Page 38 of House of Hearts

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 joint snapping 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’t you .”

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 a Night of the Living Dead ghoul, 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 volcanic spurts.

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 later there’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.

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 to the 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.