Stolen Hearts: Book 1 (Grim's Labyrinth Series) Read online

  Stolen Hearts

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  © 2014 by Grim’s Labyrinth Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any written, electronic, recording, or photocopying form without written permission of the publisher, Grim’s Labyrinth Publishing, LLC.

  Cover Artwork

  Model: Agnes from Garbledville

  Photographer: Arek Kowalini

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  Chapter 1

  You’re having the dream again, Jessica. She heard the echo of her own voice sounding throughout her brain, but she was powerless to wake, to stop it. This time, though, the dream had taken on a whole new twist, a darker and more sinister tint as she watched it happening around her.

  Instead of being a passive observer in her own dream, Jessica found herself living it in the first person, as if she held the mysterious camera that captured every detail. She moved through the stone cavern, its walls hewn from a limestone cave, until the light that pinpricked the darkness up ahead grew more pronounced, more inviting. Following her own lead, Jessica moved along the slick floors, wet from the constant intrusion of water seeping through the rock.

  There were voices, but Jessica couldn’t find them. They weren’t angry or anguished, but they were insistent. Whatever was supposed to happen, she knew it wasn’t happening fast enough for the faceless, wordless whispering that urged her forward.

  Wake up, Jessica. Now! This isn’t going to end well. It’s going to be just as bad as last time, she promised herself, wishing she could wake up. This was the only dream she could remember where she knew she had tried to warn herself, tried to make it stop.

  She didn’t want to move forward, but she had no choice. She was still under her own command, still in control of her own movements, but she was also still just as powerless to stop it. But if she didn’t end it before it was too late, she would see it again. She would see the horrible scene, one that she had memorized in minute detail from years of having this same dream. She’d had it as long as she could remember, and even though she had grown numb to the helpless feeling of this darkness working its way into her brain, she would never get used to the visual.

  Her mind’s eye carried her down the hallway towards the increasingly bright light, a dot that grew as she approached, revealing that it was actually a shaft of light slithering out from beneath a large metal door. She moved forward reluctantly until she was standing on edge of the shadow it left behind. She couldn’t will her feet to carry her forward into the brightness. The long trek hadn’t taken any time at all, no matter how much she wanted to stall in order to avoid seeing.

  Jessica didn’t fight it, although she wished she had. It was as though her sleeping brain was oblivious to the warning that her conscious brain tried to send. Her sleeping self so innocently reached for the long, vertical handle that would let her slide the door back on its track, even while in the conscious part of her mind she knew this couldn’t end well.

  The heavy door creaked as she pushed her weight against its handle, erasing any possibility that she could slip in quietly. One small part of her consciousness wanted to hurry and get this over with, because she knew once she had seen the horrible thing she would wake up, just like she had hundreds of other nights over the past fifteen years.

  Just get it over with, she reminded herself. Open the door, enter the room, do as you’re told, and it will all be over soon. You’ll wake up and get ready for school and this will all be behind you. Just like last time.

  Once the door finally gave way and slid along the groove in the floor, Jessica stepped across the threshold and approached the bed in the center of the room. It was more like a mortician’s slab or even a table than a bed. She moved forward automatically until she stood next to the person who lay there, eyes closed and hands bound in front of her.

  “She’s been waiting for you,” a man’s voice crooned softly in her left ear. Jessica didn’t need to turn to see who it was, to see the face with the hollow eyes, its irises a dull black. The sunken cheeks beneath those eyes only made the blackness all the more hopeless.

  The dream had now taken on a life of its own and Jessica couldn’t stop it. She turned her head just like she’d done every other time and looked the man in the face imploringly, begging him with her frown not to make her do this.

  “You have to,” he answered to her unasked question. “It’s the only way we can be free. It’s the only way you’ll ever be free. You will be held captive until you do.”

  Jessica nodded, letting her hair fall in front of her face then absentmindedly tucking it behind her ear with her fingertips. She looked down at the woman on the table, but then a sense of unease overcame her.

  Something’s not right. This isn’t right, she told herself. This isn’t the dream, they changed it. Who is that?

  Electric sensations crawled over Jessica’s skin when she looked around the room, aware that this was no longer the dream. Something was different, the atmosphere was too charged for her to process where the script had gone awry. She couldn’t find the source of the shift, but she almost missed the familiar comfort of the horror. Now that it was changing, anything could happen. She was no longer in control.

  Jessica looked down at the woman on the table again, willing the dream to return to normal and behave itself. Instead of seeing the same woman who’d endlessly plagued her dreams, this woman was too real. She knew this woman. There was no chance of this dream returning to what she knew now.

