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Kate stood before the enormous wall, in which there was a doorway shaped like a woman’s head. Pink clouds were puffing almost cheerfully through this bizarre doorway and trailing away to nothing behind her, and on the other side, a field of green was sitting quaintly beneath a perfectly pink sky. Kate could see a long table in the distance, full of paper plates and pitchers of lemonade. There were people at the table. It looked like a picnic or a barbecue. She didn’t know which. She only knew she was hungry. Before her was a pink staircase. All she had to do was walk up it, and then she would reach the food. Her only worry was that the people already sitting there would not welcome an uninvited guest.
Kate didn’t move and stood there indecisive. Where was she and how had she come to be here? She was standing in an empty room with pink walls and a pink floor – a floor the pale pink color of brains, in fact. She had the intense feeling that she would be leaving some integral part of herself behind if she were to step through the head-shaped doorway. And suddenly, she realized the doorway was shaped in the image of her head. It was her head that formed the way out. How bizarre.
Taking a shaky breath, Kate stepped up the pink stair slowly and deliberately. She glanced to the right and realized with a gasp that the world ended quite abruptly some ten feet away. There was green grass and then a sudden, sheer drop into the pink sky – as if one could simply walk off the edge of the world!
Kate kept climbing the stair, the wind in her blonde hair, and as she drew nearer and nearer to the top, she realized that the world did not end. Glancing back, she could see that she had been standing inside a great stone carving of a head that was perched on the edge of a grassy cliff – and the head looked exactly like her!
Kate halted in her tracks, turned back, and stared in amazement. The head had her features, her lips and eyes, the ears that sort of suck out. And her hair, pale blonde and cut in a short bob that barely reached past her ears. She stared at it and stared and stared, trying to make herself believe what she was seeing. The stone image of her face was smooth and impassive as it “gazed” down on her with eyes that could not see.
Pulling herself together, Kate turned her back on the stone head and continued up the pink stair, but as she went, she could feel its blank eyes upon her. Panicking, she broke into a breathless run, her skirt streaming behind her, and lost one of her ballet slippers – Why was she wearing ballet slippers?
And she was wearing tights as well. But her skirt and the sleeveless pink top she wore, those were hers. At least, she remembered wearing them back in the real world. The real world. How could she get back there? Maybe the people at the picnic would know!
Breathless, strings of hair in her eyes, Kate halted at the top of the hill and leaned forward, resting her hands on her knees to catch her breath. She had finally reached the picnic table. She could hear the people talking and laughing, but upon seeing her, they fell silent.
Kate straightened up. “Excuse me, could you tell me—” The words halted in her throat: the people sitting at the table were not people at all. There was a woman with a dog head, a woman with a cat head, a fat unicorn who sat on the ground between two chairs, a lion was sleeping under the table, and a robot was standing at the grill, flipping burger patties and even wearing an apron. There was also a little girl with a mouse head who was flying a classic pink kite on a string, and a small fishbowl sat at the center of the table with a fat goldfish circling inside.
The people at the table were enjoying hamburgers, hot dogs, and potato chips, as well as plastic red glasses of lemonade. That they had chosen the robot to cook for them – a creature that could not even taste – was probably the least bizarre thing about the picnic.
The woman with the cat head had glasses perched on her pink nose and tilted them down, peering over them at Kate. Her eyes were giant in her face, bright green, with the shrewd slanted shape of an old, crafty housecat. “And you are?”
Kate was taken aback and suddenly felt ashamed: she had not even bothered to introduce herself. Her cheeks flamed a little.
“Humans,” snorted the woman with the cat head. “They always forget their manners!”
The fat unicorn extended its neck and bit savagely into a large white cake with strawberries on top, covering its face in white icing. The mouse-headed child with the kite squealed in indignation at this, scowled, and stuck her little hand in the cake in an attempt to salvage a clean chunk. She crammed the entire misshapen chunk in her face and stuck out her tongue at the unicorn, which indifferently kept chewing the cake it had stolen with dull eyes.
From under the table came a great snore from the lion. Kate wondered if it would leap out and eat her if she wasn’t pleasant.
