by Evelyn Avery
The Erlking appeared next to me as I looked down and then swallowed a scream. His expression was perfectly neutral, so he had to be unsurprised we were here.
“The entrance to the Underground awaits you.”
“Where?” I snapped, thoroughly sick of his shit. This did not bode well for the next twelve hours and fifty-eight minutes. “Off the side of the building?”
His smile was my only answer.
I looked nervously at the edge, lit by the Los Angeles skyline. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am. Always.”
That felt like a warning, but it was impossible to know for what. He was as inexplicable as he was beautiful, which seemed to be entirely the point. “You just magicked my friends away. Why can’t you do the same thing for me?”
He made an annoyed sound. “This is no simple thing. You wish to enter another realm by choice. That requires a sacrifice.”
By choice was a stretch even with the loosest definition. “Throwing myself off a seventy-story building isn’t sacrifice, it’s certain death.”
“You must offer up your fear, of death and loss, or anything else that tethers you to this world. All of these are things you must leave behind to have any hope of walking the path laid out before you.”
Oh, fuck that. “A realistic assessment of the dangers inherent to a particular action isn’t the same as fear. Just because I don’t want to die doesn’t mean I’m afraid.”
I looked for a door that had to be used to access the roof but didn’t see one. That was likely because no one was ever meant to come up here. I wouldn’t be able to get down again unless he decided to take me there in whatever way he’d brought me up here in the first place.
Not fucking likely.
“Are you already admitting defeat?” he asked, voice like music on the wind. “Even I thought you would make it further than your first challenge. My victory has always been assured, but I am a bit disappointed it happened so quickly.”
His arrogance was absolute. But that was also how I’d always imagined him.
Everything I wanted to say and didn’t was a debt I accrued toward the future. Each time I swallowed my voice, it made it harder to stay quiet the next time. Eventually, I’d lose the ability to hold my tongue and suffer for it when I gave the Erlking the verbal lashing he deserved.
Looking down at the dark streets below, I fought off a wave of dizziness. I could already see the headlines now. Suicidal girl jumps from L.A.’s tallest building in an epic display of selfishness. It was late enough in the night that at least there wasn’t anyone down there to break my fall and take out with me. I stepped closer to the edge and stared down at the dizzying heights. There was no doubt that I gaped at the face of my own death.
The mind could be a powerful thing. During my last hospital stay, there were at least three different men with paranoid schizophrenia who believed they were Jesus. Not to mention the woman who convinced herself she was in labor after being constipated for a few weeks, then proudly brought the results of her efforts bundled up in a blanket to the nurse’s station. Maybe I hallucinated the Erlking and then somehow made my way up here like a true lunatic. Everything but the fall could be fantasy.
Not that it would matter, because I’d be dead.
“You’re a fucking monster,” I spat, anger finally boiling over like I inevitably knew it would from the moment the Erlking had appeared. Just looking at him made me feel capable of murder. “If this is some joke and you’re messing with my mind, I hope you’re still laughing while you rot in a jail cell.”
A malicious smile twisted his lips. “Would it be easier if I pushed you? Consider it a favor, the first of many that you will beg from me before we’re finished. I won’t even ask for anything in return. This time.”
I backed away from him as he took a menacing step forward, which brought me that much closer to the edge. “Don’t touch me.”
“I cannot until you ask it of me. Or beg.” He held up the handkerchief, my blood staining part of it a dull red. “For now, I have only your blood because you’ve gifted it to me. The rest will come in time.”
A shiver worked over me, of fear and dark desire. My body was outside of my conscious control, reacting in ways that made no sense to my mind. “Just stay back.”
“Time passes as you deliberate, and it will continue to do so. You have so little of it to waste.”
I looked down at the cool stones dangling from my neck. The highest most one had already turned from milky white to pale pink, shifting the barest shade darker with each beat of my heart.
“It isn’t fair you started the clock before I’ve even entered your world.”
My words seemed to amuse him. “Nothing is ever fair. It simply is what it is. There is no more time to waste on dithering, either jump or forfeit.”
“I’m not forfeiting shit.”
I had to assume at this point that my mouth couldn’t get me in any more trouble. There wasn’t much he could do to me that he hadn’t already. My friends were gone, and I was about to jump off the tallest building in Los Angeles. Fuck biting my tongue.
The edge seemed to shift away and closer as I took shuffling steps toward it. That was as likely to be a result of the blood rushing to my head as it was to be magic. My vision blurred, and I forced myself to take deep breaths before I passed out. I doubted it would count as a willing sacrifice if I tripped and fell over the side.
“Why jumping off a building, for fuck’s sake?”
The question was rhetorical, but he answered it anyway.
“I rule that which exists between what is and what will be. Like the space between sky and earth. Manufactured steel and the fertile ground upon which it rests. Perhaps even life and death. If you wish to enter my realm, then you must thrust yourself into such a place.”
Not exactly comforting. There wasn’t a lot of maneuvering room between jumping and hitting the ground down below. By the time I figured out that I’d made the wrong choice, I would be dead. But the rules weren’t there to be understood, simply followed with dire consequences for those who refused. The fae had no interest in making sense and confused the details just for the hell of it.
