The sofa’s dark stains waited to catch her notice once more, and Lux didn’t want to avoid them any longer. She didn’t want this place to hold power over her at all. She stepped toward it.
Her eyes burned with a vengeance, but she didn’t look away. Not when the stains turned to red, and the cushions sank beneath the weight of her parents’ bodies. Not even when the walls splattered with blood, the floor pooling with it at her feet.
She stared until it faded again. The floral wallpaper peeled, the floor covered in dust around the imprint of her prone body, the sofa unmarred but for several brown patches soaked into its old fabric. Her chest released like an unbound spring. She stepped back only to trip over the edge of the worn rug, nearly toppling headlong into the fireplace.
She tumbled forward and into the mantle, gripping it tight as she waited for her heart to calm. Then, without a backward glance, she entered her old bedroom. She had taken all her belongings when she’d left, along with a trunk of her parents’ things she couldn’t bear to part with. She’d forgotten what she’d left behind.
Empty vials and overturned pots lay strewn about the floor. Another jarring reminder of her last night in this house. Only just beginning to study her brilliance, her parents had generously purchased the ingredients for her to learn. Lux bent to pick up a small vial, the scent of venom barely clinging to its insides. She had used it all. She’d sapped every ounce of strength she possessed from her body, and she could never forget the look in their eyes as they rose to stand before her.
Lux dropped the vial, and it shattered across the floor. Backing from the room, she would have fled, confronting her fears be damned, but something else caught her eye. The rug. The overturned corner. She tilted her head, brow furrowing, and stepped toward it.
A near-invisible seam. But a seam, nonetheless. She gripped the edge of the rug, tugging it away.
A trapdoor. A mirror image of that in her current home. Tucking her fingers into the deceptive handle, she pulled upward. Remarkably noiseless, the door lifted. Darkness spilled out. Outside, the rain drummed harder, and in it, she heard her own words echoed:
Decide your course.
Lux grinned a terrible smile—and pulled on her wings.
The sputtering lantern protestedits use; it’d not been lit in nearly a decade and had grown accustomed to the idea. Its random acts of fading and flaring were about to stop Lux’s heart.
When she’d first climbed down, she’d not allowed the tiniest intake of air, awaiting some summoned monster. But after an extended period of standing still, in which she’d grown lightheaded from lack of breath, she’d finally given up and began to walk. Next, she’d been worried about touching the walls. Would they tumble in? But no, they were constructed of soil so hard-packed they mimicked stone. It smelled of dirt and earth, and it was dark and terribly cold. All things she would expect to experience below ground.
But the lantern—the ancient lantern her parents had never replaced because they’d never replaced anything unless it was irrevocably broken—would be her undoing.
The flame flared brightly as day only to gutter so weak it nearly went out. The resulting shadows crawled around her, pushing her heart out of rhythm.
You’ll meet fears you’ve never known you possessed.Her aunt’s voice rang in her head. But Riselda didn’t know Lux had met her greatest fear last night and survived. There wasn’t anything else in existence that could be worse.
“Ifearyou should have been honest with me, Aunt.”
Still, time seemed impossible to mark down here, and that was bothersome. She’d guessed the tunnel must lead to her and Riselda’s home. Far more likely that it was a network, too, one her aunt knew the way of—and hopefully nothing else.
Lux gave the lantern a hearty shake, same as she’d done the last time it threw such a fit, and with a pulse of light, it brightened and steadied. “Finally, you obey. You wasted bit of iron.”
And just like that, it went out.
“Devil’s tits!” Lux shook the lantern again, but to no avail. The flame was fully and surely gone.
Pressure built in her chest, a telltale squeeze. “Breathe. You’re not dead…yet.” She reminded herself that the heaviness of the earth was not growing. That nothing skulked behind her in the pitch. Of course, it would have been easier were she Riselda with her bag of weapons and oddities. Lux only had her wings.
Certainly, she should turn back. She knew what awaited her at that end. She could run, even, if she wanted. There would be no one but her own contemptuous inner thoughts to judge. Except…the idea of it. Of going backward when all she’d ever yearned for was to forge ahead. Surely, this moment shouldn’t define anything to do with her future—but then, why did it feel like it did?
She’d once cast off wishes in exchange for survival. It had kept her alive for nine entire years. But what if a shriveled pit from a rotted fruit could still be planted and urged to grow? Would it hurt to maybe try?
Probably. A good thing, then, that she’d grown accustomed to pain.
With the lantern clutched to her chest for protection, she muttered as she walked. “The walls are not narrowing. The ceiling isn’t shorter. The dark is like any other. You are alone.”
She repeated the lines until she lost count, and then repeated them countless times more. Until the lantern met a wall and pressed into her front, and there wasn’t a way forward anymore but only right or left. A damned-all fork.
It’d been impossible to keep track of each bend in the tunnel. She hadn’t any idea where she might be, if she was even beneath the town any longer or meandering contentedly beneath the wicked trees. She loathed the sensation of indecision, it felt like a not-so-distant relative to fear. She turned to her right.
Half odds were against her, but what did it matter if it meant half odds were with her, too? Lux stepped forward, brave and sure—and screamed.
It was the shock of it that yanked it out of her, she thought later. The cloud of frost drifting in that portion of the tunnel like the yawning abyss of a devouring tree. An actual assailant, she could muster courage for, but an invisible one? Not today.
Left. She would go left.
