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

by Evelyn Avery

  Which meant that now I had the choice.

  Pulling away from Puck, I bent and picked up the book, its leather cover too warm against my skin. “In the story, those girls all died. Is that what happened to me?”

  “Over and over again. The devastating power of reincarnation was bestowed upon you by birthright and twisted to dark purpose when we were exiled together here,” the Erlking admitted, his gaze never leaving my face. “An endless cycle of death and rebirth that cannot be avoided or denied. Your suffering feeds the magic that sustains this realm, and your eventual death is always inevitable. Until you are reborn, and we play the same game all over again.”

  It sounded terrible, a fate literally worse than death. “Why?”

  “An unbreakable curse, punishment for falling in love without consideration for the consequences.” The sadness on his face made it clear that there was significantly more to the story than that, but he only sighed and gestured around him. “It no longer matters when this entire realm is at stake. Some creatures will still survive here, but time is running out.”

  My gaze was drawn to the lariat that still dangled from his fingers. “And what will happen if I go back to my human life, if I just leave?”

  He only shook his head, expression bleak. “Look around you. Without your sacrifice, this world and everything in it ceases to exist. It has only been twenty-four of your human years, and already so much has died. We’ve waited for you to return for so long that it is the only hope there is left.”

  As crazy as it sounded, and I was used to a lot of crazy, his words were like a puzzle piece, finally falling into place after years of searching. For so long, I’d been unable to understand why I never felt like I belonged in the world, why I saw things so differently than everyone else did. The hallucinations that the doctors tried so hard to medicate away were never psychosis at all. All the art and writing that clawed at my head until I got them out weren’t evidence I had gone crazy. The vivid dreams that haunted me were so much more than just my fevered imagination.

  Because they weren’t dreams, but memories. Memories of a past that I had somehow compelled myself to forget.

  I couldn’t have known that the missing part of me would only be filled with more darkness.

  “Why did I leave before?’

  I’d asked the question of the Erlking, but it was Puck who answered.

  “He tortured you,” Puck spat, expression pained when I turned to look at him. “Every creature in this realm witnessed the terrible things he did to you. It was only after you were gone that I understood it was necessary.” He pointed an accusing finger at the Erlking, voice severe. “But make no mistake. He enjoyed all of it to your dying breath. Every time, he killed you with a smile on his face.”

  The Erlking didn’t even try to deny it. “I am the master of this realm, and it was created with my darkest urges in mind. I won’t deny that hurting you fulfills a need in me.”

  Anger had fled completely, leaving me bereft and confused. I no longer knew what I was supposed to feel. “You’re disgusting.”

  He inclined his head in acknowledgment, but excruciating emotion colored his voice when he spoke again.

  “Izzy, I loved you before the birth of the oldest stars, an eternity of desperate obsession and exquisite suffering. You give, and I take, that is the way that it has always been, for reasons beyond all of our comprehension.” A shiver of anticipation made him clench his hands into fists, even as he stared me down. “Make no mistake. If you choose to save us, you will suffer for it.”

  If you choose.

  Despite how looking at his face pulled at my soul, I felt no love for the Erlking. Only a few minutes ago, I would have happily watched him be burned alive. But he wasn’t the only living thing in this place. I thought about what Puck had said to me earlier when he described the nymph and selkie, the goblins and elves, and who knew what else. All these creatures dead and dying as the realm decayed into dust.

  Because of me.

  I could stay here and make it right, but lose everything I’d built for myself in the process. It wasn’t as if my life was much to celebrate, but I couldn’t help but recall the fog-induced dream. Having a cozy home with a picket fence and children playing in the yard, married to a devoted man who loved me without the need to hurt, that was the future I wanted. A man like Vaughn, who I could almost convince myself felt the same way.

  As if reading my mind, the Erlking produced an unblemished crystal orb and spun it on the tips of his fingers. For a moment, I saw Vaughn’s face flash in its surface before the image was gone.

  “I would bring him here for you if you wished it. I would provide you with any inducement to save this world. He is the only reason you came here, after all.” There was the smallest hint of resentment in his voice, but the Erlking’s tone was sincere.

  Could I do that? Rip Vaughn away from everything and everyone he had ever known to live in a dream with me. A dream that I couldn’t guarantee wouldn’t turn into a nightmare.

  He deserved more than that.

  “You promise that they’ve both returned home?” I stared into the icy gaze of the Erlking as dread rose up to almost choke me. “Vaughn and Chloe have to be safe.”

  “I give you my word.” He held the lariat, so the upper portion formed a circle in his hands, ready to place it around my neck. “I would give you the universe if only to tear it away from you again.”

  I didn’t have to be told that the stones had never been intended to mark the time, but had become charged with the very essence of my life. As the color faded, my life would fade with it until I succumbed to death.

  Only to be reborn so that he could kill me all over again.

  But it was the only way to save the realm that I had loved since I was a child, even when I’d been convinced it couldn’t exist, and all the creatures in it.

  If I chose to stay, there would be no going back.

