“What?” The Reader looked fearful. “What are you going to do?”

Alice ate him. He tasted sweet, like a sticky gumdrop, and she chewed thoughtfully a few times before swallowing him down.

“Monster!” someone shouted. “You’re a monster!”

She looked around, huge body coiling. The maze was gone, and in its place was a city street. Standing alone on the pavement was her father, in the nightshirt she’d seen him wearing in the magic mirror, pointing a trembling finger at her.

“No,” Alice said. “Father, it’s me. You don’t understand.”

“Kill it!” Her father bent over, picked up a stone, and hurled it at her. It struck her in the face, and the impact hurt, in spite of all her size and armor. “Come on, help me!”

A small crowd was gathering. There was Miss Juniper, her tutor, and Cooper, her father’s man. Mr. Pallworthy the lawyer was there, and the postman who’d always said hello to her as he went about his rounds, the librarian from the Carnegie Library, and the man who sold her favorite candy in Grand Central Station. And more, faces she couldn’t put names to, everyone she’d known in the days before Geryon had come into her life and wrenched it onto a new course. Now they were all grabbing stones and throwing them at her, and she shrank under the barrage.

“Wait!” she shouted. “Father, it’s me, it’s Alice! Please!”

It was because she still had the Dragon’s shape, she realized. Hurriedly, she fumbled with her threads, trying to uncoil the black one that led to the Dragon and return to human form. But her mental grip slipped off it, as though it were coated in ice, and no matter how hard she tried, the control she needed wouldn’t come.

“Kill it!” her father screamed. “Kill it!”

Wailing, Alice turned and ran, pursued by a rain of stones.

She opened her eyes as the light of sunset painted her room orange. The old toys in the window threw enormous, rabbit-shaped shadows across the floor. Alice lay still for a moment, breathing hard, as the remnants of the dream chased themselves around and around inside her head.

Father . . .

Carefully, wincing at the aches in her muscles, she sat up and slid her legs out of bed.

She couldn’t shake off the memory of her father’s face in the dream. Twisted up, not with hate or rage, but something even worse. Disapproval? Disappointment?