It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize, out of a number of facts, which are incidental and which vital. Otherwise your energy and attention must be dissipated instead of being concentrated.

—Arthur Conan Doyle,

“The Adventure of the Reigate Squire”

1

It was now 9:03 a.m.

At the Bangsian, General Jinjur (a.k.k., Lt. Anne Granger) had spent the last ten minutes explaining her involvement with the Allied Battalions of Oz to Inspector Stephen Larking and Sgt. Rousseau and Lt. Scott Hamilton and Col. Roosevelt. Jinjur had received a summons from Princess Ozma of the Emerald City of Oz, because the Princess had received a letter from Glinda the Good Witch asking Ozma to reinstate Jinjur as a general and to send her to Glinda’s estate in the land of the Quadlings to train under the guidance of Glinda’s private bodyguard and captain of Glinda’s ‘brilliant’ army of beautiful young women.

When Col. Roosevelt asked how long she trained, General Jinjur said, “Colonel, I’ve trained for a hundred years from 1918 to 2018 in the arts of war and espionage. In that time, I’ve also amassed 1,000 volunteers (all women) from each of the four counties of Oz in the Quadling Country, the Winkie Country, the Gillikin Country, and the Munchkin Country. And in the weeks since I’ve been involved in your op,” she added, looking Stephen Larking in the eyes without so much as blinking, “I’ve also been keeping tabs and relaying the information to my four captains, and they’ve prepared for your op accordingly.”

For the next few moments (which seemed to stretch into minutes), General Jinjur’s audience stared at her and gaped, till Inspector Stephen Larking in particular was muttering under his breath, “I can’t believe this! I can’t fucking believe this!”

So General Jinjur said, “I’m sorry for deceiving you, Inspector Larking, but—”

“Don’t ‘Inspector Larking’ me!” Stephen yelled. “Jesus, you’ve been lying to me this whole time! You’ve been leaking sensitive information to third parties! And you expect me to—”

General Jinjur grabbed Stephen’s shirt collar and yanked him up to her face and said, “I’ve been preparing for this day for longer than you’ve been alive. So if you don’t want to be court-martialed for disrespecting a superior officer in front of witnesses, I’d suggest you quit your bitching and act your age, Inspector,” and she let him go.

Silence reigned for a time.

Then Col. Roosevelt broke the silence, saying, “Have your troops been deployed at their locations, ma’am?”

“Yes, sir,” General Jinjur said, nodding. “They’re all at their stations on the battlefield and awaiting my orders.”

“I see,” the Colonel said.

“And Inspector Larking,” General Jinjur said to the disgruntled Stephen, “I value your participation and your insights in this operation. In fact, I wouldn’t have come to you at all if I didn’t trust you.”

Inspector Stephen Larking remained silent for a time, but Col. Roosevelt said, “You know she’s right, Inspector. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have revealed herself to us.”

After that, Stephen breathed out a sigh and said, “All right, I’ll let you have your way, Lieutenant— . . . I mean, General. Sorry, ma’am.”

General Jinjur smiled and said, “Well, at least you’re trying, Inspector. That’s all I ask. Anyway, let’s get down to—”

Then a high-pitched tune resembling birdsong fluttered through the room, and everyone turned their heads in different directions as if they were looking for birds, till Lt. Granger manifested a mirror in her hand, in which the image changed into a close-up of Princess Ozma’s face.

“Your Highness,” she said. “I was going to call you after the meeting here. Did something come up?”

“Yes,” Princess Ozma said. “I’m calling to inform you and Inspector Larking that Mr. Foster is in my custody at my Palace at the moment, and he wants to speak with Col. Roosevelt and Lt. Hamilton.”

Which made Lt. Hamilton gasp and beckon his hand for the mirror, so General Jinjur handed her mirror over. Lt. Hamilton took it, and when the reflection changed to that of Roanld Hamilton sitting in Ozma’s Throne Room, she heard Ronald say, “Father, is that really you?”

“My God, I thought I’ve lost you!” Lt. Scott Hamilton said. “Are you hurt anywhere?”

“I’m all right, father,” Ronald said. “I’m a bit roughed up, is all, but it’s nothing that a few hours of bed rest won’t cure, honest to God.”

“So this is your son, eh, Lieutenant?” Col. Roosevelt said, clapping Lt. Hamilton on his shoulder and smiling at the mirror reflection. “He’s a bully young man, he is.”

“Thank you, sir,” Lt. Hamilton said, “but I must be frank. He was a bit of a handful when he was younger, and he still is to some extent, so help us God.”

Then Inspector Stephen Larking circled around the desk, joining in on the conversation and saying, “Ronnie, you scared the shit out of us! What happened out there?”

“Oh, nothing much,” Ronald said. “I only got captured and pilloried and violated against my will, till I got rescued by these fine gentlemen.”

Then General Jinjur heard a familiar voice, saying, “I’m Wantowin Battles, and I did the shooting.”

Then she heard another familiar voice, saying, “And I’m Lewis Carroll, and I did the rescuing.”

“God, bless you both!” Lt. Scott Hamilton said.

“You two have my thanks, as well,” Stephen Larking added. “Looking after Ronnie was a serious pain.”

Lewis Carroll and Wantowin Battles laughed in the mirror, accompanied with more laughter from two other personages that General Jinjur didn’t know, while Ronald just said, “Oh, hardy har har, Steve. You’re the one who ordered that fire team to go. I was just doing my part, is all.”

Yet before Stephen said anything, Col. Roosevelt leaned forward and cut in, saying, “We need brave men like you, Mr. Carroll, Mr. Battles. Why don’t you two come over in person and help us with the fight we’ve got brewing here?”

“Actually,” Lewis Carroll said, “I was thinking of the same thing myself. From what I’ve seen today, Wantowin Battles is a good man to have with you in a fight, and I vow to do my own part, as well, since I’ve got some skin in this whole affair myself. That is, if we have your permission to go, your Highness.”

And Princess Ozma said, “You both may go. Just stand a little ways from us and wave your handkerchiefs as you did before, and I’ll send you there.”

There came a pause from the mirror as Lewis Carroll and Wantowin Battles separated from the gathering in Ozma’s throne room and waved their handkerchiefs, disappearing from there and reappearing behind everyone inside the hotel suite.

General Jinjur and Sgt. Rousseau turned around, while Inspector Larking and Lt. Hamilton and Col. Roosevelt looked up from the desk, and lo and behold! There stood the curly-haired Lewis Carroll in a rumpled dark waistcoat and vest and a loosened bowtie around his open collar and the towering Wantowin Battles with his long handlebar mustache wearing a rumpled green military uniform on his lanky body, complete with frayed frogging over his shoulders and dusty green trousers and scuffed tall boots over his spindly legs and a dusty top hat atop his head, both men smelling like burnt gunpowder.

Lewis Carroll waved, and Wantowin Battles saluted, and General Jinjur smiled at the two familiar faces.

Meanwhile, Princess Ozma said through the mirror, “Lt. Granger, are you there?”

Lt. Hamilton handed back the hand mirror, and General Jinjur said to Ozma’s reflection, “I’m here, your Highness. And I’ve already revealed my true name to these men. I trust them, and so can you.”

“Ah, good,” the Princess said. “Then if anything happens over there, keep me informed.”

“Will do, your Highness,” she said.

Then Princess Ozma turned to Ronald outside of the reflection and said, “Mr. Foster, do you have anything left to say?”

“Yeah, I do,” Ronald said. “Um, father?”

General Jinjur handed the mirror back to Lt. Hamilton, who took it and said, “Yes, my son. What is it?”

“Be careful over there,” Ronald said. “This isn’t any kind of battlefield you’ve been in.”

“Oh, I will, my son,” Lt. Hamilton said.

“Don’t worry yourself, old boy,” Col. Roosevelt added. “I’ll make sure to get your father out of trouble when it arises.”

“Thank you, sir,” Ronald said, then to Princess Ozma: “All right, your Highness. I’m done for now.”

After that, Lt. Hamilton gave the mirror back to General Jinjur, who then dissipated it in her hand and said to him, “Your son is a very brave man, Lieutenant. Out of everyone in the operation, he was the one person I warmed up to the most, and he got me to warm up to the rest of the operatives in this op,” and added, looking at Inspector Larking in particular, “include some of the more prickly members.”

“Stop with the subtle jab, please,” Stephen said. “God knows we’ve had our differences, especially today, but I’ve already been harried enough.”

General Jinjur laughed and said, “Surely you jest, Inspector. As far as I know, you owe me, big time. In fact, if it wasn’t for me getting your sorry ass out of the Dragon Volant, you’d be dead right now,” and she walked off to greet her old companions Lewis Carroll and Wantowin Battles. “My God, I haven’t seen you two in a hundred years. How have you been?”

Lewis Carroll whistled and said, “Has it really been that long? I don’t think an hour has passed since I saw you last.”

“A lot has happened, trust me,” she said.

“Oh, I’m sure of that,” Wantowin Battles added, smiling and twitching his long mustache. “You can probably outshoot me, one on one, with a century’s worth of practice.”

“I don’t know if I can do that,” she said, “especially with your cloning abilities.”

“Oh, don’t be too hard on yourself, General,” Wantowin Battles said. “You might even be good enough to change shifts with me as Captain General of all the Armies of Oz.”

At this, General Jinjur laughed again and said, “If Princess Ozma allows it, then I’ll think about it.”

2

It was now 9:06 a.m.

Stephen Larking just stood there behind the desk, forming a trio with Col. Roosevelt and Lt. Hamilton and staring at General Jinjur being all chummy with the two men.

Then Sgt. Rousseau walked over to the little get-together and introduced himself to Wantowin Battles and Lewis Carroll, shaking both of their hands. The sergeant said that his son and daughter loved Carroll’s Alice books and Baum’s Oz books when they were little and added, “In fact, I have both Alice books and all fourteen Oz books, and my kids used to pester me or my wife to read a chapter or two to them before they went to sleep. Believe it or not, reading those books to them became our little nighttime ritual.”

Lewis Carroll beamed at him, saying, “Really now?”

“Yes, sir,” Sgt. Rousseau said. “They love those books.”

“Your kids have good reading tastes,” General Jinjur said. “I bet they’ll grow up to be smart like their old man.”

“Smarter than me, I hope,” the sergeant said, making the trio laugh. “Say, Mr. Carroll, would you mind if I have you autograph the two Alice books for my kids?”

Lewis Carroll laughed yet again and said, “No, I don’t mind at all, Mr. Rousseau. In fact, I’m honored that what I’ve written still makes kids like yours so happy.”

“Thanks so much, Mr. Carroll,” the sergeant said, shaking the author’s hand again. “You have no idea how much that means to my kids. They’re gonna freak out when they find out.”

“I’ll do you one better, Mr. Rousseau,” Lewis Carroll said, smiling at the man like he was his own brother or something. “When this madness is all over, not only will I sign both of your Alice books, I’ll also ask my friend L. Frank Baum to sign all of your Oz books for you, too. How does that sound?”

“That would be amazing, Mr. Carroll,” Sgt. Rousseau said, shaking Lewis Carroll’s hand once again. “Thank you, thank you so much, Mr. Carroll!”

And while Sgt. Rousseau went on fanboying over Carroll’s generosity in this little get-together, Stephen continued to stare and say, “Man, I need a drink.”

Col. Roosevelt clapped Stephen on the shoulder and said, “That’s life, old boy, and a bully one it is, too.”

“In other words,” Lt. Hamilton said, “enjoy these little glimmers while you can. There’s no telling what’ll happen in the future, you know.”

Stephen Larking looked at the two men, both of them men of action that have lived full and meaningful lives in the service of their country and their fellow man, and Stephen thought of everything he had done at this early stage of his life. It wasn’t much compared to the likes of these two, but he promised himself that whatever he could muster in this life would all be spent in the service of something greater than himself, yet he gave no inkling of his thoughts.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” was all Stephen said.

And for now, that was enough.

3

It was now 9:07 a.m.

Meanwhile, back at the Hearn household, the hour that had elapsed between the departure of Leslie and Colbie from the house to follow Connie to the Arcana Bookstore and the present time was full of activity. After the Hearn sisters had finished clearing away the dishes and washed up, they had gone back upstairs and changed in their bedrooms. As the sisters were changing, Roy and Randal passed the guest restroom into the entranced hall and entered the family on their right. They took their places by the sofa on which Kendra slept beneath Katherine’s blood-colored shroud, with Roy leaning against the armrest by Kendra’s head and Randal leaning on the armrest by Kendra’s feet, and exchanged a few details of the case as they waited. Meanwhile, Celia had finished changing into a pullover sweater and Bermuda shorts and went downstairs towards the family room, where she sat on the sofa adjacent to Kendra’s and exchanged small talk with Roy and Randal as she waited for her sisters to come down. When they came down, Katherine had changed into another pullover and leggings, while Madison had changed into a tank top and shorts, and both sisters joined Celia on the sofa.

To pass the time, Roy and Randal had spent the last forty-odd minutes sharing cop stories with the Hearn sisters, keeping them occupied as they waited for news from Connie and Leslie and Colbie’s excursion. Katherine and Madison kept asking Roy and Randal about their cases, while Celia just sat and listened to them talk on and on as she looked at the sleeping Kendra on the nearby sofa wrapped up in Katherine’s blood-colored shroud. Celia had often butted heads with Kendra throughout their rocky friendship, so she wondered how Colbie was able to maintain such an easy friendship with her. Yet as the storytelling continued, she began to realize something about Colbie and Kendra and Randal and Roy: they all had good stories to share with each other.

Then at around 9:00 a.m., Randal received a call on his smartphone and excused himself and exited the family room into the entrance to take the call. Now the three Hearn sisters and Roy waited for Randal Larking in the family room. Except for Kendra, all of them were listening to Randal’s conversation with Connie Davis on his smartphone in the entrance hall just outside the family room. From the contents of the conversation, they found out that Connie and Leslie and Colbie had visited the Arcana Bookstore and were now waiting at the Nayland Hospital for the CSIs to finish processing the scene of Mara Cairns’ anomalous disappearance.

As such, their storytelling got Celia thinking throughout Randal’s phone conversation with Connie: what stories could Celia Hearn offer? She thought about it, yet the longer she mulled it through her mind, the more it became clear to her that most of the stories she knew centered around trolling Katherine for her hidden naughty room full of smut or trolling Madison for her boyfriend troubles or trolling Kendra about her relationship with Randal Larking.

Maybe, she thought, that was the difference between herself and her peers: while their stories lifted people up and brought them together, Celia’s stories brought people down and tore them away from each other. Maybe, she thought, that was why she had such a rocky friendship with Kendra. Maybe, she thought, that was why she was always at odds with her sisters. Maybe, she thought, that was why her parents were no longer living together. And maybe, she thought, that was why her mother had been away from the house for so long. And maybe, just maybe, that was why Katherine couldn’t trust her sisters with the truth of their familial relationship with Rancaster. And maybe, just maybe, that was why that bastard could control her actions, making her pull the trigger on Auna . . .

