell you put on me, it just took time to figure it out. Aren’t you happy? This will make me much more useful as your sidekick. This human shape is a good disguise and all, but you two-handers are awful in a fight—no offense.”

I stopped—I’d been drifting toward him almost unconsciously. “And you—you still want to be my sidekick? Even though you broke the enchantment?”

“It isn’t broken,” he said. “I’m just in control of it now.”

He closed the distance between us and seized my hands. “Alice, that’s why I left. I thought I’d cast the spell off, and I couldn’t stay with you anymore, not as myself. So I flew away—I was going to go back to the Jabberwoods, but I kept wanting to turn back to find you again. I don’t want to stay in the Jabberwoods—I never have. I kept arguing with myself about what to do, and the whole time I was losing more and more blood. I don’t even remember landing here.”

“You must have fallen from the sky!” I threw my arms around him. “I’m so glad you’re all right, and that you—that you didn’t leave for good. Grackle led me to you.”

“He did? He’ll be expecting a feast of silk, then. He wouldn’t have done it out of the kindness of his heart. Grackle doesn’t have kindness or a heart.”

He wrapped his arms around me, leaning his head against mine so that I felt the brush of his dark hair against my forehead. One of his hands was in my hair, combing it back from my face with slow, gentle fingers, as if savoring the feel of it.

“Alice?” he said. His breath was warm against my skin.

I drew back. “Oh,” I murmured as I immediately froze. His eyes were simply inconvenient. Particularly at close range, they were like an enchantment. I knew now that they hadn’t changed; they were the same color as when he wore his true shape, just a little darker.

“Excuse us?”

I gave an unbecoming snort of surprise. Jack released me, and I turned to find Alex and Maria standing by the stream a few paces away. Maria gazed at us with a puzzled frown; Alex’s face was wrinkled up.

“I hope we aren’t interrupting,” Alex said. “Actually, I hope we are. Ick.”

Maria elbowed her. Alex muttered an objection that had jabberwock at the end.

“I’m sorry I frightened you,” Jack said, though he didn’t sound particularly sorry—he was suppressing a smirk. “Alice said we’re working together now, so I won’t do it again.”

“Oh, well, that’s all right then,” Alex said. “It’s not like you nearly scared us to death.”

Maria, though, had begun to smile. “Are we, Alice? Working together?”

“I think we’ll have to,” I said with a shaky laugh. My heart had been thundering since Jack had touched my hair, but that was only from relief, I told myself. “We can’t keep trying to betray each other. It never seems to go very well.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Maria said. “We sent that mock dragon packing, didn’t we? And we got Jack on his feet again. Maybe we should keep being enemies.” Her smile faded abruptly. “No—I didn’t mean that. I don’t like being enemies with anyone. It gives me a stomachache.”

Alex, whose gaze had been moving from me to Jack and back again, her nose still wrinkled in disbelief, said, “I thought jabberwocks had two heads. I heard a story about a two-headed jabberwock.”

“Some of us do,” Jack said. “The thing is, we don’t look alike. So most of the stories disagree with each other. My grandmother had horns that shot poison venom.”