Stolen by Shadows: A Paranormal Reverse Harem Romance (Into the Labyrinth Book 1)

by Evelyn Avery

  “It’s just getting late.” Still feeling uneasy, I turned away from the mirror. “Help me get this dress off.”

  Vaughn helped me out of the frothy concoction of the dress, moving quickly but with enough care to ensure it didn’t rip.

  He seemed a little unnerved when he caught the look on my face. “You don’t like it?”

  “It’s just not right,” I lied, pushing the dress into his arms so he would hang it back up. “We’ll keep looking.”

  “This is the closest thing to what you describe in the scene notes. If not this, then what did you have in mind?”

  An itch had started under my skin, and all I wanted to do was get out of there. “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know? You’re the one who wrote it. What were you thinking when you created the character?”

  “I have to go.” I didn’t wait for him to answer as I turned toward the door. “We can work on this some more next time.”

  Running made me a coward. But confronting my feelings meant trying to tell the difference between fantasy and reality, and I didn’t have the strength for that right now. Vaughn thought of me as quirky and eccentric, but still in the general range of normal. I wanted to keep it that way.

  “Izzy, wait—”

  But I was already shoving open the doors.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  I ran away, even though it was impossible to escape what only existed in your own mind.

  Someone once told me that creativity was the only natural outlet for madness.

  But that was just the sort of shit people said in mental hospitals.

  The idea that our individual psychoses somehow entitled us to special gifts of creativity helped keep the darkness of reality at bay. It was one of the few things that made the oppressive gray walls and forced medication regimens manageable. We all liked to pretend that without the constraints of society’s labels, we would be gods among men.

  Also known as delusions of grandeur, one of the things that shows up on many of the pages that I steal a look at when my chart is laid out on the table.

  Maybe it was because the people in charge treated art as therapy. Crayons and paints were cheap, and our time was meaningless. Stick us all in a room with some paper and art supplies, then call it a therapeutic intervention. Sounds a lot better than warehousing.

  Perhaps it was because I considered myself an artist even when my mind wasn’t going sideways, but the whole thing just kind of pissed me off.

  The girl down the hall who wrote her magnum opus on strips of toilet paper while not sleeping for three days straight wasn’t a creative genius. Just manic and off her meds.

  They made me paint as a condition of my release. Something about how it was the only way I would be able to confront my delusions and finally recognize they were false. The walls of my sad little room at the hospital eventually became covered in drawings and paintings of whatever fantastical thing I could think of: unicorns with knives for horns, creatures crawling over a mountain of bones, blood dripping from the red in the rainbow.

  I let them think I was working through my “issues” when really, I made up whatever shit I thought would make them happy.

  No one needed to see what I had seen.

  Even if it all existed entirely in my head, and I had a team of therapists and doctors insisting precisely that, it wasn’t a risk I was willing to take. I could never fight the idea that something terrible was coming for me. The doctors didn’t understand that I yearned for them to prove it to me, make me believe that all of it was a figment of my imagination.

  I wanted to be as crazy as they said I was because that was less scary than the alternative.

  Every so often, they tried a different technique or altered the cocktail of chemicals I forced down my throat several times a day. But let’s be honest, the only difference between jail and the psych ward was that everyone in jail knew what they had done to get there. The locks on the doors were just as thick and the rules just as inexplicably repressive. They watched us shave our legs and stuck fingers in our mouths after we took our pills, all in the interest of safety.

  Being committed just made it easier to believe that all the rules I imagined kept society in line no longer applied. It strengthened the delusion instead of convincing me that my memory was flawed.

  It took months of therapy before I would even consider the idea that the Underground and its monarch had been a figment of my overactive imagination. The specialist that my guardian flew in from Switzerland insisted that the traumas of my childhood had manifested themselves in this fantasy world where I could act out all the suffering that I couldn’t remember.