“Whoa, what’s wrong?” Roy said.

She snapped out of her revery and said, “It’s nothing.”

“You’re crying again,” Katherine said and reached over and wiped the tears that had streaked down her cheeks. “So it’s definitely something. What is it?”

Celia looked away from her sisters, wiping away the rest of her tears that seemed to keep welling up from her eyes.

“Come on, Celia, tell us,” Madison added.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Is it about what happened to Auna?” Katherine said.

“It’s not your fault,” Madison added. “It was that bastard’s—”

“I know already. And, no, it’s not that,” she said, wiping away more tears. “It’s everything else. I’m sorry for being such a brat all the time. I don’t wanna be like that anymore. I wanna be someone you can depend on.”

Celia’s words left her sisters silent for a moment, eyes wide and mouths agape, yet they both smiled at her.

Katherine put her arm behind her shoulder in a one-armed hug and said, “Are you really Celia?”

“I’m being serious here, geez!” she said.

And Madison, for her part, got up from her side of the sofa and sat beside Celia and wrapped her arms around her shoulders in a tight embrace, saying, “If Mom were here listening to you say that, she’d be crying right now.”

Celia paused at her words, wondering if she should contact her mother when it was probably around sunset or early evening in Europe, wondering what her mother was doing right now. She sniffled and said, “I wanna call Mom.”

“Do you have something to say to her?” Katherine said, fishing into her pants pocket for her smartphone.

Celia nodded.

So Katherine pulled out her smartphone, turning it on and waiting for it to reboot, then punched in her access code and gave it to her.

“Thanks,” Celia said.

“No problem,” Katherine said.

So Celia dialed her mother’s cell phone number and waited for her to pick up, till her mother said, “Kathy?”

“Mom, it’s me,” Celia said.

“Celia, what’s going on?” Lima Hearn said.

“Mom, I know why you’re doing this,” Celia said and sniffled again, trying her best to keep herself from falling apart in front of her sisters and Roy and failing at it.

There came a long sigh through the connection, and Lima said, “Did Kathy tell you about your name?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I know my name’s an anagram, but when did you find out about it?”

“About three years ago,” Lima said. “I think it was around a month after Kathy’s nightmare about Alice. After pouring through Amelia’s diaries, I found several entries referring to a collection of stories, Entering the Secret Room, written under a pseudonym.”

“Linda Kouri?” Celia said.

“That’s the one,” Lima said. “It took me years to track down the location of her manuscript. I eventually had Steve and Randal track it down for me, because they had better resources than I did. Anyway, back to Linda Kouri. After reading through Amelia’s diaries, I got a hunch that she had used that pseudonym as a spell word, and I confirmed it after I used a blood seal to decipher it.”

“Wait, Mom,” she said, “you can use blood seals?”

Katherine and Madison both gaped at this intelligence.

“Yep,” Lima said, “but mine doesn’t work the way yours does. I can only use mine on a paper talisman for inanimate objects. Anyway, after I deciphered the name using my blood seal, I found out that Amelia used spell words from two different languages to make up the pseudonym as a talisman. She used the Italian meaning for Linda, ‘clean,’ as a cleansing element, and she used the Japanese meaning for Kouri, ‘having luck,’ to add further protection. That was my first clue.”

“And what’s the second clue?” Celia said.

“I knew Amelia kept an old edition of the book somewhere in the house,” Lima said. “So I searched and found it inside a wooden box up in the attic and read the first story, ‘Alice and the Mad Tryst,’ and that’s when I had a vision of myself when I was your age opening the box and reading it from the light of the lamp on the nightstand in my old room, which is now your room, Celia. I had completely forgotten about it, till I read it again, and that was my second clue. As such, I suspected Amelia had placed another spell over it, so I used my blood seal on the book to decipher it. That’s when I found out that Amelia had used a reflection spell to scatter my memories of reading it at the time.”

Her mother’s words electrified her, and Celia’s thoughts raced back to the harrowing interview with Randal leading up to Katherine’s visionary spell. In fact, Leslie’s account of witnessing Lima’s own words play out in Amelia Hearn’s reflection pool during Leslie’s dream dive with Ramona and Connie’s anomalous first-person account of the same scene both confirmed her mother’s words, providing secondhand accounts to back up Lima’s firsthand observations. With these connections hanging together in her mind, Celia said, “Then what Leslie and Ramona and Connie all saw—”

“Don’t tell me,” Lima said. “The less I know about it, the better. There’s a reason why Amelia went to such lengths to scatter that memory.”

Celia guessed, saying, “Rancaster?”

“Exactly,” she said. “Anyway, after I read her book again, guess what I found out?”

“What did you find out?” Celia said.

“After rereading that story,” Lima said, “I found two other talismanic names, ‘Auna’ and ‘Alice,’ and deciphered them using the same method I used to decipher Amelia’s pseudonym, ‘Linda Kouri,’ using blood seals on paper talismans. As such, for ‘Auna,’ Amelia used a Czech variation of the Hebrew name, Hannah, meaning ‘favor’ or ‘grace,’ to change ‘Alice’s name and break Rancaster’s spell over her. That was my third clue. Did Kathy share her vision with everyone at the house earlier?”

“Yeah, she did,” Celia said, looking over at her eldest sister biting her lower lip. “We saw what Amelia did for Auna.”

“I see,” Lima said and cleared her throat over the connection. “Anyway, for ‘Alice,’ Amelia used a reflection spell and scrambled the name into an anagram name.”

“My name?” Celia said.

“Yeah,” Lima said. “That’s how I figured it out. And what’s more: Amelia placed a blood seal over that anagram. Celia, that’s why you can use blood seals. If Amelia hadn’t done that, you’d be a normal witch who could only use teleportation seals.”

“Why would she do that?” Celia yelled.

“Celia, listen to me,” she said, then paused and took a deep breath and exhaled over the connection. “Amelia was diagnosed with hemolytic anemia before she died, and hers was an advanced case due to her dormant vampiric powers.”

“Wait, Mom,” Celia said, “how do you know this?”

“I know this,” she said, “because I was born with those vampiric powers already activated within me. I don’t know what had activated Amelia’s vampiric powers in the first place, but I suspect that Rancaster had something to do with it. Because of these powers, Amelia’s lifespan had been shortened, and since I was born with these powers, my lifespan was shortened, too.”

“Oh my God,” Celia said under her breath.

“When Amelia was diagnosed,” Lima continued, “the doctors said she had two years left to live at most, and that was being optimistic. That’s when she told me her plans, telling me to name my third daughter ‘Celia,’ and when I asked her why, she said it was to dilute the symptoms of my own vampiric powers by sharing them with you and Alice. In other words, Amelia did it to save me from what she was going through at the end of her life. So when I named you after you were born, I named you ‘Celia’ to complete her spell.”

“Did it work?” Celia said.

“It did,” Lima said. “After naming you, I felt like a huge burden had been lifted from my shoulders, and the lethargy I’d been feeling at that point had disappeared.”

“Does that mean that you’ll be okay?” Celia said.

“Don’t worry, Celia. I’m going to be fine,” Lima said, but then she let out a long sigh. “I just never thought she’d die the way she did. Did Kathy show you how she died?”

“Yeah,” Celia said and sniffled again, closing her eyes and blinking out the horrific moments of Katherine’s shared vision of Amelia Hearn possessing Lima’s teenage body and dealing out the killing blow with one downward stab into Amelia’s . . . Tears trailed down her cheeks as she glimpsed the images, sniffling again and wiping away tears that keep welling up from her eyes, for when she blinked, she saw snatches of her own horrific visions flooding through her head. She blinked again and saw through Nico’s telepathic kiss the godless moments before Nico and Mara pulled the trigger of their guns on Rancaster’s stage, and she blinked yet again and relived the godless moments before Rancaster forced Celia to fire Auna’s gun on Auna Wenger at the base of the stairs inside Katherine’s dream mansion.

“Celia, what’s happening?” Lima said. “Are you okay?”

“No, I’m not okay,” she said as Katherine and Madison both grasped onto her shoulders in a tight embrace, rubbing circles behind her back and shoulder blades, letting her know that she wasn’t alone. “Mom, there’s something I have to tell you.”

“What is it, honey?” Lima said.

“Mom, you’re not the only one Rancaster used to kill someone,” she said and took a deep breath. “He did the same thing to Mara and Nico when he made them shoot themselves in a game of Russian roulette. Nico died because of it.”

“Oh, my God!” Lima said.

“And that’s not all,” Celia added. “He also made me shoot Auna Wenger with her own gun last night, and her death summoned Alice into the Phantom Realms.”

“Oh, Jesus!” Lima said. “Celia, do you want me to come home?”

“No, please don’t,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure, Mom,” Celia said. “Kathy and Maddy are with me now, so please don’t worry about me, okay?”

“I’m your mom,” she said. “It’s my job to worry!”

“I know,” Celia said, “but I want you to trust me on this. I’m doing okay right now.”

“Listen to me,” Lima said. “After all this is over, I’m gonna schedule therapy sessions for you, because you’re gonna need them for PTSD. And I’m speaking from experience here, and Leslie will back me on this. It took me and Leslie and Ramona months of therapy to settle our PTSD, and Leslie and I still go to a therapy session every six months to help us maintain our sleep cycle. I’m not joking, either, Celia. This is serious.”

“Okay, okay, I get it,” she said.

“Good,” Lima said.

Then came a pause as someone else started talking to her mother through the hollow static of Roy’s smartphone, so Celia said, “Mom, who are you talking to?”

After a few moments, Lima said, “It’s your cousin.”

“Wait, my cousin?” Celia said.

“Her name’s Isabel Hearn,” she said, “and she’s been listening to me talk over the phone. She wants to talk to you.”

Then came the scratching static of the phone being handed to another person, and a loose RP-accented female voice came through the connection and said, “Hallo there. Is this Celia?”

“Yeah, that’s me,” Celia said.

“Oh, hold on for a bit,” Isabel said.

“Okay, sure,” Celia said, and as she listened, there came a pause over the connection, and Celia heard her mother talking to Isabel through the hollow static that made Celia think that Isabel was holding Lima’s smartphone by her side as they talked.

“What’s happening?” Katherine said.

“Mom’s talking to her.”

“Any idea what they’re saying?” Madison said.

“I can’t make out any words,” she said, “but I think Mom’s telling her what I just told Mom.”

Then, after the talking had ceased, Isabel came back through the connection and said, “Sorry about that. Your mum just told me what happened to those two girls you mentioned.”

“Mara and Nico?” she said.

“Yeah,” Isabel said. “And she also told me what you’ve gone through. My God, no wonder your mum was mentioning therapy and the like. Sounds like you’ve had it rough last night.”

“You have no idea, trust me,” she said.

“And I thought I’ve had it rough,” Isabel said. “Say, have you . . . ? Never mind, it’s a weird question.”

“Wait, what is it?” Celia said.

There was silence over the connection for a moment, and then Isabel said, “Can I Screen Chat you? I mean, only if you want to, but I want to see you and your sisters for myself. I’ve never really had any sisters before, either.”

“Okay, sure,” she said.

“All right, hold on,” Isabel said. “I’ll do it from my end,” and the call disconnected for just a moment.

“What did she say?” Madison said.

“She wants to Screen Chat me,” Celia said, waiting for the call, till the smartphone rang up again, and she pressed the FaceTime button, bringing up a video feed of a petite bespectacled girl with long flowing black hair and a beret atop of head, wearing a high school blazer over a cardigan over a blouse and tie. “Whoa, is that really you?”

Isabel smiled and waved at her on the screen, saying, “Yeah, this is me.” And when Lima came up beside her on the screen, waiving at Celia and her sisters on the screen, Isabel added, “I’ve been traveling abroad with your mum throughout Europe, and it’s been a blast.”

Celia and her sisters smiled and waved back, while Roy circled around and photobombed them behind their sofa.

“Is that your uncle?” Isabel said.

Celia turned back at a smiling and waving Roy Dolan and said, “No, he’s not. He’s a family friend, though.”

“The name’s Roy,” he said.

“It’s a pleasure,” Isabel said, but as Randal finished talking to Connie on his own smartphone in the entrance hall just outside the family room, she added, “Oh, is someone else talking back there? I hear someone.”

“That’s just Randal,” Celia said, looking back over her right shoulder to the family room entrance. “He’s another friend of the family.”

And right on cue, Randal appeared at the threshold of the family room entrance and beckoned Roy over and said, “Roy, it’s Connie. She wants to talk to you.”

So Roy excused himself from the gathering and walked out of the family room with Randal, where Roy was now talking to Connie on Randal’s smartphone.

At this, Celia said, “As you can see, this morning has been really busy.”

“Ah, I bet,” Isabel said.

4

It was now 9:10 a.m.

After talking with Roy through the connection, Connie Davis talked with Randal for a bit before ending her phone call with him. She then approached the yellow tape and waved over the CSI she had talked to earlier, beckoning him to come over again. When the CSI came up to her, Connie said, “Do you have a spare laptop? I need to check on something for the case.”

“Yeah, sure,” the CSI said and called over his colleague who had finished following up on the witness statements and was now taking a coffee break.

His colleague came over, listened to Connie’s request, and went back to his chair on the other side of the cordoned-off area, where a laptop bag was slung over the backrest of it. He unzipped his bag and pulled out his laptop and started it up, then waited for it to finish rebooting before coming back to Connie and handing it over to her, saying, “Give it back after you’re done with it, okay?”

“I will, thank you,” Connie said, taking it in her hands. After that, Connie turned her attention to Colbie and Leslie on the bench. Colbie was reading the book Connie had given her, and Leslie was drinking coffee and eating handfuls from a packet of trail mix with more unopened packets and granola bars between mother and daughter. She walked up to mother and daughter and said, “How’s the book, Colbie?”

The girl read on for a few moments—

(“Colbie, she’s talking to you,” Leslie said.)

—before she turned to the next page and raised her eyes and said, “It’s really good. Sorry about that: I just finished reading the second part of ‘Alice and the Mad Tryst.’”

“Anything interesting?” Connie said.

“Yeah,” she said. “There are these two Alice characters in the story. There’s one Alice who’s with Mr. Prospero, and she’s the one who orders Lewis Carroll’s beheading. She kind of reminds me of that Alice-girl I fought in Kathy’s ballroom. Then there’s another ‘Alice,’ written in single quotes. She’s the one this story is about, and she gets trapped in the mirror and then visits a girl named Ozma. It’s totally whacked out!”

“How so?” Leslie said.