And he was the very same.
It was only as I stared into the distant lights of the Hollywood sign that I understood this was a test. Not of my resolve, but of my belief. Even as the Erlking stood before me in all of his glorious and terrifying cruelty, I hadn’t believed it could be true.
I was trying to remember if I’d taken my medication, even as a face too alien and perfect to be real glared down at me.
If I jumped, it was because I believed this was real. The only alternative to belief was death.
My gaze moved to him as I turned, so my back faced the skyline. I didn’t want to see what came next. The view from up here would have been heartbreakingly beautiful if I saw it under any other circumstances. But I didn’t want it to be the last thing that met my gaze before I died.
The Erlking’s features were carved in cold marble, but with even less warmth than forbidding stone. His smirk said more than any words could, but he spoke them anyway. “What are you waiting for?”
When I was in middle school, they made us do these trust exercises in gym class, where we would fall into each other’s arms. The reasons for it were unclear then, and even less so now. My classmates tittered as they stood behind me, the girl they mocked for being small and strange and quiet. Even as the teacher urged me forward, I knew without a shadow of doubt, that they would let me fall.
And they did.
A deepest fear fulfilled hurt worse than the pain, even as I had to be taken to the nurse so my dislocated shoulder could be placed in a sling. The other girls had been roundly chastised and given detention, but they weren’t really to blame. It was my fault for trusting them when I knew them to be unworthy of it, like feeding a wild animal and thinking it won’t maul you when it’s done. I had been certain they would let me hit the floor, and I had fallen in
to their arms anyway.
The sensation was the same now. Forced to trust that some unseen force would save me from destruction, even as I knew with every fiber of my being that it wanted to see me destroyed.
But now, just as then, I had no choice.
My heels met empty air as I took the smallest step backward, one more and there would be no more ground beneath my feet. Blood rushed to my head so loudly that I could hear it pounding in my ears, drowning out the wind that had picked up even higher. We seemed high enough to touch the clouds, but tonight was the clearest it had been in weeks. Not a cloud in the sky. If I turned back to look, there would be nothing but empty air to obscure my view to the street below.
Eyes like shards of jagged glass were pinned to mine. His gaze—that normally gave nothing away—watched me with visible anticipation. There was a hunger there more frightening than the deadly drop behind me. And it wasn’t my body that he craved, at least not only that.
He wanted to watch me plummet.
And with no more thought to the consequences, I let my body tip backward into the embrace of empty air.
I felt myself falling. And falling more. Falling further than seemed possible, even though I’d never seen anything plummet from such a great height. Wind whipped around me, growing colder until it froze the breath in my lungs. I tried to take a breath, and it caught in my throat, depriving me of precious oxygen. My lungs burned with the failed effort to breathe, and my vision blurred as suffocation set in.
The air itself moved so fast around me that my lungs couldn’t breathe it in.
I was drowning.
And dying.
My last thought before I passed out was that I preferred to die this way—suffocating—than by hitting the ground.
Then everything turned to black.
This hurt too much to be a dream.
I came awake lying face-up on a mound of scrubby grass and dirt, staring up at a sky streaked with angry reds and yellows. My body felt like it would if I had plummeted a thousand feet through the air and hit the ground but somehow survived. I groaned, wondering if every organ inside of me had burst open at the impact.
There was no visible damage as I got to my feet, despite the ache that drove deeper than my bones. Every moment I breathed in and out was the slightest bit easier than the last as I took in my surroundings.
Nothing was the way I imagined it.
If my paintings and sculptures were something at all close to what this place could be, then what I saw now was its photonegative. Darker and stranger than anything I’d ever encountered before.
Desolation surrounded me. Wizened trees with no leaves and spindly branches dotted the landscape along a path of broken stones, their edges razor sharp. I breathed in air tainted with dust that dried my mouth and made me cough. For a moment, I wondered how any living thing could survive in a place like this, even something like the Erlking.
Ahead of me was a forest that seemed to grow all wrong. The trees twisted together until it was impossible to see through them, their trunks practically touching. From here, I couldn’t see the entrance, but beyond the wall of trees, a winding path had been cut through the forest.
“It’s a maze.”
“It’s a labyrinth,” the Erlking said from behind me. “A maze is made of many diverging paths and dead ends, this is simpler than that. The path is laid out clearly for you. Traversing it is what will present the challenge.”
I hated that he had the ability to appear and disappear, seemingly at will. My journey here had been terrifying and excruciatingly painful, but he didn’t appear to have so much as a hair out of place.
The earth underneath me was scorched and crumbled slightly as I shifted my weight. “I know how to put one foot in front of the other.”
“So you say.”
I picked up a piece of glass from the ground and held it up to the red-tinged light. “This looks like sea glass. Are we near an ocean?”
“Perhaps.” He hesitated before the familiar and cruel smile curved his lips. “And perhaps not.”
Typical doublespeak.
“That’s really helpful, thanks,” I said sarcastically.
