“Did you teleport?” I asked him sleepily when he settled in the driver’s seat.
“What?”
“Nothin’.”
“Seat belt,” he said.
I was going to put it on, but now that he said it, I didn’t want to.
“Kara,” he growled.
I turned away from him, lowering the seat so I was lying at a comfortable angle. I was so exhausted I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore, let alone argue with him. Maybe I could relax for a bit while he drove us to school. It was so warm in here. His sweater smelled so good, felt so comfortable. If I had my own place, I’d want this scent to cover every surface of it. I let out a contented sigh, closed my eyes, and fell asleep.
Chapter 15
Cameron
There was a maze in my childhood that I would never forget. It had been a refuge for me when I was a kid, trying to escape from everyone’s expectations. Trying to just be.
It had been a safe haven until that vicious night when life sharpened its claws and made me bleed. Before everything fell apart because of one mistake.
It had been a welcome surprise when I found the maze. Raven and I had just moved to a new neighborhood—for the sixth time that year. I was eight years old, but Raven had made me pack our bags so many times that every place and every face started to look the same.
It only got worse when my father divorced her and remarried. Before, her attention had been divided between me and my father; now, it was concentrated solely on me. It was toxic.
If the kid inside me yearned for an adult to lean on, or for a friend, it was easily squashed by the reality that was my mother. Raven’s demands and emotional instability stopped me from reaching out to anyone.
People stopped mattering to me—just as I stopped mattering to them. It was easier to stop caring.
But at night, when I was alone in a huge house, with my mother out partying or doing whatever the hell she pleased, and when the confines of that house started to represent what was lacking in my life that an eight-year-old boy couldn’t fathom, the maze had been my sanctuary.
/> She’d lock me in the house, but a kid could escape if he had half a brain and enough guts.
Funny how I despised the nights I was locked up. Funny how miserable I thought they were when the worst was still yet to come—the night that shattered everything.
But I’d locked away those memories. Locked them tight.
It didn’t take long to find the maze. The kids in my class often talked about a haunted mansion on my street. They said it was cursed, that whoever entered it would be cursed as well, so there weren’t a lot of people in town who had the balls to venture inside.
The mansion stood on twenty acres of land. It was owned by a writer who never left her house. Rumor had it that it took a year before they found her dead body in the mansion and that she still haunted it up to this day—especially the intricate maze she had built for her lover behind it.
It was a siren’s call to an angry, lonely boy, but I wasn’t afraid of a stupid ghost or a stupider curse. I wasn’t afraid of anything.
Armed with a flashlight and nothing else, I broke into the mansion. A flimsy board served as the front door, as if it didn’t need protection from anything. As if it were daring anyone to smash the board and go inside. All the windows were boarded up with drywall now covered in graffiti.
I only made it to the foyer that first night before my imagination got the best out of me and I ran back to my house, trying my best not to piss my pants.
The dark, cold, and damp room freaked me out; it felt like an evil clown was hiding in there, waiting for me.
It took me a whole week before I tried again. I had cut classes and sneaked out of school, so I’d have the light of the day to guide me.
I climbed the long winding staircase that was covered with unidentified debris, stopped when I reached the landing. There were impressive floor-to-ceiling windows that dominated the wall. I walked toward them, wiped away the thick dust on the glass at eye level, and gawked at what I saw behind the mansion.
The maze spread out before me. The magnificent green of it, the fascinating twists and turns. I was mesmerized. My immediate fascination with the maze overpowered any lingering fear I may have had for the house and I ran straight to it.
The maze was massive. Tightly packed bushes and trees as high as a house served as walls—some of them dead and brown, some green. A few of the partitions were made of steel and wood, buried in vines so thick and fat I could barely see what was behind them.
But if I kept looking, and I did, I saw what hid behind them were secret passages and doors.