Mister Edwards muttered, “Maybe he’s right inside waiting for me? Maybe I don’t have to . . .” He ran his paw over his ears. “Maybe we don’t have to fight the dragon at all.” He furrowed his brow and shook his head. “But if we don’t go the right way, terrible things will happen, just like before.” He paced. “What if it’s a test? What if we fail and the Fate Spinner hurts Mister Amoureux? I’m scared to make the wrong decision.” He sobbed angrily. “I’m scared of her!”
The Fate Spinner. It always came back to her.
Annalise knelt beside the fox as black crows screamed. “I am, too. Mister Edwards, I’m scared of a lot of things.” She unclenched her fist. The tip of the spiraled black horn poked through her dark mark more than an inch. Gold smoke curled up from her palm in a stream, swam into the entrance of dragons, and vanished.
Whether Mister Edwards took the first path or not, she needed to trust the signs pointing to mirror three.
“Mister Edwards, I think you were right the first time. I think we need to go through the third mirror. I always choose the number four of things so I’m nervous, too. But,” she said, stroking her hair, “the third path is the only one that didn’t make my big hand lash out and burn with pain. And I don’t know why, but maybe that means something.” She glanced at him shyly. “Maybe now the thing inside my big hand wants us to beat the labyrinth, too. Maybe it can help us beat her. It did help save you earlier.”
Mister Edwards sighed. “You’re right. It does seem to be looking out for us.” He glanced wistfully at the first entrance. “And since we know we can’t trust anything on the Path of Illusion, and that the mirror of dragons led me to Dreamland once before, then yes. We should definitely stick with the plan.”
Annalise released a held breath. “I couldn’t agree more.”
The two stood before mirror three, side by side. Mister Edwards held his head higher, more confidently. He leaned closer to her and whispered, “The Fate Spinner made a mistake leading me to you. And if she’s angry about us taking her on together?” He snarled. “So be it.”
Laughter gusted through the glass before them on fiery winds. Annalise’s hair whipped in ribbons of purple, Mister Edwards’s fur blew this way and that.
The bitter stink of char and smoke wafting out from inside the mirror stung Annalise’s nose. The cries and screams of the dragons thumped the glass, walls, floor. Worry-thoughts swarmed, trying to suck her confidence away.
You’re going to fail.
Die.
Burn.
The dragons will rip you apart—
Stop.
Annalise clenched her big fist and remembered her dream: I wish to rule my own destiny and rid myself of this curse. Then she put on a brave smile for the trembling fox. “Please, after you.”
White crows appeared and cawed comfortingly high overhead.
The glass before them thinned to a curtain of smoke. Mister Edwards regarded her nervously but walked through the entrance head high. And Annalise followed.
As she stepped through the smoky veil, a shimmer of magic caught her eye. The writing on the mirror had changed.
There Be Dragons morphed into The Spinner of Fear. Annalise had just enough time to think the labyrinth tricked us before the Fate Spinner’s voice howled so loud it rattled the earth, “Inside the Path of Illusion, nothing is as it seems!”
The Fate Spinner’s laughter followed them to the other side.
Chapter 21
The Spider Takes the Fox
The red moon had tucked itself behind clouds, the world darkened to cinnamon and black. Annalise couldn’t see her hand in front of her, and the air was as thick as earth. She stumbled forward, feeling her way.
In the silence, screams of agony echoed from someplace below the labyrinth. Tiny sounds followed. The scuttling of many-legged creatures scraped by her feet in the dark.
Only one thing makes that sound, Annalise thought. A thing with too many eyes and legs and fangs, like her dark worry-thoughts. A thing like—
Spiders.
One-Two-Three-Four.
“Mister Edwards?” The scurrying grew louder. Her skin ignited with squirming nerves desperate to run. She scanned for any sign of spiders or her friend, but it was too dark to see. This is wrong. You’ve taken a wrong turn. Go back! Annalise spun around, hand out, searching for the way they’d entered, and felt solid wall.
The entrance had already sealed.
Tiny legs brushed past her ankles. Annalise jumped. She cried out and darted ahead through the blackness, almost too heavy to move.
