by Liv Rider
“Okay, this is more impressive than I thought!” he told Joel, who looked smug.
“I can’t believe I’ve never heard of it.” Mitchell was looking at the line in front of them. “This is pretty popular!”
“But not amongst the people you usually hang out with,” Joel replied pointedly.
Even with the scent of fake smoke in the air—he really hoped there wouldn’t be too much use of smoke machines in the Maze, the smell was awful—Parker could tell there weren’t any other shifters in the barn. “Those people might be missing out.” He’d have to look into how this Fest was promoted in Lewiston. It wasn’t exactly his thing, but there were probably other shifters who’d like it.
Joel looked surprised by his remark. “You think so?”
“Why not? It’s not for everyone, but people here are enjoying themselves.” While the line was long, everyone in it seemed cheerful as they waited.
“Careful.” Thomas nudged him. “You might be one of them!”
Parker laughed at that, and they continued chatting amongst themselves while waiting.
The entrance to the maze was a black curtain, and a girl dressed as a vampire, wearing fake teeth, a long, black dress, and a cape stopped them from immediately following the group of five laughing teenagers who had been in front of them. “Wait your turn,” she said sternly, trying to sound like a stereotypical vampire.
“They don’t want it to turn into a conga line,” Joel told the three of them.
Parker saw the sense in that. He didn’t want to spend more time around human teenagers than strictly necessary.
The girl peeked through the curtain, then pulled it aside. “You may enter.”
Thomas and Joel entered the dark hallway first, and Parker went after them. He heard Mitchell say ‘thank you, have a nice evening’ to the girl at the entrance, and then the curtain fell closed behind them. He glanced up, noticing dark fabric covering the top of the maze. Thanks to his excellent night vision he could still see everything, but for Joel it had to be pitch-dark in here.
They had to pull aside another dark curtain to enter the first room, which looked like the living room in an old log cabin. There was a fake fireplace in the left wall with a deer’s head mounted above it. A rocking chair was to their right, in the corner where they had walked in, and a desk with a wooden chair against the opposite wall with some books and an old-fashioned tape recorder lying on it.
“Okay, this looks very—did that chair move?” Thomas, who’d been about to go over to the deer’s head, froze in the middle of the room.
Joel grinned, and Parker looked at the rocking chair, which was definitely rocking slowly back and forth.
“It’s moving.” Mitchell walked over to it. He was about to push it when someone dressed as a zombie jumped out from underneath the desk, startling them all.
“Was he there all along?” Thomas’ blue eyes were wide as the zombie hissed at him.
“Yes,” Joel replied, looking far too pleased.
Parker edged over to the doorway in the opposite wall as he kept one eye on the zombie. How had he not noticed a human had been hiding underneath the desk?
Did that human try to attack us? His dragon sounded angry.
It’s all pretend. For fun. He shared his dragon’s confusion at that.
The doorway led to another hallway, but this one had faded yellow wallpaper and paintings on the walls. It was narrow, forcing them to walk behind each other. His dragon was on edge, never enjoying confined spaces.
“See one you like?” Joel joked, when Thomas inspected one of the landscapes on the left wall.
“I’m just appreciating the effort that’s gone into this!”
“Oh, is that why you jumped three feet?”
“I did not jump three feet, I was—”
Thomas’ sentence was cut off by one of the paintings on right wall disappearing with a loud bang, only for an actor dressed as a demon to suddenly lunge for them through the hole left behind by the painting. Within seconds, the painting was slid back in place.
Parker had started at the sudden noise, and his dragon hissed in annoyance inside of him. He wondered how Thomas was feeling right now. They’d barely been in the Maze for a minute, and his senses were already on full alert.
“Is the whole maze going to be like this?” Mitchell was still staring at the painting where the demon was hidden behind.
“You mean sudden scares when your attention is elsewhere?” Joel asked. “Oh yeah, definitely.”
Parker eyed Joel. “Did you invite us here because you like Halloween Fest, or because you wanted to see if it’d scare us?”
“Both?”
Parker pushed Joel to keep moving through the hallway and into the next room, where splatters of loud neon paint covered the white walls, and three mannequins were dressed as clowns. Parker paused behind Joel, and he eyed the three mannequins suspiciously.
It smells awful, his dragon complained. The scent of fake smoke was everywhere, even if there wasn’t much of it in this room. It meant Parker couldn’t tell where the next actor would jump out from, and it was disorienting not being able to rely on his shifter senses.
“Let’s keep moving.” Mitchell nodded at the exit on the other side of the room.
They’d have to walk past the mannequins, and Parker nudged Joel to walk in front of him. This whole thing had been his idea, after all.
“Scared of clowns?” Joel asked. “Nothing to be ashamed of, it’s a very common—argh!”
The clown in the middle reached for Joel, and Joel jumped back to press against the wall behind him. The clown froze in place, their hand only inches away from where Joel’s arm had been.
Parker, startled by the clown as well, laughed at Joel’s reaction. He was starting to see the appeal of the maze. “Serves you right!”
Joel kept staring at the clown as he inched towards the exit, his eyes still wide.