“Only twelve hours remain until all of you are mine. I suggest you use them wisely.”
The stone that had been the palest pink in color before was now a brilliant magenta. I would marvel at the beauty of it if I didn’t know what it represented.
Every good fairy tale had a ticking clock, but I didn’t exactly appreciate the reminder.
“Are you going to follow me the entire time with useful commentary?”
I regretted the words as soon as his eyes narrowed on my face. Hatred burned in his gaze, even as his lips softened with what almost looked like desire.
A flash of white appeared in his hand, and I only recognized it as the handkerchief I’d pressed against the wound on my hand as he crushed it in his fist.
When I coughed, my first thought was that the dusty air had gotten the best of me. I covered my mouth as I coughed again, but then I pulled my hand away to see that my palm was dotted with drops of blood.
The Erlking approached me slowly as I was overtaken by another coughing fit that doubled me over. When it finally subsided, I stood back straight to find his face only inches from my own.
Without warning, he kissed me hard, the movement as quick as a striking cobra. His tongue teased my lips, tasting the blood there. A tiny moan escaped my throat, and he bit down hard, drawing more blood for him to lick away.
My lips parted with a cry of pain, and he thrust his tongue between them, owning me completely. I wanted to push him away, but when my hands rose to his chest, they fisted in the fabric of his simple tunic and tried to draw him closer.
I kissed him back because I’d lost control of my body. But the moment he had the response he’d been looking for, the Erlking broke the kiss leaving me strangely bereft. And completely embarrassed by what I’d just done.
“Your blood is mine,” he said against my throbbing mouth. “I wonder what other pieces of you I’ll take before we’re done.”
And just like that, he was gone.
There was no fucking way inside this maze.
Or labyrinth, or whatever the fuck that asshole wanted to call it.
After pacing back and forth in front of a wall made of tree trunks, so impenetrable that I couldn’t see through it, I was about ready to call this an impossible task. The second stone on my lariat had already turned a robin’s-egg blue, and I was no closer to finding my way inside than I was an hour ago.
From the vantage point of the hill, I could see the path laid out through the overgrown forest. But now that I was up close, the trees seemed to tower impossibly high with trunks wider than the spread of my arms, but tucked so tightly together I couldn’t pass between them, or even really see what might lay beyond.
I might still be there in twelve hours when the Erlking came back to gloat.
The line of trees seemed to go on unbroken for miles, although I hesitated to venture far from where I’d seen the path. I knew it had to be just on the other side if I could figure out a way to reach it. Trees simply didn’t grow like this in the real world with no space between them. Their bark was blacker than night and glassy to the touch as if made of something very different than wood.
I wondered if the material was close enough to wood that the Erlking could make my coffin out of it.
Beyond frustrated, I slapped the nearest tree only to realize that the trunk was harder than solid granite. Pain shot through my injured palm, sharp enough that I might have broken one of the bones in my hand.
“Fuck me!”
“Is that an invitation?”
A disembodied voice floated over me from somewhere inside the trees. High and melodious, it was distinct enough that I was fairly certain it didn’t belong to the Erlking. I peered into the darkness between branches, but it was impossible to see through.
“Who’s there?”
I waite
d a beat when there was no response, wondering if I’d finally gone crazy enough to be talking to myself. In all the years that I spent in and out of mental hospitals, I never heard voices.
Aside from the Erlking’s voice whispering in my dreams.
Cradling my injured hand, I glared into the darkness. “Fuck you, too, then.”
“That word, it sets me all atwitter.”
A face appeared in the gap between the trees, so suddenly that I stumbled back in surprise. It was a beautiful face, only to be expected in a place of seductive magic like this one. Hair darker than sin flopped over arched eyebrows as deep-purple eyes regarded me with amusement.
I couldn’t see any of his body through the thick branches. He was high enough that he must have been able to cling to them like a monkey. “Who are you?”
“Such an impertinent question.” His face twisted completely to the side, and I wondered if there even was a body attached. “What will you offer me in exchange for my name?”
“Nothing,” I replied quickly, unwilling to enter so quickly into a faerie deal after what happened with the last one. “Are you going to come down from there?”
If he did, I might be able to figure out how he got there in the first place. There had to be an opening somewhere in the trees.
“Tell me who you are, and I will.”
“Izzy,” I said, opting for my nickname.
“Of course you are.”
I waited a beat. “Please come down.”
“Well, aren’t you a pleasant sort of girl.” His smile somehow widened even further as his face loomed closer. Arms and legs materialized on the branches around him as if coalescing from the darkness. Before I could figure out how he might be holding himself up or how he even got there in the first place, he had already leapt down to stand beside me.
This close, he looked even less like a human man. Inky hair with streaks of darkest purple shifted in the wind above a face made of sharp angles and hard lines. Black tattoos that shimmered in the light like an oil slick started at the backs of his hands, wound up his arms, and wrapped around his neck. The tattoos merged on his bare chest to create an impossible pattern that changed each time that I tried to make sense of them. I could only assume the dark markings continued underneath the simple wool pants that he wore.