“M-My name’s Kate,” said Kate nervously. “And I’m. . .”
“Lost,” supplied the dog woman. She took a sip of lemonade from a red plastic cup and eyed Kate over it lazily, as if she were appraising a work of art and was wholly unimpressed.
“Another lost soul,” said the cat woman and clicked her tongue. “From the Other World, aren’t you? I can tell. You have that pop-eyed look about you.”
“Pop-eyed? Yes, I see it,” agreed the dog woman. “Also, sort of high-strung. It’s all in the eyes, Minerva.”
“Indeed,” said the cat woman, the apparent Minerva, and extended her arm, appraising her pink-polished fingernails. Her hand was a human hand. So was her arm. The only part of her that was a cat was her head. She was wearing a pink party dress that was low cut, revealing her enormous cleavage, and further down, her waist was tiny. Her head was the head of an orange tabby.
The dog woman, meanwhile, was dressed rather like a stereotypical butch lesbian, Kate thought. She was wearing a red flannel shirt open over a black t-shirt, and her human hands were devoid of nail polish, the nails cut very short. Hers was the head of a rather forlorn beagle. She took another sip of lemonade, eying Kate with her doleful eyes.
“Do you think we could make her like us?” the beagle woman asked the cat woman.
Minerva eyed Kate as well, then suddenly yawned wide, showing razor-sharp fangs as her whiskers lifted. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Astrid. The girl has been here five minutes! Most of the Other Worlders don’t last one day.”
“Hmm. That’s true,” said the beagle woman, but her dull, lazy eyes were still fixed on Kate – but with much interest now.
Kate took a step forward, steeling herself. “Um . . . excuse me? Could you tell me where I am?”
“You’re in the Dreamscape,” said the child with the gray mouse’s head. She, like the butch dog woman, was wearing rather tomboyish clothing: cargo pants, boots, and a military jacket open over a white shirt with a yellow smiley face on it. Her mouse head was cloaked in a mane of white hair, and she had sat herself on the edge of the table and was licking her fingers of cake icing. The pink kite was streaming from one hand.
“The Dreamscape?” Kate repeated blankly.
“It’s what your kind call our world,” said Minerva, picking up a spoon and critically examining her reflection in the back of it. The spoon wasn’t enough, however. She shook her head impatiently, picked up her little pink purse from the table, and rifled through it before pulling out a compact mirror, which she opened with a snap.
“Darling,” Minerva said, observing herself crossly in the mirror, “are my whiskers still there? Did I lose a whisker? They look crumpled.”
“Your whiskers are fine, baby,” said the beagle woman almost absently. She seemed to have lost interest in Kate and was mournfully contemplating the last contents of her red plastic cup. Her smartphone was lying on the table, and it was white, so that it almost blended with the white picnic table. Kate could see images sailing over the screen but could not clearly make them out. The woman picked up the phone and scrolled through it dully with her thumb.
Minerva, meanwhile, continued scrutinizing her appearance, while the fat unicorn chomped away at the cake and the mouse child sucked her fingers of icing. No one was paying the least bit of attention to Kate.
Kate tried not to lose her patience. Getting any information out of these people was like pulling teeth. Then her stomach growled loudly. The mouse girl giggled.
“Sit down and eat,” said the child. “You’ll need the calories if you plan on wandering around the Dreamscape. Most humans do that when they first come here.”
Kate gratefully sat at the end of the table, grabbed a hotdog, topped it with ketchup, and bit into it. The hot meat and bread filling her mouth was heaven. She grabbed a fistful of potato chips next and crammed them in her mouth, savoring the salty taste, then she tipped back a red plastic cup of lemonade. She was eating so ravenously that it took her a moment to realize everyone at the table had stopped to stare at her – even the unicorn who’d been gnawing away at the cake.
The robot, which until now had been silent as it flipped burgers, tipped a burger onto the waiting buns on a paper plate, carried it over, and set it near Kate with a beep. Kate gratefully picked up the burger and bit into it.
“She said ‘bon appetit,’” translated the child. “Do you know French?”
“No,” said Kate around a mouthful of the burger.
“Plus c'est dommage,” said Minerva with a sniff.
