He turned to wave at her—
—
But Rainy Marchwas already gone.
Book Five
YOUNG ADULT & HORROR
Chapter Thirty-One
“Rainy!”
Duke’s voice cut through the fog, pulling me back to reality.
Blinking, I turned away from the mirror and looked up at him. He had me in his arms. Fear gleamed in his dark eyes.
“Oh, thank goodness,” he breathed. “I nearly lost you.”
“What? What happened?” I asked. I couldn’t remember anything from the last few minutes, other than a terrible sense of vertigo, almost as if I’d left the world for a moment.
“You looked at yourself so long in the mirror, you started to fall through it.”
“Fall through it?” I looked back into the mirror.
“Literally. Your hand disappeared into it. How did you do that?”
“Lingering side effect of Wonderland, probably. What was I saying?”
“You saw your twin?”
“My twin? Yes! My twin.” I grabbed the bunny ears off the marble head of William Shakespeare and perched them on my own head.
“It’s Penny,” I said. “Penny gave me the white ears. Hers were brown. It was Penny all along.”
“Penny?”
I faced Duke. “Yesterday was Mad Hatter Day so she was dressing us all up like characters fromAlice in Wonderland.Penny was wearing bunny ears. She gave me bunny ears. She joked we were twins. Butwe’re not twins. If my ears are white, and hers are brown, then I’m the White Rabbit, and she’s the—”
“—March Hare! Rainy, you did it!”
“Wedid it,” I said. “We found her. She’s been staring me in the face ever since she arrived. Trying to be my friend. Trying to help me. I don’t know how or why, but it’s her. Penny Nichols.”
Duke’s beautiful mouth opened slightly. I grabbed his face and kissed him.
He didn’t kiss back.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Her name is PennyNichols? That can’t be her real name, can it? Poor girl. Anyway, carrying on. We know who our March Hare is finally, but where do we find her?”
“She said she was going back home for a while.”
“Where’s home then?”
“Uh…” I began to pace, trying to piece together every clue she’d given me about her life before she’d moved to Fort Meriwether. “She said she was from the Midwest, a pretty little river town not even on the map.”
“That’s nonsense. Every town is on the map. Unless…”