The next narrow hallway was pitch-dark again, and it took his eyes a moment to adjust to the sudden darkness. There didn’t seem to be any actors in here, but he couldn’t be certain. Not with the music being that loud.
“They didn’t have that room last year, that was great!” Joel sounded far too excited about having been scared.
“What’s next?” Thomas muttered, as he pulled aside the curtain to the next room. He’d reached out to take Joel’s hand again, no doubt feeling extra protective of his mate.
The third room looked like a living room again, but more modern this time. The walls were covered in drab, gray wallpaper and two comfy-looking chairs faced a TV stand with a big, old fashioned television on top it, showing an image of a well in black and white.
Parker wondered where the actor would jump out from. Behind the chairs? From behind them while they were distracted by the TV and the chairs? He moved over to the chairs, intending to spot the actor before they had any chance to scare them, but the seats had dark red stains. It gave him pause for a moment, even though he knew it was only fake blood or paint.
But where would the actor jump out from? The longer they were in here and the longer nothing happened, the more on edge Parker was feeling.
“Ah, there she is.”
Parker turned his head at Joel’s voice.
Someone was crawling out from behind the television set, a woman with long dark hair in front of her face and wearing a long white dress. Parker, standing closest to her, took a step away from her. He wasn’t scared. He just didn’t want to be in her way.
The actor kept crawling across the floor towards them, her movements odd and jerky. Joel was slowly moving to stand behind Thomas. Parker wondered why. At least in this room, you saw the actor coming.
Then again, they’d all seen the clown in the previous room as well, and Parker moved closer to the exit and away from the crawling woman.
The woman suddenly jumped out to snarl at Mitchell, who stepped back. “Seven days!” she hissed, before returning to her hiding space behind the telev
ision.
“Seven days until what?” Mitchell asked, his green eyes a mixture of confusion and concern.
“It’s from a movie,” was all Joel said, before pushing Parker towards the curtain. “The Ring, there’s a creepy ghost girl who kills you seven days after you watch a videotape.”
Parker didn’t watch a lot movies, so he wasn’t surprised he’d never heard of it.
The hallway was lined with paintings again, and Parker kept waiting for the loud ‘thunk,’ but it never came. Somehow, that not happening was worse than when he’d been startled by it in the previous hallway.
“That was unfair,” he complained, as he entered the next room. “They didn’t even try and scare us.”
“I don’t know, maybe that was the point,” Mitchell suggested. “Make you think something is going to happen, and then it doesn’t.”
“Maybe.” Parker took in the room. There were two bunk beds shoved against the walls, which was made to look like a log cabin, but this one was also covered in posters from eighties hair metal bands.
A headless body, presumably another mannequin, was lying in the bottom bunk bed on the left, but that wasn’t what had Parker regretting being the first to enter.
In between the bunk beds stood a tall, imposing man. He wore a white mask and dirty overalls, holding a machete in one hand and a fake head with blood still dripping on the floor in his other.
“Another movie?” Parker asked, not wanting to take his eyes off the man.
What if there’s another human hiding under a bed? His dragon was clearly catching onto how the Maze worked, and Parker glanced down at the bunk beds as he moved past them. He didn’t see anything under there, but you never knew….
Movement from the corner of his eye started him, making him move back to the doorway they’d come in from.
The masked man, his machete now raised threateningly, took one step towards them.
“Friday the 13th!” Joel pushed Parker past the man and the other bunk bed, and through another set of dark curtains. “Seriously, do none of you watch any movies?”
“I watch movies!” Thomas replied.
“Yeah, but only since we got together.”
“I’m very busy.” Parker waited in the hallway to see if any of others would go in front. Mitchell just smiled and gestured for him to keep going. Coward. “I don’t have time for movies. I’ve got meetings, and work, and—a dentist?”
“Well, of course you have to go to the dentist,” Mitchell said reasonably, “but that doesn’t take up all your—oh. You meant here.”
Parker nodded as he edged along the wall. Even the smell inside this room was like being at the dentist’s office, except his dentist didn’t wear a uniform covered in blood-splatters. The creepy dentist was bent over the head of a patient, who flailed around as blood poured out of his mouth.
He didn’t understand the rooms based on horror movies, but he understood why this room scared people.
His dragon felt insulted. We do not fear the dentist!
We are a little nervous, though.
Sure, shifters healed fast and Parker brushed his teeth twice a day, but that didn’t mean he liked having his dentist poke around his mouth.
The dentist sat up slowly, their drill raised, and turned to look at them. One of their eyes was white, a contact lens no doubt, but it looked unsettling. Now that the dentist was sitting up, Parker realized it was a woman. She pulled her face mask down, grinning at them. “Come for your appointment?”
“Please, help me!” the patient cried out, blood still pouring from his mouth. “Please, no!”
The dentist turned to put the drill back in the patient’s mouth, laughing as he went back to flailing.
“That one was very well done,” Joel said, when they were in another pitch-black hallway. “They had it last year as well, but it’s just so….” He shuddered.
“Is it from any movie in particular?” Parker walked over to the curtain that connected the hallway to the next room. His dragon urged him onwards.
