Henner nodded, but didn’t say anything. Wanda continued.

  “I vote we break for the next however long it takes Poppy to retrieve the Mystic Veil and then we meet here again once she has it in hand.”

  Henner nodded, Marty appeared thoughtful, and Finn just appeared… nervous. As to me, I was searching my mind for any reasonable explanation as to why we shouldn’t go messing around with things we didn’t understand, like black vortexes that existed behind ordinary ironing boards. But, unfortunately, I couldn’t think of a single reason that might dissuade Wanda.

  ***

  Two hours later, we were all back at the Tayir Mansion, assembled in the wash room around the mysterious black vortex in the wall. This time, I’d left Finn at Wanda’s, under the care of Astrid, Darla and Libby, much though I’d had to fight him the entire time. But there was no way I was going to let him come back to Henner’s when there was no saying what was going to happen when we used the Mystic Veil to part the veil, itself.

  “The potion, Poppy,” Wanda said as she held out her palm. With misgiving, I reached into my handbag and pulled out a small, glass bottle. I held it out to her and Wanda accepted the bottle of dark purple, inky liquid. She uncorked the top, filled the dropper, and dribbled the potion down either side of the door frame. Then she ran a bead across the top.

  “What are you doing that for?” Marty asked.

  She didn’t bother turning around, just continued anointing the doorframe and finished by dropping some of the mixture on herself. “I’m opening the door between the realms.”

  “Why?” Marty continued.

  “Because I’m going in,” she answered matter-of-factly, as if she’d just said she was hungry and wanted a sandwich. She turned around and handed the bottle of Mystic Veil back to me.

  Even though I’d assumed such was her plan, because there was no reason to part the veil unless you wanted to enter said veil, I was far from convinced it was a good idea.

  “This is a really bad idea,” Marty said. “You know that, right?”

  “I don’t know that,” she answered in that hifalutin way of hers that sometimes got on my nerves. At the moment, though, I was too worried for her to be annoyed.

  I kept my eyes trained on Wanda, who was wearing the expression of someone determined, someone who wouldn’t be dissuaded.

  “You have no idea what’s on the other side, Wanda,” I said. “You could get trapped inside or you could bring back something we really… don’t want you to bring back.” I took a deep breath. “Not to mention the fact that you haven’t told Lorcan about any of this.”

  She turned on me. “And why should I tell Lorcan?”

  “Because… you both are—”

  “Nothing,” she finished for me.

  “I doubt he’d agree with that.”

  “Regardless,” she continued, chin in the air. “If I’m able to find answers in that veil as to how we can sever this bond, Lorcan would be all for it.”

  “You don’t know that,” I insisted. “And I’m willing to bet that if you asked Lorcan if this was a good idea, he’d reply in the negative… emphatically.”

  “Well, it’s a moot point because the sun is up and Lorcan isn’t.”

  “What exactly did you mean when you said she could bring something back?” Marty asked, looking between both of us. “Like a monster or something?”

  I cocked my head to the side. “Or something.”

  Wanda glared at both of us. “This veil was woven using powerful blood magic,” she said as she turned to face it again and held up her hands on either side of her. “I can feel it.”

  “That doesn’t make it safe,” I argued.

  “It’s obvious Betanya created it,” Wanda continued. “And that makes it safe enough for me.”

  “But why did she create it?” I asked.

  She turned to look at me and shrugged. “She must have meant to store something important behind it—maybe to hide something.”

  “Hmm,” I started, but she continued.

  “I’ve been studying every detail of Betanya’s life for months and whatever is behind this… this void… it could be important—for me and for Henner.” She paused for a moment or two and then nodded again. “And if there’s even the slightest chance that there’s something behind the void that could help me break the blood bond, I have to go after it.”

  Before anyone could so much as say another word, Wanda stepped into the darkness of the veil. The red seam immediately appeared and glimmered as it stretched around her. A second later, once most of her body was encapsulated by the red glimmer, a brilliant white light flashed through the breach. I blinked against the ferocity of the light and when I could focus again, Wanda had disappeared.

