Koshka let out a softmrrwrp,which I knew meant “Breakfast?”
“Right, boy. We’re going, I promise. We need my umbrella.”
“I’ll get it,” Duke said. “Stand by.”
He slipped out the door, Koshka following.
My head was still spinning, but I had to check the book.
I picked Gatsby’s copy ofAlice’s Adventures in Wonderlandup from the table and flipped through the pages from beginning to end.
Good. Although our tea party was abandoned, in the book all the characters were present and accounted for. We’d done the book no harm with our excursion. Wonderland was as bizarre, troubling, trippy, and unnerving as always. Perfect.
Duke returned holding my umbrella open over his shoulder.
He gave it a little spin before returning it to me.
“Luckily no one vomited in it,” Duke said. “I checked.”
“Excellent. Koshka, let’s go.” He jumped onto the table and into my arms. Duke put his arms around me and held us both tight.
“Our revels now are ended!” I said, clicking my umbrella closed.
We tumbled through time and space—the time it takes to read a sentence and the space between one word and the next—and finally landed on the rug in the Pilcrow House library.
I groaned.
Duke groaned.
Koshka squeaked like a child had squeezed him too hard.
“Duke? You alive?” I asked.
“Barely, darling, but give us a moment. Right as rain soon. Or I’ll pass away. Fifty-fifty chance.”
I turned to my familiar. “Koshka?”
He let out another pathetic squeak.
“What about you, love?” Duke asked. “You’re alive, I hope?”
“More or less,” I said, leaving out the grim details. Everything hurt. Arms, legs, chest, heart, lungs, even teeth and eyelashes. “Book within a book? Let’s never do that again.”
Koshka yawned so wide his entire small body shook. Yawning suddenly felt like a great idea, so I let one out as well. “What time is it?”
Duke glanced up at the clock on the mantel. “Nearly eight in the morning.”
“No wonder I’m exhausted. We’ve been awake all night.”
“You should sleep,” he said as he got off the floor and slipped out of his tuxedo jacket.
“Aren’t you sleepy too?”
“Never, darling. A fictional detective is indefatigable until he solves the case,” Duke boasted. “We have drive. We have determination. We have—”
“Cocaine,” I said. “I mean, if you’re Sherlock Holmes.”
“And I am not,” he said. “You go and sleep.”