“Her name’s Mini,” went on the child. She pointed proudly at herself, “And I’m Rusty. I like baseball.”
Kate thought that was sort of backwards: the robot was named Mini and the girl with the mouse head was named Rusty? But she didn’t say anything. She was still hungry and didn’t want to be sent away.
Rusty pointed at the beagle woman and the cat woman, “And that’s Astrid and Minerva, my parents.” She beamed.
A cat and a dog were the parents of a mouse? Make it make sense! Kate thought. Make any of this make sense!!! But knowing she must appease her hosts, she nodded politely at the table at large and said pleasantly, “A pleasure to meet all of you.”
“Finally—manners,” complained Minerva, snapping the compact mirror shut and examining her nails.
Kate was on the verge of asking how to leave the Dreamscape and return to her world when a loud noise like paper tearing made her look up. Someone had torn open the sky as if they were punching through a paper bag, and a silhouette was coming through. The people at the table leapt to their feet, screaming. The cat woman grabbed the mouse girl by the hand and pulled her away through the tall green grass.
“But my kite! We can’t leave my kite!” Rusty wailed, and indeed, her kite was sailing away across the sky, trailing its ribbons and string.
Minerva ignored Rusty, pulling her very fast through the field and glancing back several times in horror, her pink dress streaming in a beautiful cloud.
The beagle woman abandoned her red paper cup and followed the cat and the mouse, abandoning her smartphone in the process. “Run!” she barked, scrambling frantically though the grass. “Run! Run for your worthless lives!”
The unicorn, fat as it was, managed to pull itself up and run at a fantastic gallop across the field, eventually passing Minerva and Rusty and leaving them behind until it had disappeared in the distance, mane and tail streaming. That it could move so fast was so shocking that Kate merely stared after it with her mouth open for several seconds, watching its corpulent backside jiggle.
The lion under the table likewise scrambled from under, hit its head on the table—the table lurched – and took off at top speed, its golden mane visible above the tall grass.
“But what’s happening?” Kate begged over the swirling roar of the wind.
There was such a wind emanating from the tear in the sky that Kate’s pale blonde hair was slapping around her face, her clothes were beating against her, and she saw the paper plates and plastic cups go soaring away from the table and flipping across the clouds in the wind. The pink sky had become dreary gray, and storm clouds were gathering in the sudden dark. Then a hand – a black hand with long, jagged black nails – hooked on the edge of the tear in the sky. A black silhouette lifted its head, and eyes glowed like flames in the faceless void.
Kate screamed, falling backward off the picnic bench. She tumbled down in the grass, and she felt a rock smash painfully in the back of her shoulder. As she lay there gasping with pain, she lifted her face and saw Mini standing over her. The robot blinked, and though it had no mouth, she heard a voice coming from a buzzing speaker somewhere on its body, “She has come for you!”
Kate struggled to sit up on her elbow, her hair still beating around her face. “Who?!” she called above the wind.
“She rules the Dreamscape,” answered the robot, “and it seems she’s taken an interest in you! Come with me! We must get away!” The robot reached down.
Kate took the robot’s offered hands and was lifted easily to her feet. When she looked at the tear in the sky again, she saw not a black spirit but a woman – a woman with long blue hair. The woman’s hair was blowing in the wind, and her moon-shaped eyes were the color of the sea. Kate thought she was stunning and could not move.
The blue-haired woman couldn’t move either. She seemed stricken by the sight of Kate and just stood there, the wind beating about her. It took Kate a moment to realize the wind was coming from the woman, and as they looked into each other’s eyes, it fell from a violent storm . . . to a gentle breeze. The gray sky became pink again, the clouds cleared, birds sang, and flowers bloomed in a sudden carpet across the grass.
“What are you doing?” hissed the robot. “She’ll kill us!” And so saying, the robot grabbed Kate by the arm and dragged her away.
It took a great deal of effort for Kate to stop trying to look back over her shoulder at the blue-haired woman, who was still standing there, stunned, staring at her, her blue hair slapping around her in the soft breeze.
“This way!” the robot cried.
Kate looked ahead again and screamed: they were running straight for the edge of the world. She’d been wrong before: it was not a cliff. It was not a cliff!
