Chapter Thirteen

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Roxy

I was a little salty about Nathaniel figuring out the spell before I did. He tried to play surprised when I worked it out aloud in the block room.

But for a guy who'd been un-alive for three hundred some-odd years, he'd never really developed a very good poker face.

He'd likely put the pieces together while I'd been lost in the apartment spell, leaving him alone for a whole day to start making sense of it himself.

I guess it was actually really clever magic on the part of whatever witches created this labyrinth. To create a spell that used a witch's natural instincts against them made it a lot more difficult than if there was just some straightforward spell to figure out and work against.

Fighting your own nature took a lot of determination.

I wanted to quit a million times while we sorted those stupid little blocks.

The only thing keeping me going was, well, spite. I might have called it stubbornness aloud, but it was absolutely spite.

I wasn't going to let some other, long-dead witches win.

Sure, I like shortcuts. I believed in working smarter, not harder. But that didn't mean I wasn't good at what I did. I came from a long line of powerful witches. I might not make a big show of it, but I remembered everything they taught me.

And I was going to use every tidbit of that passed-down knowledge to beat this stupid labyrinth and collect my money.

At least, that was exactly what the plan was.

Until we walked out of the block room and into one of my worst nightmares.

Which, I guess, proved my theory about the maze using my weaknesses against me.

I overcame my laziness.

And now it wanted to exploit my fears.

See, I'd told Nathaniel about the hay maze thing. I hadn't told him about another incident at a carnival when I was a kid. Back before I knew a person could even have phobias, so I'd charged right into the makeshift little carnival building, clueless that I was about to have a complete breakdown because I couldn't get out.

The House of Mirrors was hell on earth for me.

And it was exactly what I walked right into.

There I was.

Hundreds, no, thousands of times. Just staring back at myself. Green eyes saucers, lower lip trembling.

"No. No no no no no," I whimpered trying to move backward, but the door was gone. The room was gone.

There was no way out.

Behind me were just hundreds of more mirrors, more images of myself.

Same to each side.

Forward.

A whimper escaped me as I threw out an arm and started to run as fast as the tightly stacked maze mirror would allow.

Memories flashed back.

Other kids squealing.

Many laughing.

Teens making out where they didn't think they were being seen by adults.

While tears started to trail down my cheeks, my heart punching against my ribcage, my whole body starting to tremble as escape felt less and less likely.

I'd turn, and there I was.

Turn again, more me.

Until I felt like I was spinning, like my vision was jumping.

Until I had no choice but to drop down onto my butt against the mirror wall, curling my legs to my chest and crying.

I don't know how long I sat there like that. It felt like all night to a little kid all alone and terrified.

But it must have been a few hours, because the person who found me was the ride attendant who was doing a tour of the house before he closed it down for the night.

By the time I came back out, my mother was frantic, flanked by cops.

As soon as I saw her, I felt her too. Her energy pulling me toward her. A spell she'd worked up on the spot. One that would have made me rush toward her in any other circumstance. But I'd been too panicky and lost to notice it until I was out of the dreaded mirrored room.

Back in the present, I tried to reason with myself as I rushed forward, taking hairpin turns when I met dead ends.

There was a way out.

Plenty of people who'd gone into the House of Mirrors with me had effortlessly made their way back out.

It was different now.

I was an adult.

I knew this was just a trick. Just a maze. I only had to calm down, focus, and make my way through.

There was no reasoning with my panic, though, as it surged through my system.

I mean, there had been times over the years when I'd been in the home decor department of a store, turned, and saw a row of mirrors, and had to flee.

The threads of panic were wrapping around my throat, making each breath difficult as I kept almost running into myself.

Tears threatened, then spilled, as another whimper escaped me.

My heart was beating wildly against its cage as I reached another dead end.

I turned, trying to find where I'd come from, but finding myself confronted with my own panic-stricken face.

"Roxy," Nathaniel's voice whispered, sounding close. So close.

I whipped in a circle, though, seeing nothing but myself, turning in dizzying circles.

"Hey," his voice said, calm, close. Then hands were grabbing my shoulders.

"No!" I shrieked, trying to wrench away.

The strong arms closed around me, one over the top of my chest, the other around my midsection, pulling me back against a strong body. A familiar body.

But there was no one there.

"It's me," Nathaniel said, and I felt the brush of his lips on my ear. "You're okay," he assured me.

I was most certainly… not okay.

But he was there, even if he wasn't visible, and that alone seemed to be a soft caress over my frazzled nerve endings.

"Where…"

"Vampire," he said, lips brushing my ear again. And the shiver that moved down my spine had nothing to do with panic this time. "I don't understand it," he admitted, arms wrapping me up tighter. "My other powers are gone. But… I still have no reflection."

Right.

Of course.

He might feel and sound and smell like a man, but he wasn't.

"There you go," he said as some of the tension fled my body.

My gaze slid forward, looking at the space where his reflection should have been, but seeing nothing but myself.

The only proof of his existence was the way my shirt was bunched slightly where his arms were holding me, the way my head pushed to the side a bit as his pressed into the side of mine.

My belly flip-flopped as a different kind of tension worked its way through my system, chasing away the panic.

My breathing went from fast and shallow to slow and deep as I melted into him.

