“I don’t see any forks. The path seems to be leading us right through the center.”
We were being led like lambs to the slaughter.
Mostly I was on the lookout for clowns, because I wasn’t about to take any chances with that shit.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move in the mirror ahead that wasn’t us. I froze, pulling Cleo back with me. “Did you see that?”
“See what?”
I waited a beat, but I didn’t notice any more movement. When I took another step forward, a third figure moved across the mirror without reflections. “There’s something there.”
“I don’t see it.”
But as I drew closer to the mirrored reflection, I definitely saw something in there. More accurately, I saw someone else reflected there. Two someones. And both of them were me.
Except I didn’t see myself as I currently was, instead it was a version of me that was barely five or six years old. I stood outside a large building that had to be my old elementary school. My hair was done up in high pigtail braids that draped neatly over my shoulders with bows tied on each end. When I reached out to touch the back of my own head, my hands only met glass.
“Wait, I saw that,” Cleo exclaimed. “When you touched the mirror, it was like the picture cleared up. Was that your first day of school?”
I placed my palm back on the glass, watching as the smaller version of me slowly mounted the stairs. “I think so, but I barely remember it.”
“How are we seeing it now in the mirror?”
“The same way that had you believing that a bowl of maggots was edible.” I sighed, not tearing my gaze away from the slowly unfolding scene. “Because anything is possible in the Underworld, and Hades is an asshole.”
But as I watched, the memory of that first day of kindergarten started to come back. I remembered going into the classroom and being told with the rest of the class to draw a picture of what we had done over the summer. Instead of drawing about the beach vacation that Diana had taken me on, I drew a picture of a party in the Underworld full of dancing daemons and lost souls.
The teacher had gently asked if I was supposed to be in the “special” class down the hall, and the entire class made fun of me for weeks, even though I’d insisted it really happened. I’d become so overwrought that they had to send me to the school nurse and have Diana come pick me up early.
Taking my hand away from the mirror, I turned away moments before my tiny face started to fall as the teacher scolded me for not completing the assignment. “Let’s keep going.”
Cleo motioned me forward. “After you.”
But when I turned back, the mirror that had held the tiny kindergarten version of me had disappeared, leaving another pathway open. Where the previous opening had been, a mirror blocked the way.
The maze had changed.
Shaking off a sudden sense of foreboding, I gestured down the now open hallway. “I guess we’re going this way.”
“Freaky. Do you think every one of these mirrors contains a memory?” Cleo asked as she pressed close behind me.
“Maybe, although I sure as hell hope not.”
I remembered what Hades had said about reflective surfaces, that you could see much more than just yourself if you looked in them the right way.
But there was a lot of my own past that I didn’t want to remember. I was an orphan, but my parents died when I was young enough that I never knew them. I mourned their loss, but it was more the idea of them I grieved than anything else. It made those feelings distant and more manageable than if I had lost them when I was old enough to remember it.
The doctors had made it clear to Diana that I likely used my imagination to subsume what had to be some terrible trauma in my past. That could be more modern-day Freudian quackery, but it was impossible to know for sure. Perhaps I had watched my parents burn to death in that fire, or maybe something had happened to me with the temporary caregivers I’d been placed with before Diana came along.
Of course, if the Underworld and the other things I imagined were actually real, then my strangeness might not have anything to do with trauma at all. But that wouldn’t explain why I remembered so very little from my past, even when I was well into the age when some memories should have formed.
Perhaps there was something there that needed to stay forgotten.
I made a point of not looking too closely at the mirrors we passed, convinced that I didn’t want to see anything that might be found there. We followed the turns of the mirror maze, but after a while, it started to feel like we were going around in circles.
“I think we’re lost,” Cleo said with a sigh.
“You can’t get lost in these things,” I reminded her, trying to convince myself to believe the same thing. “Eventually, you always find your way out. We just have to keep moving.”
But she grabbed my arm, stopping me. “Maybe seeing memories is the point. Touch the mirror to see if one appears because a new hallway might open up with it.”
“If you’re so convinced, why don’t you try it yourself?”
She pressed her hand against a nearby mirror and gave me a droll look when absolutely nothing happened. “This place clearly wasn’t meant for me.”
The last thing I wanted to do was see whatever memory the maze wanted to show me next. But I also had no doubts that we would spend our remaining hours wandering through mirrored hallways if we didn’t find a way out soon.
Taking a deep breath, I touched the nearest mirrored wall. Cleo stood to the side, so my pale face was the only thing reflected in its surface.
But nothing happened. “I don’t think this is going to work.”
Cleo grabbed my arm and gestured behind us. “Look over there.”
The mirror on the wall behind us had grown cloudy, the same way mirrors in the bathroom looked right after you step out of the shower. When I stepped forward and held my hand against it, the surface cleared.
The mirror clouded just as it had before, and we waited only a beat before it cleared. I held my breath as my own reflection reappeared, but then nothing else changed. I wasn’t stupid enough to think that I would get off this easily, the mirror was about to show me something that I really didn’t want to see.