“Are you crazy?!” Kate screeched as the robot dragged her toward the empty pink sky.
“It’s been suggested,” answered the robot, and without further ado, it leapt off the edge of the world, pulling Kate with it.
***
MRS. POTTERMORE SAT beside Kate’s bed, listening unhappily as the heart monitor beeped nearby. Her daughter had been in a coma for three hours. The accident had totaled her car, and it was a miracle that she had survived at all. A miracle, the doctor said, and it had only been three hours, the doctor said. All of it was to cheer her up, but Mrs. Pottermore did not want to laugh and smile and pretend everything was just fine. She wanted her fucking daughter back.
Mrs. Pottermore had aged well. She was a handsome woman in her late fifties, with gray hair cut in a short bob not unlike her daughter’s. She had taught ballet for twenty-five years, and as a result, her posture as she sat beside the hospital bed was rigid. Occasionally, she took out her compact mirror and examined her face, closed it and examined her nails. Being grief-stricken didn’t mean she had to look bad.
“I’m stepping out for a smoke,” said Mr. Pottermore. He was the exact opposite of his wife: hunched, bald, round-shouldered, and fat in the mid-section from long years of drinking. He was a piano teacher with dull, unenthusiastic eyes. As he was speaking, he scrolled through his smartphone with one thumb.
Mrs. Pottermore’s head snapped up. “Your daughter is in a coma!” she said in amazement.
“She’ll be in a coma whether I step out for a smoke or not,” said Mr. Pottermore indifferently.
Mrs. Pottermore stared at him as if she had never quite seen him before. “Your daughter is in a coma,” she repeated flatly. “A coma! You should be prostrate on the fucking floor, but you want to—”
“Do you have a lighter?” asked Mr. Pottermore calmly.
Mrs. Pottermore’s eyes about popped from her head. Lips tight with rage, she rummaged in her purse and pulled out a lighter, hurling it violently at her husband, who fumbled to catch it against his chest. His indifferent expression did not change. “Thank you,” he said. As he was walking away, his smartphone rang in his pocket. He pulled it out and answered, “Hello?”
Mrs. Pottermore stared after him in disgust, then turned back to the bed. Kate was lying on her back in a hospital gown, her blonde hair lying short and straight around her ears. She was pale and drained of blood from the head injury, and the bandages were still around her head, blank white against her hair.
“My little ballerina,” said Mrs. Pottermore, lashes fluttering out tears. “Don’t worry about your father. Mommy is always here. If only you could hear me . . .”
***
KATE COULD HEAR HERSELF screaming and screaming, a long and endless “Ahhhhhh!” that seemed to echo around her as if she were in a cave. Then suddenly, she felt her feet touch solid ground again, and the robot’s heavy metal hands were shaking her gently, begging her to stop yelling.
“Come on!” the robot pleaded. “You’re killing me!”
Kate stopped screaming. She opened her eyes and glanced around. She and the robot were surrounded by stars in a black sky. The sky was so close, it felt like a wall. There was no ground, no trees, no . . . thing. Just endless starry sky. Kate was afraid to move for fear of falling into the bottomless nothing, but when she glanced down, to her relief, there was no sky under her feet as she had expected. Instead, she was standing in the grass, in the center of a field, as if the grass had suddenly materialized there. In the distance, to the right, there were trees, and to the left, a staircase. Her eyes followed the staircase up, and she realized it led back to the field with the pink sky and the green grass, to the place where she had first entered the Dreamscape.
“We couldn’t have just taken the stairs?” Kate complained.
“Jumping was faster,” said the robot. She took Kate’s hand. “Come on. Into the forest! You don’t want Juniper to catch you!”
Kate frowned as she was tugged along. “But who is Juniper?” she begged.
The robot, incapable of running out of breath, was able to answer, “She’s a witch. She rules the Dreamscape, and she’s very powerful. Usually when humans bumble in here, she toys with them, makes them do stupid things like eat pudding upside down . . . or feeds them to her fish.”
Kate frowned again. “What?”
“If she catches you,” went on the robot, “you’ll be another plaything.”
