Page 67 of House of Hearts
21
There’s a stranger in Calvin’s skin.
He’s all predatory feline grace, his eyes devilishly dark as he stalks my way. He sizes me up like a conquest to be made or a throat to tear out with his teeth. Even though fear swells like a tidal wave inside me, there’s still that dizzy, lovestruck flip of my heart.
He grabs my free hand and presses kisses to the mountain ridge of my knuckles. I shudder at the sweep of his thumb against my wrist. He holds me there for far too long, measuring my pulse. Breathing me in.
I can’t help it. He’s devastatingly handsome in the morning light, his jaw limned with dappled sunlight, his blond hair aglow. There’s no trace of his earlier exhaustion. Either this maze is deceiving me or he got a razor and some heavy-duty undereye cream. Contacts, too, because those amber eyes of his are unnaturally bright in a way no human’s should be.
In another life, I could see myself offering my heart gladly. I remember the first time I laid eyes on him—the curious, horrible realization that he could bite off my head and I’d let him. I obscure the blade from sight, wedging my arm behind my back and gripping it tightly.
“I was watching when you left my mother’s office,” he tells me,and it’s not a whispered confession, but the start of a hunter’s tale. His fingers splay mine apart, stretching my hand like we’re comparing palms. He grins down at me like he’s wondering how my head might look mounted on his wall. “It’s so strange, these thoughts in my head. At first,” he says, his lips gravitating to my ear, “I was thinking about how beautiful you looked.”
“And then?” I ask, and my voice is tight between my teeth. He laughs at my question. A low rumble trembling against my collarbone.
“And then…hmm…” he trails off contemplatively, letting the sentence linger. He doesn’t answer immediately, choosing instead to brush his cheek against mine, his body so very close. He hums softly before he switches angles. “You want to know what I love the most about falling in love?”
I make a strange noise in the back of my throat, and he chuckles.
“The thrill of the chase,” he whispers, and I stagger back, finally seeing the full extent of him. A scream threatens to peel from my lungs.
I dreamed up a great number of horrible things, but my imagination has nothing on reality. Ana’s spirit manifests over Calvin’s body like a murderous marionette. She’s a gruesome shadow, too tall and too thin, limbs all muscle beneath tight stretches of translucent skin. Her body has grown gaunt, her chest flayed open and her bones jutting out like a repulsive set of splayed wings. There’s a cavernous black hollow in place of her heart, flanked by a twisted tangle of hungry arteries. From here, they look like starving mouths wanting to latch on and feed.
She’s a dead thing, but I am not yet a fresh corpse for her to tear apart.
She steps closer, and her shadow body propels Calvin’s legs to follow. Each crack sounds like the crunch of bone; each pop is a jointsnapping in and out of its socket. How many boys and girls have fallen victim to this? How many Lockwells have lost themselves completely? Too many, and I refuse to lose another one now.
“Th-this isn’t you,” I stammer, brandishing the dagger in my hand and tightening my hold on the hilt until it feels like an extension of my own body. “Ana’s gotten into your head, Calvin. This isn’tyou.”
He might not hear me, but he most definitely sees me. His attention snags on the blade in my hands, and I don’t have long to process as he lurches forward, one hand angling for my throat and the other grappling for my knife. I only have a split second to react before he reaches me, and self-preservation yanks ahold of the reins.
Possessed by my own will to stay alive, I breathe in, steady myself, and swing the blade down. Anastasia’s body is all smoke and mirrors, and the knife fails to make impact on her. If she were aNight of the Living Deadghoul, I could hope to cut her clean away from Calvin like a nightmarish parasite. But instead, the blade bypasses her entirely and grazes against Calvin’s face before slipping from my fingers. It falls onto the grass, and I’m forced to stand back and take in what I’ve done. A thin streak of blood cuts along his cheek, sending him staggering.
He brushes at his face, blinking as if breaking free from a trance. The edges of his fingertips are stained, and he examines them in slack-jawed horror.
“Violet,” he whispers frantically. “Violet. You need to get the hell out of here.”
I squint at him, unsure whether this is a clever trap or a rare moment of lucidity. He proves it’s the latter by taking the blade from the ground and lodging it into his leg. The glint of silver disappears into the meaty muscle of his calf, and red gushes from the wound in volcanicspurts. Calvin starts to howl, his eyes welling with fresh tears, his agony disrupting the maze’s perfect illusion of him.
“Calvin!” I cry, rushing toward him. “What are you doing?”
He throws himself away from me, the abrupt lurch only causing him even more pain.
“What does it look like?” he pants through clenched teeth, squeezing his eyes shut in a futile attempt to stomach the pain. I’m not the most well versed in ghost logic, but this must be a way to thwart possession, like how Percy trapped himself in a magical coma. “I’m buying you time to get the hell out of here! You need to find Percy!”
“Percy? He’s…here?” “Here” being code for…whatever this place is. A weird limbo beyond the planes of reality, a purgatory.
Calvin nods, his skin pale from the blood loss. Behind him, the faint shadow of Anastasia grows clearer by the second. It won’t be long until she’s taken him over yet again, ripping the blade free and chasing after me with her human puppet. “I can feel him. He must’ve followed us here in this weird limbo. Find him and figure out an escape.Now run!”
I don’t have a choice. I’m forced to abandon him as Anastasia returns to his body. It begins with his eyes rolling back in his skull and ends with a tremor running through his veins and propelling him upward. I run past him, immediately hitting a forked devil’s-tongue path. Anastasia is howling my name, blood still geysering from the wound.
“Violet!” His voice no longer sounds lucid but wild and disembodied. The sound of my name is followed by a horrific, off-putting screech in the air. “Violet! Violet! Where are you?”
I hastily decide on the left path and chuck one of my shoes to the right to throw him off. It thunks in the distance, and a minute laterthere’re the lumbering footsteps of Calvin’s possessed form darting after it. Anastasia drives him forward despite his wound, my name growing more and more warped in the distance.
My chest heaves, and my body is alive with nerves. “Terrified” is a massive understatement. “Terrified” was back when I was stumbling through this maze the first time, my imagination playing hellish tricks on me in the dark. Now that I know what’s truly waiting for me inside, I want to curl up and disappear.
A cowardly part of me wishes I could find a place in this maze to ride out the storm, hide in this labyrinth until starvation kicks in. It would be a kinder death than what’s waiting for me. I rack my brain, feeling like a little girl all over again. Like I might not actually make my way out of this mess.