"That's it," he said, lips tickling the shell of my ear as his hand shifted up to my neck, fingers gently gliding across my throat, feeling for the beat of my heart.

It hadn't slowed its frantic beating though. It was just thumping faster for an entirely different reason now.

"You need to calm down," he murmured.

"I can't," I admitted, too wrapped up in the moment to come up with a halfway convincing lie.

"You can," he said, his arm tightening around my waist. "I'm right here. I've got you."

Yes, he certainly did.

He just didn't know in what way.

I glanced over at my reflection, seeing all the signs.

The pupils blown wide.

The flush that had crept up my neck and across my cheeks.

The parted lips.

But I could see how Nathaniel could easily mistake the desire for lingering panic.

And that was for the best, I told myself, even as my body rebelled against that idea.

I couldn't be crushing on a vampire. It was, you know, wrong. At least, that was what generations of witches claimed. We were supposed to hate each other.

That was why Nathaniel needed me for this labyrinth after all. It was designed to keep him from doing it himself. And the magic seemed to hinge on what the witches who spelled it saw as an impossibility.

A witch willingly working with a vampire.

"You're stronger than even you realize," Nathaniel said. This time, it wasn't my belly, but my heart, doing a flip flop.

He sounded so certain.

And I didn't remember the last time someone had faith in me. The last time someone looked past the surface and saw the potential underneath.

I guess the last time had been when my mother was alive. But with her died any desire to prove myself. It was when the laziness began. What did it matter? There was no one to care, right?

Except right now.

Nathaniel cared.

Sure, there was a selfish reason for his care.

But that didn't matter.

What mattered was that there was someone I suddenly wanted to impress, to show what I was capable of.

I sucked in a deep breath, feeling some of the desire sliding away, though it remained a hard pressure in my core that was impossible to ignore entirely.

"Okay," Nathaniel said, arms falling, and I tried not to whimper at the loss. He reached inside for my hand, joining our fingers and holding tight. "This is just a maze, Roxy," he reminded me. "A maze is just a path made of two walls with occasional dead ends. They don't matter. What matters are the parallel walls."

"Okay," I agreed, nodding, even if I wasn't completely following.

"The mirrors are just here to disorient you. Don't pay attention. Mentally, just picture them as different colors. Red and blue. Now press your shoulder against the red wall," he said.

"Okay?"

"Don't move your shoulder off of the wall. Even if it leads you into a dead end, keep this shoulder against the wall. When you run out of dead ends, you will reach the exit. That's how it works."

"Alright," I said, already feeling like I was halfway to the goal. "Okay," I agreed, starting to walk, pulling the invisible Nathaniel along with me.

As disorienting as the mirrors were, Nathaniel was right.

The whole thing was just two parallel walls with occasional dead ends.

When I started to feel a little dizzy from staring at myself appearing in front of me, I focused instead on my feet, navigating around dozens of dead ends.

"We have to keep going," Nathaniel said, seeming to sense my exhaustion. "I don't want to think about what might happen if the spell senses sloth overtaking us."

"Yeah," I agreed, forcing my aching feet to keep moving.

"Any other phobias you have in that head of yours?" he asked.

"I, ah, geese."

"Excuse me?"

"Geese?" I repeated. "Birds. Long necks. Evil spirits."

To that, I got a snorting sound out of Nathaniel.

"As an evil creature, let me set your mind at ease; geese are not evil."

"They are. I've been bitten on my ass no fewer than ten times," I admitted.

"What are you doing around geese that often?" he asked.

"My grandmother had a whole flock of them. Apparently, they deter predators from attacking chickens because they work as an animal alarm system. But, yeah, they only saw me over the summers. So I was a predator.

"They used to chase me all around the yard while my mom and grandma laughed on the porch, reminding me that it was in my power to stop them."

"Did you ever learn to stop them?" he asked.

"Not until I was older," I admitted. "My butt wasn't so accessible to them anymore, and a nip through your jeans doesn't really hurt that much. So I could focus to cast a spell. Though, I don't think my mother and grandmother meant for me to cast one to make them my goose army."

"Come again?"

"Yeah. I had a goose army," I admitted. "Just for one summer. My grandmother used to send me to the town to collect things for her because she wasn't as mobile as she used to be. And some of the kids around there had… an issue with me."

"Because you're a witch?" he asked.

"I don't know. Maybe that was part of it. It was a small town. Religious. We're, you know, wicked to them. Mostly, I think they were just little jerks who saw a short, chubby kid with a clumsy streak and sub-par social skills and decided to try to make my life hell."

"So you created a goose army."

"Yep. They used to chase those kids away for me," I admitted, the memory still making me smile. "But the geese in the city haven't been so inclined to see me as their general. So, they still kinda freak me out a little, knowing what they're capable of. I think I have a scar on my butt still," I admitted.

"Oh, yeah?" he asked, and something in his voice made a shiver course through my belly.

"Yeah," I said, my voice sounding breathless to my own ears.

But before I could analyze his tone, and my reaction to it, suddenly, there was the exit.

"Oh, thank goodness," I said, immediately feeling more stable as the mirrors disappeared behind us.

That is, of course, until the hedges surrounding us once again all just… burst into flames.