“Maybe I want her to catch me,” said Kate dreamily. The woman had had the most beautiful sea-colored eyes.
The robot halted in its tracks and stared at Kate, and though its metal face was incapable of expression, she could tell it was horrified by what she had said. Something in its posture screamed disbelief.
“Juniper doesn’t love any of the mortals who come here,” said Mini gravely, “so if you thought she’d hold your hand and skip through the fields with you, put the notion out of your head right now. Though I will admit . . . she did seem interested in you. The look in her eyes . . . I’ve never seen her look at a woman that way before.”
Kate’s heart skipped a beat.
The robot turned and raced toward the trees again, pulling Kate along. “Hurry!” she said. “Juniper won’t follow us in here – I mean, she will, but it will be hard for her to find us. We shall disguise ourselves.”
“How?” wondered Kate.
They passed into the dark forest at last. The trees here were brown, smooth as metal poles, enormous, and solemn, and things growled and scurried in their shadows. A narrow stone path had been marked, and when the robot passed down it, her metal feet tip-tapped with every step.
“But won’t she hear us?” Kate protested. “You’re making an awful lot of noise!”
“We shall disguise ourselves, I told you!” snapped the robot impatiently.
They had gone a few feet when mushrooms appeared either side of the path, and the robot stopped again.
“Eat,” the robot said, pointing to a cluster of large orange mushrooms. “Just a bite will do.”
Kate’s nose wrinkled. She did not like the idea of eating a raw mushroom from a foreign place, but then again, she wasn’t certain what sane person would. It was rather like taking candy from a stranger. She thought she would be a fool to do it.
“You want me to eat a mushroom,” said Kate skeptically. “I’ve known you all of six seconds!”
“I’m trying to help you, fool!” the robot returned, and her buzzing voice was becoming a little frantic.
“For all I know,” said Kate, “you’ve lied to me. Perhaps this Juniper woman is the good one and you’re the bad one!”
The robot sighed, and her thin metal arms swung down at her sides, as if she were slouching. She shook her rectangular head, and Kate felt guilty – perhaps even silly and paranoid—for making a fuss. Then she remembered how Juniper had emerged from the sky as a black monster, and deciding to trust the robot, she meekly plucked a giant mushroom in both hands.
“Good. You’ve got sense after all. Oh, and here,” said the robot, and Kate saw her take a white smartphone from the compartment door on her side. She offered it to Kate. “Astrid left it behind. Might come in handy.”
Kate took the smartphone and stared at it. The screen was glowing and images of naked women with cat heads were streaming by in various provocative positions. Kate’s cheeks blushed bright when she saw one woman with her thighs spread, cupping her breasts, and she quickly closed the tab with her thumb.
“Hurry,” said Mini, whose head had rotated toward the edge of the forest. “She’s coming! I will turn into a toy dinosaur, by the way. Please don’t leave me behind.”
“R-Right,” said Kate shakily. She looked apprehensively at the giant mushroom in her hands, then after hesitating, she took a big bite from its dome. It was like eating an eraser, but she swallowed it down. A second later, she saw sprinkles of light swirling around her and felt herself shooting down and down, saw the world sailing away higher and higher, until everything towered over her. Kate screamed softly, patting her face and body. She was a child – a small, helpless child, perhaps no older than four.
“Mini—help!” Kate wailed, but when she looked across, she saw the robot slide a mushroom through the compartment in her neck, and then – with a pop and a sprinkle of light – Mini had vanished, replaced by a tiny toy dinosaur in the grass.
Kate bent down and picked up the toy dinosaur. It was a triceratops. An orange triceratops. “Curiouser and curiouser,” she said, bringing the toy close to her eyes.
Before Kate had a chance to fully register what had happened, however, there was a terrible whooshing of air, and she staggered back as the blue-haired woman suddenly appeared, having run with supernatural speed toward her. Now that she was a child, Kate felt dwarfed by the woman’s height. Juniper must have been six feet tall, and Kate had to crane her neck to look up at her from her tiny toddler’s position.
Juniper, wrapped in a long blue cape, gazed down on Kate from her great height, and her sea-colored eyes glittered disdain. Kate was startled by how much hatred and annoyance the woman expressed toward what she perceived to be a little child.