  “Jessica, you don’t have to do this,” a different voice said, coming at her from her other side. “It’s not right. You’re stronger than this. You’re stronger than them.”

  She searched frantically for the source of the other, newer voice, but her sight couldn’t penetrate the shadows where she knew it originated. Worse than not seeing was the not knowing, especially since the voice she’d heard was so familiar. She knew it, had heard it a million times before, but it wasn’t clear enough for her grab hold of.

  “Do it, Jessica, so we can all move on,” the original voice told her. She detected a note of desperation in his voice. Was it possible he was afraid that she would disobey? Did he think she was going to listen to the new voice, the voice of a stranger? No way. Not if it meant she could close this nightmare and move on.

  Before she could take the next step in her dream, a hand pushed down on her shoulder. It wasn’t forceful or punishing, but instead, it was… comforting. It had a warmth that she couldn’t remember ever knowing, and it caused her focus to shift. She was no longer as sure as she had been.

  “Jessica, this isn’t the way. It’s not who you are. I’ll prove it,” he said, closer this time, close enough to hold her. While she stood still and uncertain, the hand on her shoulder slid down to her arm, leaving her wrapped in the embrace
of an ephemeral stranger. Before she could recover from the feeling of heat coursing through her, the hand and the arm solidified, encircling her in their strength. She felt herself caving in and melting against the support of the body that now pressed against hers. She let her head fall to the person’s shoulder, unaware of everything that shifted around her and only acknowledging the sense of comfort and safety like she had never felt before.

  “Let’s go,” his voice said, his breath moving across her cheek. She turned to get a glimpse of his face and instead found her lips making contact with his, his closeness leaving her no choice. Instead of pulling away in fear, Jessica moved against him, letting his strength flood through her as their lips met.

  This is new, her conscious observing brain thought, but for once the dream had become a place where anything could happen instead of the same ghoulish scene playing out in slow motion. She was a willing participant in this dream now instead of a hostage, and was intrigued by the path it was now taking. Even if it ended badly, at least it wasn’t the same horror she’d been used to enduring.

  As her dream self kissed the new player in the drama, she forgot for a moment about the body on the table and the voice that still hissed at her to finish the scene. She forgot to be afraid or numb or whatever it was that she felt. Instead, she relished the feeling of his hands at her waist and her arms twined behind his broad shoulders, letting the new sensation of this heated kiss form the only color in an otherwise black-and-white room. It was a spark of new in a dreary tableau of gruesome, and she was determined to see where this new twist took her.

  “Enough!” the first voice screamed in shrill tone, his black eyes now burning intensely. His cold hand wrenched the two apart, sending the faceless man sprawling back into the shadows. His arm caught Jessica’s by the bicep and flung her around to face the woman, still prone and lifeless on the table. “Finish it! Now!”

  Jessica was pulled back into the dream and moved once again in a robotic, obedient fashion. Despite her disheveled hair that only moments ago had a strong hand entwined in its curls, despite the linen nightshirt that hung loosely from her shoulders where its top buttons had come undone, she was thrust back into the original dream again, unable to pull it back onto the new track where it had derailed.

  Just as she had far too many times before, Jessica found herself leaning forward over the woman on the table. Just as she stuck out her hand and bared her nails, pressing them against the woman’s chest only millimeters above her heart, the woman’s face morphed into that of someone she knew. Even though the character now resembled the most familiar face Jessica could imagine, that didn’t stop her. If anything she found herself pushing against the alabaster skin even more forcefully, her fingertips tingling for the feeling of hot blood they craved.

  She pushed her hand through the woman’s chest as though it was nothing more solid than gelatin, letting the oily texture of the woman’s blood suck her fingertips down even further until her wrist disappeared in the woman’s chest cavity. She tried to fix her gaze on the face that looked up at her with a silent scream, but it didn’t matter now. Nothing could stop her once she’d begun the search for the source of life.

  Jessica dug her delicate hand slowly through the pieces of broken rib bone and sinew that encased the woman’s chest, disgusted at her own ability to complete the dream. She finally found what she was looking for—the woman’s heart—and felt it writhing beneath her palm as its pulse raced from fear and pain. She wrapped her fingers around the organ and dug her nails in for good measure, ensuring that the blood coursing from it wouldn’t let it slip from her grasp.

  Jessica pulled with a sudden force, ejecting the heart from the woman’s chest and holding it up in triumph as she looked down at the woman’s stricken face. The all-too-familiar features twisted in agony, not only the physical kind but the emotional kind as well, the pain of knowing she’d been betrayed by someone who should have cared more about her than anyone else she knew. Jessica held the dripping heart above her head in a sign of victory as the woman slowly closed her eyes.