  “She’s gone,” Marty said, sounding completely flummoxed.

  My heart was pounding, and I didn’t know what to think—other than the fact that I was scared to death for Wanda and whatever she was about to meet on the other side of the darkness.

  The three of us stared into the vacuous hole, but there was nothing to see.

  “What do we do?” Henner asked in a tiny voice as he looked at me.

  I gripped the bottle of Mystic Veil even more tightly and a split second later, I felt a sudden force pulling me towards the opening in the wall. It felt like the almightiest of vacuums sucking me forward.

  “It’s pulling me in!” I yelled as I tried to brace myself against the force, but my sneakers started skidding against the tile floor as the void continued to pull me towards it. Marty and Henner responded immediately by reaching out and gripping my arms, trying to force me backwards, but their shoes also started to skid. Pretty soon, all three of us were being forcibly yanked towards the veil.

  “Let go!” I yelled, realizing they’d be sucked into the void if they continued to hold onto me. And I was fairly sure the void wouldn’t release me, owing to the fact that I’d been the one to brew the Mystic Veil which had unlocked the boundary.

  There was a sudden wind that blasted out of the darkness in front of me, and I dropped my face to shield my eyes. Still, their hands around my arms were tight. I tried to look at Marty but found it difficult against the onslaught of wind that pummeled me.

  “If we all go in, we don’t know if we’ll be able to get back out again!” I yelled over the moaning of the wind.

  I felt Henner release my arm as he yelled to Marty, “She’s right!”

  But, Marty shook his head and dutifully clung to me, even though the two of us were nearing the breach in the blackness.

  “Let go, Marty!” I yelled to him, but his grip only tightened.

  “I’m not letting you go in!” he yelled over the deluge of sound coming from the void.

  Almost in response, the force from the veil increased tenfold, and I felt myself slammed forward as Marty tried to pull me back, but lost his footing.

  “It’s sucking me in because it recognizes my magic!” I yelled at him. “Let go, Marty!”

  The suction from the blackness just before me increased until neither of us could fight it and, with a scream of defeat, Marty finally released my arm and fell against the floor. I looked at him in shock while the red seam of the veil stretched around me. A second later, a blinding white light overcame my vision, just as it had when Wanda stepped through earlier.

  Chapter Eight

  At first, I couldn’t see anything.

  The incredible light hurt my eyes, but either the light faded or my vision adjusted after a few seconds. I blinked a couple of times and then squinted as I took in my surroundings.

  Everything was bright—lit in such a way that I felt like I was in the center of a spotlight. As I stared, I began to make out the outline of a shape in the distance. The more I studied it, the more it delineated itself into that of a person and after another few seconds, I recognized that person to be Wanda.

  “Wanda!” I called out.

  She stood at the other end of what looked like a corridor. It was a little difficult to tell because the walls were such a bright white and the ceiling and floor were exactly the same shade, that I could barely even see where the walls started and the floor and ceiling ended.

  Wanda turned around and her eyes widened in obvious surprise. “Poppy?”

  “The veil sucked me in,” I explained as I tried to catch my breath. My heart was racing, and I felt sick to my stomach.

  She nodded as if my appearance here made sense. “It was your magical imprint on the Mystic Veil.”

  “That’s what… I figured.”

  She strode down the corridor, towards me, and ran her hand along the wall as she went. When I turned back in the direction in which I imagined the guys and the washroom existed, I couldn’t see the seam, nor anything beyond it. Instead, the whiteness of my surroundings was unbroken—as if there was no seam to begin with.

  “The door is gone,” I said as I turned to face Wanda again, panic in my tone.

  She shook her head. “Don’t worry. I can still feel the threshold, which means it’s still there.”

  “What about getting back through?”