“Do you remember Randal saying something about all these shared visions you’ve both been having?” Colbie said.

Connie and Leslie both nodded, and Leslie said, “Stephen was calling them synchronicities.”

“Were there any of them in the story?” Connie added.

Colbie nodded, saying, “Yeah. There’s a major one where Ozma kisses ‘Alice’ and finds herself in the POV of another girl, but I don’t know who she is yet.”

“Does the story mention her name?” Connie said.

“No,” Colbie said. “At least, not yet in the story,” and she flipped to the last page of the novella and fanned back through the pages to where she parted the pages with her finger. “There’s one more part left to read.”

“Tell you what,” Connie said, placing her hand on Leslie’s shoulder. “You read the rest of that story, while I talk to your mom for a bit. When we come back, you can tell us who that girl is. Deal?”

“Sure,” Colbie said and eyed the laptop in Connie’s hands, “but where are you going?”

“Oh, we’ll just sit somewhere close by,” Connie said. “I have to talk to your mom about something.”

“Which is what exactly?”

“You’ll know when we come back,” Connie said and started walking down the corridor. So Leslie got up, taking her open packet of trail mix with her, and left Colbie on the bench to finish reading to herself in silence.

When Leslie finished her mouthful of trail mix, she crumpled the packet in her hands and discarded it in a nearby trash receptacle and said, “Did you call Randal?”

“Yeah,” Connie said, sitting at the next bench over from Colbie’s, while Leslie sat beside her and eyed the laptop in her hands she had opened. “I also talked to Roy.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Besides what we’ve been up to,” she said, “I asked for the addresses of everyone currently involved in this case,” and she opened an internet browser and accessed her e-mail account, where she found several messages in her inbox. She clicked on the two most recent ones, which opened two one-page PDF attachments on the screen showing two lists from Randal and Roy:

1st list (Randal)

-Auna Wenger’s house: 5283 Cardinal Dr.

-Celia’s/Maddy’s/Kathy’s/Lima’s house: 8137 Keller Ln.

2nd list (Roy)

-Colbie’s/Leslie’s house: 9648 Windham Ct.

-Nico’s/Mara’s house: 5849 Dawson Ave.

-Kendra’s/Roy’s house: 2924 Brooklyn Ct.

“Now I’m just laying it out for you,” Connie said, taking out a pen and pocket notebook from her jacket pocket and writing out the names and addresses on a spare page as she saw it on the e-mail. “That way, you can see what I’m talking about, okay?”

Leslie nodded. “Go on.”

“Now except for Colbie,” Connie said, “all the ones listed have had a personal stake in this case.”

“That’s a given,” Leslie said.

Then Connie logged out of her e-mail account and closed the browser tab, then opened another tab and accessed Infinity Maps online and waited for the browser page to boot up. While she waited, Connie handed the laptop to Leslie and flipped through her pocket notebook and pulled out a scrap piece of paper folded into quarters, so she unfolded it and showed a drawn diagram of what seemed to be a partial floor plan of a cathedral crossing, marked as an X’ed box with names and labels added in. And on either side of the X’ed box, Connie had placed the label ‘Transept,’ and above the X’ed box, Connie had placed the label ‘Choir,’ and below the X’ed box, Connie had placed the label ‘Nave.’

(Figure 1)

“While you were with Kathy and Maddy in the kitchen,” Connie said, “I was in the family room drawing and labeling the details of the cathedral crossing from Kathy’s vision while it was still fresh in my mind. I added the transepts, the choir, and the nave while I was in the car before we drove out to the Arcana Bookstore. Based on Kathy’s vision,” she continued, pointing out the corners of the X’ed box on the diagram, “we have Kendra in the Diamonds mirror on the upper left hand corner, Mara in the Clubs mirror on the upper right hand corner, Lima in the Spades mirror on the lower left hand corner, and Auna in the Hearts mirror on the lower right hand corner. In addition, Amelia Hearn was also in the Hearts mirror near the end of Kathy’s vision,” she added, pointing out Amelia’s name with an arrow pointing to the lower right hand corner, where she had labeled her as the ‘Joker.’ “I’m labeling Amelia the ‘Joker,’ because she’s the one who gave Auna Wenger her name.”

(Figure 2)

Connie then turned to Leslie and said, “Does this correspond to everything you saw in Kathy’s vision?”

Leslie closed her eyes and took a deep breath, as if recalling the vision to her mind. “Yeah.”

“Okay, good,” Connie said and flipped through her pocket notebook again to another page and poised her pen on it. “When I say the addresses out loud, you look up the addresses on Infinity Maps and show me where each house is in their respective blocks, so I can draw them out. That way, we’ll see if they correspond with the positions on the cathedral diagram. Ready?”

“Yeah,” Leslie said.

“Then we’ll start,” Connie said, flipping to the spare page containing the addresses. “Auna’s house: 5283 Cardinal Drive.”

Leslie typed in the address, locating it on Infinity Maps, and showed it to Connie with an image caption of Auna’s house address on the laptop screen. “Is this good?”

“Zoom it out,” Connie said. “I need to see the whole block.”

So Leslie zoomed it out.

“Perfect,” Connie said and drew a small diagram of Auna’s house located on the lower right hand corner of the Sun’s End neighborhood block on another page of her notebook.

(Figure 3)

“Next one,” Connie said, flipping back to the spare page containing the addresses. “Lima’s house: 8137 Keller Lane.”

Leslie typed in the address, locating it on Infinity Maps, and zoomed out and showed it to Connie with an image caption of the Hearn house address on the laptop screen. “Here.”

“Okay, good,” Connie said and drew another small diagram of Lima’s house located on the lower left hand corner of the Shady Vale neighborhood block on another page of her notebook.

(Figure 4)

“Next one,” Connie said, flipping back to the spare page containing the addresses. “Mara’s house: 5849 Dawson Avenue.”

Leslie typed in the address, locating it on Infinity Maps, and zoomed out and showed it to Connie with an image caption of the Cairns house address on the laptop screen.

So Connie drew a third small diagram of Mara’s house located on the upper right hand corner of the Glass-Stream neighborhood block on another page of her notebook.

(Figure 5)

“Next one,” Connie said, flipping back to the spare page containing the addresses. “Kendra’s house: 2924 Brooklyn Court.”

Leslie typed in the address, locating it on Infinity Maps, and zoomed out and showed it to Connie with an image caption of Kendra’s house address on the laptop screen.

So Connie drew a fourth small diagram of Kendra’s house located on the upper left hand corner of the Grimwald Cove neighborhood block on another page of her notebook.

(Figure 6)

“Okay, here it is,” Connie said and showed her friend the results of the four neighborhood diagrams in the four pages of her pocket notebook along with the positions of each victim in the X’ed box on the diagram of the cathedral crossing on the scrap piece of paper. “Do you see any parallels here?”

Leslie gaped. “No way,” she said. “All the corners match!”

“Yep,” Connie said, then flipped back to the spare page containing the addresses. “Last one, Colbie’s house: 9648 Windham Court.”

Leslie just stared at her for a long moment, staring into Connie’s eyes, before she typed in the address, locating it on Infinity Maps, and zoomed out and showed it to Connie with an image caption of Colbie’s house address on the laptop screen.

So Connie drew in another house on the lower right hand corner of the same diagram of the Grimwald Cove neighborhood block in her notebook, then cross-referenced it with the cathedral diagram on the piece of paper. Looking from the fourth neighborhood diagram to the cathedral diagram, she added underneath ‘Colbie’s/Leslie’s House’ the ‘Joker’ in brackets and said to Leslie, “Now do you see a connection here?”

(Figure 7)

“Oh my God,” Leslie said under her breath, looking from the two damning diagrams to Connie’s smiling face. “You’re kidding. Please tell me you’re kidding.”

“I know it’s crazy,” Connie said, “but there it is. The position of your house in the Grimwald Cove neighborhood matches Amelia Hearn’s position in the Hearts mirror during Kathy’s vision. Now I’m not sure how they’re—”

Connie stopped when Leslie gaped and put the laptop aside on the bench and stared at her dead in the eyes, as if she was pleading for Connie to say it wasn’t so, leaving Connie tongue-tied for several moments. And before Connie could say another word, Leslie grimaced and bit down on her lower lip before covering her face in her hands and leaning herself against the wall, making Connie regret making those connections.

“Look,” Connie said, “I know it seems like—”

“Tell me what that means,” Leslie said, removing her hands from her face and glaring at Connie as if she had threatened her daughter with a sly innuendo.

“Whoa, wait a minute,” Connie said. “Let’s not jump to conclusions, okay? I was just—”

“When you linked my Colbie with Amelia Hearn like that,” Leslie said, “are you implying that my daughter is gonna—”

“No! That’s not what I meant,” Connie said.

“Then tell me what it means!” Leslie yelled, turning the heads of Colbie and the three CSIs in her direction and making some of the nurses poke their heads out of the hospital rooms and look her way.

As such, Connie looked around the hallway and saw a few nurses exiting their stations in their patients’ rooms and congregating behind her, one of whom approached the two women and warned them to be mindful of the other patients in the nearby rooms. Connie and Leslie apologized, and the nurse left to complete her duties in the hospital room she had left. Then Connie looked at the three CSIs getting back to work on processing the scene of Mara’s disappearance, till she noticed Colbie standing up from where she’d been sitting on the next bench over.

“Is something wrong?” Colbie said.

Leslie turned to her daughter, and Connie said, “It’s okay, Colbie. Everything’s fine.”

“Are you sure?” she said. “Because Mom sounds pissed.”

“I’m fine, Colbie,” Leslie said, raising her hand to placate her daughter. “Just go back to reading your book, okay?”

For a moment, Colbie stared at her mother, then nodded and sat back down and opened her book to where she had left off and continued reading.

Leslie faced Connie again and said, “What does it mean?”

“I don’t know,” Connie said, “and I’m sorry.”

“Don’t scare me like that,” Leslie said.

“I’m sorry,” Connie said. “That won’t happen again, I promise.”

Leslie stared at her for a good long second, then looked over at the CSIs still processing the scene of Mara’s second disappearance and said, “What about Mara’s disappearance from this hospital? Does that still fit your theory?”

“Pass me the laptop,” Connie said. When Leslie did, Connie typed in ‘Nayland Hospital’ into the Infinity Maps search bar, where the rest of the address highlighted itself. She typed the rest of the address out and hit enter, locating it on Infinity Maps, and zoomed out with an image caption of the hospital’s address on the laptop screen, but instead of showing it to Leslie, she closed it from view and said, “Do you think it fits the pattern?”

“Do you?” Leslie said.

Connie opened the laptop and showed it to her.

“No way.” Leslie said. “No way is that even possible.”

Connie traded knowing looks with Leslie, then flipped back to yet another page in her pocket notebook and drew a small diagram of the Nayland Hospital in the upper right hand corner of the corporatized block, its building complex and parking lot alone taking up about a quarter of the overall area.

(Figure 8)

“All of these instances have occurred in the corners of designated areas of land,” Connie said.

“Like in a castle’s territory?” Leslie said.

“Exactly. And some of them,” Connie added, “occur over multiple instances,” and to drive her point, she reviewed the contents of her pocket notebook to solidify them in her mind. First, she flipped through her pocket notebook to the diagram of the Hearn house where Amelia and Lima and Katherine each had visitations from Alice and Rancaster and even Kendra from her own house. Then she flipped to the pair of diagram pages involving the Cairns family’s disappearance from their house and Mara’s disappearance from the Nayland hospital. After that, she flipped to the two diagram pages showing Auna’s disappearance from her house and Colbie’s house, both of which correspond to Amelia’s location inside the Hearts mirror within the crossing of Chess Cathedral during Kathy’s shared vision with everyone in the family room of the Hearn house.

“What about Kendra’s house?” Leslie said.

“Just once,” Connie said. “The only house that hasn’t had any involvement in this case is your house, and Colbie’s involvement was only because of Kathy.”

“Because Colbie’s an outsider?” Leslie said.

Connie nodded, saying, “Exactly. I don’t think Kathy had any idea about these connections, but I’m pretty sure she knew of the repetitive occurrences happening in her house.”

“Which explains all of her precautions,” Leslie added, “including her caginess with her sisters and Colbie’s involvement.” She then looked back over at Colbie reading her book on the next bench over before turning back to Connie and saying, “How much do you think she knows?”

“Beats me,” Connie said and gave Leslie her pocket notebook, then added, “I’ll go return this,” and she closed her internet browser and shut the laptop, then stood up and headed towards the yellow tape, where the CSI took it back into his hands and placed it back into his laptop bag. When Connie returned to Leslie’s bench, Connie fished out her smartphone as Leslie handed her notebook back to her. “I’ll message all of my diagram drawings to Randal, and then we’ll figure something out.”

“Don’t need me anymore?” Leslie said.

“Nope,” Connie said, entering her passcode and accessing her camera app. “I can do this on my own.”

So Leslie went back to the other bench where Colbie was still reading “Alice and the Mad Tryst” and sat down beside her, then started pestering her daughter with the sound of opening another packet of trail mix and eating them.

“Mom, really?” Colbie said.

Leslie smiled at her and offered her a granola bar.

Connie smiled at Leslie’s motherly shenanigans and took pictures of the cathedral diagram on her scrap piece of paper and the neighborhood diagrams in the pages of her notebook with her smartphone. She then accessed her messages app and sent the photos to Randal’s smartphone, then smiled to herself when she decided to troll him for a bit by sending him a misleading text message to accompany the pictures.

5

It was now 9:11 a.m.

Several minutes before Connie had sent her batch of pictures, after finishing their phone calls with Connie, Roy and Randal entered the family room and photobombed the girls behind the sofa again. Then Randal introduced himself to Isabel Hearn with a smile on his face, so the girl on the screen waved back to him, then asked what had been happening at the house to make their morning so busy. At this, Randal said that he had just finished conducting an interview with the Hearn sisters and Colbie and Leslie and Connie in the family room earlier this morning. In addition, he said that his older brother Stephen had also conducted his own long-distance interview over the phone with them as well, but he also added that he couldn’t reveal sensitive information about an ongoing investigation to a third party and apologized to Isabel for that.

“It’s all right,” Isabel said. “I understand.”

All the while, Celia had noticed the girl’s overall mature demeanor and said to her, “Isabel, how old are you?”

“I turned fifteen this month,” she said.

“Really?” Celia said.

“Yeah, really,” Isabel said. “Why do you ask?”

“She’s just shocked,” Madison said, “because you act way more mature than she does, and she’s a year older than you.”

“Maddy, geez!” she said.

“Hey, I’m just saying,” Madison said, then to Isabel: “I’m Maddy, by the way.”

“Ah, hallo there,” Isabel said.

“And I’m Kathy,” Katherine said and glanced at her younger sisters. “These two hotheads are a little boisterous, but some lessons from you would suffice.”