“Another shade pretending to be a child?” said Juniper with great irritation. “You know I can’t stand these games. Quickly – Did a woman and a robot pass by here?”
“They did, my lady,” answered Kate in her squeaky child’s voice. She didn’t know why, but she had the feeling that adding “my lady” was essential to tricking Juniper. She was right: Juniper was listening to her now with interest.
“Well?” Juniper snapped.
Kate pointed randomly. “They went that way!”
Juniper looked where Kate had pointed. “In the direction of the head fields, I suppose,” she said, more to herself than Kate. “Makes sense.” With her destination set, the witch was gliding off in the direction Kate had indicated, when Kate – shocked by her own foolishness – suddenly blurted, “But why do you want this woman so badly, my lady?”
Kate thought she felt the little toy dinosaur wiggle in protest in her hand.
Juniper whirled and gazed coldly down at Kate, and for a moment, the malice and disdain had returned, as if Kate was indeed foolish for having dared to question the queen of the Dreamscape. But to Kate’s surprise, something in the woman’s eyes softened, and she said with a dreamy sort of voice, “You are one of my shades, are you not? Then you know I grow weary of ruling the Dreamscape alone. Long have I sought a mate, but no woman ever thrilled me until just a few moments ago. My heart sings for her. I must find her.”
Kate’s heart was racing, and she knew her fat child’s cheeks were pink. She bowed her head and murmured in her squeaky voice, “My lady . . .”
Juniper nodded in turn and swept away with a swirl of her great cape, running so fast through the trees, she became a blur. Kate almost felt guilty for tricking her and sending her in the wrong direction. She didn’t understand how or why Juniper was dangerous or why Mini had scolded her for wanting to be taken by the woman.
Not knowing what else to do, Kate set off through the trees, waddling on her short toddler legs, the toy dinosaur in hand. About ten minutes passed, and then the enchantment wore off. She felt herself shoot upward in a shower of sparkles, and the toy dinosaur fell from her hand in a similar shower and returned with a pop to a robot.
Breathless from the sudden change, Kate touched her face and her chest and was relieved to find herself the same as before.
Mini folded her silver metal arms in great disapproval. “I can’t believe you spoke to her.”
“What’s so wrong with that?” returned Kate irritably. “She’s not as evil as you say. She seems lonely and . . .”
“And quite taken with you,” said the robot reprovingly, “and you’re quite taken with her!” She stepped close, gripping Kate by the shoulders. “Listen to me! Whatever you’re feeling, you must fight it! Fight it! Because if you don’t, you will never return to your world! Your lust for Juniper will trap you here forever!”
“L-Lust . . .? I don’t l-lust . . .” Kate stammered, embarrassed.
The robot shook her head and turned away, leading Kate on through the trees.
“I may be a robot,” Mini said, “but I know lust when I see it. If you don’t fight what you feel, you will be trapped here.”
Kate tripped over a branch in the underbrush and staggered on, following the robot with her head down in thought. She suddenly realized she didn’t care if she never returned to her world. What would she be returning to? A dead-end job that she hated? Expensive car repairs? A loveless life with no partner? Her indifferent goldfish? Homophobia?
The Dreamscape seemed so beautiful and surreal by comparison. Even here in the dark forest, there was beauty in the twist of the trees, the sky awash with stars, the night flowers blossoming in the sweet-smelling wind. She had lost one of her ballet slippers long ago, and the earth felt cool and soft beneath her bare foot. She clenched her toes in the soil and did not want her feet to leave it.
Kate watched curiously as Mini suddenly turned off the path and walked toward what appeared to be a door. The door stood between two trees, devoid of a building, partially open to reveal a line of pale white light.
“Where are we going now?” Kate asked, following Mini to the door.
“You don’t believe Juniper is dangerous,” answered Mini, “so I will prove it to you.” So saying, Mini opened the door and stepped inside.
