Radley's Labyrinth for Horny Monsters by Annabelle Hawthorne (highly recommended books .txt) 📕

get out of here, we can discuss your current living arrangement. I want to hear more about this ‘bad thing’ some time.”

“Step around that,” Cerulea told him, pointing at the floor.

Mike knelt, finally seeing the seam in the stone from up close. He was able to scoot by easily, wondering what sort of trap that would have set off. He continued walking and noticed the trap frequency had increased dramatically. “I have no idea how the others made it through here.”

“They didn’t come this way,” Olivia told him from up ahead. “This is a shortcut, so the number of traps is really high.”

“A shortcut to where?” Neither of the fairies answered.

Their pace slowed dramatically with the appearance of trip wires and pitfalls painted to look just like an ordinary floor. Mike nearly fell in one of these, but a quick-thinking Olivia bounced herself off his chest hard enough that he tipped back onto the path instead of falling. The way forward was perilous, and Mike moved only a few steps at a time at the fairy’s insistence. It had been a long time since the Minotaur had called out, which made him nervous. If he were to come across the beast now, it would become a battle of luck as he ran away.

“Whoa.” They came to a three-way intersection, and Mike stopped to survey the other two paths. Whoever had come through here before him had set off several traps down the other corridors. Spikes from the ground and wall were evident everywhere, and a few piles of rock could be seen in the distance. He followed Olivia, who was moving a bit faster now.

“Most of the traps have been sprung already,” she told him. “Except for a couple of the nastier ones, so watch your step.”

“What could be nastier than spikes?” Mike wondered aloud.

To answer him, Olivia flew ahead and grabbed onto a small wire near the floor, pulling it backward. Jets of fire filled the hallway for several yards. The whole area became hot enough that he broke into a sweat.

“You made your point,” he announced.

Olivia’s twinkling light hovered by his face, doing lazy figure eights.

“The fire jets are the worst,” Cerulea told him. “Even if you trip the trap, you can’t get out of the way. There’s one part of the Labyrinth where there aren’t any traps except for that one. It’s a giant pressure plate that takes up the whole floor for about ten feet, so you can’t avoid it. It scorches everything for a couple hundred feet in either direction.”

“It pisses off the Minotaur when it goes off,” Olivia added with a smile. “It leaves scorch marks that he has to remove, otherwise people will realize that the trap is there.”

“How often do you guys set that one off?” Mike asked.

“About once a year.” Cerulea giggled. “Then we all jump out when he shows and yell, ‘Happy Birthday!’”

Mike laughed. “You three are a riot.”

“It passes the time,” Olivia said. “Especially because she won’t let us leave.”

“She who? Emily?” Again, silence from both of them. “Why won’t you tell me who is running the Labyrinth?”

“Because we can’t,” Cerulea whispered. “It’s part of the Labyrinth’s magic.”

“I don’t understand why it matters who runs the Labyrinth,” Mike said.

“She doesn’t want people to know she is here,” Cerulea said. “She’s protecting something important. It’s why she is down here.”

Mike mulled over the possibilities. “Is the Labyrinth separate from the house or an extension of it?” he asked, thinking about the vision he’d had.

“We don’t know,” Olivia told him.

“We ended up at the house by accident,” Cerulea added. “We don’t know anything about it. Emily let us stay because she liked how we sparkled.”

“But she changed.”

“And it wasn’t a good change.”

“After the thing with Garrett?” Mike asked. “The guy who attacked the house.”

“No.” All the sparkle had gone out of Cerulea’s voice. “She changed way after.”

“What happened?”

The fairies were quiet. Mike was about to ask again, but they turned a corner, entering a chamber full of columns covered in thick, leafy vines. In the middle of the room, something large hung from the ceiling, vines wrapped around a figure that slowly spun in place. The creature rotated slowly until her face came into view. Her eye narrowed when she saw him.

“It’s about fucking time,” Sofia said.

Dana looked at herself in the mirror. She felt the same, or at least she thought she did. Touching the ceramic sink below the mirror, she realized that she couldn’t tell if it was hot or cold. This had been true of everything else she had encountered so far, a strange numbness that only applied to temperature.

Her sense of touch had been muted, but her sense of smell had received a boost. Even now, she could smell the corpse of her landlady in the basement and Daryl’s breath in her bedroom. Daryl the necromancer had let her out of the basement to roam about, announcing that he intended to take a nap. He had warned Dana that any attempt to flee would permanently ruin her chances of returning to the afterlife, and he would do worse things to her if he ever caught her.

His driver stood guard in the driveway. He had motor oil on his jacket from retrieving her broken bike and casually throwing it in the garage.

She didn’t know what to do or think. Her emotions were similar to what she’d felt sitting through Alex’s funeral. She knew they were there, but they were being tossed into the void quicker than she could feel them. Wandering from room to room, she thought about what Daryl had told her.

Mike apparently had something that Daryl wanted. All Dana had to do was go in his house and either get Mike to let Daryl in or figure out what Mike was hiding and bring it to Daryl. She had asked what it was he was looking for, but Daryl informed her that she would know it when she saw it. He had also tasked