Grave Mistake Read online

"You're all depressed and quiet till you see a chance to embarrass me, huh? Fine. James Marsters. You know, from Buffy."

  "I feel like I should have seen that coming."

  "Fuck you."

  "Somehow I figured you for more of an Angel guy."

  "Fuck you!"

  Ethan laughed, the first real laugh I'd heard from him since learning about the curse. Cole laughed too, more subdued, embarrassed. "Fucking Angel. Do I seriously look like an Angel fan? Don't answer that."

  I finally remembered how to move my legs and slipped away as they continued talking about nineties cult TV shows. I'd tell Ethan I'd heard them later. Hopefully he wouldn't be too upset. Despite the small breach of trust, I was glad I'd heard them. I didn't want Ethan to have regrets either. I was too upset myself, too tangled up in all of this, to comfort Ethan the way he needed. And obviously Cole shared one thing with Ethan that I never could. I could do my best to understand his sexuality and support him, but I'd never really be able to see it from his perspective or relate to it the way another bisexual man could.

  That stung a little to think about, that Cole had this connection to Ethan that was completely out of my reach. Jealousy gnawed at me for a minute before I squashed it down. I had a connection with Cole that Ethan didn't have too, since we were both necromancers. And I was glad Ethan had someone he could share that part of his life with, especially since it was clearly such a sore spot for him. I'd talk about it with Ethan later. Even if I knew being jealous was stupid and wasn't going to act on it, it was never a good idea to ignore that kind of thing.

  I'd learned that the hard way from previous boyfriends. I'd had a few with all the communication skills of particularly terse cinderblock. When you didn't talk things out, minor annoyances and anxieties compounded into major resentment and irrational insecurity. It was much better to address things immediately. Even if there weren't really any steps that could be taken to 'fix' whatever the issue was, just being understood by your partner and knowing they were aware of it helped a lot. Like this one time I—

  I stopped walking abruptly, realizing I was back on the damn repeating staircase. Or another one of the stupid things, as there seemed to be several. While I was busy patting myself on the back for my excellent relationship skills, I'd managed to get completely lost in this damn magic labyrinth of a house again. I fully expected a smug and bedazzled Gwydion to pop out from behind a corner in iridescent tights any minute, practicing his contact juggling and accompanied by a chorus of baby stealing puppets.

  Irritated by my own stupidity (Why didn't I just stay near Ethan and Cole? How did Ethan find Cole in this M.C. Escher bullshit anyway?) I reached for a little of great grandma Rosamunde's stubbornness and kept going. I'd never find my way back to the room where Ethan and Cole were, so I could only go forward. Ethan had probably used his magic werewolf nose to track Cole, now that I thought about it. Why the hell had we split up?

  I discovered something worse than the hall that turned right four times. Instead of completing a square, it dumped you in a different impossible room every time you walked down it. It was a sparsely decorated hall that turned both right and left at least five times apiece, then absurdly, impossibly, infuriatingly, ended with a big blue door with a brass demon head knocker. The same big blue door with the brass demon head knocker I'd entered the hall from to begin with. Except the room I'd entered the hall from originally was no longer behind me. It was just more hall.

  I sensed that, somehow, just possibly, I had fucked up.

  Chapter 5

  I hurried down the hall again, hoping the turns would drop me in another random ballroom. The doors that lined the windowless hall either didn't open, opened onto brick walls, or opened onto yawning black voids too infinite to contemplate. I threw some spare change into one of them (careful not to get the lucky coin Gwydion had given me mixed up with my more mundane pennies) and never heard it hit the bottom.

  I began to suspect what had happened the second time I passed through the distinctive blue door and just found more of the same hall. By the third time, my suspicions were unfortunately confirmed. I'd fallen into some kind of trap. A dead end in Gwydion's big bullshit puzzle-house, looping around infinitely with no exit.