“Mister Edwards!” The scraping and scuttling grew louder and more frequent. Things wriggled in her hair. She sprinted faster, shaking her arms and body and batting around her head.
“Mister Edwards. WHERE ARE YOU?”
Annalise ran, arms out, straight into a wall. Both hands broke her fall. And both flared in pain.
Cradling her hands to her chest, Annalise staggered right. Whispers of tiny monsters rushed past her feet. Suddenly, her big hand throbbed with sharp lashings of pain—each step forward made it hurt even more. “Mister Edwards!”
Then softly, “Miss Meriwether?”
“Mister Edwards?” Annalise skidded to a halt.
“I can’t see you!” He sounded frantic and too far away. “The Fate Spinner tricked us. She—” His voice cut off at the end.
“Tell me where you are.” Annalise rushed along the slippery, moss-covered corridor, following his voice. The stones got slipperier and slipperier; the horned creature below her dark mark stretched and grew.
“Something’s got me—” He sounded closer. “Keep going—you’ll find the mirror . . . I’m . . .” He screamed. “Hurry!”
Breathing heavy with adrenaline, Annalise pitched ahead in the rusty dark, chasing his voice, until she couldn’t run anymore.
Gauzy strings dangled from above—sliding over her face, sticking in her hair. The farther she drew up the corridor, the thicker the strings became.
Webs. The word spun through her mind.
“Mister Edwards?” Water dripped somewhere close by. The damp tang of swamp clung to her skin. Annalise gulped and licked her lips; she’d never been so parched or famished in her life. “Mister Edwards, keep talking so I can follow your voice.”
“You’re almost there.” He sounded so close, but she still couldn’t see him.
Annalise brushed sticky webbing from her clothes. The pulse of the beast in her hand quickened and thrashed. “I’m coming, Mister Edwards—hang on!”
The red moon suddenly returned to the sky, and a pink blush illuminated the corridor. Annalise found herself at another dead end. And there, strung up in the shadows against the hundred-foot wall, was the largest spiderweb Annalise had ever seen.
“Mercy,” Annalise said as too many yellow eyes opened in the dark.
An enormous spider the size of a car, half in moonlight, half in shadow, sat in the center of a gargantuan silver-rose web. Its body, like the ones she’d seen in the mirror chasing her parents through the maze, was pure white. The spider’s legs moved swiftly in the shadows, spinning something Annalise couldn’t see. Annalise’s heart slapped her bones hard, again and again. She wanted to cry. To quit and go home. To wake up from this nightmare in the arms of her parents, in a world where they were safe and sound. But until she finished what she started, her world would never change. And if that meant fighting this monster to beat the Fate Spinner, so be it.
But where was Mister Edwards?
“Greetings,” the spider hissed from the shadows. Her voice was warm and inviting, like a mother’s, like a friend’s. Annalise’s marked hand burned and tried to pull her forward. She had to restrain it before it got her killed. “I know who you are,” the goliath cooed. “Your name is Annalise.”
The beast pushed her head and front legs into the red moonlight. She wasn’t an ordinary spider but a skeleton, made of mirrors and bones. She had slim multijointed legs—many, many legs. Her shel
l bore not a hint of hair. Her hollow skull-eyes held mirrors, each reflecting a frightened Annalise. At the bone spider’s feet, the meal she’d been spinning came to light.
Held between her skeletal front legs was a lifeless, three-legged black fox. “Mister Edwards!” His tongue lolled from his muzzle; his eyes wide, stared blankly, unconscious. Annalise stiffened. She forced herself to take four steps forward. “What are you doing with my friend?”
I need to free him, but how?
I wish I had The Book of Remembering!
The spider’s mandibles snapped. “That is the wrong question,” she said with a grin. The spider’s breath stank of carcasses too long in the sun. “Ask the right question, and maybe I won’t suck your friend dry—yet.” Spin, spin, spin, spin. “Here’s a hint to get you started. I knew your grandparents once. Shame, don’t you think, what happened to them?”
My grandparents? Annalise grazed the four ribbons on her braid.
They’d left on a train. Did they end up here, too?
“How do you know my grandparents?” Annalise asked. The bone spider’s mirrored eyes drew closer, staring straight through her soul. “Did the Fate Spinner put you up to this?”
