by Evelyn Avery
Tamlin held out his hand to me, and I surprised myself a bit by taking it. There was something about him that I trusted, even though he had nearly lopped my head off a few minutes ago.
Puck took my other hand from behind. For a moment, I thought he was going to pull me away from Tamlin, but he only squeezed it hard and didn’t let go as we walked through the middle door.
It felt good to be between them as if I was protected from all sides. The back of Tamlin’s hand was bumpy and ridged under my fingers like a bed of river rocks. I stroked it gently, fascinated by the rough play of something hard under soft flesh. Puck’s hand was so warm that it sent a shimmering heat down my arm to suffuse the rest of my body.
Two challenges down, and two men collected with them. Maybe the odds were finally turning in my favor.
I expected it to hurt when we passed through the doorway, I wasn’t sure why. But it was as simple as passing through any normal door in the human world, except when I turned to look back, the door had disappeared and there was only a stone wall behind us.
We had to continue forward because there was no way back.
The landscape had not changed significantly, even though we’d been walking for what felt like hours but was actually significantly less, at least according to my lariat. All around me was desolation and decay. Walls crumbled, and I stepped lightly around the broken pieces that littered the ground. All that grew here was bare of flowers, with leaves that withered and browned. The only bit of green was in the creeping vines that wound along the wall and crept at our feet, but I avoided them. Some unknown impulse alerted me that they were dangerous.
I couldn’t help but feel like the Underground hadn’t always been this way, that at one time this place had been glorious to behold. But I had no idea how much of that was just my overactive imagination.
Although, I was certain that I hadn’t imagined my two companions. These men had never been a major part of the art I had produced based on my dreams, or characters in the fantastical stories I would tell myself as a child.
If I was crazy, I didn’t know if that made them more or less likely to be real.
It didn’t make sense that I was trusting two denizens of this realm, but it felt right to have him with me in a way that I couldn’t explain. Holding their hands made me feel safe. I got the sense that holding other parts of their bodies would probably feel even better.
That had to be more of the crazy talking.
But gorgeous men just served as a reminder that I was supposed to be here to save Vaughn. I told myself that I shouldn’t feel bad. It wasn’t as if we ever dated, and I sincerely doubted that he ever figured out the sort of feelings I had for him. If he did, the most likely emotion that would have inspired in him was pity.
Because someone like me had no business with someone like him.
But now the natural order of things had been redone. Vaughn was kidnapped by the Erlking because that bastard figured out he was my greatest weakness. That imagining us in a bright house with a picket fence and 2.5 children brought me as much pleasure as my other fantasies. Even if it felt just about as likely.
I needed to get Vaughn back to the human world so he could find a bubbly and personable girl with practical skills to settle down and live happily ever after with. The girl with a tragic history and psychotic delusions wasn’t going to fit in those designer shoes.
As if he could sense the direction of my thoughts, Puck squeezed my hand. When I turned back to look at him, a mischievous smile spread across his face as his fingers gently stroked my palm, sending shivers up my spine.
It was hard not to feel like Dorothy skipping down the yellow brick road. Only she probably didn’t want to fuck the Tinman or the Scarecrow. At least in the movie I watched as a kid, she never looked at her companions in the way I’d been looking at mine.
Tamlin didn’t look back at me, his gaze focused on the path ahead as if alert for any danger. But his hand stayed wrapped comfortingly around mine, so much larger that it made me want to press our bodies together and compare every place where he was big and I was small.
The salty tang of sea air stung my nostrils, but I had no idea if we were close to a source of water. The walls of the maze had widened, and gaps where they’d crumpled gave tantalizing visions of what lies beyond, but it wasn’t enough to know for sure what might actually be on the other side.
I could only hope there wasn’t a sea voyage in our near future. I’d always been terrified of drowning or any body of water deeper than my waist. Not to mention that I got terrible seasickness just riding It’s a Small World at Disneyland.
The lariat hung from my neck like a noose. I tried not to think about the fact that only slightly more than half the stones were still transparent. Not only was I running out of time, but part of me was wondering what it might be like to stay in this world that I’d spent my whole life imagining.
Without the Erlking, if possible, but still.
Once I’d saved my friends, how was I going to return to the real world like none of this had ever happened? Go back to my sterile apartment and put on my play, as if this entire journey had simply been make-believe. Even the Erlking, who seemed so cold and cruel now, was different in the stories I told for years. Perhaps he could change into something closer to the faerie prince I imagined.
Before I could chase that line of thought too far, Tamlin came to a sudden stop, so I ran into the back of him. The metal armor he wore was warm against my skin like a living thing. It made me wonder how much hotter his skin must be underneath.
And then I heard it.
A feminine giggle drifted through the air.
“That’s Chloe.” I recognized her laughter because it was the same sound I’d hear at night when I was trying to sleep, and she was watching late-night television. “She’s here. The Erlking doesn’t have her.”
Tamlin’s face remained tense. “Or it’s a trap.”
