The mirrors continued to cloud until even my own reflection was obscured. When they cleared, I watched a half-dozen near-identical scenes, each achingly familiar but also entirely foreign. I looked the same age as I was now, but in every single one, I danced in the arms of Hades.
In one, he wore a mask fashioned from the skull of a ram as he spun me around a dance floor made of shimmering light. In another, we were alone in darkness, and my body wrapped around his in a way that would have been obscene if we weren’t clothed. And in the one that made me draw a sharp breath, I knelt naked at Hades’s feet with the same dress I currently wore spread around me like a blanket on the floor.
For a moment, I desperately wanted to know what it would be like to submit to him.
My fingers moved over the perfect image of Hades’s face because of some unknown impulse that was impossible to ignore. Even though there was only mirrored glass under my fingers, I couldn’t help but imagine that it was real flesh I touched. With an effort, I forced my fingers to shift away.
These couldn’t be memories because none of this had ever happened. It couldn’t have. And yet, I felt a pull in my soul in the same way that I did when I watched my childhood home burn to the ground. How was it possible for something to feel like a memory when it never happened?
“Have you been here before?” Cleo whispered behind me, her voice unnaturally hushed. It was as if she also realized we were watching something of great significance.
“Of course not,” I insisted, even as doubts crept through my mind. “You’ve known me for almost three years. If I’d snuck off to a magical world at some point, don’t you think you would have noticed?”
“Maybe, but it doesn’t make sense that the maze would show you this when everything else was real memories. That was definitely you.”
“Nothing about this place makes sense,” I snapped, even though I knew I had no reason to be angry with her. The lack of answers to the questions of this place had never felt as terrifying as it did in this moment. “That’s just how magic works. The moment things start to make sense, you stop calling it magic.”
“If you say so—oh, shit!”
The mirrors darkened again, even though I hadn’t taken my hand away. All the other versions of me had disappeared, but an image of Hades remained.
And then it began walking toward us.
I scrambled back from the mirror, breaking the contact my hand had made with its surface. At every other point, that would have caused the image to disappear. But not this time. Hades remained, approaching the mirror from the other side with long-legged strides. We watched in horror as the image of him stopped inches from the mirror and then stepped through it.
The two-dimensional reflection morphed into living form, and a very real Hades stood before us.
“Is this the asshole who dragged us here?” Cleo asked snidely from over my shoulder, even as fear put a quaver in her voice. “He doesn’t look all that scary to—”
With a smirk, Hades gestured with one hand. I felt a rush of cold air blow past me, and then Cleo was immediately silenced. When I turned back, a pane of clear glass had appeared between us. She banged on it with both hands and shouted something, her mouth making the shape of words along the lines of you fucker, but I couldn’t hear a thing.
My back pressed against the glass as I tried and failed to put more distance between him and me, my heart racing. But I was proud of the note of steel in my voice when I spoke. “What are you doing here?”
“I hope you’re enjoying the trip down memory lane,” he replied, instead of answering. “I wouldn’t have thought your memory palace would take the shape of a funhouse attraction. But you never fail to surprise me.”
“Stop trying to trick me.” I gestured to the wall of mirrors behind him, where versions of us had embraced. “Those weren’t memories. None of that ever happened.”
He raised a winged eyebrow, the same pale blond of his hair. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure you can stick your tricks up your ass and clench down hard.” I flinched after the words flew from my mouth, waiting for his inevitable ire at my talking back.
Hades only smiled.
Changing tactics, I raised my chin and looked him in the eye. “You aren’t supposed to interfere. That’s one of the rules.”
“Is it?” He took a measured step forward, closing the small distance that separated us. “Tell me what else you remember about this world.”
Cleo banged her hands on the glass behind me, sending silent reverberations through my back. I didn’t need any skill in lip-reading to know that she was shouting something profanity-laden at the man in front of me.
“I don’t remember anything because there isn’t anything to remember,” I said through gritted teeth. “I see what you’re trying to do. You can have this place show me whatever you want, but I’m not going to fall for your tricks.”
Hades spread his arms wide, expression sardonic. “I have no control over what you see here. The mirrors reflect only the questions from your past that you desperately want answered. I have nothing to do with it.”
Like I believed that. “Then what the hell are you doing here?’
“You called for me with your yearning.” His sensual smirk was enough to set a fire burning in my belly. “Your desire. Why don’t you tell me which memories summoned me to you?”
I definitely didn’t want to admit that I’d just been imagining myself at his feet, even as my knees weakened and I resisted the desperate urge to sink to the ground. My attraction to him was simply a function of his ability to entice. Whatever I felt for him was part of the magic of this place, it wasn’t real.
“Let us pass,” I demanded. My hand twisted in the lariat as I held it out for him. “Stop wasting my time.”
“Is it a waste of time?” He finally closed the distance between us completely, just as I feared he would. His hand lifted to stroke my cheek, stopping less than an inch away from the skin. “Look me in the eye. Tell me truly that you felt nothing while you watched us together in the mirrors, and I will let you continue your journey without interference.”
