Page 21 of Of Monsters and Mazes

I wondered if she’d forgive me if I explained my intention had only been to show her something to get her uncomfortably hot and bothered.

But no, no, no, we’re not going to victim blame. This was still my fault for not taking the time to better unravel her tangled yarn ball of a mind before plunging her into darkness. Just because she had a head full of intrusive thoughts, didn’t mean she’d given anyone permission to use them.

Still, it made me less bothered by her presence than I’d usually felt around the tributes. Ordinarily, this time of year was another boring and bland ritual slaughter. This year might actually keep me entertained for five minutes. Of all the orders Jericho had given me, this one could actually be worth following.

“So what brings you to the Labyrinth, Butterfly?” I asked casually, despite the million thoughts running through my head. Jericho usually picked specific people for specific reasons, and I was sure she was no different. There was always a story, good, bad, or boring.

“Pumpkin.” She spoke idly while inspecting the wall. The door was literally three feet to her right, but she looked cute examining those flowers, so I wasn’t going to say anything yet. “My cat,” she clarified. “Jericho stole my cat to get me to follow him, and apparently that worked, because here we are.”

“A cat.” I pondered on that for a moment. “Is it a cute cat at least?”

“The cutest ever.” She grabbed a pink lily and yanked on it, as if she thought that might be a secret lever to open the door that, again, was three feet over there. Nothing happened, so she resumed her inspection. ”He’s a mix of a Persian and a tabby, so he’s got this kind of half normal, half squished face that makes him look like a forever kitten, and he’s the prettiest shade of orange. When he rolls up into a little ball, he looks just like—”

“A pumpkin?” I raised a brow.

“Yeah.” She confirmed.

I shook off the thought that listening to this woman talk about her cat was the actual cutest thing ever. I cringed internally at the fact that such an idea had the nerve to traipse through my mind so lackadaisically. I nicknamed her Butterfly because she looked so pretty pinned to a table, but now she was giving me ‘Muffin’ vibes. I think I liked her better when she was writhing in pleasure while full of nine inch nails.

With a sigh, I ran a hand through my hair, pushing it back between my black horns. “What are you doing exactly?”

“I’m looking for an entrance.”

“And you think it’s somewhere on that wall?”

She pursed her lips, and her whole brow scrunched. “I don’t fucking know. We’ve been walking along this wall for an hour with no obvious entrance, so I assume there’s some kind of secret switch. The king of this place only gave me seventy-two hours to figure out a way through, so I need to find some way in sooner than later.” She pointed up at the Twilight Clock, where sixty-five hours remained, ticking down one at a time.

I knew that part already, but that didn’t explain why she was looking in all the wrong places if she was aware of the time limit.

Still, I played along, just like I always did. “That was harsh of him. This thing is something like eleven miles long if you guess right on every single turn. Could be a thousand miles if you guess wrong. What happens if you lose?” I recited with only slightly more inflection than reading a script.

“He gets to keep Pumpkin.” She pouted. “And he’ll make me his ‘queen’ and his ‘slave’ and never let me leave.”

I resisted the urge to full on snort laugh. Because that would be unbecoming of a deity. What kind of a threat was that? “Fail and you and your pet will become my immortal companions and rule all the realm.” Oh no. Not that. How horrifying.

What ever happened to “lose and I’ll systematically take your children as tributes until your entire family line is wiped out,” or “your eternal soul will be banished to the eighth circle of hell”?

Jericho is getting soft.

I should have been given an award for not rolling my eyes, and instead coddling her with a simple. “Wow, how awful.”

“Exactly.” She nodded along, oblivious to my sarcasm. “Wait so… you said this Labyrinth is eleven miles if you guess right. That means you’ve done it?” Her eyes rounded with an innocent, hopeful, and weirdly precious curiosity.

I scoffed in her general direction. “Of course I’ve done it. I’m the Dream Weaver. I’ve existed since the dawn of consciousness. I’d get bored if I didn’t have puzzles to solve.”

“That makes sense. So Jericho is like the guy who comes up with the crossword puzzles in the newspaper, and you’re like an impossibly old person trying to keep their mind sharp.”

My whole expression flattened. I was about to take back everything nice I’d thought about Butterfly. Maybe I would even start calling her SEE-luh. “Something like that.”

“Will you show me how to get through?”

“Well—”

“Considering you murdered and fucked me on a table before even introducing yourself, I think you owe me at least that much.” She interrupted before I could turn her down. Not that I would turn her down, but still.

“I’d like to reiterate that I can only form illusions using the tools in one’s own consciousness as my medium. I put none of that in your head myself.” Well, I possibly constructed it in a way she wouldn’t have necessarily envisioned on her own, but that was neither here nor there. I still wouldn’t be specifying how much of my own consciousness I had to share to enter her mind and execute such an intricate illusion in full. Though she should thank me for giving her that merciful out of orgasms to escape the rest of her twisted brain.

She didn’t respond to that. Only stared at me expectantly with judgment in her shiny blue eyes. Judgment that I really should have been lobbing at her. And yet.