Then I saw my bedroom in our apartment on campus. This memory had to be something more recent because we’d only been living there for a few years. I watched a second version of me come into the room and close the door behind her. She stripped off the simple dress she was wearing and tossed it to the floor, leaving her in only a bra and underwear.
“Oh, crap,” Cleo said from behind me, her breath hitching slightly when the other version of me laid down on the bed, almost bare curves highlighted as I arched my back and sighed. “Do you normally hang around your room half-naked?”
Not that I could remember, but apparently there was a lot that I couldn’t remember. “Uh, no, not really.”
I watched myself pick up a book, and I didn’t have to look closely to know which one it was. Lament of the Underworld. My favorite book and one that I’d read over and over again, so many times that I had it memorized.
My body stretched out in the bed as I flipped open the book, and I rolled onto my back. As we watched, my hand slid down my belly and disappeared under the band of my underwear.
“Jesus.” I ripped my hand off the mirror and turned away.
“Don’t stop just when it’s getting good,” Cleo chortled, obviously trying not to laugh when I turned to glare at her. “Most girls would have their laptops out and a dozen tabs of videos pulled up, but jerking off while reading a book is a very you thing to do. Keep going; you know we have to watch this.”
“I hate you so much right now.” If it were possible to die of embarrassment, then I would already be a code blue. There were certain things that everybody knows that everybody else does, like masturbate, but seeing it in high definition and right in front of your face was still too embarrassing for words.
“I’m really looking forward to meeting this Hades guy,” Cleo mused, laughter still in her voice even as she managed to maintain a perfectly neutral facial expression. “I need to know what the fuss is all about.”
But I just shook my head, embarrassed enough that being trapped in a mirror maze for the rest of my natural life seemed like a more attractive option than letting this particular memory play out. “This is not happening right now.”
“C’mon.” She nudged me gently with her shoulder. “It’s not anything that I haven’t seen before. And judging from this, you are definitely ready for bikini season.”
I knew that I didn’t have a choice, even as I really wanted to melt into a puddle of embarrassment and ooze away through the cracks in the floor. My reflected face burned a bright red as I placed my hand back on the mirror. “I don’t want to hear about any of this after today. You take it to your grave.”
Cleo bit her lip to keep herself from laughing. “Agreed.”
Luckily, the mirror maze didn’t torture me for as long as it could have. The scene ended abruptly a few minutes later, and the mirror disappeared.
“So tell me about this book,” Cleo said as we walked down the hallway. “It sounds like it was pretty hot.”
I didn’t specifically remember ever jerking off to it, but I couldn’t exactly pretend that would be completely out of character. “It’s an old fairy tale, that’s all.”
“Like the erotic ones that Anne Rice wrote under a pen name, all heaving bosoms and kinky sex?” At my narrow-eyed look, she shrugged. “I do occasionally read books, you know.”
“Only the trashy kind apparently.”
She nodded in agreement. “Yeah, pretty much.”
Even I could see the humor in the situation. “Then I guess you should consider this one a must-read. It definitely trends toward the erotic. And if you’d asked me at any point before today, Hades was definitely finger blasting material.”
“So, he’s beautiful then.”
“That word doesn’t even do him justice.” I shook my head, chasing away the tantalizing images infiltrating my mind. “But it’s a trick, a lie. He’s as ugly on the inside as he is beautiful on the outside.”
Cleo sighed, all humor gone from her expression. “This place really isn’t how you imagined it, is it?”
In my mind and before I was forced to come here, Hades had been the dark and consuming force, who represented every bad thing that good girls secretly hoped would come for them in the night. His presence was terrifying and all-consuming, but only when I thought he was simply a figment of my imagination. “It’s like he created it for the sole purpose of torturing me.”
“You’d think this Hades dude would be all up your ass at this point,” Cleo commented, huddling close against my back as we walked down the narrow hallway. “Showing up to mock you or torment you, especially while you were jerking off to a book all about him.”
“Let’s not make things worse, shall we.” The last thing I wanted was for him to make an appearance right now. I hadn’t seen him since I first entered the Underworld and I’d hoped to keep it that way until we reached the castle and I was forced to face him. His presence definitely wouldn’t make anything better at this point, and I was happy the reprieve had already lasted this long. “We need to get this done.”
I deliberately hadn’t paid much attention to the lariat around my neck, but a quick glance supported my instinct that time was quickly ticking away. Nine of the stones had already turned to colors brighter than the rainbow, leaving only four that were still transparent.
We were very quickly running out of time.
The hallway narrowed into another dead end corner with a handful of mirrors angled so that I faced my own reflection half a dozen times. Without a shadow of a doubt, I knew that this would be the last memory that I had to confront before we were able to get out of here.
Not that it meant I was looking forward to it.
Although, it was difficult to guess what the mirror maze could show me that would be worse than me fingering myself to a story about Hades.
When I touched the next mirror, I realized that things absolutely could get worse.
