CHAPTER#72

Green was hovering in front of him, glitter shedding off her wings.

"What is it?" He asked.

"I found one of your friends," Green informed him. "She needs your help?"

"Who did you find?" Mike asked.

"The one with one eye." Green's face twisted up. "She is really mad."

"Is she okay?"

"For now." Green turned into a ball of light. "Follow follow!" She whizzed away, stopping at the entrance to the corridor on the right. Mike followed close behind, Blue sitting on his shoulder. Green moved at a pace consistent with a fast walk - she was easy to keep up with but would zip farther ahead if Mike tried to catch up

Mike was already lost, but Green led him through a series of twists and turns that made it so that he knew he wouldn't be able to find his way back to the river. He looked up, marveling at how his brain couldn't even identify a landmark in the dark ceiling up above.

"Duck!" Blue shrieked in his ear. Mike threw himself flat, and a large stone on a rope swung where his head had been. He was going to stand up when he heard the creaking of a second rope. Crouching down, he moved forward, the second rock crashing into the first one. His ears rang, and the pile of rubble buried the passageway behind him under a few feet of stone.

'Holy shit," he muttered.

'You're telling me." Blue squeezed out from under his collar, where he had crushed her. Her chitinous shell readjusted itself, her wings tucking back beneath them. She smoothed out her antenna, and rubbed her left shoulder.

"Sorry." Mike stood up. "I'm glad you saw it in time."

"Part of that is thanks to you," she said, her antenna twitching playfully. "My senses haven't been this sharp in years!"

"Have you guys really been stuck here that long?" Mike asked.

"A woman named Emily banished us to the Labyrinth over a misunderstanding," Blue told him. "She thought we did a bad thing, and told us we could live here or leave the house."

"And you chose to live here?" Mike looked around. "Why not go live and be free?"

"Fairies like us are almost extinct, you know." They had started walking again, and Blue spoke softly into his ear from her perch on his shoulder. "The human world isn't as friendly as it used to be. Our fields and forests got torn up, and fairies learned long ago never to trust humans."

"You trusted me." Mike pointed out.

Blue shrugged. "We had been down here for quite some time and figured if you weren't the Caretaker, then something had happened to the House. We could smell Naia's magic coming off of you." Her voice then lowered to a whisper. "It also didn't help that we were all so horny."

"Well, if we get out of here, we can discuss your current living arrangement. I want to hear more about this 'bad thing' some time."

"Step around that," Blue told him, pointing at the floor. Mike knelt down, finally seeing the seam in the stone from up close. He was able to scoot by easily, wondering what sort of trap that would have set off. They continued walking, and Mike noticed the trap frequency had increased dramatically.

"I have no idea how the others made it through here," Mike said.

"They didn't come this way," Green told him from up ahead. "This is a short cut, so the number of traps is really high."

"A short cut to where?" Mike asked. Neither of the fairies answered.

Their pace slowed dramatically with the appearance of trip wires and pitfalls painted to look just like an ordinary floor. Mike nearly fell in one of these, but a quick thinking Green bounced herself off of him hard enough in the chest that he tipped back onto the path instead of falling forward. The way forward was perilous, and Mike moved only a few steps at a time at the fairy's insistence. It had been a long time since the minotaur had called out, which made him nervous. If he were to come across the beast now, it would become a battle of luck as he ran away.

"Whoa." They came to a three way intersection and Mike stopped to survey the other two paths. Whoever had come through here before him had set off several traps down the other corridors. Spikes from the ground and wall were evident everywhere, and a few piles of rock could be seen in the distance. Mike followed Green, who was moving a bit faster now.

"Most of the traps have been sprung already," Green told him. "Except for a couple of the nastier ones, so watch your step."

"What could be nastier than spikes?" Mike wondered aloud. To answer him, Green flew ahead and grabbed onto a small wire near the floor, pulling it backward. Jets of fire filled the hallway for several yards. The whole area became hot enough that Mike broke into a sweat.

"You made your point," he announced. Green's twinkling light hovered by his face, doing lazy figure eights.

"The fire jets are the worst," Blue told him. "Even if you trip the trap, you can't get out of the way. There's one part of the Labyrinth where there aren't any traps except for that one. It's a giant pressure plate that takes up the whole floor for about ten feet, so you can't avoid it. It scorches everything for a couple hundred feet in either direction."

"It pisses off the minotaur when it goes off," Green added with a smile on her face. "It leaves scorch marks that he has to remove, otherwise people will realize that one is there."

"How often do you guys set that one off?" Mike asked.

"About once a year." Blue giggled. "Then we all jump out when he shows and yell 'Happy Birthday!'."

Mike laughed. "You three are a riot."