Red Queen E-Book

Christina Henry

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The land outside of the Old City was supposed to be green, lush, hopeful. But the verdant fields are nothing but ash—and hope is nowhere to be found. Still, Alice and Hatcher are on a mission to find his daughter: a quest they will not forsake even as it takes them deep into the clutches of the mad White Queen or into the realm of the twisted and cruel Black King. The pieces are set and the game has begun, and each move brings Alice closer to her destiny.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Praise for the Series

Also by Christina Henry

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue: An Interlude in the Old City

Part One: The Forest

Part Two: The Mountain

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

PRAISE FOR THE SERIES

“I loved falling down the rabbit hole with this dark, gritty tale. A unique spin on a classic and one wild ride!”

Gena Showalter, New York Times bestselling author of Alice in Zombieland

“A dark, delightfully disturbing fall down a rabbit hole of madness and mystery. This is not your mamma’s Alice… Alice encompasses the sensation of a slippery world fueled by insanity, where reality can fall from under your feet with each step unless you are very, very careful. It’s a delightfully twisted take on the classic and breathes new life into Carroll’s creations … If you’re looking for a book that will make you feel like you were just on a bender with the Blue Caterpillar, I highly recommend Alice.”

R. S. Belcher, author of Brotherhood of the Wheet

“A horrifying fantasy that will have you reexamining your love for this childhood favorite. Smooth, velvety prose blends well with the deliciously complex characters and intricate story line … A world that is nothing like Lewis Carroll ever imagined.”

RT Book Reviews (top pick)

Also available from Christina Henry and Titan Books

ALICE

Red QueenPrint edition ISBN: 9781785653322E-book edition ISBN: 9781785653346

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First Titan edition: July 201610 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2016 by Tina Raffaele. All rights reserved.

This edition published by arrangement with Ace, an imprint of Penguin, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 2016.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Lucienne Diver,writer’s cheerleader and agent extraordinaire,because you loved this book first

PROLOGUE

AN INTERLUDE IN THE OLD CITY

 

In a City where everything was grey and fog-covered and monsters lurked behind every echoing footfall, there was a little man who collected stories. He sat in a parlor covered in roses and this little man was small and neat, his head covered in golden-brown ringlets and his eyes bright and green like a rose’s leaves. He wore a velvet suit of rose red and he urged a cup of tea on his visitor, a wide-eyed girl who looked about her in wonder. She was not certain how she’d gotten here, only that this strange little man had helped her when she thought she was lost.

“Do you like stories?” the little man asked.

He was called Cheshire, and the girl thought that was a very odd name, though this room and his cottage were very pretty.

“Yes,” she said. She was very young still, and did not know yet what Cheshire had saved her from when he came upon her wandering in the streets near his cottage. She was lucky, more than lucky, that it was he who found her.

“I like stories too,” Cheshire said. “I collect them. I like this story because I have a part to play in it—a small part, to be sure, but a part nonetheless.

“Once, there was a girl called Alice, and she lived in the New City, where everything is shining and beautiful and fair. But Alice was a curious girl with a curious talent. She was a Magician. Do you know what a Magician is?”

The girl shook her head. “But I have heard of them. They could do wonders but the ministers drove all the Magicians out of the City long ago.”

“Well,” Cheshire said, and winked. “They thought they did, but a few Magicians remained. And Alice was one of them, though she did not know it yet.

“She had magic, and because of that she was vulnerable, and a girl who was supposed to be Alice’s friend sold her for money to a very bad man called the Rabbit.”

“He was a rabbit?” the girl asked, confused.

“Not really, though he had rabbit ears on a man’s body,” Cheshire said. “The Rabbit hurt Alice, and wanted to hurt her more, wanted to sell her to a man called the Walrus who ate girls for their magic.”

The wide-eyed girl put her cup of tea on Cheshire’s rose-covered table and stared. “Ate? Like really eat?”

“Oh, yes, my dear,” Cheshire said. “He ate them all up in his belly. But Alice was quick and clever and she got away from the Rabbit before he could feed her to the Walrus. The Rabbit marked Alice, though, marked her with a long scar on her face to say she was his. My resourceful Alice marked him too—she took his eye out.

“But little Alice, she was broken and sad and confused, and her parents locked her away in a hospital for confused people. There she met a madman with an axe named Hatcher, a madman who grew to love her.

“Hatcher and Alice escaped from the hospital, and traveled through the Old City in search of their pasts and in search of a monster called the Jabberwocky who made the streets run with blood and corpses.”

The girl shuddered. “I know about him.”

“Then I should tell you that Alice, clever Alice, turned him into a butterfly with her magic so that he could never hurt anyone again, and she put that butterfly in a jar in her pocket and there he is till this day—unless he is dead, which is entirely possible.”

“And what of the Rabbit and the Walrus?” the girl asked. “What became of them?”

“Nothing good, my dear,” Cheshire said. “Nothing good at all, for they were bad men and bad men meet bad ends.”

“As they should,” the girl said firmly. “What about Alice? Did she have a happy ending?”

“I don’t know,” Cheshire said.

PART ONE

THE FOREST

Alice was a Magician, albeit one who did not know very much about her own magic. She was escaping a City that hated and feared Magicians, which was one of the reasons why she didn’t know so very much about it. Alice was tall and blue-eyed and a little broken inside, but her companion didn’t mind because his insides were more jumbled than hers could ever be.

Hatcher was a murderer, and he knew quite a lot about it. Alice thought that Hatcher knew so much about it that he ought to be capitalized too—a Magician and her Murderer. He was tall and grey-eyed and mad and dangerous but he loved her too, and so they stayed together, both stumbling toward a future that would let them leave their past in the past.

She wished she could do something magical like in a fairy story—make a carpet to fly on, or summon up a handy unicorn to ride. It seemed very useless to be a Magician without spectacular tricks at hand.

At the very least she would have liked to be able to summon a bicycle, though the thought of Hatcher balancing on two wheels while holding his axe made her giggle. Anything would be better than this tunnel, an endless, narrow semidarkness with no relief in sight. She never would have entered it had she known it would take so long to get out again—three days at least, by her reckoning.

Alice thought it must be close to that long, although they had no true way to determine the passage of time.

They slept when they were tired, ate what little provisions they had left in the sack Hatcher carried. Soon enough they were hungry and thirsty, though it had become a familiar feeling and therefore just another discomfort. Food and water never seemed to be a regular occurrence since their escape from the hospital and its regular delivery of porridge morning and night.

During the long walk Alice dreamed of the open fields and trees that she would find at the end, a beautiful verdant land described by Pipkin, the rabbit they rescued from the Walrus’ fight ring. Anything, she thought, would be better than the crushing fog and darkness of the Old City.

Hatcher, in his own Hatcher way, alternated between moody silence and fits of mania. When not brooding he would run ahead of Alice and then back again over and over until he was white and breathless. Sometimes he stopped to box with the walls until his hands were bloody, or take chunks out of the wall with his axe. It seemed to Alice that there was more brooding and less running about than usual, though to be fair he had more to brood on.