But I didn’t care about that. Dropping their hands, I ran in the direction of the infectious sound. Puck shouted for me to wait, but I didn’t listen. If there was any chance that Chloe could be free of the Erlking, I had to find her.
The men caught up with me, careful not to trip on the broken flagstones underneath our feet. Tamlin’s sword creaked in its leather holster, and he held onto it with one hand. His long stride brought him several feet ahead of me. Apparently, as the one to finally relieve him of being trapped in stone, he’d become determined to return the favor by protecting me. Puck fell into step beside me, moving with a loping grace that shouldn’t have been possible on only two legs.
The maze abruptly ended and opened up into a large courtyard. The far side of it was shrouded in fog, so it was impossible to see what might be on the other side without getting closer. But it was what was at the center of the courtyard that caught my attention and made me skid to a stop.
Piles of detritus and trash littered the ground, some even higher than I was tall. Everything from rusted children’s toys to old tires was gathered in a way that looked recklessly deliberate. It was as if everything that had ever been lost or misplaced in the human world had ended up here to rot.
And smack dab in the middle of it was Chloe.
She sat on a pile of rotting kitchen rubbish that had been formed into the general shape of a couch. In her hand was a headless baby doll that she held like a remote control and flicked in the direction of a sagging refrigerator box.
“What are you doing?” I asked, coming to a stop a few feet away from her. “We have to go.”
Chloe rolled her eyes at me as she flicked the doll again. “Of course you want to go out right now when my favorite show is on. Have you seen this episode? The baby and the alien go back in time to kill Hitler, but he’s just an emo art student with girl problems. It’s so wrong but somehow hilarious.”
I looked between her and the sagging box. It had a mysterious stain on the bottom corner that looked green and slimy. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Puck came up beside me. “Your friend doesn’t know where she is right now. She must be trapped in an illusion, an elaborate one. Your apartment from the sound of it.”
I grabbed her shoulder and shook it. “Chloe, snap out of it!”
“That isn’t going to work,” Tamlin added with a sigh. He looked around the piles of junk and trash. His booted foot stepped over the maggot-ridden corpse of some kind of animal. “You can’t talk someone out of an illusion. She has to make the connection to reality on her own.”
“And how do we get her to do that?”
He just shook his head.
I turned to Puck, who watched Chloe with an expression of pity on his face. Seeing it made my heart drop. He was the one with the most knowledge about how best to overcome illusions. If he didn’t have the answer, then it was impossible to know what to do.
When he looked at my face and saw the desperate entreaty there, Puck let out a long sigh. “The only way to break an illusion is to force your mind to see through it. That’s what we did by throwing stones on the path. But that illusion simply made us think we were in a different part of the Labyrinth than we really were. This . . . this is something different.” He gestured to the piles of trash that could defeat all the Febreze in North America. “If she can’t see through this, then there may be no hope.”
But I wasn’t going to give up that easily. It was impossible to understand how, but the knowledge was there that she’d die like this, trapped in a fake reality surrounded by garbage if I couldn’t find a way to convince her of the truth. The Erlking wouldn’t have left her here otherwise, he taunted me with my inability to save her.
“Want some popcorn?” Chloe asked as she stared into the empty air in front of her. She picked up a battered wooden bowl and held it out to me. “I just made it.”
When I looked down, I nearly puked all over her. Inside the bowl was a writhing mass of worms and grubs, wriggling out of a few pieces of rotten fruit. The smell alone was enough to knock me over. Forcing myself to take the bowl, I placed it a few feet away and out of her reach. “Thanks, I’ll just put it over here.”
“Don’t hog it.”
If she ate anything out of that bowl, I might completely lose my ability to function. I couldn’t even sit through an entire episode of Fear Factor without having to leave the room. Watching it in real life was just out of the question. The Erlking could have picked almost any other torture, and I was positive I could withstand it, but this was just fucking disgusting.
“If she tries to eat that, you need to get it the hell away from her,” I told Puck, who gave me the ghost of a smile in response. But something in his eyes made me wonder if he had seen things here that were significantly worse.
What had happened here?
In my dreams, the Underground had been a place of shimmering magic and exquisite fantasy with beautiful creatures roaming the landscape. Of course, even the Erlking of my imagination ruled his realm in the mercurial way of all fae, but nothing about this place had been the stuff of nightmares. How could it be? His whole thing was luring girls away from the drab and boring real world so he could keep them here forever, using their life force to sustain him. The beauty might be a trap, but it was exquisitely rendered just the same.
But as I watched Chloe settle into her pile of trash, it was like warring images competed for dominance in my mind. The things that seemed so real the doctors called them hallucinations, just didn’t jive with what I was seeing now. When I first arrived here, I’d thought that maybe I somehow managed to wish this place into existence or been gifted with a second sight to see into the fae world, like in the stories.
Now, I felt like Alice in a broken-down Wonderland. Nothing was the way that it was supposed to be, which scared me more than if it were all wholly unfamiliar.
A half-truth could be so much more devastating than a lie.
I knelt beside the couch-shaped pile of dirt and tried to take the doll from Chloe’s hand. “Why don’t we turn off the television?”
