🎃 🎃 🎃
I took off my hat when I returned to my room in Unicorn Dorm. I opened the curtains and watched Alice in front of the building until Jack arrived and threw the door open.
“She left,” he said.
“I know. I was watching.”
Alice was a beautiful student, dressed in the two-piece outfit I’d prepared for her. Her red hair, skirt, and ribbons swaying in the wind stirred a commotion in my heart.
I could almost certainly whisper “You look beautiful” in her ear to make her blush and tell me to stop. She was so strong, yet her delicate side came out whenever I wooed her. It was truly adorable.
Not that I can say that to her right now.
I’d fallen for a demon’s trap and turned back into a child. It was the age when I didn’t yet know how to hide my horns. My back had shrunk, my face was rounder, and my voice was higher.
A pair of sharp horns reflected on the window.
I couldn’t flirt with her like usual—not when I looked like this.
“Why’d you ignore her? It’s not like you.” Jack sat on the bed, irritated by my slight against his mistress.
Alice was his entire world. Leeds and the Tweedles were also devoted to protecting their happy family, which centered around Alice. It was a way of preserving that familial love she offered them as its head.
Their feelings were strong, just as they were righteous.
They weren’t constantly afraid that they would lose Alice to someone else unless they kept her attention at all times.
All I could think to do was ignore her so that she couldn’t get a good look at me in this pathetic state.
“Someone as pompous as you wouldn’t let a change in size bother him, I suppose,” I quipped.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Jack was annoyed, but his attitude was no different now that he was a child. That was because he had confidence in who he was as a person. His heart was untouchable, no matter what happened to his body.
“I’m saying that I’m not as strong as you.”
I left the window, casting my shadow on the bed in the light of the sunset.
Looking at my horns’ shadow reminded me of when I first met Alice. She came to the room that I’d locked myself away in, gave me the name “Rabbit,” and became my friend. She was an innocent, brave girl who’d grown up receiving lots of love.
Unlike me…
“If I change again, can I ask you not to tell Alice?” I requested of Jack.
“Change? Like get even smaller?”
“If only that was all.”
I smiled so as not to give a true answer.
I didn’t want my dear Alice and the Liddell boys to know the truth.
As someone clad in human skin, my true nature was something more horrific and wretched than anything they’d ever experienced.