“Delightful,” the spider hissed, scuttling down from her web. Annalise took several steps back. “Those are the right questions.” A creeping grin slipped up the spider’s skull as she wrapped the fox’s face in another layer of silver webbing. “I am not permitted to answer your first question, but I can answer your last.” Spin, spin, spin, spin. “The Fate Spinner cannot control me but does know I rather enjoy trapping deliciously plump little foxes.” Her mirrored eyes flashed. “And those who think themselves better than their given fates.”
The spire beneath Annalise’s dark mark pushed against her skin. Her monster had helped her before, and Annalise felt it wanted to help her now. Not yet, she whispered in the quiet of her mind, hoping her horned monster heard her.
Her black mark zinged in reply.
Annalise hid a smile, counted to four, and forced herself to meet the spider’s eyes. “I feel everyone deserves a chance to figure their fate out for themselves, don’t you?”
The bone spider sprang forward, mandibles snapping a foot away from Annalise’s nose. “I can see right through you, Annalise! You’re a child. Too weak for this labyrinth. Too kind to sacrifice this useless fox to get to your dreams. Too sentimental to accept the offer I’m about to make you.” Annalise wanted to run from the terror before her but forced herself to stand. After the right number of seconds, the beast finally moved.
The spider hung the cocoon holding Mister Edwards like a decoration from the top of her web, dangling in the pale ruby light. The air pushed in close—thick enough to taste: moss, humidity, death, the sudden chill of ghosts.
“What sort of offer?” Annalise asked, hoping her fear didn’t show.
The bone spider grinned. “I will return the black fox to you and let you pass. But, you must give me something in return.”
Pulse whipping a fury through her veins, Annalise forced her gaze from poor Mister Edwards and onto the spider. “What would you want?”
The spider gestured one long, thin leg toward Annalise’s hidden big hand. “Something you don’t want anyway,” she hissed. “Your cursed hand.”
Night wolves howled inside the labyrinth, just out of sight.
They’d wanted her big hand, too.
Annalise’s black mark seared angrily. She assured the creature hidden within her big hand that it was almost time. “What do you want with my curse?”
“Wrong question.” The spider neared Mister Edwards’s cocoon. “I, too, am a prisoner of fate. I can’t answer that question, same as I can’t rip the hand from your body and suck the life from it, much as I’d like to.” She snapped her mandibles and perched them before the cocoon. “I’d crumble to dust if I tried, thanks to the old magic governing the labyrinth. So if you do not surrender your large hand willingly, you will go no farther and you’ll never see your friend again. That is my price.”
Movement from Mister Edwards’s cocoon caught Annalise’s attention. His front paw slipped from the webbing and flexed. He was alive!
A thrill of power shot through Annalise from her dark mark to her heart. Her whole body seemed to electrify. She’d never felt so powerful and brave. “And if I refuse?”
The spider pinched her mandibles hard against the cocoon. Mister Edwards screamed, then wilted like a dying rose. “The fox is mine.” Snow-tipped mountains, blue sky, caves, and seas reflected in her ocular mirrors. “You’re not the only one with dreams, you know. I’ve always wanted to travel. To live a life of peace in a distant land. And if I give your cursed hand to the Fate Spinner”—Annalise’s big palm jerked forward like a dog on a chain; Annalise held it back—“I’ll be granted freedom from this prison of fate.”
The bone spider left Mister Edwards and faced Annalise. “From one dreamer to another, let me take your curse off your hands and set your beloved Mister Edwards free. What say you, child of Fate? Do we have an accord?”
Annalise tapped her leg by fours, remembering the kindnesses of the fox, the first in her history to truly be her friend. She thought about how she’d feel betraying him, leaving him to die. She couldn’t do it. That wasn’t her. Not only that, but she’d never reach the labyrinth’s end.
The spider clicked her bone legs on the stone floor. Her mirrored eyes narrowed onto Annalise. “Choose, Miss Meriwether.” The spider salivated and moved inches from Annalise’s cursed hand. “My hunger for dreams grows.”