  I looked at Puck’s stricken face, the war within him written in the drawn lines around his mouth. He couldn’t decide if he should beg me to stay or force me to run as far away as possible. Tamlin stood only a foot away, his sword lowered but still gripped with both hands. He knew this was an impossible fight, one that couldn’t be won, but he was prepared to wage it anyway. For me.

  Without me, they would fade into stardust and be lost to the universe.

  “Fine,” I snapped as I glared at the Erlking. “But not for you. I’ll stay for them.”

  His lips thinned in barely restrained anger, even as triumph bloomed in his gaze. He approached me slowly, with the lariat still held in his hands. “You must speak my name. And the right words.”

  “Killian Everdawn, Prince of Dreams and Twilight, High Royal of the Summer Court—” The words caught in my throat as I spoke his full name out loud for the first time. Power beat against my skin, like the wings of some great bird of prey moments before it snatched me up in its talons. What I was about to say was so close to a lie that I could barely form the words. But I had made my choice.

  “I belong to you.”

  The Erlking, Killian, released his breath in a great sigh as if he had been holding it for years. Twenty-four of them, to be exact. “Princess Liminalia. I’ve waited so long for this.”

  “Call me, Izzy,” I snapped, just as he closed the distance between us.

  When the lariat fell around my neck, it felt like a noose weighted down with heavy rocks dragging me toward the floor. His hands followed its path as the string of stones fell and settled in the cleft of my chest. The moment that his fingers touched my skin, even just the gentle brush against my shoulder, all of my strength fled. The strain and stress of my journey through the Underground seemed to catch up with me all at once. I felt as if I had been walking for the past thirteen hours straight as my eyes rolled up toward the ceiling.

  When my knees collapsed, the Erlking swooped me easily up into his arms, as if I weighed next to nothing at all. The arms that tightened around my body felt li
ke a cage or a trap, but I lacked the strength to resist him.

  There was no will left to fight.

  I caught a glimpse of the sadness on Puck’s face as the Erlking carried me away. Tamlin appeared as stoic as always, his expression a mask of stone, but anger flashed in his eyes before the Erlking turned, and his shoulder blocked my view.

  I had made my choice.

  Vaughn came awake with the shocked sort of awareness of someone who was falling in a dream and snapped back to consciousness just before their body hit the ground. His heart beat too hard in his chest, and adrenaline made him sharply alert, with no transition between sleeping and waking.

  Had he been dreaming?

  His body ached as if it had been stuck in a strange position for hours on end, despite the plush sheets and memory foam mattress underneath him. And when he closed his eyes, he could almost hear the maniacal laughter of the man who’d spent thirteen hours torturing him. And as Vaughn stared down at his hands, there were already half-moon indents on the back, as if someone had been holding on for dear life only moments before. Even the worst nightmares didn’t leave physical marks behind.

  Which meant that it all had to be real.

  Scrambling to his feet, Vaughn leapt out of bed. His legs tangled in the sheets, and he nearly toppled to the floor before righting himself. His haste didn’t make any rational sense. Either the already fading images in his head weren’t only a dream, and Izzy was already lost or he’d go to her, all frantic and beside himself, only to be reassured that she was just fine. Hurrying wouldn’t change anything, but he just had to know.

  Izzy had never told him exactly what she went through when she was younger, at least not specifically, but he knew that she took medication. He didn’t know precisely what, just that it was the stronger stuff. The kind of drugs that they didn’t advertise on television because the side effects ruined your life almost as much as the actual illness did. That had never bothered him. Most people struggled with something, whether they had a diagnosis or not. But he had taken an intro psych class as an undergrad, so he understood the concept of a shared psychosis. If a sane person spent enough time around a mentally ill one, sometimes the crazy wore off.

  Folie a deux. Perhaps both of them had just gone the tiniest bit insane.

  But even standing in the middle of his messy bachelor apartment, the realm of dangerous magic still felt just as real as when he’d been trapped inside of it. The memories were distant and fading more with each passing moment, but he hadn’t imagined them. He knew that as surely as he knew that Izzy was gone, trapped in a place completely out of reach as if it had never existed in the first place.

  Technically, Vaughn shouldn’t have any idea where Izzy lived. She’d never invited him or anyone else from their program there before. But it didn’t take much more than a quick Google search to find both her building and apartment number. Nothing was secret in the age of the internet.

  The trip took about half as long as it should have, a combination of a rare occurrence of minimal traffic and his decision to drive like a madman. Some poor asshole cut him off on the 405, and he nearly ran the guy off the road before he got control of himself. It wouldn’t do Izzy any good if he died in a car wreck or got shot in a road rage incident, something that occasionally happened on the freeways of Los Angeles.

  His hand was already raised to knock when Chloe wrenched open the door, staring at him like he’d suddenly grown an extra head. The stricken look on her face was enough to tell him everything that he needed to know.

  “It really happened, didn’t it?”

  Without answering, she motioned him inside and firmly shut the door. Vaughn couldn’t help but notice the normally poised girl was a nervous wreck. Usually, Chloe walked around like she had just stepped out of magazine spread. But now her perfect manicure was chipped from her biting compulsively at her nails, her hair was tangled enough for birds to nest in, and she was dressed in shabby clothes that looked like they’d been pulled from a hobo’s dirty laundry pile.