Isabel smiled and said through her chuckles, “That’s all right. You should’ve seen me when I first met your mum. I gobsmacked all of them when I decided to help her.”

“Wait a minute, Isabel,” Madison said.

“Call me Izzy,” Isabel said.

“Okay then,” she said. “Izzy, was it true? Did your family actually disown you?”

Isabel bit down on her lower lip and averted her gaze, then took a deep breath and said, “Yes, they have. I’ve had to take everything with me, mostly books and clothes and my passport, and I’ve traveled with your mum on a roving commission.”

“You’re kidding!” Madison said.

“I’m not,” Isabel said.

“What about your parents?” Katherine said.

“Aren’t they worried about you?” Celia added.

Again Isabel averted her gaze and paused for a moment, then said, “My parents passed on when I was twelve, and that was three years ago. I’ve been living with my uncle since then, but he’s a boozehound, that bugger, and I’ve never gotten along with the rest of the Hearn family. So when I heard about your mum looking for someone to help her on her journey, I jumped at it, and here I am talking to you.”

“I’m really sorry, Izzy,” Celia said.

“It’s all right,” Isabel said.

“Anyway,” Celia continued, cutting to the chase, “where are you and Mom right now?”

“Oh, we’re in a library,” Isabel said, then turned to Lima Hearn who was shaking her head, “but I can’t say where.”

“And why is that?” Celia said.

“It’s complicated,” Isabel said, looking at Celia's mother on the screen before turning back to her. “Let’s just leave it at that, shall we?”

“Oh, okay, sure,” Celia said, and there followed the scratching static of the smartphone getting passed to someone else as the picture on the screen blurred out for a moment before it refocused onto Lima Hearn. “Mom, is Izzy okay?”

“She’s fine, Celia,” Lima said. “Don’t worry.”

“I know, but I can’t help it,” she said.

“She’s fine,” Lima said.

“But what’s gonna happen to her?”

“I said, don’t worry about it, okay?” Lima said. “Things are a bit sideways right now, but I promise we’ll all get through this. Me, your father, you three, and even Izzy—we’ll all get through this whole thing together, I promise.”

“Sure, Mom,” Celia said.

“I’ll call you back when I have time,” Lima said. “Call me if you need me. And if I’m not there, just shoot me a voicemail or text message.”

“Okay,” Celia said. “Wait, what time is it there?”

“It’s 6:21 p.m., well past sunset,” Lima said. “Is it still morning over there?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Leslie and Colbie and Connie left already, but we’re waiting for them to come back later today.”

“Good,” Lima said. “Stay safe, you three.”

“We will,” Celia and her sisters said in unison.

After that, the Screen Chat connection ended, and Celia was left thinking about Isabel’s plight and wondering if the girl was really doing ‘fine,’ like her mother had said. Then, as Randal started informing her sisters and Roy about the situation at the Nayland hospital, Celia was thinking of Connie and Leslie and Colbie, in which she wondered if they were also doing ‘fine,’ till her thoughts drifted onto the missing Mara and her deceased sister Nico, then to the sleeping Kendra wrapped up in Katherine’s blood-colored shroud on the sofa adjacent to hers, and last to Auna Wenger whose whereabouts were a mystery.

6

It was now 9:14 a.m.

After eight minutes of listening to General Jinjur (a.k.a., Lt. Anne Granger) talk with Sgt. Rousseau and Lewis Carroll and Wantowin Battles, Stephen waved the general and her friends over to the desk, where Col. Roosevelt and Lt. Hamilton stood waiting. The new arrivals walked over, and everyone shook hands across the desk, General Jinjur introducing Lewis Carroll and Wantowin Battles to Inspector Stephen Larking and Col. Theodore Roosevelt and Lt. Scott Hamilton and vice versa, and everyone exchanged pleasantries.

“All right, gentlemen,” General Jinjur said, looking everyone in the face and catching Stephen’s eyes in particular, “let’s get down to business, shall we?”

Everyone nodded.

“Now that you know of my subterfuge,” she said, “are there any questions you want to know before we go on?”

So Col. Roosevelt said, “My Rough Riders endured a beating when we charged up that hill under artillery bombardment and enemy fire from those red musketeer girls this morning, bringing down our number from over 2,000 strong to 1,520 soldiers still ready to go on my command. Barring what had happened to the 150 operatives under your command as ‘Lt. Anne Granger’ at the same hill, how many are under your command as General Jinjur?”

“I have four battalions numbering 1,001 soldiers each, a thousand foot soldiers and one captain per battalion,” General Jinjur said. “That makes 4,004 soldiers in all, with me being the 4,005th soldier as their general.”

“Who are the captains?” Col. Roosevelt said. “And who are the battalions?”

“There’s Captain Keely of the Munchkin Battalion,” General Jinjur said, “Captain Imogen of the Quadling Battalion, Captain Yana of the Winkie Battalion, and Captain Nell of the Gillikin Battalion. Inspector Larking,” she added, “how many does Lt. Shaefer have ready at the third drop zone?”

“Well,” Stephen said, “last time I checked with him, he had a head count of 97 operatives, which includes the two survivors under your command as ‘Lt. Anne Granger.’”

“Cory and Benson?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Stephen said. “The rest are either dead or missing.”

Then she turned to the tallest man of the group, whose head almost touched the ceiling of the hotel suite, and said, “What about you, Wantowin Battles? How many can you muster by cloning yourself?”

“3,000 at the most,” Wantowin Battles said.

“What about you, Mr. Carroll?” General Jinjur said.

“What I lack in strength of numbers,” Lewis Carroll said, “I more than make up for in unpredictability.”

“I can vouch for that,” Wantowin Battles said. “I’ve witnessed it myself when Mr. Carroll managed to rescue Ronald Hamilton from those red musketeers in their underground lair. He’s full of surprises, I can assure you.”

“And I have the Vorpal Sword,” Lewis Carroll added, manifesting the enchanted weapon in his hand in front of the others. “I may be a little rusty, but I still know how to use it in a fight.”

“When you and Wantowin Battles were in that underground place,” Stephen said, “how many red musketeers did you find?”

“I can only guess, Inspector,” Carroll said, dissipating his sword from his hand, “but my gut tells me they number 5,000 at least in that place alone.”

“An entire brigade?” Col. Roosevelt said.

“That’s just a guess, Colonel,” Carroll said, “but when Wantowin Battles and I reconnoitered the place, we noticed two different kinds of red musketeers. One group was composed of doppelgängers of the same girl, but the other group seemed to be composed of different men and women. Based on what we’ve seen there, we might be dealing with two enemy brigades.”

“Jesus, a whole division?” Lt. Hamilton said.

“It seems so, lieutenant,” Carroll said.

“So that means that Alice’s doppelgängers form one brigade,” Stephen said, “while the other brigade is composed of Rancaster’s retainers.”

“Rancaster?” Carroll said. “Is that his name now?”

“Yes, Mr. Carroll,” Stephen said. “I know he went under a different name in your time. Prince Prospero, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that was his name,” Carroll said.

“This Aaron Rancaster,” Wantowin Battles said, “he sounds dangerous.”

“From everything I’ve investigated so far, he’s one of the most dangerous men I’ve come across,” Stephen said and looked at Scott Hamilton and Wantowin Battles in turn. “Rancaster killed the then-missing five-year-old Aaron Rancaster during a missing persons case that Lt. Scott Hamilton here had investigated in 1897. Afterwards Rancaster assumed the child’s identity and lived on as Aaron Rancaster up to the present day, and that’s on top of his other crimes over the centuries.”

“My God!” Wantowin Battles said. “I’m not sure I can fight a man like that on my own.”

“Then that leaves us at a distinct disadvantage in terms of manpower and specialized forces,” General Jinjur said. “With the losses we’ve already sustained against that old fort at the second drop zone, all of our remaining forces combined will only number around 9,500 soldiers, a division on the smaller side. I don’t know the true extent of Alice’s cloning capabilities, but from the intel I’ve received from my scouts in all four battalions, she’s capable of replicating herself from the corpses of the dead, just like Rancaster, but at an ungodly rate.”

“In other words,” Stephen said as the true horror of Jinjur’s words pulsed through his chest in icy stabs of dread, “for those of us who are alive, Alice can turn us into copies of herself if we die on the battlefield.”

“That’s what I mean,” General Jinjur said. “We need specialized forces to deal with Alice and Rancaster, but I won’t risk losing Wantowin Battles should he encounter either of them on the battlefield. The costs on our side would be too great for us to sustain.”

“Then what do we do?” Col. Roosevelt said.

For a time, General Jinjur remained silent, as if she was rolling the options through her head, options that escaped Stephen at this point, though he had his suspicions. So he said, “What’s on your mind?”

General Jinjur took a deep breath and was about to speak when a high-pitched tune resembling birdsong set everyone looking around the room for the source of the sound, till General Jinur manifested a mirror in her hand showing Princesses Ozma and Dorothy in the reflection.

“Your Highnesses, what is it?” she said.

“Alice just entered the field,” Ozma said, “and she’s brought reinforcements.”

The general cursed and said, “I know, your Highness, and pardon my French. Based on what we’ve seen, we’ve estimated a brigade’s worth of manpower with Alice’s doppelgängers alone and another brigade consisting of Rancaster’s retainers, as well. 10,000 in all, at least.”

“There’s more, general,” Ozma said.

“What is it, your Highness?” she said.

“Alice has obtained the silver shoes,” Ozma said.

“Wait,” the general said, “how on earth did she find them?”

And for a time, there came a pause from Princess Ozma as if she herself was struggling to come up with a good answer, before she said, “I don’t know, but this has become serious. Not since the Wicked Witch of the East have we seen another enemy wearing the silver shoes.”

“Which means,” Dorothy added, “Alice can teleport from one place to another.”

General Jinjur leaned against the table and looked at Ozma through her hand mirror, saying, “What will you do?”

“Dorothy and I will think of something,” Ozma said, “and we’ll have to talk to Glinda later, but for now—”

“Send me over there,” Dorthy said.

“Wait, what?” Ozma said. “I won’t do that!”

“Please, you Highness, send me over there,” Dorothy said through the hand mirror. “I was the last person to wear those shoes on my first visit to Oz before I used them to get back to Kansas with Glinda’s help. I lost those shoes on my way there, and Alice must have found them afterwards, so I’m responsible for this. Please, your Highness, let me go and help them.”

Princess Dorothy’s bombshell of a request left everyone silent and made General Jinjur’s jaw drop, and Stephen looked around the table at the other men trading glances with each other. Stephen wanted to say something but stayed his tongue, lest he interfere with a momentous occasion between two foreign princesses of a fairyland he had only seen in the old technicolor adaptation of The Wizard of Oz.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Ozma said.

“Please, your Highness,” Dorothy said.

There came another pause.

And for a time, Stephen noticed General Jinjur gulp as they all waited for Ozma’s response, and Stephen fisted his hands on the edge of the table at the thought of letting a kid like her participate in this op, let alone march out into a war zone full of blood-thirsty red musketeer girls.

Then Princess Ozma said, “All right, Dorothy, I’ll let you go.” Then she said, “General, I’ll prepare Princess Dorothy and send her to your location, so wait for a little bit, okay?”

“Will do, your Highness,” General Jinjur said.

With that, Ozma touched the reflection, blurring out the glowing image and turning General Jinjur’s hand mirror into a normal one. She dissipated it from her hand and looked at each man around the table, looking on Stephen in particular and saying, “I know what you’re thinking, but—”

“Are you insane?” Stephen said. “She’s a kid, for God’s sake! Several of our operatives have died already, and you’re gonna let a kid into this mess?”

“Princess Dorothy may look like a child,” General Jinjur said, “but she’s been a princess of Oz for longer than you’ve been alive and is more capable, to boot. In fact, from what I’ve heard from her exploits against the Nome King, she’s far more capable under battlefield conditions than you’ve been this whole morning,” and she shoved her finger at Stephen’s face across the table, “and we haven’t even begun to fight!”

“That’s not the point!” Stephen said.

“Then what’s your point, eh?” General Jinjur said. “You think we women can’t pull our own weight, is that it?”

“It’s not that,” he said. “It’s—”

“Or do you think that,” General Jinjur went on, “because her Highness Princess Dorothy seems like a child? Do you think you can write her off because of that? For God’s sake, haven’t you realized what we’ve been doing? This ’mess’ isn’t just yours anymore: it’s ours. And like it or not, unless we work together, we won’t stand a chance against Alice and her doppelgängers, let alone against this Rancaster fellow!”

“I’m inclined to agree,” Col. Roosevelt said.

“You can’t be serious, Colonel,” Stephen Larking said.

“Trust me, my boy,” Col. Roosevelt said, “I’ve been around my share of dangers, and I’m privy to some things I never would have believed if I hadn’t witnessed them myself. And that includes the actions of Willie Johnston, an 11-year-old drummer boy in Company D of the 3rd Vermont Infantry who saw action in several Civil War battles, including a retreat under enemy fire in which he survived carrying his war drum with him.”

“Wait a minute,” Stephen said, the history buff stirring within him, “are you talking about that Medal of Honor recipient?”

“You’ve heard of him?” Roosevelt said.

“I have, sir,” Stephen said.

“Well, I’ve met him myself before I saw action in the Spanish–American War,” he said. “Willie Johnston was the one man I consulted before I resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to join that fight. Let me tell you, if a mere boy could do that much on his own and that much for me, then how much do you think Princess Dorothy could do for us, eh?”

General Jinjur smiled and said, “Thank you, Colonel.”

Col. Roosevelt nodded and said, “And it looks like we have a guest,” and he nodded his head towards the double doors of the suite. “Princess Dorothy, I assume?”

Stephen and Lt. Hamilton looked up as General Jinjur and Lewis Carroll and Wantowin Battles and Sgt. Rousseau turned around, and there she was: a blond-haired and blue-eyed girl of military age wearing a uniform similar to General Jinjur’s uniform with the addition of a sheathed broadsword hanging beneath a baldric slung diagonally over one shoulder.

“Yes, sir, that’s me,” Dorothy said.

At Dorothy’s appearance, Wantowin Battles and General Jinjur clicked their boots together and saluted her at once.

“At ease,” Dorothy said as she approached the table. “Part of this is my fault. If I hadn’t lost those silver shoes, then Alice wouldn’t be able to teleport at will.”

“Pardon my asking, your Highness,” Stephen said, “but what can you do for us in this op?”

“Steve!” General Jinjur hissed.

“Hey, I was just asking, okay?” he said, raising his hands, then to Princess Dorothy: “I meant no disrespect.”

“It’s fine, don’t worry,” Dorothy said. “Since Alice has those silver shoes, as long as she’s wearing them, then as their former owner, I’ll know where she is.”

