Chapter Nineteen

Show much for powerless. Having inherited some of the Fury benefits package, I burned to run and fly and fight.

I stormed out of the mirrored dojo as soon as the door shut behind Lindsay. As much as I didn't want to be in that room anymore with so many reflections judging me—all of them my own—I didn't want to follow to closely and risk running into her in the hallway. One more humiliation I did not need.

Leaving the room proved to be slightly more difficult than I'd hoped: when even the door is covered in mirrored panels sometimes you forget where the latch is. Which I had.

Finally in the hallway, I let the door swing shut behind me and started back towards the portal at the end of the hall to my left. My hands rested on the glass at either side of my face, sheer willpower keeping me from shattering the reflection that looked back at me.

She was weak. She was too slow. She didn't belong here. And she knew it. Yet another mirror that held truths I could not hide even from myself.

I wasn't supposed to be any of those things. Her hands pressed against mine and for a moment the world stopped turning; the glass gave way under my palms. A spark of hope flared in my chest and I was finally going to be able to escape through the portal until I noticed the hairline cracks that stretched out along the glass, starting at my hands.

The will power holding back the storm was waning, stretched so thin it could no longer contain the disappointment, frustration, and anger. Pure fury rolled across the face in the mirror and the ugly expression shattered under my fist. A spider web of cracks altered my face until it was multiple ugly expressions that looked back at me instead of one.

The broken mirror showed not only the things I disliked about myself but also the thing I was most afraid of: me. The person in the mirror, damaged as she was, was a stranger. I'd never felt less like me than I did in that moment.

Like a child, I just wanted to go home.

Rather than wallowing in my frustration I tried the doorknobs on the other three doors in the hallway. They had been locked before but if I couldn't get through the portal and wouldn't go back into the empty training room, maybe I could force one open with my new Fury-strong hands. I had no clue what hid behind the closed doors but they didn't look at me through my own eyes and whisper to me all the reasons why I wasn't good enough.

Sometimes you need to lose yourself in the mundane, the inconsequential, and though it was an excuse to stop the unfamiliar and sudden self-loathing I faced in the mirror, I welcomed the distraction.

Two knobs refused to turn. No tiny jerks side to side. As if the two mechanisms were there only for show. I was stronger now but not any closer to a skilled lock-pick than I had been when I'd arrived in the Underworld. Without great force and without a bobby pin—and the bobby pin would not have helped in the slightest—there was no way I was getting passed those doors.

A third door, next to the dojo entrance, begged me not to see it; I hadn't before. On my previous investigation of the hallway rendered three locked doors and the dojo door. Now there were four.

I crept up to it, not wanting to scare it away. Muffled sound came from the other side of the door—voices, a jovial rumble of unmistakable laughter. My hand rested on the plain knob, hope turning to disappointment when it wouldn't move. Their words were unrecognizable but on the other side of the door there were people. People who maybe didn't want to send me into a war I had no stake in. People who maybe didn't want to eat me or beat me up.

The first knock was tentative, just a shy rap of my knuckles against the wood.

All conversation halted. I waited a heartbeat before calling out to them, whoever "them" was. When no one called back, I knocked harder. Fists pounded against wood again and again. Still, the door remained closed to me.

I waited but the conversation was over. Whoever had been there had left.

At the last doorknob I almost didn't even try. This door was the same that Jasper had escaped through the first time he had dropped me in this empty hallway. I didn't expect it to open, great was my disappointment thus far. And it almost didn't.

My hand fisted around the spherical knob and crushed it, unable to take the disappointment of another locked door or the humiliation of going back to the mirrored room to wait for Gregory and Alex to return and deposit me back in my apartment. The remnants of the once-pristine sphere fit nicely in my palm, the metal contouring to fit. I turned the ruined knob slowly, silently hoping for traction.

When it turned in my hand I held my breath. It hadn't turned when I'd tried before and despite my desperate need to leave the hallway, I was weary of what lived behind the door.

But I didn't need to be—the sight on the other side of the door was a grand let down.

More closed doors. Hooray. "Surprise, surprise," I muttered.

The hallway I stood in lead to another hallway, this one with easily three times as many doors.

I sighed my dismay. Trading one hall for another, one set of locked doors for a larger set, my feet carried me into unknown territory.

No mirrored portal watched me as I wandered quietly into the second hall. Each of these doors, ornate and decorative with raised wooden designs or intricate carvings, was unique. The first I came to depicted trees, full and old and wise, shading a tiger from the sun. I touched the raised leaves, each one made to look authentic.

Across the hall was a door that could barely contain its design. The dragon carved into the wood lived in perpetual mid-take off, each scale detailed on a creature too large to fit within the confines of the door. An artist of true skill had created this masterpiece—all of these doors—and the dragon looked as though a living creature might, trapped in the wood for the sake of keeping his beauty alive for eternity.

Other doors showed creatures that were amalgamations of three or four different species, most I didn't recognize. One had a set of constellations carved deep into the wood; another depicted a circle of children, somber, heads bowed as if in prayer.

I didn't try the knobs on any of the door until I came to one that looked a little like me.

Well, the raised carving of a woman could have looked like anyone—it was the outstretched filmy wings that caught my immediate attention. Her head was bowed much like the kids on the other door but unlike those children, she looked out with her eyes, empty eyes that stared into my soul. They were deep holes carved into her face, hungry.

I looked back at the dragon door across the hall and pointed to it. "Gregory," I said into the empty hall. Turning to the door in front of me, I pointed at the woman's face. "Alex."

Naturally I opened the door.

Inside, and without the carving's empty eyes sucking the soul right out of my body, relief swept over me. It was dim in the room, surprisingly sparse. The walls were a soft beige and the furniture—by furniture I mean the twin-sized bed, an armchair, and a dresser and armoire set—were wooden, covered in a deep burgundy color fabric where appropriate. There were no mirrors, no windows; nothing hung on the wall or gave the room a personal touch. An open door on the far side of the room exposed a small bathroom.

Tile floors, dim lighting, and bed linens so crisp they might have been wooden as well; it didn't look like anyone lived here.

After the overwhelming museum décor in my apartment and the stark newness of the training room, the bare-minimum emptiness of the dorm-like room was more than welcome. And the best part was that it was completely devoid of people.

The bed didn't look like anyone had slept here last night but just in case it belonged to Alex, I opted to curl up in the armchair rather than wrinkle the bed covers. I sat heavily, every muscle suddenly aching, and pulled my knees up to my chest. With my arms wrapped around my legs to hug them close and my forehead bent to press against my kneecaps I breathed easily for the first time in days, maybe longer.

For the first time since meeting Hector, I was completely alone; not asleep, not being watched, not laying on my back wishing Gregory was slow and old and fat. No one waited in the next room for me, no one was trying to hit me, not a soul was trying to feed me.

I thought about the scene on the door—on all of the doors in the hall outside. In the hall where I started, the doors lay flush with the wall. Here they were individualized, like nametags on the doors. A woman with wings was a good name plate for a Harpy with soul-sucking eyes.

Here, in the small, meager living quarters she lived in, I understood Alex just a little better.

The armoire stood, proud and stoic, daring me to open it. I feared I would find a reflection of the room itself: mostly empty, just the necessities. It felt like a betrayal of privacy to open those doors so I stayed scrunched up in the chair. I was invading her space enough as it was.

Rolling my head to stretch out my neck, I felt tired. There wasn't any room for anger at that point, just exhaustion. I lifted my shoulders to stretch out my upper back, still curled up on the chair. Eyes closed, head down in the dim room, sleep found me.