Excerpt: Lady of the Labyrinth, Too

Lady of the Labyrinth, Too

Emma woke in the middle of the night, something she rarely did. The night light candle glowed through its chimney of thin porcelain, faintly lighting the room she could see through a gap in the bed curtains. She felt uncomfortable, wary, dreams fled rather than vivid from interruption. She wondered if she had heard a sound and lay still, waiting for it to repeat: a burnt log collapsing in the grate, a servant stopping in to check on the fire, a mouse.
The curtains closed across the foot of the bed fluttered, then again. A draft, intermittent with the breeze outside, she guessed. That would be nothing new.
Flutter or a slight billow again. Again. Not quite as regular as breathing. At least, human breathing.
The idea of a ghost popped into her head. These people and their ideas of the afterlife were affecting her. Ghost hunter shows bored her. Either everywhere had enough deaths or strong emotion to be haunted, or almost nowhere did. Unlike some of the Labyrinth's patrons, she didn't live for the afterlife.
She sat up, which didn't necessarily make her feel better. If she had been frozen, she would have called this night terrors, the classic nightmare, and used the classic dream control techniques to get through or out of it. A live situation, not a dream--well, they would find what the Cinderella Life School taught when they dropped ballet from the curriculum in the Sixties.
But maybe a dream, explaining why she didn't remember one. At that she grew bold, fearless as the Senoi taught. Still, she slithered out of the covers to one side, rather than tossing them back and losing all that heat. The dream mansion didn't have any more central heating than the one in 1802. Inside the bed curtains was pleasantly not-warm, at best. She pulled her dressing robe over her nightgown and stepped out through the side curtains--just as the end curtains blew wide open.
She sprang past the foot of the bed, four fast leaps, to face what might be between her and the red ember glow in the grate.
Smoke, black smoke. It twisted in the air, not rising away, but staying between head height and knee height, strands rather than billows, as if off a dozen incense sticks rather than one carcoal grill gone bad.
She couldn't hit smoke. "Go on! What do you want? And behave yourself or--"
Strands wove extrusions, tentacle arms reaching toward her.
Emma swung her full sleeves, disrupting the smoke. "Don't say I didn't warn you." She blew on it like birthday candles, trying to get that wish.
But then she had to stop and inhale.
The smoke pounced, flowed all around her, filling her nose and mouth with a bitter taste. Her eyes watered. She started coughing, but each gasp pulled more in.
How could she fight smoke? She couldn't flee it--it followed her around the room.