“Where is she then?” General Jinjur said.

“She’s close by atop the building right behind you,” Dorothy said. “She’s looking at our window, but don’t turn around! Just stay as you are and go on talking as if you didn’t notice,” and she separated herself from the group.

“What are you doing?” General Jinjur said.

“I’ll change into something less conspicuous,” Dorothy said and pulled out a large handkerchief from her right sleeve and spread it like a small curtain before her onlookers. Then she bent down and covered her feet and the lower part of her legs with it and raised it up along the silhouette of her body and, like a magician, transformed back into her preteen self wearing a dainty knee-length dress and a skimmer hat over her curly hair. “There! How do I look?”

“Like a kid,” Stephen said.

“That’s what I was going for,” Dorothy said. “This way, I won’t attract too much attention when I go outside.”

“I’d beg to differ,” Stephen said.

“As much as I hate to agree with him,” General Jinjur said, “he has a point. Don’t do anything reckless, your Highness.”

“I know,” Dorothy said, “and I won’t.”

Then Lewis Carroll stepped forward and said, “I’ll accompany her Highness and pretend to be her guardian. We’ll pretend we’re out on vacation or something.”

“Alice and Rancaster already know your face,” General Jinjur said. “You’ll make her stand out.”

“Then I’ll go with her,” Stephen said and circled around the table towards the young Princess. “I’ll be damned if I let a kid go out alone like that.”

“Steve, mind your words!” General Jinjur said.

“Hey, I’m not trying to diss her,” Stephen said and raised his hands up. “I’m just concerned for her safety out there.”

“That’s rather nice of you to say,” Dorothy said, “but I’ll be fine as long as you’re with me, right?”

“Yeah, sure,” Stephen said.

So Dorothy grabbed a hold of Stephen’s hand like a little sister or niece and said, “Let’s go out, Uncle Steve.”

Stephen just gaped at her words, then looked back on a smiling Lewis Carroll and Wantowin Battles and a glaring General Jinjur as he exited through the double doors of the suite, hand in hand with Dorothy. He nodded at Pvt. Benjamin and another private standing guard by the doors and walked down the side hall towards the elevator in silence, unable to say anything to this princess of Oz that might be older than he was.

Instead, Stephen pressed the button that opened the elevator doors before them, and the pair walked inside. Stephen pressed the Floor 1 button, closing the doors, while Joseph F. Lamb’s “Topliner Rag” played on the overhead speakers.

“Are you nervous?” Dorothy said.

Stephen looked down at his pretend-charge staring up at him with her piercing blue eyes, then gulped and said, “Maybe a little, your Highness.”

“Don’t worry, Uncle,” she said. “I know where Alice is, and she’s nowhere near us.”

“It’s not Alice I’m worried about,” Stephen said. “It’s Rancaster. He’s killed a lot of people.”

“I’ve heard of him under a different name,” Dorothy said and looked up at Stephen with inquiring eyes. “I think his name was Mr. Prospero, wasn’t it?”

Stephen choked, then said, “Where did you hear that name?”

“I heard it from the Red and White Queens,” Dorothy said. “When they had an audience with Princess Ozma and me and the others, they introduced themselves as ‘Lorina’ and ‘Edith,’ but they later revealed themselves under different names: Akami and Shiromi.”

Stephen’s heartbeats began to pick up on the mention of the name, Akami, remembering his phone conversation with the concierge of the Dragon Volant earlier this morning, and said, “I talked to someone who said that a girl of the same name, Akami, accompanied another girl named Auna to another hotel this morning. Have you heard of Auna, by any chance?”

“No, I haven’t,” Dorothy said.

“What about Mara or Kendra?” he said.

“I’ve heard of them, actually,” Dorothy said. “Akami and Shiromi said they were missing, though Mara was only mentioned. As for Kendra,” and she paused here as if she was rolling something in her mind, “Princess Ozma and I looked for Kendra in her magic picture, and we found her asleep in two places at once. In one place, she’s sleeping on a sofa inside a house with three other girls and a man standing by her.”

“That’s the Hearn house,” Stephen said. “I dropped off my brother to check up on Kendra this morning.”

“What happened to her?” she said.

“Just as you said,” Stephen said. “Kendra went missing from one house, and the Hearn sisters found her in their house. What about the other place?”

Again Dorothy paused, making Stephen wonder what was going through her mind, and she said, “She’s in another room on a bed. That’s all I know.” With that, the elevator doors opened, and Dorothy added, “Let’s go, Uncle.”

And Stephen and Princess Dorothy walked out, hand in hand, where they greeted the concierge and the Sgt. Rousseau’s troop and Col. Roosevelt’s Rough Riders that occupied the reception area like schools of fish, all of them yammering about something or other about a girl on the rooftop of a nearby building with some guy in a white suit. When the concierge of the Bangsian took a double take and asked where Dorothy came from, Stephen said she’s his niece who wanted to visit.

“At this time?” the concierge said.

“She’s been pushy about it,” Stephen said, “but yeah.”

“You want us to accompany you two?” another Rough Rider said.

“No need,” Stephen said, then leaned and whispered into his ear, “She and I will be acting as spies outside.”

“Spies?” the Rough Rider said.

“Don’t let on,” Stephen said. “It’s top secret.”

The Rough Rider said, “Be careful, mate.”

“We will,” Stephen said.

After passing on Dorothy’s involvement with the others, Stephen accompanied Dorothy, hand in hand, through the entrance amidst a flurry of gusts rustling Stephen’s hair and his black trench coat and the skirt of Dorothy’s dress as she kept her hat from flying with one hand. Once the turbulence settled, Stephen felt a chill raising the hairs on the back of his neck as if Alice herself was observing them from the rooftop of the neighboring building.

As for Rancaster’s whereabouts, though, Randal could only guess and said, “We’re being watched.”

“I know,” Dorothy said.

7

It was now 9:16 a.m.

Several minutes beforehand at the Hearn household, just after Randal Larking had finished informing the Hearn sisters and Roy Dolan about the current situation at the Nayland Hospital, he heard his smartphone chiming in his pocket. He fished it out and punched in his passcode, then accessed the messages app on screen and read the following text message:

From: Connie Davis

To: Randal Larking

Text: Hey, Randal. Wanna see my nudes?

Text: [URL link] [Tap to open.]

Text: Open it. I dare you!

“What the fuck?” Randal said, staring at an anomalous text message from a woman he’d only met during his cases with his brother Stephen Larking, and those few instances were on a need-to-know basis. Even so, he felt his cheeks flushing at the thought of it and shifted his weight on his other foot to quell the stimulation of an erection building in his pants and looked at the three Hearn sisters and Roy staring at him.

“What is it?” Roy said.

“Did something happen?” Katherine added.

Yet before Randal could speak, Celia leaned over and snatched the smartphone from his hands and sniggered at what she saw, then tapped on the screen and said, “Wow, she’s got big tits. I wonder what Kendra’s gonna think when she sees this.”

Madison snatched it away from Celia and smiled and said, “Wow, I didn’t know you were into older women.”

Then Katherine reached across Celia’s lap and snatched it away from Madison and said, “God, you two are sick!” Then she scrolled through the pictures on the screen and added, “Don’t worry, Randal. Connie just sent you a few photos—”

“—of herself,” Celia said.

“—in the nude,” Madison added.

“Stop it, you two!” Katherine said, yet as her sisters kept on sniggering about it, she pinched Celia’s thigh.

“Ow!” Celia said. “Geez, I was joking!”

“Now’s not the time for that,” Katherine said, and she reached across Celia’s lap and pinched Madison’s thigh.

“Ow!” Madison said. “Why are you such a killjoy?”

“Because you’re acting like idiots,” Katherine said, “when you both should know better.”

“But Connie started it,” Celia said.

“And I’ll end it with another pinch,” Katherine said, “if you two don’t stop it right now.”

“Okay, okayyy,” both sisters said.

With that, Katherine handed Randal back his smartphone and said, “Try to forget what my sisters said, okay?”

“I’ll try,” Randal said, getting back his smartphone and scrolling through the photos on his messages app. “They’re all hand-drawn maps. The first one is of a cathedral crossing, and the others show the houses of those involved in this case. My God, how did she come up with this?”

“Let me see,” Roy said, reaching out his hand.

Randal gave him his smartphone, then turned to the eldest Hearn sister and said, “Kathy, do you remember the vision you showed us?”

“The one in Chess Cathedral?” Katherine said.

“That’s the one,” Randal said. “Connie correlated the positions of everyone in the cathedral crossing with the positions of their houses in their neighborhood blocks.”

“Including the position of the Nayland Hospital in its own block,” Roy said. “It’s an interesting correlation, but what does it mean?” He gave Randal back his smartphone.

Randal took it and scrolled through the photos again, scrolling back to the first photo of the hand-drawn map of the cathedral crossing and referencing it against the others, then looked up at his companions and said, “I think Rancaster might have used a form of chaos magic.”

Katherine snatched up her smartphone from the coffee table, where she had left it after the harrowing phone interview with Stephen Larking, and said, “Should I call Connie?”

“Yeah, please do,” Randal said.

So Katherine punched in her passcode and called Connie’s phone number and waited for her to answer, then said, “Connie, it’s me, Kathy. We just received your photos. Oh, and hardy har har. Your little message gave both of my sisters hard-ons.”

“Hey!” Celia and Madison said at once.

“Yeah, well,” Katherine said, “try a more tactful joke next time, okay? . . . Good. Oh, and Randal wants to talk to you,” and she handed her smartphone to Randal.

He put it to his ear with one hand and thumbed through the photos in his smartphone with the other hand, saying, “Randal here. Nice prank, by the way.”

“Ha! Sorry about my message,” Connie said. “I was just trying to lighten the mood. Did you see the photos?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“What do you think of them?” Connie said.

“Based on what you’ve sent,” Randal said, “I think Rancaster must have used a form of chaos magic in his abductions.”

“That’s what I think, too,” Connie said.

“How did you even come up with this?” Randal said. “I wouldn’t have noticed it if you hadn’t pointed it out.”

“Hey, don’t sweat it,” she said. “I’m not as good as Lima, but I can pick out patterns in magic seals and sigils. Anyway, do you see the designated jokers?”

Randal scrolled back up to the first photo of the cathedral crossing diagram showing Amelia Hearn as one ‘Joker’ and then scrolled to the sixth diagram of the Grimwald Cove neighborhood showing Colbie’s house as another ‘Joker,’ both Amelia and Colbie occupying the same lower right hand corners in each. He said, “You think Amelia and Colbie are jokers?”

“Yep,” Connie said.

“But what’s that supposed to mean?” he said.

“They’re both outsiders,” Connie said. “Amelia spent ten years in the past from 1913 to 1923 when she published her book, Entering the Secret Room, under a pseudonym. And if you remember from Stephen’s interview with us this morning, so were Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker. All of them were outsiders writing about something weird happening, and Colbie just happens to like writing about weird stuff, too, so she fits the pattern.”

“I see what you’re getting at,” Randal said, beginning to pace around as he organized his thoughts, “but how does that correlation figure into these disappearances?”

“Just before the interview with Steve,” she said, “do you remember those shared visions the girls had?”

“Yeah, I do,” he said. “Steve called them synchronicities.”

“Well,” Connie said, “Colbie spotted a few of them in Amelia’s book. She’s reading ‘Alice and the Mad Tryst’ as I speak, and she read about this girl named Ozma having a vision in another girl’s POV, kind of like the one I had of Lima’s POV without realizing it, till Leslie pointed it out, and I was like, holy crap, you know. It’s crazy, but it all fits together.”

Randal paused at this new information, thinking of all of those connections he made with the girls' various visions last night, specifically the physic vision shared amongst Celia and Madison and Katherine in connection to Nico’s death at the same moment. The synchronicity of visions from two different sources left him in awe for a time, till he regained his composure and said, “Do you know whose POV Colbie read?”

“I don’t know yet,” Connie said, “but Colbie’s on the third and last part already. We’ll find out when she finishes.”

“Let me know when she does,” Randal said.

“I will, don’t worry,” Connie said and hung up.

Randal gave Katherine back her smartphone and said, “We’ll just have to wait till Colbie finishes reading.”

“What did Connie say?” Roy said.

“She’s having Colbie read ‘Alice and the Mad Tryst’ from Amelia’s book,” Randal said, “and she already told me that Colbie’s read another example of a shared vision similar to what you all shared with Nico yesterday.”

“That’s another synchronicity,” Roy said.

“Yeah,” Randal said. “Two separate instances, two POVs.”

“Whose POV was it in the book?” Katherine said. “Do you know?”

“Not yet,” Randal said, pacing around again in thought, “but Connie said she’ll fill us in after Colbie’s finished reading the story.”

Yet the more Randal thought about it, the more unsettled he became at the fact that Colbie Amame shared the same symbolic designation as Amelia Hearn, who died at Lima’s hands in that crazy vision Katherine shared with everyone this morning. Then he remembered Celia’s account of Colbie’s death at Mara’s hands during their collective dream dive, which led to Leslie crying over Colbie keeping it from her the whole time. In each instance, Amelia and Colbie were both stabbed, creating yet another synchronicity between them for Randal to mull over. He thought of sharing these insights with the rest, but the last thing he wanted was to make them worry, so he kept quiet on it for now and checked the time on his watch: 9:25 a.m.

“What’s the matter?” Celia said.

“It’s nothing,” he lied.

8

It was now 9:25 a.m.

At the same time, after Ozma had finished sulking with her friends Betsy and Trot over Dorothy’s departure, she peered up at her magic picture that had reverted back to its ever-shifting images of glens and brooks and gullies and hamlets. Princess Ozma approached the picture where Dorothy had stood moments before and wondered what had become of her dear friend, so she said, “Dear Magic Picture, I wish to see Dorothy Gale.”

At once, the shifting landscapes faded from view and manifested a picture of a preteen Dorothy Gale in her dainty dress and skimmer hat holding hands with a young man within the teeming streets of the same weird Chinatown.

“Who’s that man with Dorothy?” Trot said.

Ozma took a closer look and remembered Ronald Hamilton mentioning the man’s name and said, “I think he’s Inspector Stephen Larking.”

“Where are they going?” Betsy said.

“I don’t know,” Ozma said and wondered what Dorothy was thinking of going off with a stranger without her disguise.

In the picture, the pair were moving at a brisk pace down the block away from the Bangsian hotel, where the sidewalks teemed with ghosts and dreamers and yokai and the thoroughfares overflowed with phantom rickshaws going to their destinations on a busy morning. They continued along this direction for a time, blending in with the spectral crowd, then turned along a row of mom-and-pop storefronts and took a sudden detour into an alleyway that doubled as a bazaar for goblins selling mounds of spices and other dry goods near the entrance. As they continued down the bazaar, they passed charity sales with more goblins selling second-hand clothes and used books and old rugs and antique furniture among other used items. Then they stopped at the deepest part of the bazaar, where the morning rays have yet to banish its shadowy lamp-lit quarters, and began bartering with a goblin selling enchanted carpets.