  “Yes, that’s it,” the voice hissed nearby. “Now finish it.”

  Jessica closed her eyes for a moment as her conscious brain tried to look away, to do anything that would distract her from the rest of the dream. Instead, she was all too aware when her dream self held the warm heart close to her lips and let the blood run across her teeth before taking a bite of the hot muscle.

  A sharp pain in Jessica’s ankle caused her to cry out, dropping the woman’s heart suddenly and watching in agony as it slid across the dark slate floor before moving out of sight in the shadows. She tried to grab her leg where the pain continued to increase, but she felt bound by miles of cloth, unable to do anything to stop the hurting.

  When Jessica opened her eyes, she choked back a scream as she saw the woman was awake, her face hovering above her own, only inches from where she writhed. The pain in her ankle increased when the woman kicked again.

  “I told you to get your ass out of bed,” the woman said, giving Jessica one final kick in the leg. “Get up, or you’re not getting anything for breakfast. And if you’re not downstairs in five minutes, I’ll make sure you don’t have lunch, either.”

  Her stepmother turned and left the room, purposely leaving the door open just because she knew Jessica hated it. She stomped down the hardwood stairs before disappearing from sight, leaving Jessica to sort through one of the weirdest dreams she’d ever had.

  She headed downstairs and snuck into the kitchen, trying to draw as little attention to herself as possible. She’d once tried keeping a stash of food supplies in her room in order to avoid confrontations, but it only infuriated her stepmother for some reason.

  Jessica silently reached for a bagel that had been left out on a plate for her, marveling for a moment at the thought that Faydra had actually done something halfway nice for her. The feeling was short-lived when she saw the mold that coated the underside of it, and the obvious dog hairs that meant the bagel had been dropped on the floor and quite possibly kicked across it before being retrieved from beneath the refrigerator. She picked the hairs off and tore away as much of the mold as she could before taking a bite of the cold bagel.

  Chapter 2

  School was particularly brutal that day, at least until mid-morning when she finally got to change for PE and go for a run. Despite her stepmother’s refusal to let her go out for cross-country, Jessica loved to run since it was practically the only time in her day when there was nothing else happening in her mind except the sound of her own breathing. It didn’t matter that she didn’t have real running shoes or even the kind of a bra that would hold her growing “assets” in place as she ran. She ran barefoot and wrapped an athletic bandage around her chest before welcoming the feel of the wet grass beneath her feet, warmed only slightly from the heat of a sun that was still trying to break through the fog of a New England springtime day.

  During her run, the small crowd of other high school students who usually struggled to stay within a football field’s distance of her often chatted noisily behind her, gasping for breath while gossiping about the latest schoolwide scandal. When she bothered to listen, Jessica could sometimes hear them talking about her with a mixture of scorn for her sad lot in life and admiration for her abilities. During the second hour of PE, made possible by the blessed and sought-after position as teacher’s aide to the school’s coaches, it was more of the same. All told, it meant she was given two whole hours a day to herself, time in which she could think of absolutely nothing while moving under her own beautiful power.

  “I heard she’s on all kinds of pills,” one girl directly in front of Jessica said loudly to her friends while gasping for air. The fact that the group was only ahead of her because Jessica was about to lap them should have explained the gasping. “Weren’t you there that day she practically had a seizure in the lunchroom? The kid who works in the nurse’s office said it had something to do with her medication.”
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  “That could have been anything, Brit,” one male in the group of runners said, also struggling to fill his lungs. “She could have diabetes for all you know.”

  “Oh, so now you’re defending her? Go ahead, Josh, tell us what else you’d like to do to her.” Jessica watched as Josh shoved Brittany a little harder than a playful push should have felt, knowing that the fact that they were siblings made it okay in everyone’s eyes.

  Jessica sidestepped the group and launched herself past them, calling over her shoulder, “You got passed. That means three more laps,” before surging forward.

  The collective groans were only punctuated with one voice who said, “Do you think she heard us talking about her?”

  “So what if she did?” Brit fired back. “It’s not like she can do anything about it. She’s such a loser.”

  “A loser who can hear you,” she called back behind her. “That’ll be another two laps.”

  Despite the smug grin she allowed herself, it really was strange that Jessica suddenly had the ability to hear them, given how far her tingling quads had already carried her. It wasn’t something she’d ever noticed before, and instead of feeling put out by the strange new sensory skill, she simply enjoyed the fact that the fates had aligned and let her tear down one of the up-and-coming queen bees in the school. Brittany was two years behind Jessica, but that didn’t stop the girl from taking the occasional stab when the rest of the popular crowd was there to back her up.