Cave of Nightmares (27 page)

The clear prism was still casting bright light all around it as it slowly shrank, and he held it carefully away from his line of sight as he looked th
rough the amber one and thought,
Air
. He just needed the residual light to cast the spell and had no desire to compound his prisms.

Bubbles of air were approaching him from a narrow tunnel straight ahead, and Hayden swam towards it as fast as he could, his lungs beginning to strain for air as his body tired.

The Endurance is wearing off already…

He supposed he shouldn’t have expected more from a level-three
mixture, since the mastery-level version only lasted an hour, but it was still disappointing. He extinguished the light in his clear prism and returned it to his belt, swimming through the narrow tunnel and seeing light above him.

He broke the surface of the water and was surprised
to find that he was surrounded by his own soggy reflection. As he pulled himself out of the water and onto solid ground (he had somehow popped up in a fountain in the middle of a mansion), he understood why.

Mirrors.

And so they were. Floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall, he was surrounded by dozens of images of himself, some of them small and far away and others magnified to twice his actual size. He continued onwards carefully now, holding his hands out in front of him as he went to avoid walking into anything, his footsteps echoing all around him from the black-and-white tiled floor.

“Hayden! Is that you?” h
e heard Tess’s voice from somewhere nearby, though he couldn’t see her.

“This is
the third time you thought you’ve seen him, Tess. He’s not here…” Tucker’s voice now.

“No, I thought I saw his reflection for a moment…”

“TESS! TUCKER!” Hayden shouted, relieved to finally make contact with part of his team. “I’m here!”

“Hayden! Thank goodness, we thought we’d never find you!”
Zane called out this time.

The three of them have been together this whole time?

There was something odd about that, but he didn’t have time to worry about it right now.

“I’m
stuck in a room full of mirrors,” he called out, feeling his way around more quickly now and bumping sideways into a reflection of himself in his haste.

“So are we. Keep talking and we’ll
try to move towards your voice,” Zane said.

They began a loud discussion about what happened to each of them since entering the maze while they searched for each other, and Hayden frowned when he heard that the others had started off on their own but run into each other after about five minutes inside the maze and
had been together ever since.

“How did you get past that gaping chasm without
using conjury?” Zane asked with interest.

“I didn’t see a chasm…but I got stuck underwater for a while with some
twenty-foot sharks,” he replied, beginning to get really irritated with this mirror room and wondering what the entire point of this part of the challenge was.

He stopped walking for a moment, standing directly in front of a mirror that reflected his image without distorting it. He could
see the annoyed set of his jaw, the amber prism that was resting in front of his right eye, the circlet matting down his wet hair except for a few pieces that stuck out around it at odd angles. Something about his image gave him pause, like there was something niggling at the back of his mind that he was supposed to remember but couldn’t.

Curious, he took a step closer to the mirror, his outstretched hands making contact with the surface so that it looked like he wa
s pressing against his own palms.

Something was
wrong about this, very wrong. It was stirring in his memory, a horrible feeling…

Pressure on his hands, someone pushing down so hard against them…his mother’s screams…lights exploding inside his head while the world ripped apart…

Sunlight.

Someone carrying him as he forced his eyes open.
It was sunny, with a slight breeze…

Hayden felt a surge of hysteria and terror the likes of which he’d never experienced before, and the space around him was filled with a bloodcurdling
, ear-splitting scream. He covered his ears with his hands but the noise was still everywhere, and when he looked in the mirror he saw that the wild-eyed boy screaming bloody-murder was him. He wasn’t able to stop; something had broken inside of him, and he ripped the circlet from his head and threw it to the ground, never wanting to see a prism again because his mother was going to die if he looked into it...

He could hear the echoed s
houts of familiar voices but couldn’t immediately place them, nor did he care who they belonged to right now. He was consumed by the fragments of memory, of strong hands pressing against his own, holding him down while someone screamed…of thousands of arrays of lights exploding through his head until he was sure he would die.

Hayden leaned
to the side and vomited, violently nauseous with the remembered sensation of it.

“LET ME OUT!” h
e shrieked, slamming his hands into the mirror in front of him and shattering it, blood streaming down his palms as they were cut by the fragments. There was nothing behind the mirror but a solid brick wall, and Hayden flung himself into another one, shattering it as well.

“LET
ME OUT OF HERE!” He felt insane, trapped, in terrible danger and alone…

He smashed every mirror he saw, not caring that it hurt, not caring
that he was bleeding everywhere; he just needed to get rid of his reflection and he would be able to calm down…

“HAYDEN, STOP!” Two arms clo
sed around him from behind, pinning his at his side, and Hayden felt the world spin around him and then go black.

His eyelids struggled with the effort of opening as his mind attempted to orient itself. He could still remember scattered remnants of exploding lights, hundreds—no, thousands of them, forcing their way into his head and ripping him apart, burning his insides...

He peeked through the narrow slit in his eyelids and saw
nothing but a dusky sky overhead.

The world trembled
around him and he realized that he was being carried by someone, his head lolling backwards over the person’s arm, which was creating the jostling effect. It felt pleasant outside, with a breeze.

My mother just died…they’re carrying me from the house…

But that didn’t seem right. His mother was already dead, had been dead for a long time now. Also, it was the middle of the day when he was removed from the wreckage of his childhood home, and it was clearly evening right now.