That’s when Ozma realized Dorothy’s plan and said, “They’re gonna buy a magic carpet.” Then she gritted her teeth and grimaced and added, “Arrrgh, I should have given her money before she left! I don’t want Dorothy bartering with those goblins.”

“What do you mean?” Trot said.

“Are they that dangerous?” Betsy added.

“They are if you don’t have money,” Ozma said, remembering the “Goblin Market” poem from Christina Rossetti. “If you don’t have money, you have to barter with something of equivalent value to get what you want, but it’s tricky.”

And since she had given Dorothy the sword from Lady Justice, Ozma gulped and bit down on her lip as she saw it now in her mind: Lady Justice and her friend Lady Viviane storming into her private quarters to harangue her for giving a wayward Kansas girl one of their enchanted swords, only for her to barter it off in some seedy goblin market. And by then, Ozma would have to call on her own mother (the Fairy Queen Lady Lurline) to intervene and straighten things out with those two old broads.

Ozma manifested her hand mirror and whistled a high-pitched birdsong and then said, “Dorothy, whatever you do, don’t barter away that sword! . . .”

9

It was now 9:27 a.m.

Meanwhile, amidst the persistent hubbub of voices in the goblin market, the thought of bartering the sword did cross Dorothy’s mind, till she heard a shriek of birdsong around her and manifested her hand mirror and got an earful from Ozma saying, “Dorothy, whatever you do, don’t barter away that sword! If you do, Lady Justice is gonna be pissed!”

“Whoa, whoa, slow down!” Dorothy said, looking at the goblin and Stephen Larking staring back at her in the middle of their negotiation over the enchanted carpet. “That barely crossed my mind, honest to God. And no, I won’t do that, either.”

“All right,” Ozma said, breathing a sigh of relief on the other side of the mirror. “I was just making sure. How are things going on your end?”

“Uncle Steve’s haggling with the goblin for the price of the carpet,” Dorothy said, glancing over at Stephen resuming his negotiations with the goblin seller, “so I won’t have to buy it myself. He’s actually been here before, can you believe it? I would’ve been lost if I’d have come alone.”

“Was there anyone following you?” Ozma said.

“We were surveilled,” Dorothy said into her mirror, “near the premises of the hotel, but other than that, I don’t think we’ve attracted any unwanted tails.”

“Do you know where Alice is?” Ozma said.

“Yeah,” Dorothy said. “She’s mostly on the roof of the building next to the hotel. Before we left the suite, I felt she was looking at the window of their suite, and when we left, Steve and I felt Alice surveilling us outside but only when we were at the premises. At other times, though, I felt Alice in other locations for a moment before she came back to her station on the roof of the building. That’s all for now.”

There was a pause from the other end of the hand mirror, and Dorothy was about to say something when Ozma said, “I see Alice on the rooftop in my Magic Picture. I think she’s waiting for someone on the rooftop.”

“For who?” Dorothy said.

“For that man, I think,” Ozma said. “For Rancaster.”

“Can you check his location?” Dorothy said. “Uncle Steve wants to know ASAP.”

Then Dorothy heard Ozma say through the hand mirror, “Dear Magic Picture, I wish to see Aaron Rancaster.”

Then there was a brief pause.

“What’s this?” Ozma said. “Why won’t you show what I ask for? Dear Magic Picture, I wish to see Aaron Rancaster.”

Another brief pause in which Ozma didn’t respond right away.

“What’s the matter, Princess?” Dorothy said, dropping her voice and feeling something off about the magic connection of the hand mirror in her grasp. “Is there something wrong with your Magic Picture?”

“I’m . . . I’m not sure,” Ozma said.

“Why is it turning black all of the sudden?” Betsy said through the hand mirror. “It looks kind of scary.”

“I don’t know,” Ozma said.

“Maybe you used it too often, Princess,” Trot said through the hand mirror. “Yeah, that must be it!”

“I don’t think that’s the case,” Ozma said.

“Ozma, Trot, Betsy,” Dorothy said, “tell me what’s happening on your end, please!”

“Dear Magic Picture,” Ozma said once again, “I wish to see Dorothy Gail again.” Then another pause. “My God, it’s not responding to my commands at all!”

“Tell me what’s happening!” Dorothy said.

“The Picture is completely blacked out,” Betsy said.

“Wait,” Trot said. “I think I see something in the Picture.”

And before Dorothy could ask anything about it, Dorothy saw Ozma gasp at something out of the frame of her hand mirror and yelled, “Ozma, what’s going on? What did you see?”

Screams pierced the air and rang in Dorothy’s ears, making her crouched to the floor and wince. When she opened her eyes, she saw the reflection blurring out of focus and heard running footsteps on the floor and the sound of someone struggling and grunting and two girls crying and whimpering.

And in the final seconds before the magic cut out from her mirror, Ozma was saying, “You won’t get away with this, Rancaster! By God, I swear you will—”

The reflection in Dorothy’s hand mirror clouded over in darkness, cutting off the magic connection and turning it black and hot in her hand. So Dorothy dissipated it as she winced at the residual heat stinging her palm, yet in that split-second darkness of wincing pain, in the mirror of her own mind, she witnessed a darkness more than night obscuring Ozma and Betsy and Trot inside a nameless and formless void, where all things are one and the same, where the first meets the last, where everything meets nothing, where the past meets the future, where eternity meets the now, and where there was no happiness, no hope, no love, no life, and even no soul, leaving nothing behind in its wake—

Except for their screams.

10

It was now 9:28 a.m.

The moment General Jinjur saw what was going on through the window of the suite, she dashed towards the double doors and ordered Sgt. Rousseau and Lewis Carroll and Wantowin Battles to follow her up the staff stairs towards the rooftop. At the same time, Col. Rosevelt and Lt. Scott Hamilton stormed out of the suite and ordered Pvt. Benjamin and another private to alert the rest of the Rough Riders about the hostage situation on the rooftop. As the two privates took off towards the elevators, the Colonel and Lieutenant followed after the stomping footfalls of General Jinjur and Wantowin Battles and Lewis Carroll down the hallway and up the staff stairs, their footfalls echoing along the walls amidst the hubbub of heavy breathing.

When General Jinur came across the closed door barring her entry into the rooftop, she brogue-kicked the door open, and the quartet pooled out into the open beneath the shadow of a wooden water tower gleaming in the midmorning sun. Then followed Col. Roosevelt and Lt. Scott Hamilton into the rooftop, both wheezing on their feet, where the spectacle unfolded before everyone’s eyes.

In front of them on the rooftop of the adjacent building, there stood a pair of Alice’s red musketeer doppelgängers standing guard over the four corners of the roof (eight of them in all). And by the balustrade, Alice stared back across the gulf between them, smiling a slasher’s smile amidst a light breeze fluttering the hems of her blue Sunday dress with a red heart over her bodice. And behind her was Rancaster, that damnable man in a white suit, standing over three little hostages sitting in chairs.

One was Princess Betsy on the right, one was Princess Trot in the middle, and one was Princess Ozma on the left. All three sat in place under Rancaster’s psychic restraint, all three fighting against his hold over their arms, all three struggling to speak against his spell over their mouths, all three glaring up at the man in the white suite like three death row convicts.

Then Rancaster stepped between Ozma and Trot and manifested a megaphone and said, “Glad you could make it, and you’re just in time, too. Welcome to Alice’s debut as the Queen of Hearts, and we’re starting it off with a bang!”

The group ran up to the balustrade, but four of Alice’s doppelgängers aimed their muskets at them.

“Nah ah ah,” Rancaster said. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. They’re crack shots, these girls. And,” he added as Alice manifested her own gun and aimed it at one of the Princesses, “you don’t want any collateral damage now, do you?”

“Curses!” General Jinjur said, slamming her fist on the balustrade railing.

Then Pvt. Benjamin and a company of Rough Riders began pooling into the rooftop with their bolt-action rifles held at the ready, yet Lt. Hamilton turned around raising his hand for them to lower their weapons and saying, “Stay your guns, boys! They have hostages!”

“How many, sir?” Pvt. Benjamin said.

Col. Roosevelt turned and said, “Three little girls. For God’s sake, this is no time for waving your sticks, boys!”

So the Rough Riders rested the shoulder stocks of their rifles on the ground by the feet, and they all lined up in several ranks by the water tower. Some of them took a knee, some of them sat down, others leaned against the support columns of the water tower, and the rest remained standing.

General Jinjur stared across the gulf between herself and their Highnesses on the adjacent rooftop, gritting her teeth and clenching her hands into knuckle-white fists. In all of years of preparation for this one-time sally into enemy territory, she’d never have imagined seeing three of the four princesses of Oz under this kind of danger before. So she spent a few moments devising a plan, any kind of ruse she could think of to delay the inevitable, and when she thought she had it, she left the balustrade and waved Col. Roosevelt and Lt. Hamilton and Pvt. Benjamin over to her.

Once they approached, she said to the colonel, “Are there any crack shots amongst your men?”

Col. Roosevelt said, “Pvt. Benjamin Colbert is a crack shot if ever there was one.”

“What are you planning, General?” Lt. Hamilton said.

“I want him to go to the top of the water tower,” she said, “and wait for my signal: I’ll fly my handkerchief over my head for him to get ready. Once I let it go, he can fire at will,” and she patted the sleeve of her right forearm to let them know she already has her handkerchief with her.

“A signal?” Lt. Hamilton said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Who are you trying to signal?” Pvt. Benjamin said.

“Princess Ozma,” General Jinjur said. “I’ll try to get her attention with my handkerchief, try to get her to do something, anything as long as it’s a distraction. If she manages to distract them somehow, then I’ll let go of my handkerchief, and you can fire at will.”

“That’s risky,” Benjamin said.

“I know,” General Jinjur said. “That’s why I’m working on a contingency plan, as well. Go take up your position.”

Benjamin just stared at her for a bit, then looked over at Col. Roosevelt and Lt. Hamilton, who both traded dark looks before nodding for him to go. So Pvt. Benjamin took off his slouch hat, then reached into it and took out a magic feather and gave it to General Jinjur, saying, “Put this feather in your pocket.”

She took it and said, “Why?”

“It’ll help you communicate with me,” Benjamin said.

“That makes things easier,” General Jinjur said, doing as she was bidden, “but wait for my signal all the same.”

The private nodded, then disappeared before her eyes like a Cheshire Cat and walked towards the water tower (unseen) and climbed the ladder.

While Private Benjamin was getting into position, General Jinjur stalked back over to the balustrade and fished out her smartphone from her side pocket, then dialed Stephen Larking’s number and waited for him to answer . . .

11

It was now 9:29 a.m.

Dorothy was crying in the middle of the bazaar, attracting the gazes of morning shoppers and goblin sellers. Murmurs flooded the bazaar as Stephen Larking and the goblin seller he had been haggling with ran towards her, asking her what was wrong. At first, Dorothy could only whimper at their questions as more goblins and yokai and ghosts crowded around her, but Stephen was persistent and said, “Princess Dorothy? Princess Dorothy, can you hear me?”

The girl looked up at him, her blue eyes swimming in tears, and said, “Something’s happened to my friends.”

“What happened?” He said, but then his smartphone rang in his pocket. He fished it out and clapped it to his ear and said, “I’m here. What is it?”

“Steve,” a breathless General Jinjur said amidst the turbulence of a brisk breeze, “where are you and Princess Dorothy?”

“We’re at a bazaar,” he said. “Listen, we just—”

“Get back here ASAP!” the general said.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“We have an emergency,” the general said. “Rancaster is holding Princesses Ozma and Betsy and Trot hostage.”

“What?” Stephen yelled through the breezy static. “Where are they? Where are you right now?”

“We’re on the rooftop of the Bangsian,” she said through the static. “They’re on the rooftop of the adjacent building to our north just across the street. Rancaster and Alice are there with the Princesses, and there are eight of Alice’s doppelgängers on the roof with them.”

Stephen paled at her words as he remembered Celia’s account of how Nico died, of two sisters raising guns to their heads and one of them ending up dead in front of their screaming parents and a sick crowd of applauding spectators. So he gulped down his qualms and took a deep breath to quell the beating in his chest and said, “What are they doing to them?”

Yet the general just said, “Alice has a gun, for Christ’s sake, and Rancaster had her threaten one of the Princesses to make us back off. We’ve got our hands tied here! So get back here, pronto, and I mean, PRONTO!”

“God, damn it all!” Stephen said.

Stephen’s conversation roused the little girl to her feet, and she wiped away tears. She took her handkerchief out of her sleeve and wiped her eyes with it, then let it fall from her hand to the ground, where it dissipated into nothing. And all at once, Ozma’s enchantment transformed Dorothy back into her older self in her military uniform, her knee-length skirt rustling against the high boots over her legs and her sheathed broadsword hanging from a baldric slung diagonally from her shoulder.

The crowd backed away a step at the transformation, some of its members calling her a fairy, while others were talking amongst themselves about something else entirely. In fact, there were whispers going around about groups of uniformed female soldiers taking out those red musketeers in a few skirmishes, and Stephen noticed many of these goblins complaining about a certain man in a white suit running the town like a mafia boss and extorting protection fees from their businesses.

Dorothy said, “Where are they?”

Stephen shook himself from his thoughts and said, “They’re close to the Bangsian. Rancaster has captured them and is holding them hostage near the hotel.”

Then something in Dorothy seemed to burn inside her, and Stephen felt it swirling around her like a dust devil of energy, and what’s more: that energy seemed to blend in with that of the goblins and other patrons of the bazaar.

Which made Dorothy look out across the sea of spectral faces and say, “Listen, all of you here. We have an emergency hostage situation at a nearby hotel called the Bangsian, where three of my friends are being held against their will.”

The crowd of goblins and yokai patrons stirred as Stephen finished talking with General Jinjur on the phone and hung up, then talked to the goblin seller, saying, “All right, we’ll buy the carpet at full price. We don’t have much time,” and he dug into his pocket for his checkbook.

“No, sir,” the goblin seller said. “Now that I know the gravity of your situation, I’ll let you have it for free.”

“Ah, thank you!” he gushed, shaking his hand.

“Don’t be that way, mate,” the goblin seller said. “This is my home, too, you know. And this is our town,” he added. “On my decrepit soul, as God is my witness, no blackguard is gonna kidnap people and get away with it.”

Dorothy looked back at the goblin and said, “This is your town, and the ones who need help are my friends. Will you help me?”

The goblin nodded and said, “I’ll help, missy.”

“I’ll help, too!” another goblin said.

