The Collectors' Society 01 by Heather Lyons Read Free Book Online

but I swallow it back as he drops into the chair next to me. There’s concern in those blue-gray eyes of his, concern that has no right to be there.
    He doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know my experiences. If he did, the concern would go running into the distance.
    I haven’t been okay in nearly a year.
    I sip the water slowly. It’s icy cold, allowing me to trace its path down into my stomach. “I am fine, thank you.”
    Finn leans back into the chair. “Are you a reader?”
    I slide the glass back onto the table. “I feel as if my day is looping, because Mary asked the same of me less than an hour prior. It leaves me to assume I’ve been brought to the future to discuss literature rather than save Wonderland.”
    He lifts a hand to scratch his forehead. “Actually, as weird as it may seem, you are here to do both.”
    It’s enough to give me pause, and for the door to open and bring with it Van Brunt. “My apologies.” No doubt taking in what must surely be my pale countenance, he asks Finn, “What all have you told her?”
    Finn rises from his seat. “Not much. We’d only just begun.” He taps on the newspaper lying between us. “But I’ll leave it to you to finish the rest.” He turns to me, and once more I spy concern shining out from his eyes. “If you need anything, I’m in 1510.”
    Van Brunt lowers himself into the chair so recently vacated. “The Librarian awaits your field paperwork, Finn. I’d hate to think of what she’ll be like if it isn’t filed within the hour.”
    How interesting it is that this man’s name is familiar to Van Brunt’s lips. Along with Victor’s, they are the only one so far to be so.
    Finn slides the newspaper underneath his arm. “I’m on my way to do it right now.” When he makes his way to the door, I steal another glance just in time to watch him throw the paper away.
    “Well now,” Van Brunt says. “It’s time for those explanations, isn’t it?”

T HERE ARE MOMENTS IN one’s life that always leave a person wondering if they’re dreaming. I’ve had plenty of those moments—years of them, actually. In Wonderland, the amazing became mundane, and yet, the entire time I was there, I often speculated if I was in fact in England, asleep in my childhood bed. That perhaps I was riddled with fever, even close to my final sleep because I no longer questioned the extraordinary I lived through. Day after day, year after year, my existence devolved into one dream state after another until it was all I knew, all that I hoped for. All that I expected. When I was forced to leave it behind, and after I practically bargained my soul to do so, the promise of quiet, mundane events held me together when the urge to shatter into mindless grief and insanity proved nearly irresistible. For weeks, I was willingly restrained in a special coat that kept me from tearing my hair out, and lived in a room with soft walls that refused to allow self-harm. I howled, I raved, I frothed at the mouth. I tried to bite nurses who came to close, and I threatened to unleash an army against them more than once if they dared touch me.
    I plotted how I could go back. Prayed I could find an answer, that perhaps now I had the clarity to find what I could not then. And then I despaired when I accepted I couldn’t, shouldn’t, and wouldn’t.
    Slowly, but surely, I acclimated to my new existence. My days morphed into the regulated and predictable. People who surrounded me became reliable and steady. I was in an asylum, yes, but hope sprung that I could put that foot in front of the other and move on whether it was my wish or not.
    And now, here I am, a hundred and forty years in the future, with a man who possesses more secrets than any person I ever met in Wonderland, and I’m fearful I am once more trapped within a vicious cycle of unrealistic dreams.
    He wants to send me back. Is it even possible? And if it is, could I even allow it?
    “The Collectors’ Society,” Van Brunt says as he