  He was an idiot. But at some point, I had to confront the idea that the world would never let me be unless I convinced them I didn’t believe in things that couldn’t be real. And the longer I pretended it was true and went along with them, the easier it was to actually accept the reality around me.

  Eventually, I managed to convince all of us, and they let me go.

  I told myself that the Erlking’s realm couldn’t possibly be real. I had never traveled there, barely escaping with my life and freedom. Instead, I was like Dorothy waking up after her adventures in Oz.

  All of it had been only a dream.

  Now, the Underground lived on only in my nightmares and in my art. And so did its master.

  Finally, after years, I accepted that it couldn’t be real.

  Then it took only a moment for everything I knew about the nature of reality to crack and shatter around me like shards of glass. I’d gotten complacent, crediting myself for the creation of an entire world as if one fragile, human girl could possibly possess such power.

  The doctors and nurses at the hospital worked so hard to convince me to accept reality. If only they’d known that they chose the wrong one to believe in.

  My roommate, Chloe, was already home when I burst into our shared apartment. I always felt like the darkness was chasing me when the sun set, and I refused to be outside when it disappeared over the horizon.

  Call it a phobia, but I knew terrible things happened in the liminal spaces, when one thing became another. Light to darkness was the most dangerous transition of them all.

  Chloe didn’t seem surprised at my huffing and puffing as I shut the door behind me and locked each of the four deadbolts one by one. My antics had been on display for all three of the years we’d been living together.

  She put up with me without complaint because tolerating me meant she didn’t have to pay rent.

  “Greta called,” Chloe said without looking away from the television. “I’m supposed to remind you to take your meds because you haven’t picked up a new prescription for this month yet.”

  Greta was my foster mother and the guardian that the court appointed when I was in and out of mental hospitals, which meant she was still in control of my finances even though I was old enough to access my trust fund. I’d considered petitioning the courts to have the guardianship formally rescinded, but I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Greta was the closest thing I had to a mother figure, and it felt like a betrayal to go around her when she tries so hard to take care of me. She made sure that my bills got paid on time when I would have otherwise forgotten, set up grocery deliveries because I would go hungry instead of leaving the apartment if I was in a mood, and managed my inheritance so the money would last for my entire life.

  I slung my bag onto the table next to the door. “What did you tell her?”

  “The truth. Your bottles are all almost empty, which is a good sign.” She casts me a sly glance, her gaze taking in the crooked neckline of my shirt from when I hastily pulled it back on in the costume room. “But for all I know, you’re taking pills out and flushing them down the toilet every day.” She picked up the remote and flicked the channel, smiling when some foul-mouthed cartoon came on the screen. “What else was I supposed to say?”

  “That, I guess.” The kitchen cabinet next to
the fridge was full of enough bottles to stock a pharmacy. I sincerely doubted that Chloe took the time to go through them all. “I’m sure you’d tell her if you thought something was wrong.”

  She snorted without looking away from the screen.

  Chloe was a doe-eyed senior in the undergraduate theater program with a body out of a dirty magazine and a scary ability to read people. When we first met, I assumed she’d end up using her expensive education to give situationally believable hand-jobs on some porn set in the San Fernando Valley. But for as beautiful as she was, Chloe knew that all the magic happened behind the camera, and she was way too smart for anyone to take advantage of her.

  Greta let her live in the second bedroom of my fancy high-rise apartment rent-free in exchange for spying on me. But Chloe and I had a decent arrangement. As long as I didn’t give her any obvious reasons to sound the alarm with my guardian, then we could mostly stay out of each other’s hair. I didn’t exactly love that Greta picked someone younger than me to be my mother hen, but apparently no one my age was hard up enough for cash to take the offer.

  I knew Chloe thought I was weird as hell because she said something to that effect on a daily basis. There was always a gentleness to the observation, so I tried not to take it too personally.