We’ll be outside soon enough. He was done with narrow hallways and humans scaring him too.
“I don’t think so. I mean, there are horror movies about dentists, but I don’t know if that room is based on one of them.”
“Glad I don’t have another appointment for weeks,” Mitchell muttered.
The next room they entered had even more fake smoke, but he could see fake grass on the floor. He walked in further so his friends could enter as well, and he noticed there were six tombstones, all with mounds of dirt. He turned to the other three, raising his voice over the sound of the dentist’s drill. “It’s a graveyard!”
“It will be your graveyard soon!”
He started, and suddenly there was a zombie right in front of him, grinning wildly. “What?” He blinked, staring down at the man’s face. He was only a few inches shorter than Parker. His cheeks and forehead were covered in fake blood, and his dark hair was wild and tousled. Like the dentist, he was wearing white contact lenses, but unlike the dentist, Parker didn’t find the zombie unsettling at all.
If anything, he found him the opposite.
The zombie lunged for Joel instead, who laughed and stepped back behind Thomas. “We’ve dug these graves especially for you! Welcome to your final resting place!”
“I’m not tired!” Joel replied, even as the zombie hissed and came closer.
“Join us!”
Parker turned to find a second zombie had been lurking in the corner next to the entrance. He’d been so focused on the male zombie that he hadn’t spotted her. She had a grisly-looking fake wound on her neck, was also wearing white contacts, and her blonde hair was teased and back-combed to look like a complete mess. She lunged for him as she snarled.
“I think that’s our cue to leave.” Mitchell was already ushering Thomas and Joel along as the two zombies growled at them, herding them over to the exit.
Parker kept looking at the male zombie, trying to figure out why he wanted to. When the zombie’s eyes met his again, he felt a jolt throughout his entire body. His heart was racing, but not for the same reason the other actors had sent adrenaline coursing through his veins.
Him! The rush of happiness from his dragon was overwhelming.
Parker knew exactly what it meant. What that man meant to him.
Our mate! Ours!
It was like all the joy of a good, long flight where he led the breeze carry him hitting him all at once. Thomas had tried to describe how meeting Joel for the first time all those months ago had made him feel, and hadn’t been able to put it into words. Now Parker understood why.
Claim him! Take him with us! Bring him back to our lair and don’t let him out!
Those were all excellent suggestions. He had to talk to his mate. He had to do more than talk to his mate. He wanted to touch him and hold him. Desire was building up inside of him, and the longer he stood here simply looking at his mate, the worse his need was getting. Parker let his eyes roam up and down his mate’s body. He had a slender, athletic build, and the holes in the rags he was wearing gave Parker tantalizing glimpses of smooth, bare skin. Smudges of fake blood were on his mate’s biceps and lower arms, and Parker wondered if fake blood was edible, because he wanted to lick it off of him.
Suddenly, a pair of strong arms grabbed him and dragged him through a pair of curtains and into the cool night air, and his mate was gone. He stood staring at the curtains for a second, wondering if he’d imagined the whole thing.
The roar of chainsaws behind him jerked him out of his thoughts.
Three tall, broad men dressed as lumberjacks waved chainsaws at him and his friends, yelling at them to leave. They had gruesome-looking wounds on their arms and blood splatters on their faces, and Parker didn’t take long to jog after his friends. Once they were about ten feet away from the exit, the lumberjacks went back to scare the next people coming out of the maze.
“They got you in the graveyard, didn’t they?” Thomas
asked, grinning at Parker. “Come on, both those zombies got you. You were so frozen that Mitchell had to drag you out!”
“That one by the door definitely got me.” Mitchell was smiling as well. “You’d think we’d have noticed her! But with all the fake smoke it’s impossible to smell anyone in there.”
“Using your, ahem, special senses is cheating,” Joel told him firmly. “Not knowing where they’re going to jump out from is half the fun!”
“Well, it worked to get us out of that room,” Mitchell added.
“Yes, so we could run into some guys with chainsaws.” Thomas shook his head. “They’d better be very careful.”
“Oh, those chainsaws don’t actually work. They’ve removed the chains so they don’t do anything except make a lot of noise,” Joel explained.
“How do you know that?”
“I volunteered in the maze two years ago. Thought it might be fun, and they needed more zombies.”
While Thomas asked Joel why he’d never mentioned that before, Mitchell turned to Parker. “You’re very quiet.” He sounded worried, and Parker shouldn’t have been surprised his friend noticed something was up and asked about it.
“Just thinking,” Parker replied.
He’d met his fated mate.
He’d met his fated mate in a haunted house while his mate was dressed as a zombie.
“Thinking about what?” Mitchell continued. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” Any other time he would’ve appreciated Mitchell’s concern. As laid-back as Mitchell was, he was also very good at asking what was wrong just when Parker was wondering if he should talk about some issue with his friends. It was like Mitchell had a sixth sense for people simply thinking about asking for help. “It was a little overwhelming, didn’t you think? The smells and the sounds….” He trailed off, not wanting to explain that the most overwhelming thing had been his mate.
