Page 20 of Of Monsters and Mazes

He rested a hand with black painted fingernails on his hip, hooking his thumb through the leather belt that held up his black jeans on his perfect frame, then he tipped his chin and offered me a hand to usher me to his side.

Theron, the Dream Weaver.

“Enough of this stalling. You’re coming, aren’t you, Butterfly?”

“It’s Sela. Not Butterfly.” I couldn’t explain what compelled me to introduce myself properly, yet I took his hand and let him help me to my feet. I cursed every flawed trauma response in my brain that told me it was okay to trust him. That he would be my ally and not my next living nightmare. Somehow he’d just shown me the most horrifying illusion of my life, yet I knew he wasn’t lying when he said he’d built it from intrusive thoughts in my own head. I wished I could say he had been.

“SEE-luh,” he repeated awkwardly, like my name tasted spoiled on his tongue. He scrunched his nose and shook his head. “That doesn’t work for me. I like Butterfly better, so I’ll stick with that.”

I pursed my lips in irritation. “You can’t just rename someone for no reason. What if I decided I didn’t want to call you Theron?”

“Your soul has only been known as Sela for something like .0004 seconds on a cosmic scale. I’ve been Theron for as long as the cosmos have been.” He laughed at me as if I was a petulant, spoiled child. “We are not the same, Butterfly.”

Is he for real? “So that gives you the right to rename me at your discretion?”

“Correct. Any human that exists today has already been known by ten thousand different names across all their past lives, you included, so I don’t see why you’re so attached to this terrible one.”

I made an exaggerated point of sighing, having no honest way to argue with that, and Theron was completely unbothered. The logic was probably sound for an immortal god, and I couldn’t totally fault him for it. At least butterflies were pretty and generally well liked, so I could take it as a compliment, really.

Terrible. I was forgiving him way too quickly, and I didn’t like that one bit. I still had to hold him accountable for what he’d done. Even if the content of the dream was somehow allegedly my fault, that still didn’t excuse a damn thing. My simple fantasy of wanting to be held down and forcefully pleasured—CONSENSUALLY, THANK YOU VERY MUCH—was heavily perverted by that nightmare. He was the one who painted the picture, even if he used my own acrylics to fill in the shadows.

I almost smiled at the ridiculous thought that this made him at least as disturbed as I was, but I was quick to cringe that away. This man was not a kindred spirit, and I would not be thinking of him as anything other than a fucking menace.

Right. He was the menace. Not me.

… Maybe I do belong here.

Chapter 8

So this little butterfly was the woman who caught Jericho’s eye. A new year always meant a new tribute, and I should have suspected we’d be seeing another useless human in the realm soon. Someone had to water the plants, after all.

Though it was more than a bit unusual to have her plopped on my doorstep. The only logical explanation was that she’d collapsed there after somehow making it through the Senseless Forest on her own will. She had more than enough Skolex goo and blood in her clothes to imply she’d not been portalled to the other side, but the fact that she was fully aware and sharp was still a clear sign of preferential treatment. Someone must have given her an antidote for Tree Sprite poison at the very least. Otherwise, there was no way her body would have cleared those toxins so quickly without intervention.

Was Jericho actually sweet on this one? Wild.

Whatever the case, I’d been obligated to dip into her head and see what I could find. Placing a tracking mark on the tributes was the bare minimum expected of me, and I could muster that much effort once a year to keep Jericho off my back. The singular dot on her palms allowed him to watch her through his projection lens, and my only real job was to assure he had a window to the show. Though the amount of time I had to spend cleaning the stains and smells out of her clothing was far beyond that bare minimum. I wasn’t going to tell her that the real reason she didn’t have a bra was because I accidentally ruined all the lace in the scrubbing process. It was bad enough trying to undress, clean, and redress her without looking or touching places I shouldn’t. My reputation and intimidation factor would be more impressive if I let her think my nightmares contained a touch of physical reality.

It was also to my advantage for her to think I’d marked her intentionally, like some sort of animalistic claim. I’d brutalized a lot of human psyches through dreams, traumatizing men and women with equal enthusiasm, but the physical scars never materialized in reality. The only person I’d ever marked like that was from Olympus, which she certainly wasn’t. The heavenly realm would be raining destruction down upon us the moment she entered the portal if this tribute had been born with even a drop of angel’s blood.

None of this made sense. I couldn’t say what I’d done differently, but the damage was done. My one solace to this already growing mess was that there were certainly worse tributes I could have been stuck with.

Butterfly was interesting, I’d give her that. I’d taken deep dives into the psyches of an untold number of humans in my lifetime, recreating dreams and nightmares for their time in REM, but of all the horror scenarios I’d built out of their internal insecurities over the years—which mostly ranged from cheating spouses to home invasions—I’d not ever peeked into a fantasy quite like that.

It was a bit telling and disturbing, however, that her worst fear and her most taboo kinks were so tightly interwoven in her headspace that I couldn’t fully separate them before showing her a vision. Her mental health was either concerning or delightful, depending on how fucked in the head you were.

Also the fact that I had to personally temper back the violence of it all, softening her nightmare to keep her mind from total shutdown, was saying something. It was as if sex and fear were the same for her. Not even I could pinpoint exactly where her nightmare ended and her needs began. All I’d discerned was that she wanted to be pinned down and taken—presumably less literally—and she cried when she came. I wasn’t entirely sure where the severed heads, the water torture, and all the blood came in, but somehow that was stored pretty snugly against her ‘romance and dating’ section.

Maybe she loved sex but was afraid of people? Maybe some irrational fear of men? Were there enough kidnappers and serial killers in the human realm to merit giving them such a significant space in her mind? How confusing. I’d say I needed to slip into the human world and give it a look one day, but dealing with even just one of these mortal things each year was more than enough for me.

Still, why would someone feel that way? The last woman to die in the maze had seen sex as power. She lived to seduce the weak willed monsters and men alike, and her nightmares were little more than growing older and losing her youthful beauty.

The one before her took endless joy in fornication, and she saw the devils of the maze as a series of unique dildos. Well, up until she encountered Rai, anyway. When he gored her through her stomach and threw her into the hands of the Cronus, the dildos weren’t so fun anymore.

She had a great time up until that point though.

Yet when I touched my fingers to Butterfly’s temples to read her deepest desires, she seemed to associate sex with an action that gave power to others. She wasn’t allowed to want or seek it, or it would make her somehow less valuable and less worthy of respect to those around her. It was like she wanted it but was so afraid to admit it, she needed someone to give it to her, potentially against her will, rather than offer it. I suppose that would explain how arousal got so muddled with her kidnapping and death scenarios.

Funny. And fascinating. What kind of environment breeds such unhealthy dynamics? I wanted to ask, but getting to know someone who would likely be dead in the next few hours was fairly pointless. Jericho had expressed interest in protecting this one a bit more than usual, but that hardly guaranteed survival.