  She giggled at a poop joke but then craned her head over the couch as I passed behind her. “Hey, the condo association sent some maintenance guys to look at the plumbing. I had to let them into that cave you call a room. If you don’t straighten it up, Greta is going to freak when she visits next week.”

  The visits were supposed to be a surprise, so Greta could make sure I wasn’t “decompensating” again, but Chloe always warned me when they were imminent. But I had no plans to change anything about my room. Greta could freak out if she wanted to, but I had everything set up the way I needed it to be.

  “Thanks for the heads up.”

  But she didn’t turn back to the show. “A few of us are going to the Stockhouse tonight for drinks. You should come.”

  I got the feeling that she was only offering the olive branch because she felt guilty about spying on me for Greta. It wasn’t like I blamed her for it. If Chloe had refused the job, Greta would have just found someone else to do it. But even though we got along okay in the apartment, Chloe and I ran with very different crowds.

  Hers was an actual crowd. Mine was me and sometimes Vaughn, but mostly me.

  I forced myself to smile in a way that I hoped looked normal. “Maybe next time.”

  “You could bring Vaughn.”

  So that was her angle. If Vaughn stood out in the graduate program, to the younger students, he was a glorious god among mere mortals. “Have fun. Don’t stay out too late.”

  With a shrug, she turned back to the television as I hurried for the safety of my room and shut the door behind me.

  As I surveyed the space, I could only imagine what a stranger would think if they saw it. It wasn’t much different than when movies depicted the room of a disgraced cop hunting a serial killer.

  Drawings and paintings of fantastical landscapes covered every inch of the walls, some ripped out of sketchbooks and others done on actual canvas when I felt compelled to take the time. Imaginary creatures, many of them sinister, sculpted out of clay or paper mâché crowded each surface. Some of the work was good, and in another life, I might have made a career of it. I could be the H.R. Giger of twisted fantasy.

  But to have it all here like this looked more than a little crazy.

  Or like the space of a person with an overactive imagination and entirely too much time on their hands. I’d never seen Greta madder than when one of the dozens of psychiatrists I saw in the hospital first suggested that I translate the things I saw in my waking nightmares into art and then made the art therapy part of my treatment plan. She’d called him the worst sort of quack.

  She probably wasn’t wrong, looking at the results of his advice.

  When I didn’t create to get the persistent images out of my head and into some other medium, I read. Bookshelves dominated one wall, overstuffed with volumes of every type even though I felt drawn to the fantasy stories that I both loved and despised.

  They felt like reading someone else’s memories, both intimate and voyeuristic. As I grabbed a book off my shelf at random and collapsed onto the messy bed, Greta’s nagging voice echoed in my mind from the last actual conversation we had weeks ago.

  “I hope you’re not spending all your time daydreaming in your room or creating those . . . things. People will think you’re a snob, or worse. You’re in college, for heaven’s sake. This is the time when you should be living your life to the fullest. Meeting men! You’re so lovely, plenty of boys would fall all over you if you just put in a little bit of effort. I’d rather discover you’ve had a string of one-night-stands a mile long than spent every waking moment outside of class by yourself. I want to see you fall in love, even start a family.”

  Greta was the old-fashioned type. I didn’t think she’d be happy taking a step back from me until she knew there was a husband with traditional values in the picture to keep me in line. Sometimes I wondered if I would ever be able to prove to her that I could take care of myself.

  I knew she meant well by encouraging me to date. But when I went out in the world, all I could think about was how little it seemed like I belonged there. That didn’t really make good conversation for a romantic dinner. And Greta acted like being single and without children at the ripe old age of twenty-four meant my biological clock was moments from running out.

  Ignoring the specter of my lovably nagging guardian, I opened the book and relaxed back against the pillows. With a little frisson of pleasure, I realized that I grabbed one of my favorites.