She yanked it away. “Don’t be rude. If you want to talk to me, at least wait for a commercial break.”
The situation would be funny if it weren’t so close to life and death. What was it Puck had said? The only way to break through an illusion was to realize that it couldn’t possibly be real.
“Don’t you want to meet my friends? You’re being rude by ignoring them.” I had never in all the years she’d known me brought anyone to our apartment. Even Vaughn had never been there because I knew he’d finally be convinced I was crazy and run for the hills if he ever got a good look inside my bedroom. He’d think I was some idiot girl who never grew out of the phase where she obsessively collected statues of unicorns and dragons. The motif was pretty similar to what it would look like if The Nightmare Before Christmas and Lisa Frank had a baby then all their family portraits were done by M.C. Escher.
Colorful chaos and total madness, in other words.
Her gaze flicked over the men behind me, and a momentary awareness flashed in her eyes. One had a body that was impossibly lithe covered in tattoos that shifted or changed shape when you looked too closely. And the other was a stone warrior who had only come to life enough that his skin was warm and tanned, but with a sheen like polished granite and the imprint of marble.
I waited for her to see them for what they were.
Then Chloe rolled her eyes and turned away. “I swear they let weirder kids into the drama program with every year that goes by.”
Well, fuck.
If she couldn’t see that these men would never end up inside our apartment, then I had no idea what would knock her out of this—if anything even could. I looked around the garbage heap for something that might trigger her awareness of our surroundings. Inside the bowl of rotten fruit, a worm wriggled out of the blackened core of an apple, and I could have sworn it winked at me.
We might be totally screwed.
Racking my brain for other options, I came around the dirt couch, so I was standing directly in front of Chloe, blocking her view of the refrigerator box television. “Chloe, we need to talk.”
“I told you to stop bothering me while the show is on.” She tapped the beheaded doll as if increasing the volume on the television that only existed in her head. She tried to shoo me away, and when I didn’t move, she glared up at me. “Why are you being so annoying right now? I leave you alone when you lock yourself in your room for hours doing God knows what.”
“C’mon, Chloe.” I held my hands out and gestured down my body. “You’re not even wondering why I’m dressed like this?”
The fanciest outfit that I owned was made of cotton, and I almost never wore skirts or dresses. My Converse high tops usually had some intricate design that I drew on them with colored Sharpie markers, but my appearance was rarely my highest priority.
She glanced at me, gaze traveling over my dress before resting for the briefest moment on the lariat. “At least you’re out of sweatpants before noon. Greta will be happy to hear that. You know she calls me for updates on how you’re doing like every day, right?”
That was old news. “I do.”
“Did you know that she said you’ll still be a little girl when you’re forty?”
I didn’t know that, and a spark of anger shot through me. Greta was the closest thing I’d ever have to a mother, and she protected me when I’d had no one left in the world. She made sure that my bills got paid without me having to think about it and kept my flights of fancy from getting the best of me. In hindsight, the time she’d put her foot down when I wanted to buy a two-hundred-pound piece of raw sapphire that would have cost the same as the GDP of a small country was almost certainly for the best. She forced me to get a roommate, not just because she wanted eyes and ears for when she couldn’t be there, but so I wouldn’t spend all my time alone. I didn’t have to wonder if Greta cared about me.
But she could also be overbearing as hell.
“What else do you and Gre
ta talk about?” I asked, momentarily disregarding that Chloe was trapped in an elaborate illusion. This version of her was a lot more forthcoming then I’d ever seen her before. “Concerning me, I mean.”
“You’re lucky this is a rerun.” She let out a dramatic sigh and squinted up at me. Her gaze fell on the lariat again, focusing briefly on the fifth stone that shifted between a pale green and darker sage. You’d have thought she would figure out that gemstones didn’t typically change color before your eyes. But it wasn’t enough to filter through the illusion, and she looked back at my face with an expression of exasperation. “I mostly tell Greta whatever she wants because she pays our rent and makes sure that we’re set up with every streaming service known to man. And it’s not like she’s ever surprised by the weird shit you do.”
My teeth ground together. “Give me an example.”
“I don’t know, she always wants to know about any guys you’re seeing.” Chloe reached for the bowl of maggots, but Puck was fast enough to pull it out of reach and toss it over his shoulder. She looked put out for a moment, but then shrugged. Because a strange man throwing what she thought was popcorn across our living room was completely normal. “And I told her you were too much of a coward to ask Vaughn out, despite the fact that he’s obviously into you. No guy would put up with all this nonsense otherwise. She’s the one who suggested I try to make you jealous by going after him, but the guy is clearly smitten.”
It felt like a hole had opened at the center of my chest, and my heart was moments from falling down it. Vaughn had so many chances to make a move, but he never did.
Or I was too much of an idiot to notice when he tried.
“Did he tell you that?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking. I heard a muffled laugh behind me and didn’t have to look back to know it came from Puck. The hobgoblin had the uncanny ability to find the humor in even the worst situations.