Furious

Chapter Nineteen

Show much for powerless. Having inherited some of the Fury benefits package, I burned to run and fly and fight.

I stormed out of the mirrored dojo as soon as the door shut behind Lindsay. As much as I didn't want to be in that room anymore with so many reflections judging me—all of them my own—I didn't want to follow to closely and risk running into her in the hallway. One more humiliation I did not need.

Leaving the room proved to be slightly more difficult than I'd hoped: when even the door is covered in mirrored panels sometimes you forget where the latch is. Which I had.

Finally in the hallway, I let the door swing shut behind me and started back towards the portal at the end of the hall to my left. My hands rested on the glass at either side of my face, sheer willpower keeping me from shattering the reflection that looked back at me.

She was weak. She was too slow. She didn't belong here. And she knew it. Yet another mirror that held truths I could not hide even from myself.

I wasn't supposed to be any of those things. Her hands pressed against mine and for a moment the world stopped turning; the glass gave way under my palms. A spark of hope flared in my chest and I was finally going to be able to escape through the portal until I noticed the hairline cracks that stretched out along the glass, starting at my hands.

The will power holding back the storm was waning, stretched so thin it could no longer contain the disappointment, frustration, and anger. Pure fury rolled across the face in the mirror and the ugly expression shattered under my fist. A spider web of cracks altered my face until it was multiple ugly expressions that looked back at me instead of one.

The broken mirror showed not only the things I disliked about myself but also the thing I was most afraid of: me. The person in the mirror, damaged as she was, was a stranger. I'd never felt less like me than I did in that moment.

Like a child, I just wanted to go home.

Rather than wallowing in my frustration I tried the doorknobs on the other three doors in the hallway. They had been locked before but if I couldn't get through the portal and wouldn't go back into the empty training room, maybe I could force one open with my new Fury-strong hands. I had no clue what hid behind the closed doors but they didn't look at me through my own eyes and whisper to me all the reasons why I wasn't good enough.

Sometimes you need to lose yourself in the mundane, the inconsequential, and though it was an excuse to stop the unfamiliar and sudden self-loathing I faced in the mirror, I welcomed the distraction.

Two knobs refused to turn. No tiny jerks side to side. As if the two mechanisms were there only for show. I was stronger now but not any closer to a skilled lock-pick than I had been when I'd arrived in the Underworld. Without great force and without a bobby pin—and the bobby pin would not have helped in the slightest—there was no way I was getting passed those doors.

A third door, next to the dojo entrance, begged me not to see it; I hadn't before. On my previous investigation of the hallway rendered three locked doors and the dojo door. Now there were four.

I crept up to it, not wanting to scare it away. Muffled sound came from the other side of the door—voices, a jovial rumble of unmistakable laughter. My hand rested on the plain knob, hope turning to disappointment when it wouldn't move. Their words were unrecognizable but on the other side of the door there were people. People who maybe didn't want to send me into a war I had no stake in. People who maybe didn't want to eat me or beat me up.

The first knock was tentative, just a shy rap of my knuckles against the wood.

All conversation halted. I waited a heartbeat before calling out to them, whoever "them" was. When no one called back, I knocked harder. Fists pounded against wood again and again. Still, the door remained closed to me.