  The Tale of the Erlking was probably the work that most influenced my fevered imagination. I found it among my parents’ things when I was a kid, and I treated my copy like gold because, as far as I could tell, it had gone out of print years ago. I’d never run into another copy, no matter how much time I spent in used bookstores. There was a point in my life when I’d been convinced it was real, before a legion of specialists and a truckload of medication tethered me back to the real world. Greta had tried to take it away from me once, and my reaction had been the only moment of violence I’d ever exhibited in my life. I’d tried to claw her face and screamed like a banshee until she gave it back.

  I’d been six at the time.

  In the story, the Erlking stole young girls away and used their life force to sustain his realm. It was published in like the 1800s, so the writing was spare, but the sexual innuendo of it always grabbed me. The girls had to go willingly, or he couldn’t take them in the first place. And he seduced them slowly once they were trapped inside his castle, wooing them with wine and treasures until they succumbed.

  And submitted.

  My play maintained a faithful adaptation of the Erlking character, but I took plenty of liberties to make the story more interesting. In my version, the girl went through a hero’s journey to gain the strength to resist the Erlking, even as she fell deeper in love with him. In the end, she had to decide between wasting away into death as his prize or escaping back to the real world and watching the realm she had come to love descend into darkness and cease to exist.

  As I turned the page, Greta’s voice nagged at me.

  “These are books for children, not a grown woman. When are you going to grow up and focus on what’s real?”

  Greta wasn’t a fan of my decision to pursue a program in the arts. She was okay with the college thing because it served as a distraction from something worse, but I was sure she hoped I’d focus on an M.R.S. and drop out eventually to have babies.

  She seemed to think that all it would take to make me normal again was good dick.

  Before I could sink further into the realm of imagination, loud banging rattled the door. Without waiting for an acknowledgment, Chloe burst into the room.

  “It looks like the guy from
Memento went on an acid trip in here,” she declared, eyeing with disdain a poster-size painting on the wall of a raven with dozens of eyes. “Greta just called and asked me what your plans are for tonight.”

  I sat the well-worn book down on the nightstand, careful not to tear any of the fragile pages. “What did you tell her?”

  Chloe smirked. “That you’re wallowing in your room and doing your best impression of a total social reject, like always.”

  That nearly made me choke on my own spit. Greta would ride in here like a Valkyrie. “Seriously?”

  “Of course not. What do you take me for?” She tossed a fall of golden-blonde hair over her shoulder. “I told her you were coming out for drinks at the Stockhouse.”

  My eyes rolled so hard they nearly fell out of my head. “You couldn’t tell her that I’m studying?”

  “We’re theater majors, what is there to study?” she asked with a laugh. Holding out her hand, she inspected her set of perfectly manicured coffin nails painted an electrifying pink. “And now you have to come because you know Greta is going to track the location of your phone.”

  “Or you could take my phone with you to the bar because it’s not like anybody calls me anyway.”

  Chloe’s hands slid down the skintight bodycon dress she must have poured herself into while I was reading. “I totally would, but unfortunately, this dress doesn’t have any pockets.”

  “Of course it doesn’t. And who carries a purse these days?”

  Obviously treating the question as rhetorical, she raised her own phone and waggled it at me. “Oh, I almost forgot. I texted Vaughn to see if he’s free. He’s already in a cab headed downtown, so if you don’t come, then I guess I’ll have him all to myself.”

  My legs were already swinging over the side of the bed. “I hate you.”

  She clapped her hands together before spinning back to the main room, heels clacking on the hardwood. “Be ready in ten, babes.”

  It was impossible to tell if Chloe was actually interested in Vaughn, or just using whatever means to manipulate me that were at her disposal. Access to a luxury apartment and the money Greta pays her on top of it were all predicated on her ability to keep me from becoming a total hermit, per Greta’s exacting instructions. This situation was orchestrated with the skill of a mastermind. If I went out with her for drinks, then it kept Greta happy without Chloe needing to work too hard. And if I said no, she got to monopolize Vaughn’s attention for the entire night. Either way, she won.