  “You have the Mystic Veil, right?” I nodded and looked down at my hand where I still clutched the potion. And good thing too because without it, I wasn’t sure how we’d get back out.

  “What is this place, anyway?”

  She peered around her. “We appear to be in some sort of maze.”

  “A maze?”

  We started forward and at the end of the corridor, we met another wall leading to the right. This hallway led into a different corridor and that corridor led to the next and so on and so on, apparently without end. Suddenly, it made sense as to why Wanda had described the place as a maze.

  There weren’t any signs directing us through the labyrinth, and without any identifying features, there was no way to figure out where we were going, nor where we’d already been. It was just endless white halls, apparently leading nowhere.

  With no color or sensory stimulation, my mind started to play tricks on me as random and sporadic thoughts suddenly invaded my mind.

  Was I even really ‘here’ at all? Was this some sort of astral projection of my soul self? Or was I actually here, in the flesh?

  Regardless, I had to get out. We had to get out.

  Thinking of how in the world we were going to find our way back out of this maze of corridors, I glanced down at the bottle of Mystic Veil, and caught sight of my watch. I had to study it for a few seconds, because the face had completely disappeared. There were no hands or numbers. The watch was as blank as the corridors around me.

  “How is that,” I started.

  “Don’t ask what’s possible and what’s not in a veil,” Wanda answered as she continued forward and I followed her, both of us turning another corner. “Everything is possible.”

  I nodded, although I didn’t like the sound of that. Wanda looked like she was just about to say something more when she paused and stopped walking, standing right next to me. She frowned and cocked her head to the side like she was thinking hard about something.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Look up.”

  She took a few more steps and craned her neck upward as I followed her gaze. I gasped at what appeared to be a bright red bloodstain on the ceiling.

  “There’s no sign of what or who caused it,” she said, scanning the corridor behind us and shaking her head.

  A memory suddenly interrupted my thoughts—a flash back to the bloody room in Betanya’s house. It couldn’t be a coincidence that blood was here, too. We turned another corner and stopped short when we spotted another blood smear—a bigger one. Following the stretch of the red stain, we ventured into the hall where the stain skidded down one wall.

  Tiptoeing forward, I quickly took note of another stain as soon as we turned the next corner—on the floor this time. A puddle of blood darkened the white surface, and the puddle was so wide it was nearly impossible to step around it. Bloody footsteps led away from the puddle.

  “Whoever left all this blood is or was moving deeper into the maze,” I said.

  Wanda nodded.

  The footprints, meanwhile, led to a T-intersection and veered to the left. The hall to the right was just as white and unblemished as was the rest of the maze. The hall to the left, though, was one grotesque crime scene of blood. The red stuff was smeared everywhere—on the walls, across the floor, and even splattered across the ceiling.

  Wanda and I stood at the intersection, measuring the landscape.

  “We should go back,” I husked. “Whatever is in here must be dangerous.”

  “I don’t know that we can go back,” Wanda responded as she turned to look behind her. Then she looked at me. “Do you remember which way we came?”

  “Well, away from all the blood to begin with.”

  “And beyond that?”

  I chewed my lower lip. “I’m not sure.” I cast one glance down the hall before us and shuddered. “If we head that way, though, who knows what we’ll find.”

  She looked over her shoulder toward the other fork of the maze and when she faced forward again, she didn’t appear any more excited to traipse into the bloody corridor than I did.

  “Let’s go that way.”

  I didn’t argue. We turned our backs on the blood and made our way to the right-hand corridor, entering the immaculate white expanse again. I let out a shaky breath as I thought about how in the world we were going to find our way back to our entry point.

  “What do you think made all that blood?” Wanda asked, pulling me from my thoughts.

  “I don’t know and I don’t want to think about it.”

  I turned the corner and my toes rammed into something solid. A split second later, I glanced down and screamed when I found a human body sprawled across the floor.

  Wanda pounced on me and clapped her hand over my mouth. “Quiet!” she hissed.