  I kept busy for a while, confirming my fears by digging a mostly melted cheap lipstick out of the bottom of my purse and using it to mark the walls next to each door as I tried to open them. As before, it was all locked, bricks, or bottomless pits. When I passed through the blue demon head door the fourth time, all the doors were closed again, but the lipstick marks remained, confirming this was the same hall repeating. On the off chance the answer was simple, I turned around and went right back through the blue door, rather than following the hall to its end. On the other side was the same hallway, complete with lipstick marks and the same blue door at its far end, confirming that this was some kind of dumb spatial loop and that I was thoroughly fucked.

  I lost it a little bit after that, screaming a lot and smashing all the chintzy vases and washed out watercolors of unrecognizable plants that stood on the regularly spaced end tables or hung on the wall in precisely measured intervals and repeating colors. I made a valiant, temper-tantrum effort to break down one of the locked doors, which refused to so much as shake in its doorframe even when I threw myself at it with all the momentum I could gather. I scuffed it up pretty good though. Maybe if I stayed at it long enough I could hack my way through the door and really bring this Shining reference full circle. If my luck so far was anything to go by, it would turn out the door opened inward rather than outward and there was just more bricks on the other side. To top it all off, I went through the blue door again and found all traces of my tantrum erased. The vases were back on their tables in one piece. The tepid watercolors were back on the walls, un-smashed. Infuriated, I smashed several vases again and screamed some more.

  It was so monumentally frustrating, and I was so wired and unstable from everything that happened over the past week or so that eventually I just sat down against a wall and started crying. I don't think you could blame me. Two weeks ago, my great uncle died. I hadn't known him well, but still. Then I'd been tricked into bonding with the Candle of the Covenant (thanks, Gwydion), I discovered I had a disgraced and incredibly powerful ancestor I'd never heard of who was alive and wanted the candle (I discovered this when he t-boned my car and stole it out of the wreckage), I met a werewolf and an undead mountain lion in pretty quick succession, killed the mountain lion, fucked the werewolf, found out the werewolf was dying and I was making him die faster just by being around him, fought my unimaginably powerful undead ancestor in there somewhere, learned that everyone with a drop of magic hated me on principle and wasn't crazy about werewolves either, found out the nice lawyer from work that I had a crush on was a compulsively mischievous Court Fae who had set me up with the candle just to see what would happen (thanks again, Gwydion), got dragged through a fucked-up purple parallel universe where space didn't work right, which gave me a migraine and would probably haunt my nightmares for years (THANKS, GWYDION), and now I was stuck in a stupid endless magic hallway, maybe forever, and I was going to go crazy and starve to death and never be found. Which was also, by the way, Gwydion's fault!

  So yeah, I was probably due a proper cry. I'd been putting it off. That little cry in the alley outside Julius's had weakened the dams. Now they were overflowing.

  Not just any crying either. No picturesque, single-tear-rolling-down-my-flawless-cheek movie crying. Hard, heavy, ugly bawling. The kind of crying you only do when there's no one to see you doing it. The most embarrassing, red faced, miserable wailing possible, complete with all the expected snot, redness, and stupid distressed seal noises. I'd already been a mess before. Now my makeup looked like I was auditioning for a part in a Kiss cover band composed of sad clowns. I didn't dare even contemplate what my hair was doing right now. I'd got stupid cheap melted lipstick all over my hand and had to wipe it on my nice skirt. I hadn't looked this pathetic a
nd unkempt since middle school.

  Someone cleared their throat.

  I looked up, shocked, to see Gwydion standing above me, brows drawn in a frown of mild concern. He was shutting the world-tree door behind him, through which I briefly glimpsed Gilfaethwy looking murderous in a slightly too small copper wire cage that thrummed with magic. I was not in the hallway from hell anymore, but sitting on the floor outside of Gwydion's artifact collection like I'd never left.

  "Are you alright?" Gwydion asked, frown deepening as he looked over me, absorbing the hideous state I was in.

  "Oh my God," I muttered, pulling my knees up to my chest and hiding my face in them, half to keep him from looking at me and half just to hide.

  "He's not going to do you any good," Gwydion said blithely. "Wardrobe malfunctions weren't really His area even before He stopped doing direct intervention. Unless you're declaring me your god? In which case, I humbly accept."

