Total pages in book: 53
Estimated words: 51038 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 255(@200wpm)___ 204(@250wpm)___ 170(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 51038 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 255(@200wpm)___ 204(@250wpm)___ 170(@300wpm)
I felt his power. Not just whatever magic those sunglasses are doing, though I did feel that too, but his power. The power of being him. Quaid, the man.
And honestly, it’s kinda sexy.
Not me being him.
Him. Just him.
Immediately, I’m aroused. I’m talking… all the way around kind of aroused. The throbbing between my legs is like a tiny pulse of electricity.
The world glitches again, and then it’s back. I’m in his head. This time though, I don’t waste it. I look over at the spot where I saw the movement a few minutes ago, and then Quaid wrestles back the power of his glasses from me and I start running.
Right through the walls. Or, where they would be, if they were here.
“No!” Quaid yells. “Stop right now! You’re fucking up the software!”
But I don’t stop because just a few paces in, I see Declan and the monster attacking him and I run harder, a straight line through all the invisible walls of the maze, heading right towards it.
Quaid grabs me by the arm and pulls me back with such force, we both fall to the ground, and the moment we hit, the walls are back.
And when I look at Quaid, his sunglasses are no longer black and all I see are bright green eyes staring back at me.
Powerless, bright green eyes.
He growls. And it’s a real one. I know, because his lip actually goes up into a sneering snarl over his teeth. “Congratulations, you fucking brat.” Those green eyes narrow down into tiny slits. “We’re all gonna die because of you.”
I slowly raise my middle finger at him.
And then I get up and I run.
10 - ARIC
Iturn back in the stone hallway and find the claws of my worst nightmare snatching Declan and pulling backwards so hard, when he slams on the ground, I am a hundred percent sure he’s dead.
The only reason I don’t freak out about this is because he’s a demigod, like me, and it’ll take much more than that to kill him.
I am a hundred-and-one percent sure of this fact. Because this isn’t just any maze or any monster, this is my maze. My monster.
My training grounds, to be exact.
When I was sixteen, my father made this maze so he could turn me into a soldier. I can still see, with perfect clarity, that look in his eyes when he brought me here for the first time.
“You’re weak,” he said. His words coming out like venom. “You’re pathetic. And if you can’t live up to my name, Aric, then you don’t deserve to live at all.”
I was never a small boy. How could I be? I was Ares’s bastard son and took after him in build and muscle. So these insults weren’t based in facts. They were never meant to physically describe me, they were meant to emotionally hurt me.
Because pain, in the eyes of Ares, builds character. And character builds heroes. And if I wasn’t gonna grow up to be a hero, he didn’t want me around.
He was training me to be a warrior and the only way to cure fear is to face all the consequences of losing before you ever step out onto the battlefield.
That’s what this maze was. My battlefield.
The day he brought me here was my sixteenth birthday.
The next time I saw daylight, I was twenty-one.
Five years.
He left me here to fight this monster in the maze for five fucking years.
It’s not real, this place. Well, it is, in every way that matters. But it’s not Olympus and it’s not the mortal realm either. It’s something in between.
Some kind of illusion.
If an illusion could literally decapitate you, and you don’t die. Just wake up in your bed like it never happened.
Except it did happen and there was no way to forget.
I died every way possible.
I suffered every pain imaginable at the hands of this monster.
And I came out the other side with every single memory intact.
This is how you build character, my father told me.
This is how you make a warrior.
I’ve never been the same since.
So when I see my nightmare pulling Declan away with those massive claws, I freeze. I can’t process what I’m seeing. I killed it, even though it wasn’t really alive, it bled. I took its head off. I cut it up into little pieces and threw them into the fire. I watched it burn, bit by bit. I ground those horns down into dust with a crude grindstone. So that when I left this place, I knew I would never have to come back because the monster was gone.
And yet, here it is.
My monster. Doing its best to kill Declan right in front of my eyes.
I can’t move. I’m frozen, like I looked the Medusa in the eyes and was turned to rock.
I went crazy in here.