So who’s carrying me and why?

He blinked a few times and tried to bring his head forward, a low moan escaping his lips from the effort.

“Whoa, steady there. I’ve got you.” A stout man with bushy red-grey hair was carrying him, his bright red robes swishing all around him.

“Master…Kilgore?” Hayden asked, confused. He couldn’t remember what he was doing or why the Master of Elixirs was carrying him into the school right now.

“Is he awake?”
Zane’s voice rang out from somewhere behind him, but Hayden couldn’t twist around to get a good look, though he tried.

“Hold still
, boy, you’re no pixie,” Master Kilgore said in his usual gruff voice, and Hayden stopped moving and allowed himself to be carried.

“What happened?”

“We’ll get to that in a few minutes; just relax for now,” Master Asher said, and Hayden tilted his head back and saw that the Prism Master was walking along right beside them, looking unusually serious.

They brought him into the infirmary and laid h
im out on a small bed with blue cotton sheets. Since he felt fine, he immediately sat upright and prepared to get up.

“No you don’t, son. You stay in bed until Razelle has had a look at you
or she’ll have all our heads on a pike.” Master Kilgore pointed a menacing finger at him and Hayden frowned but sat back down on top of the sheets, propping up the pillows so he could sit upright. He tried to imagine the polite, kind Mistress Razelle keeping a secret collection of the other Masters’ heads on pikes in her office and almost laughed out loud.

Kilgore and Asher were the only Masters in the room wit
h him right now, but his teammates followed them inside and greeted him with equally frightened stares. Tucker’s face had blanched oddly, Tess was wide-eyed and shaking, and Zane was scanning his features as though searching for a visible wound.

Before he could insist that
they tell him what was going on, Mistress Razelle swept into the room wearing her green robes, closely followed by Masters Sark, Reede, and Willow—who was wearing pajamas and looked like he’d left his room in a hurry.

“Out of the way,” Mistress Razelle shooed
the others away from Hayden’s bedside and knelt down next to him.

“What’s wrong? Am I ill?” he turned to her
, hoping for some answers, since even Sark was giving him a strangely worried stare right now.

If Sark’s afraid for me
it must be terminal.

“T
here was a problem in the arena and I need to make sure you’re alright,” she answered calmly, shining a bright palm-light in his eyes and looking into them carefully.

The room full of mirrors.

He remembered it now, but distantly, as though it happened a very long time ago and he was only able to call up bits and pieces of it. He strained his mind to think through everything he could remember since he entered the maze that evening, while Mistress Razelle checked his vital signs and began waving a wand and some charms over him.

I was
in the tall grass for a long time…I was by myself.

In his mind he ran through the maze again, dodging traps and eventually entering the water under the rocks. He remembered swimming for a bit, and passing the sharks without getting attacked; he had been particularly proud of that. He came up in a fountain inside a house full of mirrors, and he heard the others…

“He’s fine, physically at least,” Mistress Razelle interrupted his thoughts and Hayden blinked and looked around at the Masters, who were still watching him carefully.

“And mentally?”
Master Reede asked with professional interest, and the healer pursed her lips at him.

“I see no signs of permanent damage. Whatever happened seems to have passed.” She glanced back at Hayden. “How do you feel?”

“Fine, just a little confused,” he admitted.

“Thank you,” Master Willow spoke softly, pulling up a chair near the door. “I believe that the events of tonight’s challenge arena merit a discussion before scores are issued.”

“We’re still being
scored?
” Zane looked aghast by the prospect.

Mistress Razelle muttered somet
hing about skewed priorities as she swept out of the room, shutting the door behind her rather harder than necessary.

“You more-or-less completed the challenge, and it appears that Hayden has recovered sufficiently
to join in the discussion.”

The others took seats as well, with the exception of Master Asher, who leaned against the wall facing Hayden and remained silent and watchful. Hayden’s teammates sat down around the edge of his bed, and
Zane kept shooting glances at him like he expected him to drop dead at any moment.

“How come I was in the maze by myself and the others were all together?”

Master Kilgore smirked. “It wasn’t deliberate. The maze is set up so that most of the paths will intersect at some point so you meet up with your teammates fairly soon. You just happened to take every wrong turn possible and avoided them.”

“We’ve been meaning to decommission the
underwater lake for months now,” Master Reede added casually.

“What went wrong
after that?” Hayden continued asking questions, annoyed that no one was explaining things properly. “I remember getting all the way to the room full of mirrors without too much trouble, even if I went the wrong way…so why am I in the infirmary?”

Master Sark gave him a disbelieving stare.

“Because you went crazy and tried to kill yourself.”

Everyone was staring at him
now. At first Hayden thought the Powders Master was lying just to get a reaction out of him, but then fragments of memory and emotion started to return to him. His hands, covered in blood while he screamed at the top of his lungs, the lights exploding inside of him hard enough to make him vomit, a terrible weight pressing down on his hands…

“Oh…” he blinked hard and swallowed. “Yes…I remember now.”

“What in the world happened to you?” Zane frowned. “We thought you were being attacked by something horrible…all the breaking glass and you screaming your head off. We were trying like crazy to get to you but we couldn’t find a way around those stupid mirrors.”

Hayden shook his head slowly, staring at the palms of his hands as he remembered the weight upon them, turning them slowly and looking for signs of damage. They seemed fine.