  I turned my face away from my knees long enough pin him with a poisonous glare. He just smiled and offered me a hand up.

  "Come along then," he said. "I can help you with that."

  I didn't take his hand. After that little god comment, I was wary of anything that could be interpreted as accepting a deal. But I did get slowly, miserably to my feet. Embarrassment and reflexive anger burned under my skin. I had plenty of reasons to be furious with Gwydion. But I was mostly just humiliated that he was seeing me this way.

  "Hold still," Gwydion ordered, taking me by the shoulders. "I haven't done this on anyone but myself in some time."

  He held up a hand about an inch from my forehead, his other still on my shoulder. He snapped his fingers, and a wind lifted my hair off my shoulders and rushed across my face. My crying sinus headache vanished, my stuffed-up puffiness was gone, and I even felt more alert. As that breeze caught my skirt, the makeup stain vanished.

  "There we are," Gwydion said with a satisfied little tilt of his head. "Much better. How did you get in such a state?"

  He drew a silver mirror from inside his coat and held it out for me to inspect myself. My makeup and hair were once again perfect. Even the nail I'd broken while smashing things had been restored. I leaned closer with a curious frown, noticing my makeup wasn't exactly what I'd done this morning. It was close, but my lipstick had been a slightly different shade and glossy, not matte. Also, I always did my eyeliner wings horizontal, and these tilted up in perfect cat-eyes. Gwydion hadn't just restored my makeup; he'd redone it.

  "I was already kind of a mess," I admitted, still looking at myself, mystified. "Had to talk Ethan out of committing suicide before we came through the portal. I thought I'd go find a bathroom, but your house is impossible. I don't know why I thought it was a good idea to wander off into it to begin with."

  "That would be the house's fault," Gwydion assured. "Don't beat yourself up about it. The foundations are made from stones that once comprised the walls of the Labyrinth of Mynos. They broadcast a subtle hypnotic suggestion that wandering off and not paying attention to where you're going is a good idea. It's a useful security feature."

  "Makes sense," I said, fussing with my hair in the mirror. "Is that what that stupid trap hallway was about too?"

  "I don't have any traps in my house," Gwydion replied. "Laying traps in the place you live is very unwise, as anyone who has stumbled to the bathroom in the dark and stubbed their toe on every piece of furniture they own can attest."

  "It was definitely a trap," I said, shaking my head to fluff my hair out. "An endless stupid hallway with doors that don't open or don't go anywhere, and no matter how many times you go around it's just the same hallway with the same big stupid blue door and you can't even break things to feel better because it all just resets."

  "I see," Gwydion said, tilting his head thoughtfully. "I would hazard a guess that you are feeling trapped, anxious about your lack of options or control over your situation."

  "Well, yeah," I scoffed, fixing my earrings. I'd been staring into the mirror so long I didn't quite recognize my own eyes. Had I blinked? "I mean, have you seen what my life is like lately? I'm just getting dragged from stupid bullshit to stupid bullshit, and there's nothing I can do to stop it or even to help the people I care about. Crazy, right?"

  "Indeed," Gwydion said without much sympathy. "The blue demon door is not a trap. It's a trial. I had the door removed from a monastery in what is currently Spain centuries ago, along with a great deal of the supporting architecture, in order to insure the enchantment remained intact. The trial of the blue demon pits you against your anxieties and insecurities. There were three such doors in the monastery. I also have the green demon door, which tests you against your fears and unacknowledged desires. I left the red demon door."

  "What did the red one do?" I asked, straightening my clothes for the hundredth time. I couldn't seem to stop doing that, but it didn't worry me.

  "The trial of the red door was false pride, self-aggrandizing misconceptions, and the lies we believe about ourselves. It's said that at the end of the trial you would stand face to face with yourself, and see your own soul in perfect, objective truth."

  "Wicked," I mumbled, grimacing as I checked my teeth. "Why didn't you take it?"

  "Because, Miss Vexa," he replied. "As previously stated, putting traps in one's own home is deeply unwise."