Kate followed and halted almost immediately: a field of black, barren earth stretched away to the horizon, and buried in the soil to their necks were hundreds, thousands of people, all wailing and screaming and sobbing as the giant moon shone its pale light over their contorted faces. A sea of heads. Thousands and thousands of heads. The cacophony was enough to make her ears bleed. Kate backed away through the door, and Mini followed, closing the door behind them, so that the screams were abruptly silenced.
Kate took her hands from her ears. “What was that?”
“One of the many places Juniper stores the Other Worlders who come here. Back in your world, they remain in a coma until they die, and then they are trapped here forever. They cannot escape while buried here in the mud.” The robot fell silent, arms folded, and seemed to be waiting.
Kate shook her head. “I just don’t understand. How could she be so cruel and yet . . . the way she looked at me . . .”
“Shades are creatures of duality,” said Mini calmly. “Remember when the portal tear first opened over the picnic, and that black creature came through?”
Kate nodded, remembering the black creature with disdain. She refused to believe Juniper had really been that . . . thing!
“That was Juniper,” said Mini, picking up on the stubborn disbelief in Kate’s eyes. “Or one side of her, anyway. When she saw you . . . She changed. She immediately took on her gentler human form.”
“And everything became quieter,” said Kate, smiling as she remembered.
“It’s true you calm something in her. I won’t pretend otherwise,” said Mini grudgingly. “But she is not human. You will never understand her ways.” The robot’s head rotated away, and its body smoothly followed. “Now come. I will take you to a place you can hide. The exits are probably being guarded by shades now.”
Kate followed, still thinking dreamily of Juniper’s sea-colored eyes. “But why is she like that? I mean, what is a shade?”
“Before the Corruption, they were just normal people,” answered Mini. “Juniper ruled us with kindness and fairness, and her people nurtured the dreams of mortals, not terrorized them. Now she and her people are sick. They arrest and jail us, raid our homes, torment us—We were lucky not to have been captured and jailed for our little picnic today. I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if Minerva and Rusty hadn’t been caught. Juniper only noticed us because she sensed your arrival. She monitors all the entry points.”
Kate felt a surge of guilt, knowing that if she hadn’t shown up, Mini and her friends would not have been discovered. She hoped the little family of half-beasts had escaped.
“Can’t anything be done to heal Juniper?”
“As if no one had ever tried,” said the robot with a sad, buzzing sigh. She halted, her back to Kate. “Please tell me you’re not thinking of—!”
“No, no! I just want to understand this place,” Kate quickly lied.
The robot’s head rotated around on her neck and her eyes narrowed on Kate suspiciously. After deciding Kate was telling the truth, her head rotated back around, and she kept walking. Kate followed again.
“To heal Juniper, one would have to take a crystal shard,” answered the robot, “and plunge it into her heart. Of course, no one has ever gotten close enough to do it. She doesn’t let people get close.”
I bet she would let me get close, thought Kate.
“Where would you find a crystal shard?” Kate asked, trying to sound casually interested, but she knew the robot suspected her immediately.
“Put the thought from your mind!” snapped Mini. “As if you could just waltz in here and fix everything! You’re just a human who got hurt in a car accident. There’s nothing you can do.”
Kate frowned. “How do you know about the car accident?”
Mini did not answer her and went on, “No more of this. I will help you hide, and when Juniper gives up the chase, you can return to your body in your own world. It isn’t safe for you here.”
But Kate followed in silence, knowing she had already decided to try saving Juniper.
They walked for some time in silence, passing through the solemn trees as the dark knight and the winking stars remained ever fixed beyond, like a liquid painting. Kate looked at the sky and wondered if it was real. Nothing was real in place. She had the sneaking suspicion that she could walk up to the sky and slap it down like a theater backdrop.
But Kate also had the feeling that some things here were real. What was real and what was fake? That might have been the key to surviving here. But did she really want to stay here? She thought of the heads in the field, screaming and weeping, and wondered how it was possible that Juniper – Juniper with her doting sea-colored eyes – could have done something so monstrous.
As they continued forward through the trees, Kate noticed another building-less door up ahead. It stood between the trees, slightly adjust, white light spilling forth from it in a blazing line.
“There!” said the robot and burst into a run, her thin legs almost windmilling. Kate saw her yank the door open, revealing a doorway filled with blinding white light. The robot ran into the light without looking back.