“I’ll go get the carpets,” yet another goblin said.

And more goblins said they would help as they all followed the first goblin into the back of his shop and came back out with more rolls of enchanted rugs over their shoulders. Stephen took up his own enchanted rug, and he and the goblins helped each other unroll them on the ground, while the other goblins in charge of other venues went back into their own shops and got out various broomsticks, and a big goblin that ran a spices shop went into his shop and tried to carry out his big boat with the help of more goblins.

Then Dorothy looked around her at the faces of yokai patrons and added, “This is your town, as well. Are you going to let some kidnappers get away with it?”

A number of these yokai, specifically the yokai runners who had been dragooned by Rancaster’s masquerading retainers into giving them a lift in their phantom rickshaws earlier this morning. These honorable yokai stepped forward, and one of them said, “Iie, watashitachi wa shimasen.” (No, we won’t.)

“Then will you help us?” Dorothy said.

The yokai nodded and bowed with his fist pressed against his palm, saying, “Hai, shimasu.” (Yes, we will.)

“Thank you,” she said.

The yokai said, “Dōitashimashite.” (You’re welcome.)

And the group of yokai runners went over to the goblins struggling to position the big boat in their hands and helped them carry it all the way out of his shop, then volunteered to help man the board with him.

“Bloody good of you, boys!” the big goblin said.

The yokai all said they were welcome and helped the other goblins carry out enchanted jars from the shop into the boat. More goblins and yokai got into the spirit of it and helped each other in the bazaar organize their jars and went to get more rugs from their own shops. Meanwhile, Stephen had finished helping the rest of the goblins unroll the magic carpets, a dozen in all, then followed the goblins back to their shop and came out carrying a small enchanted jar with him to the carpet. Then he kneeled on the shaggy rug with the jar in his lap and called out for Dorothy, saying, “Princess, we’re finished here. Let’s go.”

So Dorothy came over and stepped onto the carpet and kneeled with him, saying, “Do you know how to fly this thing?”

“Gobsmacker showed me how,” he said.

“Gobsmacker?” Dorothy said, raising an eyebrow.

“That’s his name, yes,” Stephen said and snapped his fingers, and the carpet levitated off the ground. He looked behind him and waved at the other goblins on their levitating carpets with their own jars on their laps and said, “We know where the hotel is, so follow me there.”

“Aye aye, boss,” Gobsmacker said.

Then Stephen looked over at the big goblin with his crew of goblins and yokai runners and said, “Are you guys ready?”

“Aye aye, boss,” the big goblin said.

With that, Stephen and the goblins lifted up into the air on their carpets, followed by the boat floating after them, while all around them arose a cheer from the goblins and yokai patrons below them in a teeming crowd. Once they ascended past the awnings of the alleyway and the rooftops of the surrounding buildings, the squadron of carpet-riding and boat-riding volunteers flew in the direction of the Bangsian with the warmth of the morning sun at their back. And for the first time since his interview with the Hearn sisters this morning, Stephen felt himself getting into the swing of this operation as if he was the master of the skies, the captain of his destiny—

Till he noticed Dorothy’s steely gaze and her trembling hands curled into knuckle-white fists, and all at once he was brought back to Nico’s death on Rancaster’s stage full of the applause of spectators and the screams of parents in the godforsaken aftermath. Then his thoughts shifted onto the whereabouts of the missing Mara Cairns and Auna Wenger and Kendra’s current condition and his brother Randal fretting over her at the Hearn household like a worried mother.

Turning from these thoughts, Stephen reached over and covered Dorothy’s trembling fist in his hand and said, “They’re gonna be okay, I promise.”

Dorothy smiled up at him and said, “I sure hope so,” and she scanned the horizon for her friends somewhere on the rooftops of this weird Chinatown full of enchanted folks.

Her words fit Stephen’s thoughts:

I hope so, too.

12

It was now 9:30 a.m.

After hanging up with Stephen, General Jinjur asked Sgt. Rousseau for the name of the building where the Princesses were being held hostage, then dialed Lt. Shaefer’s phone number and waited for him to answer. When he answered (“This is Frank. Code word?”), Jinjur said, “Comrades! This is Anne. Listen, there’s a hostage situation on the rooftop of the Belgrave hotel right next door to the Bangsian, but stay where you are.”

“What’s happening?” Lt. Shaefer said.

“There are three hostages on the rooftop,” General Jinjur said and noticed Rancaster dissipating his megaphone from his hand and manifesting his cane and twirling it around before poking the end of it against Princess Ozma’s stomach, which provoked the other two Princesses to demand that he stop. “And Alice and Rancaster are there with them.”

“Ah, shit!” he said.

“I know, I know,” General Jinjur said, “but stay put. Don’t mobilize your men, unless Steve calls in with the order to mobilize. We don’t want any mistakes here.”

“Will you keep us updated?” he said.

“Yes, I will,” General Jinjur said. “Over and out.” She then pocketed her smartphone and manifested her hand mirror again, praying that her four captains had their own hand mirrors ready, and whistled a high-pitched birdsong similar to Ozma’s and said, “Testing. Testing. One, two, three. Anyone there?”

Then Wantowin Battles and Lewis Carroll and Sgt. Rousseau and Lt. Scott Hamilton and Col. Roosevelt crowded around her, and Roosevelt said, “Who else are you calling?”

“My captains,” General Jinjur said, waiting for a reply through her mirror, but when she received none, she whistled another high-pitched birdsong and said, “Testing. Testing. One, two, three. Anyone there? This is an emergency!”

Then there came a four-way split screen of her four captains in the reflection: Captain Imogen of the Quadling Battalion, Captain Keely of the Munchkin Battalion, Captain Nell of the Gillikin Battalion, and Captain Yana of the Winkie Battalion.

“What is it, General?” Captain Imogen said.

“It’s bad,” she said. “Rancaster and Alice have captured Princesses Ozma and Betsy and Trot—”

“WHAT?” they all said.

“—and they’re being held hostage at the Belgrave hotel right next door to the Bangsian. There are four pairs of Alice’s doppelgängers on the rooftop with them, and they seem to be acting as lookouts or— . . . Wait a minute,” and General Jinjur looked up in the sky and saw a troop of winged monkeys in red uniforms and shako hats circling around the rooftop of the Belgrave, where Alice’s four doppelgängers started aiming their muskets and firing at them.

“Whoa there,” Captain Imogen said.

“Were those gunshots?” Captain Keely said.

“What’s happening over there?” Captain Yana added.

“General, do you want us to mobilize?” Captain Nell added.

“Not yet,” General Jinjur said as she approached the balustrade, tearing her eyes off of the flying monkeys and peering over the railing at the street below, where she saw more red musketeers standing guard around the perimeter of the Belgrave hotel in pairs. “Captain Yana, stand by.”

“Aye aye, ma’am,” Captain Yana said.

“Captain Imogen, Captain Keely,” she added, “you’re the closest in the vicinity of the Belgrave hotel. I want you two to send out a squad each and find out what’s happening on the grounds surrounding the Belgrave and Bangsian hotels. And don’t have them engage the enemy, unless they’re fired upon. I don’t want your positions revealed to the enemy.”

“Aye aye, ma’am,” both captains said.

Then she looked back up from the street below and saw the troop of winged monkeys flying away to another location due southeast and said, “I’m not sure what’s going on, but the doppelgängers are shooting at a bunch of flying monkeys due southeast of my location. Captain Nell, expect to see them coming your way due northwest of your location. Send out a squad and have them track down where they’re going.”

“Aye aye, ma’am,” Captain Nell said.

“Okay, all good then?” General Jinjur said.

“Yes, ma’am,” they all said.

“Good! Over and out,” she said and dissipated her hand mirror, then turned towards her friends on the rooftop.

“What’s going on?” Col. Roosevelt said. “What were those monkey’s doing?”

“I’m not sure,” she said, “but I think Glinda might have sent them.”

“Glinda?” Col. Roosevelt said. “Who’s she?”

“Long story,” she said, then touched the pocket containing the magic feather that Pvt. Benjamin had given her and said, Private, are you ready?

And in her mind, General Jinjur heard the man pulling back the slide of his bolt-action rifle and chambering a round inside the barrel, and then she heard him say, I’m ready when you are, ma’am.

She then put her hand into the sleeve of her right arm, ready to pull out her handkerchief for Princess Ozma to see, and said to Private Benjamin, Wait for my signal.

Will do, ma’am, he said.

With everything set up on her end, General Jinjur waited for her cue, replaying the possibilities through her mind, whether that was Stephen and Princess Dorothy calling in or the flying monkeys coming over again with reinforcements or something terrible happening to one or all three of the Princesses of Oz. She gulped down her spittle at the last possibility and prayed it wouldn’t come to that, God forbid!

13

It was now 9:31 a.m.

The 13-member group of Amelia Hearn and Bridget Barton Wenger and Ramona Tellerman and Lucy and Nico Cairns and Akami and Shiromi and Cooley and Blaze and John Crane and messieurs Dolan and Shaefer and Curvan arrived at the ‘Secret Garden’ square in the center of the Coventry Gardens neighborhood. Then several gunshots from the Belgrave hotel due northwest of their position echoed across the town, reaching their ears before dying off across the sky behind them.

“Do you know who’s shooting?” Lucy Cairns said.

“I don’t,” Amelia said. “There’ve been gunshots all morning. Monsieur Curvan, Monsieur Shaefer, do you know who it is?”

“I’m not exactly sure,” Monsieur Curvan said, “but they sound like they came from smooth-bore muskets.”

“So do you think,” Nico said, “they’re from Alice’s doppelgängers?”

“I think so, yeah,” he said.

Then Amelia had messieurs Curvan and Shaefer point out the exact location within the square, and Nico looked where they pointed and noticed the mirror sheen of a pool in the paving of that corner. And on either side of that pool were the ghosts of a cow and a tiger lapping up water, till a troop of winged monkeys wearing red uniforms and shako hats came flocking towards their right, scaring away the cow and tiger to the northeastern part of the square. All the monkeys were looking down with their hands over their brows and scanning across the square, and Nico noticed one of their number, in particular, wearing glasses and a golden cap with diamonds and rubies encircling its rim atop its head.

Assuming him to be their leader, she tugged at Amelia’s arm and said, “Are those circus monkeys?”

“They’re winged monkeys,” Amelia said, then waved her arms like a windmill and called out to them. “Hello there!”

The winged monkeys turned their heads, and the one wearing the golden cap flocked over to Amelia and the rest of the group, followed by the other monkeys. They all landed and bowed in unison before Amelia, and their bespectacled leader replaced his glasses in his blazer and said, “There you are, Lady Hearn.”

“You should get a new prescription,” Amelia said.

The monkey laughed in a chimpanzee-like manner and said, “I’ve always been meaning to, but it keeps getting delayed. Anyway, Lady Glinda asked us to find you.”

“Lady Glinda?” Amelia said, stepping forward. “I haven’t met her for quite a while. How’s she doing, by the way?”

“She’s doing just fine, ma’am,” the leader said, “but she’s sent us to find you. It’s an emergency.”

“What happened?” she said.

“It’s urgent, I’m afraid,” the monkey said. “Glinda’s sent us out after a man named Aaron Rancaster and a girl named Alice Liddell for having captured their Highnesses, the Princesses Ozma and Betsy and Trot.”

“WHAT?” Amelia and Nico said.

“Yes, I know what you mean,” the monkey said. “They’re currently holding all three of them hostage atop the Belgrave hotel near the Bangsian hotel.”

“WHAT?” Akami and Shiromi said.

Then they stepped forward with Shiromi grabbing the winged monkey and saying, “The Princesses, are they hurt?”

Yet Akami stopped her white counterpart from shaking the monkey out of his senses and added, “Rancaster and Alice, what are they doing to them?”

The monkey lolled his head around for a time, then shook his head and blinked his eyes and said, “They’re not hurt, but my boys and I can’t get anywhere near the building, because there’s also eight sharpshooters on the rooftop with them in addition to Alice and Rancaster.”

So Amelia manifested her mirror and pressed her hand against it and closed her eyes, and an aerial image of the hostage situation appeared in the reflection, showing four pairs of Alice’s doppelgängers watching over the four corners of the rooftop, while Rancaster loomed over Princess Ozma sitting in her chair besides her captive friends on the roof, where he seemed to be pressuring Ozma with intrusive questions. With everyone looking on, Nico saw Ozma chafing under Rancaster’s questions and noticed Alice still holding onto her gun as she lingered by the balustrade, which brought back memories of that godless night in which she and Mara were forced to pick up their guns and point them at their own heads and . . .

“We have to do something!” Nico said.

“So you’ll help?” the monkey said.

“Of course,” she said.

“Nico, are you crazy!” Lucy Cairns said. “That’s out of the question! I won’t let you go there!”

“But, Mom!”

“Don’t worry, ma’am,” the monkey said to Lucy Cairns. “We aren’t going in alone. Others are on their way there as I speak, but they haven’t arrived yet. And I suspect they’ll have a hard time getting close, too. So how about it, Lady Hearn?”

“I’d love to,” Amelia said, “but it’s not up to me whether we go or not,” and she looked back over her shoulder at Lucy Cairns and Bridget Barton Wenger and Ramona Tellerman. “Mrs. Tellerman, I know we came here for your daughter, but—”

“Kendra can wait,” Ramona said.

“Are you sure?” she said.

So Ramona stepped forward and said, “There’s no way in Hell I’m gonna face my daughter if I’ve refused to help someone else for her sake. God help me, I’m going in.”

“Then I’m going in, too,” Bridget added.

Amelia smiled, beaming at both mothers before facing her four male companions, one by one, and saying, “What about you?”

“Count me in, mademoiselle,” Monsieur Dolan said.

“Me, too, ma’am,” added Monsieur Curvan.

“Me, three,” added Monsieur Shaefer.

“Me, as well,” added John Crane.

Then Amelia faced the women in the group, but she didn’t even have to ask, because Cooley and Blaze said, “We’ll go, too.”

Then Akami and Shiromi added, “Count us in, too.”

But when Nico stepped forward and said, “Then I’ll go with you,” her mother Lucy came in and grabbed her wrist.

“No, you won’t,” Lucy said.

“But, Mom, I—”

“Don’t ‘But, Mom’ me!” Lucy said. “That monster killed me, your father, and yourself, and he left your sister orphaned! God knows what he’ll do to you if he sees you again!”

“That’s not fair!” Nico yelled.

“Mrs. Cairns, I’ll be honest with you,” Amelia said, facing the recalcitrant member of the group. “I’ve been wondering if you’re ready for this ever since I brought you in, because out of all of us here, you’ve experienced the worst of it, and your memories are still fresh.” Then she grabbed a hold of Lucy’s trembling hands and added, “But I’ll tell you this: you weren’t alone when it happened. I was with you when Nico died, I was with you when Rancaster killed your husband in front of you and Mara, and I was with you as you screamed for her to run away. Let me tell you: that’s more than I could have ever done if I was in your shoes.”