  "It can't be that bad," I said, pulling on my hair, motions becoming more aggressive as I tried to find an acceptable style. My scalp was starting to hurt. "It was just a hallway. I have waaay more anxieties and insecurities than that. It didn't even bring up my weight, or how I feel like my magic makes me gross and maybe evil and it's no wonder no one with magic wants to associate with me, or how maybe I'm moving too fast with Ethan, and maybe he's just into me out of pity, or because he knows he's dying and he'll just take what he can get, or how guilty I feel about how much I like Cole and what if I like him more than Ethan and what if Ethan can tell and what if I realize I DO like Cole better and break Ethan's heart when he's dying and what if he decides he wants Cole and not me, and what if the next time he shifts I can't stop him and he kills me and what if I can't find a way to break the curse and what if in the end I just have to let him crawl off somewhere to die like a stray dog and I'll never know what happened and what if what if what if what if—"

  "That's enough," Gwydion said, removing the mirror from in front of me. I stumbled, dizzy, wondering what the hell had just happened. "The trial would have reached all those insecurities eventually. Though frankly, I think a few of those would have been saved for the green door. The goal is to allow you to confront one or two at a time, accept or overcome them, and move on, until you have destroyed all doubt and weakness within yourself. The monks who completed all three trials had achieved unparalleled understanding of themselves and their place in life, and thus the enlightenment of perfect self-annihilation."

  "What did you do to me?" I asked, slightly slurred as I grabbed for the wall to support myself, missed, and had to try again.

  "Of course, most of the monks that tried it went bat-shit insane," Gwydion said idly, tucking the mirror into his coat again. "A few of them just kept going back through the doors, over and over again, trying to find some ultimate, unchanging knowledge of self in complete bullheaded disregard for the inherent paradox. Eventually, the entire order passed through the red door and never returned."

  "What did you DO?" I demanded, too disoriented to appreciate his weird rambling about monks.

  "If you would pay attention, I am trying to explain," Gwydion said evenly, examining his nails while I shook my head, still trying to clear it. "Because you did not know how to leave, the door would have held you indefinitely. Fortunately, I noticed and pulled you out, but the door did not release you. You had neither completed the trial nor conceded defeat. It would have drawn you back to it, over and over, any time you passed through a door until you finished the trial, one way or another. Which would have been incredibly inconvenient for me. But it is easily count
eracted by demonstrating that you already have perfect knowledge of your flaws. The White Stag mirror compels whoever looks into it to speak only in perfect truth, even truths they can't acknowledge consciously. I gently guided you towards truthfully declaring your insecurities, and the door released you."

  "You... you hypnotized me?" I summarized, still clinging to the wall for support. I was shockingly tired.

  Gwydion rolled his eyes and made an impatient 'more or less' gesture with a hand.

  "If you must put it in such inaccurate terms," he said. "It was the most convenient and expedient way to rescue you. It is not even a particularly strong compulsion. The mirror only really works if you aren't expecting it. As soon as you realized there was something to resist, for example if I had asked you direct personal questions, you would have broken loose. So please don't throw a fit about your free will or whatever. I've never understood the human obsession with it anyway. It's a poor delusion. A man is lucky to make even three or four choices that were not all but predetermined or else utterly inconsequential—"

  "Shut up," I said, loud enough to echo in the impossibly high ceilings, which rose to vaulted peaks in brazen defiance of the fact that I knew there were other floors above this. Gwydion shut up. I took a deep breath. The dizziness was fading, though I was still weirdly exhausted. I pulled out my phone and nearly dropped it as I saw the time. I had been in that fucking hallway nearly eight hours. I took another deep breath, drawn hard through flared nostrils, hoping it would do to calm me what the first one hadn't. I put my phone away, closed my eyes for a moment, and gathered myself. Finally, I found the composure to look Gwydion in the eye. "Thank you."

  Gwydion inclined his head in a small, gracious bow, smiling smugly.

  "If you ever do that again," I continued, concentrating on keeping my voice as even and controlled as possible as I stepped very deliberately into his personal space. "I will figure out exactly how many pieces you can cut an immortal into without them losing consciousness, stuff the biggest piece in a mason jar, and reenact my favorite scene from Peter Pan."