Kate was running after Mini when a cold shadow fell over her. She felt it before she had even turned her head: the blast of cold hair, the prickles on her skin. Blonde hair and clothes slapping and beating against her in the sudden wind, she turned her head and screamed: a black monster was running toward her in a blur, is eyes glowing like candles, its body twisted and long as a snake.
Seeing Kate’s face, the monster’s eyes seemed to glow brighter with something like greed, and it snatched Kate into its arms. Kate struggled and screamed. She could feel the monster’s arms holding her tight, squeezing almost frantically to keep her from breaking free. She could see nothing but darkness and the cold wind was beating about her relentlessly. One of the monster’s claws tried to cover her mouth to silence her, but she twisted away so that her back was to it, and as she wiggled to get free, her pink camisole top slipped down over one shoulder, and one of her breasts pushed free of the fabric, standing high and supple, the pink nipple rigid in the cold.
Almost immediately, the blackness swarming Kare disappeared, the wind collapsed to a soft breeze, and the smell of flowers filled Kate’s nostrils. Breathless and flushed from the struggle to get away, Kate looked down and realized with a jolt that she was no longer being embraced by darkness but by arms – the slender, pale arms of a woman. Panting, she looked over shoulder and her heart skipped a beat: Juniper was gazing down at Kate, her sea-colored eyes wide in fascination, her pink lips parted, her blue hair floating gently around her, as if she were underwater.
Kate stared back, just as smitten. All the fear and panic left her, and she relaxed in Juniper’s arms, suddenly quite content to be there.
“How dare you be so beautiful,” Juniper quietly scolded. “Mortals aren’t supposed to have this power over me.”
Kate scowled and was on the verge of protesting that she had no control over how she looked when she felt Juniper’s soft hand cup her naked breast from under, hefting it gently. Kate blushed to her hairline as her breast was carefully stroked. Juniper’s fingers were skilled and caressed her pleasantly, smoothing along the shape of her breast to the nipple, which she rolled delicately in her fingers. Kate bit her lip as arousal flushed through her sex.
“You have stopped struggling,” whispered Juniper. “A pity. I liked it when you struggled. Your tits jiggled everywhere.”
Kate didn’t have a chance to answer, for Juniper had leaned down and was kissing her cheek. Slow, careful kisses trailed from cheek to neck to shoulder, then Juniper squeezed her breast hard, and the woman’s other hand smoothed down, slipping down the front of Kate’s skirt. Kate blushed when she realized she wasn’t wearing panties. Why wasn’t she wearing panties?
But all questions flew from Kate’s mind when she felt Juniper’s fingers caress her pumping clitoris. The strokes were soft and careful, as if Juniper were afraid of hurting her. Then Juniper’s fingers slid carefully inside Kate’s sex, pushing through the fat pink lips, and Kate sighed, her head falling back against the taller woman, her thighs trembling as the moisture dripped down them. Was this really happening? Was Juniper really standing here, in the middle of the forest, making love to her? And there she was, finally caught in the witch’s embrace with no desire any longer to run.
Yes, God, touch me . . . Kate thought, moaning as she was fingered, as her breast was stroked, as Juniper’s kisses on her neck and shoulder intensified. Her eyes flew open wide, and she gasped, staring blankly into space, as she trembled through an orgasm. She shuddered and gave in to the sweet release, letting her head fall back, thrusting her breasts, and Juniper kissed her cheek and neck frantically in silent approval.
“Yes, give in to your ecstasy, my little flower. My god, you’re beautiful,” Juniper whispered. “And your pussy is so wet for me. Do you think I’m beautiful too—?”
“No!” Kate suddenly shouted. This wasn’t happening – this wasn’t happening! Juniper was a monster! She’d seen it herself!
Horrified, Kate broke free of Juniper’s arms, and the sorceress stood there, baffled and sad, as Kate – tousled, blushing, and undone – ran for the doorway and its bright light.
“You can run, Kate,” Juniper called as Kate ran, “but I will always find you! I will always come! For I know now that you crave me as surely as I crave you!”
Heart pounding in her ears, Kate ran through the light and to the other side.