  “When I woke up, Izzy was gone,” Chloe said with a sigh, looking more lost than he thought possible. Most of the time it seemed like she barely cared about her roommate at all, so this turnaround surprised him. “Her foster mom has been calling me like nonstop all morning, and I haven’t answered because I literally have no idea what to tell her.”

  That distracted him for the briefest moment. “Why would Izzy’s foster mother be calling you?”

  “It’s sort of my job to give her updates on how Izzy is doing, that’s why I moved here in the first place. Free room and board in exchange for a little information.” Chloe had the grace to look embarrassed but balked at the obvious censure in his gaze. She sounded more like a plant than a friend. “Don’t look at me like that. If it wasn’t me, then it would have been somebody else, and Izzy knew all about it. We had an arrangement, so she always knew what information I was sharing. Greta can be overprotective, and I helped keep her off Izzy’s back as much as I could. Maybe it was just a decent gig at first, but Izzy and I became friends. You have to believe me.”

  He did believe her, even if there wasn’t a good reason to. “Okay, I get it. I assume you just woke up here, right?”

  “In bed, like normal. Except . . .” She trailed off and looked at him with eyes that had suddenly become guarded. “You tell me what you remember first.”

  Vaughn’s voice was flat. “I remember being kidnapped and tortured by some guy straight out of a fractured fairy tale who called himself the Erlking. You were there, and Izzy was there. And now I feel like Dorothy waking up in her bed after the adventure ended, except it wasn’t just a dream, and everything is definitely not back to fucking normal.”

  “Same,” she sighed, rubbing her temples as if they ached. “I can’t decide if I’m relieved to hear you say that, or not. It might have been better to find out that I was just going crazy.”

  “I get the feeling that’s how Izzy has felt for most of her life.” He surveyed the neat apartment with a critical eye, noting that there was only one closed door in the hallway leading off the living room. “Is that her room?”

  “She isn’t in there. I already checked.”

  Vaughn had already accepted that the girl he loved was somewhere far beyond his reach. He wasn’t surprised to open the door to find an empty cluttered room. But if there was any hope left of reaching her, then he would tear this place apart to find it.

  But as the room came into focus, he couldn’t fight a spurt of surprise. And trepidation. Every wall was covered in paintings and drawings of fantastical creatures and places. Most of it looked like Alice in Wonderland reimagined by H.R. Giger, whimsically terrifying in other words. Some of the pieces were more romantic, done in pastel colors or with softened lines of charcoal. The large sketch hanging above the bed immediately caught his eye and kept it.

  “Who does this look like to you?”

  Chloe stepped up behind him. “That’s the goddamned Erlking.”

  In the bright light shining through the windows, the burns on his wrists from where they had been bound by rope were clearly visible. He wasn’t imagining the ache in his body that was left over from what he had been put through. “It was real. All of it. Izzy was never crazy, not for even a minute.”

  “Don’t say that,” she groaned. “My brain isn’t capable of comprehending this right now. I think I’d rather just be crazy.”

  “Me too.” Vaughn picked up a small sculpture off the desk, it was heavy and carved from stone. He could just make out a man’s body taking shape from what looked like what was meant to be a door.

  There were clues everywhere in the room, recognizable figures and places that he now knew were so much more than the product of Izzy’s imagination. He understood that somewhere buried here was the key to finding their way back to her.

  His voice was resolute, despite the flash of fear. “We have to get her back.”

  Chloe just looked at him. “Even assuming that I believ
e all that shit really happened, which I’m still only about halfway on board with, we were lucky to escape with our lives. You can’t be serious about trying to go back. We’re not wizards, here. The Erlking will murder us and giggle while he does it.”

  Even if it had only been a dream, he’d finally come to understand that his interaction with Izzy had reflected real-world desires. They had seen into each other’s hearts and designed a shared world that fulfilled them both. He would make that vision of their future real or die trying. As he looked down at the marks on his wrists, growing more painful as he viewed the welts in the dawn sunlight creeping through the windows.

  “The Erlking can suck my dick.” Vaughn picked up a book that sat on the corner of the desk. The Tale of the Erlking. Its leather binding was soft under his hands as if it had been read a thousand times. “We have to assume that Izzy tapped into something, visions or memories, whatever you want to call it. She created stories and artwork, all of it centered on this guy and his world. Something in here holds the key to getting back there and rescuing her. You don’t have to help me. Feel free to skip off to class and pretend none of this ever happened. But I care too much not to try.”

  She glared at him. “You think I don’t care? Screw you. Yeah, the free rent is nice, but I’m here with Izzy because I want to be. Who do you think makes sure that she doesn’t spend all day drawing or writing and then forget to eat. It’s me who counts out pills every day and watches her for signs of trouble. I’m her friend, and the last thing I want is to see her get hurt, whether you want to believe that or not.”

  He couldn’t reconcile that with any of the interactions that he’d ever witnessed. But had he really been paying that much attention? “Every time I’ve seen you together, you act like Izzy is a total pain in your ass. Or you’re trying to get under her skin, like when you flirt with me.”