My breath caught in my throat, and I had to make several attempts to speak. “I don’t have to tell you anything.”
“I see you prefer prevarication to a lie, which makes you more like me than you’d care to admit, I’m sure. If you twist the truth far enough, then it becomes so much like a lie, if by another name.” His gaze bored into mine, hypnotizing me even as I tried my best to resist. “I would offer you the truth now, in exchange for something of equal value.”
I didn’t have to ask him what he considered to be a thing of value. Me. Or, at least, a piece of me that he wasn’t allowed to take if I didn’t offer it first. “Tell me.”
“This is a memory palace. I had a hand in creating it, but no say in the form it chooses to take. After all, it’s here for you. This place shows you what has been and perhaps . . .” He hesitated, gaze boring into mine as if urging me to understand something that remained outside of my comprehension. “Perhaps what will be. Tell me what you saw, and I might aid you in understanding the difference.”
“No fucking way.” I exhaled on a hitched breath. “If you don’t know what I saw, then I’m not going to tell you.”
Genuine humor briefly touched his smile before it faded to his usual smirk. “As you wish. But you still must pay a forfeit.”
His finger touched my cheek, sending a bolt of electricity shooting across my skin. As much as I wanted to pull away, some unseen force compelled me not to resist. I tried not to think about the fact that there was nowhere for me to go.
He stroked the curve of my jaw in almost exactly the same way that my fingers had lingered on the reflection of his face. It took everything in me to fight the seduction of his touch on my skin. I waited a beat for my breathing to slow and my heart rate to decrease, so it didn’t feel like it was about to burst from my chest.
“Let me pass.”
But
instead of letting me go, he simply smiled. “We could end all of this now, you know. There are so many things that I would show you, gifts that I would shower upon you. All that I ask is that you submit, and I will give you your dreams.”
It was so much more tempting than it should have been. Then I felt the thump of Cleo throwing herself against the glass behind me, which was just enough to bring me back to myself. Taking a deep breath, I forced myself to deny what every cell of my body screamed that I desperately wanted. “Get out of my way, or our deal is forfeit.”
“But I requested a thing of value, and I haven’t yet collected my due.”
His hand slid down my cheek, touch so light that it was possible to think I imagined it. The touch drifted along my collarbone and down, teasing at the fabric of my bodice where it met sensitive skin. I shivered in awareness, wondering if the glass wall at my back kept me from shifting away or if it only served as a convenient excuse to stay in place.
When he dipped his fingers underneath my neckline, I let out an involuntary gasp. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been touched this way—if I ever had. His hands shifted over my body with deliberate intent, even as they moved with excruciating slowness. I had plenty of time to run or shove him away before he took further liberties, but I didn’t do either of those things.
My voice slipped from my lips in a soft gasp. “Please . . .”
“Tell me what you desire. I would give you worlds as baubles to drape around your neck like precious gems. I would worship at the altar of your body and make you my queen.”
I knew that it had to be a trick, nothing he offered me came without a heavy price, one that I definitely wouldn’t be willing to pay. “I just want to go home.”
“Do you really? Have you ever actually felt that you belonged there?” His face leaned into mine, blotting out my view until my vision filled with the icy silver of his eyes. “You’ve always known that the human world wasn’t truly meant for you. Why would you ever want to go back?”
He gently touched my bare stomach through the cutout in the dress, sending a shot of heat through my belly. I knew that Cleo stood less than a foot behind me, a few inches of glass separating us, able to see all of this. But that awareness did nothing to make it easier to fight Hades’s seduction. If anything, her presence only heightened the illicit quality of all of this, stoking the fire that burned within me.
I knew that his next step would be to shove his hands under my skirt and grip my thighs. With only the slightest pressure, I would wrap my legs around his waist and let him fuck me against the glass wall at my back while Cleo watched it all.
Unless I stopped him now.
Shoving at a chest harder than a rock wall, I glared up into his mercurial eyes. “Let me pass.”
He sighed as if disappointed. “As you wish.”
Glass fractured behind him as if struck with something heavy. I winced as shards flew in every direction, bracing myself for the stinging pain that never actually came.
Blinding light reflected off the shards of glass, filling my gaze with painful brightness. The room spun around me, making me dizzy and disoriented. I felt Cleo’s arms come around me as the glass between us shattered.
The last thing I heard before I passed out was Hades’s laughter.
Chapter Twelve
“I think she’s coming around.”
“She’s been out for a while. You don’t think she has brain damage, do you?”
“I am not sure what you mean by damage to the brain. Her head appears to be quite intact.”
“No, that’s not—you know what, never mind. Seph, it’s time to wake up. I can’t deal with this nonsense on my own.”
I heard the familiar voices distantly as if they came from a million miles away. My head ached and my eyes already burned even before I opened them to greet the light. I was completely over passing out if it meant waking up still in the Underworld.
A dark shape moved over my vision, blocking out the low sun that hung near the far horizon. It took a few minutes for me to realize it was a person and that I hadn’t so much passed out as gone temporary blind and deaf.