A familiar house appeared beyond my own reflection, and I snatched my hand away. “Nope. No way. We are so not doing this.”
“I’m right here with you.” Cleo stepped up behind me and put a reassuring hand on my shoulder, squeezing it gently. “We have to get through this stupid funhouse if we want to make it out of here before time runs out. Think about Adonis, God only knows what he’s going through right now.”
And I couldn’t exactly say no to that. With a sigh, I pressed my palm against the mirror one more time.
The house reappeared, one I only remembered because before and after shots had been in news articles about the fire. All of my memories before the age of about five were completely lost to me, but I had a yellowed news clipping tucked between the pages of one of the books on the shelf in my room. Even Diana had no idea that I’d found it in a library archive a few years ago and taken it home with me.
Two figures moved past the brightly lit windows, but they were too far away to make out clearly. I could only discern their distant shapes, but I knew they had to be my parents. The distant cry of a wailing baby sent a strange sensation through my chest.
I didn’t want to remember this, didn’t want to remember them. It wouldn’t make it any easier to deal with their deaths if their faces were clearly outlined in my mind. The lack of memory put some distance between them and me, and I couldn’t mourn the loss of something that I never remembered having in the first place.
“Oh God,” Cleo murmured, gripping my shoulder hard enough to bruise.
My attention returned to the house, watching as a fire started near the side and crept upwards. It built quickly, and after only a minute, more than half the structure was overtaken by the inferno. The screaming of a crying baby was now bolstered by adult shouts, the sound piercing through my very soul.
But something didn’t look right.
“The fire started inside of the house,” I said, my creeping sadness momentarily overcome by confusion. “Diana read the police report years ago, and she told me the fire started with faulty wiring in the bedroom. That was why it spread so quickly, and everything was destroyed.”
“That’s not what it looks like here, but you shouldn’t assume any of this is more than just Hades screwing with your head.” Cleo sounded considerably more assured than I felt at the moment. “Just let the memory spin itself out so we can get out of here. You don’t even have to watch.”
But I knew that I did, another of those unspoken rules that underlined the very nature of this place. These memories were something that I had to experience if I wanted to continue forward, I knew that as certainly as I knew my own name.
This was something the mirror maze wanted me to see. This was what Hades wanted me to see.
The house quickly became consumed by flame, I could practically feel the heat of it through the mirror. A single slight form escaped from the house in the moments before it collapsed, carrying a blanket-wrapped baby in their arms before disappearing in the night.
A person that couldn’t be either of my parents because they both perished in the blaze.
As soon as I leaned closer to get a better look, the image disappeared. Then I fell forward and had to catch myself on the walls when the mirror vanished and opened up into another hallway. “Wait, that’s it?”
“Let’s go,” Cleo said, helping me back onto my feet. “None of this matters as long as we make it through to the end.”
“But someone carried me out of the house. There was nothing about that in any of the news stories. By the time the firemen arrived, the house was already completely destroyed, and they found me in a bush outside my parents’ bedroom window. They assumed I’d been dropped there when my parents realized they wouldn’t be able to get out. There was nothing about anyone running in to rescue me.”
&
nbsp; “That’s probably because it never happened,” Cleo said with a wave of her hand as she pulled me down the hallway. “This place is just here to trick you. Don’t trust anything.”
But that memory had felt as real as anything else, even though I had been too young to recall it. My parents’ deaths had never made any sense to me. How had an infant escaped with her life when neither of them had? It never made any sense.
But who would have carried me out, but then left my parents to burn without alerting the authorities? And why?
Something niggled in the corners of my mind, an awareness that bordered on true knowledge but remained just out of reach. I didn’t need to be told that what we just saw was real, even as my mind railed against it. Hades’s intentions were never clear, but this was more than a simple trick. There was something here I was supposed to understand.
Before I could think any more on it, Cleo had already pulled me down the hallway into another room full of mirrors. Distantly, I wondered how many more of these I could take before it was just too much. These memories had been forgotten for a reason, I didn’t want to remember this shit.
“I think we might be close to the end,” she said, hurrying me along as my gaze was caught by every reflection of myself rushing past in the mirrors. “Look, here’s another dead-end. Put your hand on the mirror here.”
She seemed a little too eager to watch me relive my past, and I couldn’t fight a flash of annoyance. The mirrors didn’t seem all that interested in showing me anything pleasant and I had no reason to expect that would change with the next one. “I hope with the next challenge, it’s your turn to be tortured.”
Cleo only shrugged, gesturing toward the mirror. “That’s fair. Now, move your ass.”
With a sigh, I touched the mirror in front of me with hesitant fingers, but I nearly stepped back in surprise when all of the mirrors around me clouded at once. It was only Cleo’s presence at my back that kept me from running in the opposite direction.
There were already multiple versions of me reflected in the mirrored surfaces, each one of them staring at us with identically wide-eyed expressions, filled with both fear and anticipation.
Tempted by Darkness Page 12
