My netherling side flutters inside my skull, assuring me this is going to work, but my human side instinctively recoils as fear tightens my throat. I can’t cry out to tell anyone I’m still alive. My vocal cords won’t work. Claustrophobia, my old enemy, forms itchy tangles beneath my skin. I know what’s going on around me, although my eyelids can’t open and my limbs can’t twitch. Every smell, sound, and tactile sensation is magnified by my inability to react to it.

The paramedic who answered my twenty-seven-year-old granddaughter’s 911 call this morning pronounced me dead on the scene—struck down by a heart attack. It was unbearable, hearing her cry and wail. It triggered memories of my own greatest loss—of Jeb’s death three years earlier. A knife still gores through my chest each time I remember our final good-bye.

But Jeb told me to be strong. And I taught my grandchildren the same—to always face things head-on. She’ll be all right. I know it without a doubt because she’s like me in so many ways, even beyond her blond hair, blue eyes, and inquisitive nature. She’s stubborn, loyal, and a survivor.

Once the paramedic delivered my body to the morgue, everything went like clockwork.

My family was aware of the cemetery I’d chosen and the four requirements in my will: no public viewing of my body, no chapel service, cremation within twelve hours of my passing, and the sprinkling of my ashes where Jeb’s were, beneath the weeping willow at our country cottage. That tree held special meaning, grown from a clipping taken off the willow that used to share our backyards as we were growing up.

Such unconventional requests didn’t even faze my family, considering the eccentric old woman I’d become.

After Jeb’s death, they watched me putter about my cottage, gathering up the mosaics I’d made throughout my life, filled with bizarre and mystical landscapes—with titles like Winter’s Heartbeat, Checkerboard Dunes, and Belly of the Beast—and pack them away in the attic along with other heirlooms, including a tourism brochure for the Thames sundial trail in London. The last things I added were two keys: One had belonged to my mom and could make a mirror into a portal, and the other could open the gate to Wonderland’s garden of souls. The latter was a gift granted to Jeb after he gave up his muse so he could fulfill the nether-realm’s need for vivid, imaginative dreams, and bridge our worlds with peace in the process. He gave up what had once made him unique, to keep human children safe. A courageous act his own children and grandchildren never had the privilege to know. That memento was the hardest for me to let go of, for it was a tribute to Jeb’s courageous heart and noble nature—the two things I loved most about him. But as Wonderland’s Red Queen, I had no business keeping such a hallowed key.

I hid everything in a trunk in the attic and locked it. Then I stashed the trunk’s key inside the pages of my well-worn Lewis Carroll collection. Jeb and I owned the cottage, and all the land around it, and insisted in our wills that it forever stay in our family’s name. That way, if any of our descendants should ever need to find me, they can. All they’ll have to do is look for clues like I once did. Follow the steps I’ve laid out, and believe in the impossible—in fairy tales and wishes and magic.

I’ve always kept them in the dark about our legacy, to give them a chance at a normal life. I even commanded the bugs and flowers to silence. I’m the only one who can hear those lines to the nether-realm now, and it will be that way as long as I’m the reigning Red Queen. But should any of my family members search diligently enough, they’ll find the truth I’ve hidden for them.

All these years, they accepted my quirks because I’ve always respected and loved them, unconditionally. And now I’m counting on their loyalty. My entire plan to die hinges on the timeliness of the execution of my will.

Cremation was the only way to avoid draining my blood and pumping my veins with formaldehyde, sewing my eyelids shut—all the morbid and intrusive steps taken to embalm and preserve a mortal’s body. I was blessed throughout my eighty years of human life with health and a sharp mind. I never needed a pacemaker and I have no prostheses, implants, or dentures, so there was nothing that might explode in high heat. That meant no incisions, no extractions. It was important that I remain intact—inside and out.

But if Rabid White doesn’t hurry and get here with the inception potion to rouse me out of my stasis, it won’t matter. I’ll be a pile of glowing embers. And Morpheus will have to find a new home for my eternal spirit . . . a new body for me to inhabit.

He’ll be livid if that happens, and he’ll never let me forget it. An eternity is a long, long time to listen to I told you so pitched continuously in a deep, cockney accent.

“I don’t care for it one bit,” he had said two weeks ago, while we discussed my exodus from the human realm over tea during one of my Wonderland dream visits. He lifted a cup to his lips, his studious face as perfect and ageless as always. He took a sip, and then set it down once more. “Too many things can go wrong. I should be there to execute my plan.”

“I’m doing it myself,” I’d countered. I studied the canopied bed and fireplace, located diagonally from the tall Victorian parlor chairs where we sat beside a small oval table, seeking comfort in the familiar surroundings. “And we’re going with my plan.” Those would be my last moments in the human realm. It had to be on my terms. I suppressed a tug of sadness and attempted the same graceful control Morpheus had displayed with his cup of tea, but hot liquid splashed down my age-worn hand as a tremor shook through my wrist. I yelped.

“Alyssa, please. Allow me.” He gently gripped my gnarled fingers in his elegant, smooth ones, wiping away the tea and soothing my scalded and scarred flesh with a cloth napkin.

Allow me. We both knew he referred to so much more than cleaning my spilled drink.

So many years we had spent together in my dreams—just as it was during our childhoods—with Morpheus training and teaching me about my kingdom and world. There weren’t opportunities for us to be alone, since he kept the veil of sleep pulled away so I could interact with Rabid, Chessie, Ivory, the creatures, and my subjects.

That had changed once I’d become a widow. I would uphold my royal duties each night and fight to be strong until my grief for Jeb became so intense, tears built up on my lashes and blinded me. Morpheus—sensing my shame, because queens don’t cry—would insist it was time for tea, which we’d take alone in the royal bedroom that would one day belong to us as king and queen.

There in our solitude, hidden from prying eyes and surrounded by lush red carpets and curtains of gold, I would lose myself to my grief. Allow me, he would say. Holding out his arms, he’d hold me as I wept. Night after night for a year, until at last I was cried out.

Shortly thereafter, Morpheus’s attentiveness changed. His touches became less comforting and more intimate. I was too embarrassed to respond, too self-conscious in my aging shell.

An eternally young fae romancing an elderly woman—I would’ve laughed at the absurdity, had I not been so deeply affected by his blind devotion and the depth of his love.

“Even if we go with your plan”—Morpheus’s voice was low and cross as he dabbed the napkin between my fingers, sopping up remnants of tea—“I should still be there in the wings, to supervise how it plays out.”