  I nodded to let her know I’d gotten control of myself and we both took a step back from the body. The woman’s unseeing eyes penetrated the ceiling of this awful place and it took me another second or two before I recognized her facial features and the salt and peppered black hair as belonging to Mrs. Nicholson, Henner’s housekeeper.

  Blood caked Mrs. Nicholson’s clothes and saturated her hair. It also smeared every inch of the corridor beyond the place where we’d found her.

  “Yikes,” Wanda said and frowned as my gaze settled on a gaping, ragged hole in her throat. It looked like she’d been attacked by some wild creature.

  “We have to get out of here,” I whispered as I realized whatever had killed this poor old woman could still be inside the maze.

  Wanda surveyed the area. “Easier said than done.”

  At her words, I realized she was right because it dawned on me just what this place was, what this maze was.

  “Betanya trapped something in here,” I said as Wanda continued to scrutinize the maze with sharp eyes.

  “But…”

  “The beast escaped,” a voice I didn’t recognize announced from directly behind us.

  With my heart in my throat, I turned around at the same time Wanda did. Before us stood a tall woman with dark black hair. I recognized her immediately—from the pictures Wanda and I had discovered when we’d researched the women mentioned in Betanya’s journal.

  “Florence!” I gasped as my mouth dropped open. “Are you Florence Wilson?”

  If she were surprised we knew who she was, she didn’t show it. Instead, she worried her lower lip as her fingers creased the hemline of her dress, which would have been fashionable in the seventies.

  “You shouldn’t be here.” Florence spoke in a wooden tone.

  “We don’t have much of a choice in that matter,” Wanda answered as she swallowed hard.

  “Florence, is this place a cage?” I asked, wanting to immediately detect the current threat level. Florence nodded. “So what in the world is in it?”

  Before Florence could respond, Wanda interrupted her.

  “Roscoe.”

  Florence looked at her. “Yes.”

  Wanda then started nodding as if something was starting to dawn on her. “This was Roscoe’s prison—or it was supposed to be his prison.”

  “Betanya trapped him here,” Florence replied in that stony way of hers that reminded me directly of… Libby.

  “Florence,” I said, wanting to get to the most important point ASAP. “Is Roscoe still inside the maze? Could he attack us?”

  Florence looked at me and shook her head. “He escaped.”

  “Then he’s inside the house?” I asked as I looked from Florence to Wanda.

  I turned back to Florence as something else dawned on me… if Roscoe was still alive, then...

  “Florence, what happened to Betanya?” Wanda asked, apparently on the same thought trail I was.

  Florence looked at Wanda and matter-of-factly answered, “Oh, she’s in here… in the maze.”

  “Betanya’s alive?” I insisted, just to make sure.

  Florence nodded as Wanda looked at me and gave me an enormous smile. Then she turned her attention back to Florence. “We need you to take us to Betanya, Florence.”

  Florence worried her lower lip again and the expression she gave us said she wasn’t sure if she should trust us. And I didn’t blame her—as far as she knew, we’d just randomly appeared in this maze she’d been imprisoned in for decades. Not to mention Roscoe escaping and then the death of Mrs. Nicholson. Of course she didn’t trust us.

  “We are friends, not enemies,” I said as I faced Florence. “Wanda is a Blood Witch, just like Betanya, and I’m a gypsy. We only want to help Betanya and stop Roscoe.”

  It took Florence another second or so before she nodded and then beckoned us to follow her. She crossed the puddles of blood in our way and led us through bright white corridor after bright white corridor, winding this way and that. She turned so many corners, I lost track and was fairly certain I’d never find my way back if left to my own defenses.

  Along the way, Florence answered our rapid-fire questions, and we learned exactly what had happened that had led to Roscoe escaping. Apparently, the maze was created to keep Roscoe away from the mortal world, but in order to keep him here, Betanya had to also imprison herself. So she created a constantly expanding maze that would allow her… and Florence… to hide from him.