“No.” Annalise took a few steps back, stomach churning. “I won’t surrender my hand or the life of my friend, and I won’t dishonor or surrender our dreams by giving in to you and the Fate Spinner.” Annalise sharpened her voice. “I have come for the Spinner of Dreams and I’m not leaving the Mazelands until I find her.”
“If that’s what you want,” the beast growled, engorging to her full height. She shrieked, “May the best Spinner win!”
Annalise shouted to her big hand in the quiet of her mind, Now! and thrust it from her cloak. Fire flared from her marked palm. The sharp spire ripped free, longer than ever.
And the bone beast lunged forward to bite.
Annalise gripped the spider’s front leg; her horn stabbed straight through. Power flooded through her hand—big and bright as angels, sizzling with golden light. The spider shrieked and thrashed her legs, tossing Annalise into the air.
Then Annalise let go.
“How dare you!” the thing shouted in warbled speech as Annalise crashed to the ground. The stench of burnt skeleton filled the cavern-like room. The spider’s bone feet smacked the ground around her so hard, each strike cracked the stone.
Annalise dodged while whispering to the one within her big hand: Now show me what else you can do!
She darted toward Mister Edwards, dangling from the web. Hundreds of tiny skull-and-bone spiders scuttled over the walls after her. Another shock of power surged through her black mark, followed by a stream of gold flames. The swarm of spiders screamed but didn’t stop coming.
Annalise spun in a circle, aiming the fire-blast at the unnatural beasts until they scuttled over the wall, exoskeletons ablaze. The giant spider hissed, raised her front legs, and jumped through a cloud of flames. Annalise watched the giantess fly toward her in slow motion, and in each of the spider’s mirrored eyes, she saw the Fate Spinner grinning back at her.
Annalise glared and took aim. “I guess,” she shouted, not unkindly, “the best Spinner is me.” And with one clean shot, Annalise blew the giant bone spider away.
Seconds before the poor creature crumbled to dust, her mirrored eyes reflected blue skies and mountains, caves and seas of faraway lands. Annalise watched respectfully as the spider’s dreams went up in flames. “I’m sorry you didn’t get your dream,” Annalise told the sad beast, and reined in her flame. “Wherever you are, I wish you peace.”
The spider’s spirit rose from h
er ashes. No longer a beast of mirror and bone, the giant was covered in golden fur and had lovely dark eyes. “Thank you for freeing me,” the spider’s spirit said. “Not in the way I’d imagined, but a better one—a freedom outside of fate. Enjoy your reward, dreamer. I was going to gift you a truth but felt you needed this more.”
Lying atop the spider’s bone dust rested an item illuminated in gold. Annalise hurried over and grabbed it, grinning from ear to ear.
The bone spider had found her lost book.
“This book is the first of three magical items hidden within the labyrinth that will help guide you toward the labyrinth’s end. When next you open this binding, clues to an ancient mystery will be revealed. And when you pass through the door after the next, a memory you’ll need to survive will return. Fight well, Warrior of Dreams. And may the magic of dreams be yours.” The spider’s spirit vanished in a burst of sheer golden light.
With a shy, proud sort of grin, Annalise slipped The Book of Remembering into her cloak pocket and scrambled to the top of the web. She sliced Mister Edwards free and climbed down with him cradled in her arms.
The black fox she’d come to love hung limp against her. He wasn’t moving or breathing. “Mister Edwards, wake up!”
Suddenly, the spiderweb blocking the dead end shriveled and disappeared, revealing a small door shimmering in rainbow glitter. Upon it were scrolled four words:
The Room of Secrets.
“Stay with me, Mister Edwards. Something wonderful is inside, I can feel it.”
Chapter 22
A Feast Fit for a Queen
With the fox out cold in her arms, Annalise shouldered open the door and crawled inside. The second she entered, the small door vanished in a whoosh of black flame. Gone were the stone blocks of the labyrinth, the sharp-leafed ivy, the red moon, the dark, the grim. Annalise found herself in a sunlit room the height and length of a couch. Four tiny doors on each side were decorated with mirrors of shimmering gold, though they reflected nothing within. A floor of lush grass below, a skylight framing a lilac sky above, the room was so short that Annalise could barely sit up straight. But it felt safe.
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