Cleo’s face coalesced first as she leaned over me while I slumped on the ground. “Oh, thank God.”
We wrapped our arms around each other in the kind of hug you have when you’ve survived a near-death experience. I only let go of her to push up on my knees.
Ryn leaned over me on the other side, a cheeky grin on his face that almost distracted me from his black eye and the scratches along his face. “Don’t stop on our account.”
I struggled into a standing position as the world tilted around me, waving off their hands when they tried to help me up. That was when I noticed Cerberus standing a few respectful feet away, cheeks stained pink as one hand rested on the pommel of his sword.
“You’re alive.” I groaned as I forced myself to my feet. Every part of my body ached like I’d just been hit by a Mack truck. Looking around me, I realized that we were no longer inside the Mirror Maze or even the fairgrounds. Behind us was a darkened building that looked vaguely like an abandoned warehouse. “I was so worried.”
“Those werewolves were no match for us.” Ryn grinned widely, then immediately winced in pain. “You should have seen it.”
Cerberus was considerably more circumspect. “They had little interest in us. As soon as you escaped, we were able to evade them.”
I didn’t want to think about the werewolves or anything else that might possibly be imagined into this world by an errant thought. “We need to get moving. How much time has passed?”
“Too much and also not enough.” Ryn held up the end of the lariat, the third stone from the bottom glowed a bright blue. “Less than three hours left.”
Nearly out of time.
I scrambled to my feet, ignoring the overwhelming nausea that made me wonder if I was about to throw up. That only reminded me that I hadn’t eaten in hours, although it felt like significantly more time had passed. As if perfectly timed, my stomach rumbled loudly.
Cerberus turned to me with a concerned expression. “Are you alright?”
“She’s hungry,” Cleo grumbled, rolling her eyes. “And so am I, for that matter.”
“We can’t eat anything here,” I told her as I took a step forward and stumbled, catching Ryn’s arm to steady myself. If I was a different sort of girl, I’d be asking him to carry me. Okay, I’m definitely that sort of girl, but I needed to keep it together right now. “If you do, then anything you try to eat back in the human world will turn to dust in your mouth, and you’ll eventually starve to death. Never eat anything offered to you in the Underworld unless you never want to leave it again. Everyone knows that.”
She rolled her eyes with a patient sigh. “You should really stop saying that. Some of us didn’t spend our entire lives reading fairy tales.”
“If we get out of this alive, you and I are paying a visit to the local library.”
“We should get moving.” Ryn’s gaze squinted at the horizon, where a too-bright sun hung low in the sky. The cycle of sunrise to sunset clearly didn’t follow the same pattern as they did in the real world. The moon had been out when we entered the memory palace. “We have to reach the waters that surround Hades’s castle before the sun sets.”
“Or what?” I asked, even though I probably didn’t want to know. It was hard to decide which was worse, the anticipation of what might be coming next, or the reality of knowing just how bad it would be.
But Ryn only sighed. “The waters should not be sailed at night, let’s just leave it at that.”
I got serious Wizard of Oz vibes as we started down the path and away from the abandoned mirror maze. It was amazing how much less terrifying it seemed now that we were outside of it. But I was more than happy to put it behind us. Hades’s words echoed in my mind.
You’ve always known that world wasn’t meant for you.
Because that was always how I’d felt. Even as a child with bar
ely any self-awareness at all, a deep malaise overlaid everything I did. I had to be the only toddler who finger-painted exclusively in the blue and black colors of clinical depression.
As if sensing the direction of my thoughts, Cleo fell into step behind me with an unreadable expression on her face. “What did Hades say to you before he copped a feel?”
How the hell was I supposed to respond to that? Playing for time, I asked. “You didn’t hear any of it?”
“Uh, there was a six-inch wall of glass between us that appeared there by magic, so no. I didn’t hear anything.”
“He was just taunting me.” I stared into the barren crop of trees ahead of us, looking for a distraction that I knew I wasn’t going to find. “Just trying to get me to give up because he knows how close we are to making it through this.”
“Hades is known for his deceptions.” Cerberus’s solemn voice washed over us from where he walked a few feet ahead, sword out and at the ready. He always looked ready for battle, seeming almost disappointed with every moment that passed in which we weren’t attacked by something. “I would give much to see him defeated.”
Hades had turned him to stone and forced him to guard the diverging entrance to the labyrinth. But I hadn’t asked him anything else about it. Whatever story he had to tell would make a great distraction from Cleo’s questions.
“Will you tell us what happened?” I lengthened my stride to catch up with Cerberus, while Cleo followed me, and Ryn ambled along behind. “Why did he turn you to stone?”
Voice like tumbling stones, Cerberus spared me the smallest glance from the path ahead as he spoke. “Hades discovered that I had defied his direct orders and helped someone that I should not have. His precise words were something along the lines if you can’t be of any use to me as you are, then you might as well be made of stone.
I waited a beat for him to tell us more, but he remained silent. “What did you do?”
Tempted by Darkness Page 13
