Page 39 of House of Hearts

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 like I’m the 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 if you’re here, 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 need to 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 come here .”

He clears his throat and continues. “I didn’t tell Emoree the full truth.

I scratched out the word eternal in 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?”

“She fell.”

The scene plays out in my mind. A million little clues finally pieced together into a fairy-tale tragedy—Emoree waiting in Helen’s old room, alone and terrified for Percy. Searching the maze for a glimpse of him, chest pressed too close to the railing, the wind swirling.

It’s so easy to imagine how the maze might’ve played tricks on her even from afar. She could’ve seen the silhouette of a woman. Maybe Em saw Ana follow Percy into the mausoleum, or maybe Anastasia simply stood there, staring up at the tower, beckoning for Emoree to lean in and look closer.

And Em did just that. She strained over the railing, the perch under her feet slippery from a rain-heavy winter. A sharp wind and a fall.

Emoree Hale sat on a wall,

Emoree Hale had a great fall.

Six seconds.

And then nothing—nothing at all.

“If she’s dead…” he attempts to say, the words a choked cry.

He looks nauseous at the very idea, and it takes him two tries to even finish his thought.

He rubs his eyes like this is all some lucid dream he can shake off.

If only it was that easy. “If she’s dead and you’re here, in this world, then that means the curse has extended to you and… Calvin?”

I nod, and even the sound of Calvin’s name in the air is enough for me to crumple in on myself. A nervous half giggle gurgles up his throat, echoing the delirium I feel.

“Well, shit,” he says, and it’s such a heart-wrenchingly normal thing to say that I almost forget where we are. We could be two friends sitting in the school courtyard for lunch, swapping poor test grades and shrugging it off with a muttered curse.

“Yeah, ‘well, shit,’?” I repeat.

Percy’s expression sobers up, and he looks achingly broken.

“This has gone on for too long,” he snarls to himself, and it’s not difficult to match his anger. Thinking of Calvin alone out there in the maze, bloodied and stripped of any free will, makes me want to punch a hole in the wall.

“How many hearts do you think she’s stolen?” I ask even though I’m not sure I want to know the answer.

“Too many,” Percy says, wiping the beginnings of tears with the back of his hand. “It needs to end. I won’t let Emoree die in vain. I won’t let Calvin get roped any further into this mess. We have to end it.”

“How?” I ask, looking around us at the mausoleum. Nothing about it seems like it’s equipped for curse breaking. There’s nothing but sterile white walls and… the hole he dug . “Wait a minute. We could lure her in here, couldn’t we?” I whisper in a daze.

With the door stuck behind him, Percy had been trapped inside Ana’s mausoleum and had resorted to trying to dig his way out. Is it possible to trap her now while she’s corporeal?

Percy throws a disparaging look back in the direction of the hole, but nods.

“You might be onto something there. We can have her—or, my brother I guess—chase us into the mausoleum. If we could somehow get them to fall into the hole, it’ll buy us time to trap her and work up a counterspell.

We’ll need to cover it, though, so she doesn’t see what’s directly under her until it’s too late. ”

“Not sure with what,” I say, scanning around for a convenient camouflage tarp. Unfortunately for me, the maze is fresh out. It’s just hedges and dirt and more dirt. “There’s nothing here.”

He considers that, and I watch him do the same miserable sweep of our surroundings. Finally, his gaze lands on my shoulders and he nods in my direction. “Your blazer should do.”

With as many falls and tumbles as I’ve taken today, my blazer very nearly matches the raw floor in color. I shrug it off my shoulders and do just as he said, covering the hole and staking my sleeves on either end with two thorned branches. “All that’s left now is the bait.”

I throw an anxious glance to the distance to make sure we’re still alone.

We seem to be for now, but I don’t trust Anastasia not to come barreling out of nowhere.

I smother the naive rush of hope in my chest at this plan.

I’m not foolish enough to think we’ll escape alive, but I know I’ll go down swinging.

“It’s risky taunting her out in the maze,” I say, weighing our odds. “There’s a chance she could draw us away and lead us deeper into her labyrinth.”

Percy tightens his fists and steps away from the trap. “That’s why I’ll be the one to bait her. No use risking both of us.”

I scoff. “Over my dead body.”

“That’s what I’m worried about.”

I narrow my eyes into slits. “There’s no way I’m letting you face her alone.

” I lift my chin defiantly and take a step forward until my finger wedges against his chest. “I wasn’t there for Emoree when she needed me most, and I refuse to make the same mistake again.

” I gulp and wet my parched lips. “We’ll go together, and when this is over, we’ll find a way to free Calvin. ”

He smiles somberly. “I can see why you’re his true love. You two complement each other well. Okay. We’ll both do it then. If she gets too close to one of us, the other will need to shout out to distract her.”

He offers me a hand, and we shake on it.

“Time to put an end to this once and for all.”

Actively taunting a monster in her own domain has got to be a new low for me. What felt like only thirty minutes ago, I was chucking my shoe and trying to stab her just to get away. Now I’m here, missing a shoe, missing a weapon, ready to whistle through my fingers like she’s my long-lost dog.