Now tears ran down Lucy’s cheeks, so Nico hugged her waist and buried her face in her bosom and cried into her clothes, saying, “Mom, it’s okay. It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay, damn it!” Lucy said.

So Ramona and Bridget came over to her and put their arms around her shoulders and started rubbing circles around her back, both dead mothers telling her to stop being so hard on herself, that it wasn’t her fault, that she wasn’t the reason why her family ended up the way it did.

And after hearing their words, Amelia continued with tears running down her own cheeks, saying, “Mrs. Cairns, I was there with you on that godless night, up until your death. God, I wish I could’ve done something to help, but I couldn’t! I couldn’t save you or your husband or your daughters, because I’m a ghost! Me, you, Nico, Ramona, Bridget: we’re all ghosts, and as ghosts, we can’t do anything for the living. I’m sorry to say this, but we physically can’t do anything for Mara right now.”

Then she turned to Ramona: “Or Kendra.”

Then to Bridget: “Or Auna.”

“Then what do you expect me to do?” Lucy said, squinting out more tears before wiping them away. “If I can’t do anything for Mara, then what the hell can I do?”

Nico looked back up at her mother and wiped the tears from her eyes and said, “Don’t doubt yourself, Mom.”

“What are you talking about?” Lucy said.

“She’s telling it as it is,” Amelia said. “Only the living can play with the living, but we can play with the dead, including bastards like Rancaster.”

“Are you sure?” Lucy said.

“I am, and I’ve seen it myself,” Amelia said and clapped Nico on her shoulder. “Just ask Nico. She’ll tell you. You have no idea how brave she’s been this entire time.”

“Wait,” Nico said, thinking back to her fight with Rancaster in the middle of Richet Square in the old Rancaster district, “were you there?”

Amelia nodded and smiled, saying, “I was there watching during that entire night, from the time you and your parents died to the time you fought against Rancaster to the moment you came to Celia and Kendra and brought their friend back from the dead.” Then she beamed at Lucy and added, “Trust me, Mrs. Cairns, if you’d have been there to see what I’ve seen, you’d understand why I brought you and Nico along. That night may have been a tragedy, but it was also a miracle.”

Lucy stared at Nico, making her cheeks burn, then turned back to Amelia and said, “Really?”

“Really,” Amelia said. “So are you in?”

Lucy paused in thought.

So Nico said, “Mom, please.”

Only then did Lucy cave in and say, “All right, Nico and I will go,” but then she grabbed Nico’s hand and added, “but you’re gonna stay with me while we’re there. Got it?”

Nico let out a sigh and nodded.

“Better listen to your mother, Nico,” Amelia said and ruffled her hair. “She just agreed to what I said, and that’s a miracle in itself.”

“I know,” Nico said.

“I’m not that hard-headed,” Lucy said.

“Sure you’re not,” she said.

“Nico!”

14

It was now 9:32 a.m.

Back at the Nayland Hospital, Leslie Amame had finished eating yet another packet of trail mix and found herself with half a dozen empty packets lying between herself and Colbie, still with her nose between the pages of Amelia Hearn’s Entering the Secret Room. While her daughter kept reading, Leslie looked over at Connie talking with two CSIs, one that handled a manilla envelope of witness statements and the other that handled another manilla envelope of diagrams and photographs of the room. She stood there wondering what they were talking about, so she gathered the empty packets and disposed of them in a nearby trash receptacle, but when she turned around, Leslie saw Connie beckoning her over.

So Leslie stalked over, saying, “What is it?”

“These gentlemen want to show us something,” Connie said, nodding at the CSI that handled the witness statements. “He thinks it’s about the Kimon.”

“The Kimon?” Leslie said, thinking back to Connie’s little diagram drawings in her pocket notebook. She remembered the placement of Mara and Nico’s house in the northeast corner of their neighborhood block, as well as the position of the Nayland Hospital in the northeast corner of its own corporatized block. In both buildings, people had disappeared: in the first, it was Lucy and Paul Cairns and then Mara and Nico Cairns in their house at 5849 Dawson Avenue in the Glass-Stream neighborhood; in the second, it was Nico Cairns in the Nayland Hospital. And within the Nayland Hospital itself, as Leslie surveyed her surroundings, she noticed the placement of Mara’s hospital room where two hallways meet in the northeast corner of the building.

That’s when it hit her.

“Oh my God,” Leslie said. “Please don’t tell me.”

The CSI named Mr. Tamago nodded and said, “I’m afraid it’s so, ma’am. Come on,” he added, lifting the police tape.

“Thanks,” Connie said.

Connie and Leslie ducked under the tape and followed Mr. Tamago and the other CSI, then nodded at the third CSI as they all filed through the door of the Mara’s hospital room. The sheets on the bed lay crumpled as if its former occupant had melted into its folds, and the slight indentation of the pillow indicated where Mara had laid her head, and the overbed table lay overturned on its side next to the bed, as if someone had pushed or pulled it aside.

Then Mr. Tamago pointed out a flowerpot full of black roses by the window sill and said, “Steve and Randal interviewed six orderlies who saw a man put that there last night during their graveyard shifts, but none could say anything about him except that he wore a white suit.”

Leslie traded knowing looks with Connie, then said to the CSI, “Why would he put black roses?”

“That’s the weird part,” Mr. Tamago said. “When all six orderlies described the color of the roses, none of them said they were black. One said they were white or dog roses, another said they were red, another said they were yellow, another said they were green, another said they were peach, and another said they were blue. Whatever kind they were,” he added, “they all saw something different.”

“And that’s on top of what I found,” the other CSI said.

“You mean the Kimon?” Leslie said.

The other CSI nodded.

“I can’t believe we missed that,” Leslie said.

“Yeah, I know,” Mr. Tamago said, “but at least we know now.”

“Who said they were dog roses?” Connie said.

Mr. Tamago stared at her for a time, then opened his envelope and looked through the witness statements inside, then pulled one out and said, “Give it back after you’re done.”

Connie nodded and took it, then spent the next few minutes perusing its contents before giving it back to the man and saying, “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” he said, putting it back in the manilla envelope. “Seriously, don’t mention this to anyone. I don’t want to get my ass canned.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t,” Connie said. “Is that all you boys wanted to show us?”

“Yes, ma’am,” both CSIs said.

“Sorry we can’t show you the rest yet,” Mr. Tamago said.

“Don’t be,” Connie said. “Just keep me informed of anything else you might find, okay?”

“We will, ma’am,” Mr. Tamago said and nodded at the door. “Ladies first.”

So both women filed out of the room ahead of the CSIs and ducked underneath the police tape and headed back to the bench where she and Connie had shared their findings with the help of a laptop and Connie’s notebook and sketching skills. All the while, Connie kept repeating to herself, “Black roses, black roses . . .”

“What is it?” Leslie said.

Connie then faced her and said, “During this morning’s interview, do you remember Steve and Colbie saying they used a black light to read invisible messages?”

“Yeah, I do,” Leslie said.

“Well,” Connie said, “black lights filter out other visible lights, right?”

“Right.”

“So if the orderlies all saw different-colored roses,” she said, “then maybe a spell of some kind must have changed their perceptions.”

“Like a black light over invisible ink?” Leslie said.

Connie nodded, saying, “It takes all the colors combined to create the color black, but take away all the colors, and you get white. What’s the rose mentioned that wasn’t a color?”

“I think he said dog roses,” Leslie said, noticing a sheen over her dark gray eyes and wondering what was going through her mind. “You’ve got it, don’t you?”

Connie smiled, saying, “Dog roses can be pale pink or white, but unlike white roses, dog roses repel vampires.”

“And that means what?” Leslie said.

“Take a guess,” she said.

“What do you mean?” Leslie said. “I don’t understand.”

“I know it’s been awhile for you,” Connie said, “but try your best. If Colbie can do it, so can you.”

So Leslie thought about it, mulling the symbolic connections and historical connotations between white rose and white dog roses, but came up with just one connection between them: their color, even though not all dog roses are white. So she thought about white roses and weddings and white roses and fealties, which brought up the bonds between husbands and wives and feudal lords and vassal knights, which then brought up another connection between white roses and dog roses: the connection between dogs and humans, like that of wolves and vampires such as Dracula, a.k.a., Prince Prospero, a.k.a., Aaron Rancaster, who also wore a white suit. And the more she thought about it, the more it made sense when she remembered Connie informing her of yesterday’s misadventures amongst Colbie and Celia and Kendra in the old Rancaster district, where all three had encountered wolves. And like a pack of wolves, a house of vampires depended on a hierarchy between a lord and his vassals.

“Loyalty,” Leslie said.

“Looks like the old girl still has it,” Connie said.

Leslie glared and said, “What did you say?”

“Sorry, sorry,” Connie said, then looked over at Colbie. “Say, hasn’t she been reading for a while now?”

Leslie looked over her shoulder, saying, “Yeah, she’s been pretty quiet,” and she picked herself up, and both women came up to the girl with her nose still in Amelia’s book.

“Colbie, are you finished yet?” Connie said.

But Colbie kept reading.

“Colbie,” Leslie said, “don’t ignore your elders.”

But Colbie kept reading in silence, though she didn’t seem to be turning the pages, so Leslie pulled the book from Colbie’s face and turned up her daughter’s chin and found her eyes glazed over in a trance.

“Colbie?” she said, shaking her daughter by her shoulder and snapping her fingers in front of her face, but she wouldn’t snap out of it. “Colbie, wake up!”

Yet her daughter wouldn’t respond.

“Ah, shit!” Leslie said, then to Connie: “Call Kathy and get the Hearn sisters over here, pronto!”

“What happened?” she said.

“She’s in a trance,” Leslie said. “Call Kathy now!” And as Connie fished out her smartphone and called Katherine’s phone number, waiting for Kathy to answer and then informing her of what had happened to Colbie, Leslie laid her daughter on the bench and summoned an omamori charm in her hand and pressed it to the back of her head, then pressed her forehead to Colbie’s and saying, "Apokalýpto," (reveal) but the spell wouldn't work. "God damn it!”

When Connie finished her call, she bent over Leslie and Colbie and said, “Any luck?”

Leslie dissipated her charm and shook her head, saying, “I can’t reach her.”

Moments later, a body-length mirror appeared in the middle of the corridor, attracting the gazes of the three CSIs and a few nurses and orderlies nearby, and out of it walked Katherine and Madison and Celia. All three sisters came running up to Connie and Leslie, all three asking Leslie and Connie if Colbie was going to be okay, but neither woman answered them as Leslie now peered into Colbie’s eyes.

Celia leaned forward and said, “Won’t she wake up?”

“I don’t know yet, honey,” Leslie said.

Then Celia said, “Is she—”

Her elder sisters put their hands on her shoulder and shook their heads, meaning that she should let Leslie concentrate on what she was doing.

And concentrate she did, manifesting another omamori charm in her hand and placing it over Colbie’s eyes and pressing her forehead against hers like before and saying, "Apokalýpto," (reveal) but the spell still wouldn't work. “Fuck!”

So the three CSIs ducked underneath the police tape and approached the group asking what was going on, and Connie told them what had happened to Colbie.

And while Connie was informing them, Leslie picked up the book she had discarded and flipped through the pages, till she stopped on the last page Colbie had read and stared at the last sentence of “Alice and the Mad Tryst” by Amelia Hearn:

‘The rest is up to you, dear reader.’

Then Leslie looked over her shoulder at the body-length mirror in the corridor and said, “Kathy, I need your mirror.”

“What are you gonna do?” Katherine said.

“Do you have to ask?” she said.

Katherine stared and said, “Are you serious?”

“You bet I am,” Leslie said. “I’m getting Colbie back.”

That’s when Connie turned from the CSIs and said, “Whoa, wait a minute, Mrs. Amame. Are you sure about this?”

“Of course, I am!” Leslie said and headed towards Katherine’s mirror with the book tucked into the crook of her armpit and looked back at the three wide-eyed Hearn sisters and a pale-faced Connie Davis. “Are you coming?”

“I’ll look after Colbie at our house,” Katherine said and picked up the sleeping girl in her arms.

“Okay, then bring her there,” Leslie said. “What about the rest of you? Are you in?”

“Are you serious?” Connie said.

“Damn straight I am,” Leslie said. “Are you in?”

Yet Connie stayed silent for a time, as if she was weighing the pros and cons of such a decision, but then she turned towards the two other Hearn sisters and said, “Are you girls in?”

Celia and Madison gaped and stared before looking at their eldest sister, and Katherine nodded, saying, “It’s okay, just go. I’ll look after Colbie at my end.”

With that, both sisters said, “I’m in.”

And with that, Katherine said to her sisters, “You two be careful, okay? No idiot heroics this time, got it?”

And both sisters said they got it.

With their assurance, Katherine summoned another mirror in front of her and entered it carrying Colbie with her, and the mirror disappeared in her wake.

“Gather around now,” Leslie said.

So the Hearn sisters gathered behind Leslie and Connie before Katherine’s mirror, and Connie said to the CSIs, “Don’t let us distract you. You’ve still got work to do.”

“Yes, ma’am,” they said.

And Mr. Tamago added, “We’ll have this crime scene fully processed by the time you get back.”

And the three CSIs headed back to their stations and ducked underneath the police tape.

Meanwhile, Celia said, “Shouldn’t you wait for Kathy?”

“Why should I?” Leslie said.

“She can locate Colbie for you,” she said.

“Celia,” Madison said, “I think she knows what she’s doing.”

“Trust me, I’ve been around, Celia,” Leslie said and manifested another omamori charm in her hand and placed it onto the surface of Katherine’s mirror, pressing her hand against it. “This is how I do it,” and she closed her eyes, thinking of her daughter’s presence somewhere in the kaleidoscopic realm of dreams and looking through the darkness of closed eyelids, where the ever-shifting tangles of moving matter solidified before her mind’s eye, and said, “Apokalýpto!” (Reveal!)

And the charm dissipated from Leslie’s hand and lit the mirror in a soft glow, and a collective image of Colbie’s face flashed through the rest of their minds amidst dark surroundings somewhere in the astral realm.

“Everyone, hold onto each other’s hands,” Leslie said and held out her free hand to Connie. “I don’t want any of you getting lost when we cross.”

So Connie linked hands with Leslie, and Madison linked hands with Connie, and Celia linked hands with Madison. With everyone linked up, one by one, Leslie entered the mirror first, followed by Connie and then Madison and then Celia. And once they all passed through the reflection, the mirror disappeared in a blink, leaving an afterimage of its outline lingering in the corridor before the CSIs and nurses and orderlies.

つづく