Page 68 of House of Hearts
My name is a shrieking wail in the distance. I wait another agonizingly long moment before fleeing down another split path. With the way this maze keeps twisting and turning, for all I know, my next step might chew me up and spit me out at her feet. That’s not a thought I want to entertain.
I need to find my way into the heart of the maze, but how do I navigate anything when the maze keeps folding in on itself?
It’s only then I notice the first few flecks of red. Calvin’s blood stains the hedges, marking a gruesome Hansel and Gretel trail in his wake. He’s left a purposeful trace through the maze, and I know immediately that it’s not one for me to follow. It’s one to avoid like my life depends on it.
He’s trying to help me, even now, despite everything. He’s in there, no matter how deep.
My heart pangs, and I wish I could crawl my way back in time tothe other night. The moon overhead and his lips on mine and everything fleetingly perfect.
I continue at a careful pace, not wanting to speed ahead and launch right into Anastasia, but not wanting to be a sitting duck, either. The maze might want to play tricks on me, but I’m one step ahead, and that will have to be good enough.
I keep my gaze straight ahead, my nose to the soil like a bloodhound. If this mirror-world is anything like reality, Percy is waiting for me in the mausoleum. I hold on to that tiny hope, as fickle as it may be, and I close my eyes to will the clearing into focus. My mind paints a visual of marble walls and a slumbering boy, and I channel all my energy into breaking through the last of the maze’s illusions.
Peeking an eye open, I’m relieved to see that I can reassert logic back in an illogical situation. The path opens up, unfurling like a flower in the face of the sun. I step into the clearing, and it’s everything I remember.
The Hart crypts sit in a half-moon sickle against a wide stretch of barren lawn; beyond it, there’s a stone bench planted in the center, and the statue of the two sisters. In this timeline, Helen’s yet to die and Ana’s yet to carve out her own heart. Even their marble renditions are still intact, both sisters still wearing matching necklaces just like the one I’m wearing and holding hands, the eldest one’s head still attached to her body, not sitting in the dirt.
My stomach sours at the sight. How difficult would it have been to talk it out? Why make heartbreak and a petty siblings’ quarrel all our burdens to bear? My fingers twitch, and in a fit of anger I rip the locket off, no longer constrained in that aspect of the curse. I don’t want to die with a glorified BFF charm strung across my throat, especially not when it belongs to the person trying to kill me.
Banishing it to my pocket, I turn back to the mausoleum. It’s not silent like it was the other day. It’s a nightmare. The slab doors are pounding violently from the inside, the ground trembling alongside them. It’s as haunting as the sight of a cemetery bell ringing above a grave. And then a voice cries from inside.
I’m hesitant as I lower my hands to the door, my breath catching as I pull it open. A different scene awaits me from the last time I entered this tomb. There’s no lifeless body slumped in the corner, numb to the world around him. I see a familiar face from old photographs: wild, disheveled curls, punctured glasses splintered in the left frame, and warm brown eyes. And this time they’re open and looking right at me.
Percy.
22
Admittedly, I look horrible. I’m drenched in sweat, covered in blood that’s only half my own, and I’m missing a shoe. For as terrible as I look, I don’t think I’m anywhere near horrifying enough to warrant Percy’s response.
He gawks at me likeI’mthe ghost.
“You’re Violet,” he says breathlessly.He devolves into a broken hiccup, and his hand grapples against the wall for support. His lips pull back in a clear grimace, and he stumbles so far back, he lands on his ass on the ground. I offer him a hand, and he hesitantly takes it.
“You know me?” I take a careful step forward, and he tracks the movement with a skittish adjustment of his glasses. They slip down the bridge of his nose again, and he’s quick to correct them.
“Of course I do,” he says, and his voice is so much deeper than his baby face would suggest. “You’re Em’s best friend.”
It’s almost heartwarming—almost. The heartwarming part is overshadowed by his horrified gulp and the sentence that comes next. “But…but ifyou’rehere, that means Emoree is…”
“Dead,” I finish, and I hate being in this position. The same one my mother was in when she cradled the phone and got the news, her eyes going wide, her voice breaking in a horrified gasp. She didn’t needto open her mouth for me to know what she was about to say. The truth was written so plainly over her face, and I’ll never forget the way the world was ripped right out from under me that day.
His fist strikes the marble, and he stifles his cry before it can alert Anastasia to where we are. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he whispers, and I can see it in his eyes that he really means it. There are a fair number of things in life I never put much stock in before, and the eyes being the window to the soul was high on the bullshit meter. But when I look at him now, I think I might just see his soul after all. “How did everything get so messed up?”
His expression is unerringly genuine. I don’t know how I ever doubted his innocence. There’s such an outpouring of love in his eyes, mingled deep with pure, unadulterated heartbreak. Love and grief are two sides of the same coin, after all. I’ve learned that lesson the hard way.
“Have you been here this whole time?” I ask, waving at the strange world around us. “Whatever this place is.”
He nods. “Mm-hmm. I’ve been trapped in this godforsaken limbo since I uttered that spell in the maze.”
“Was that the plan all along?” I ask, and I’ve been dying to know how they stacked everything up before the inevitable, brutal fall.
He wets his dry lips and stares at his nails. They’re bloodied, dirty half-moon crescents caked with slivers of soil. From a cursory glance around us, it’s clear he went from pounding on the slab doors to digging a trench where Anastasia’s future grave would someday lie. He managed to carve a hole several feet deep in the earth.
“To be trapped in a hellish time loop forever?” he scoffs, running his nails along his scalp. “No. There was a spell I found in Ana’s book,and I thought if I surrendered myself, that Emoree would survive in my stead and that I would be the only one affected. I knew what I was offering, but I still had no clue what it would mean. I thought it would be like dying or falling asleep. I didn’t think I’d comehere.”
He clears his throat and continues. “I didn’t tell Emoree the full truth. I scratched out the wordeternalin the spell and let her believe that if I surrendered myself to the maze for a single night, that I could ‘ride out the curse,’ so to speak. I told her I was locking myself up in the mausoleum and she’d hide away in the clock tower. She really thought that when Anastasia’s ghost disappeared, it would mean we’d properly outlived the length of the curse. I let her believe that she could come and wake me up after and everything would be okay again.” He sniffles, averts his eyes. “She had no idea that I planned to stay like this forever. I would’ve sacrificed my life to keep her safe.”
I wring my hands helplessly, and he finally asks the question I’ve been waiting for in return. “How did she die?”
