فصل چهل و نهم

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

The Hands of the Minotaur

Screaming had done no good. Edie had never put much faith in screaming anyway, but screaming into the Minotaur’s roar had been like throwing a snowball into an avalanche and hoping to stop it.

She’d heard it stop when it was all roared out. She’d felt it shake itself in the rain, like a dog. And she’d seen the look in its unexpectedly small eye as it looked at her before it ran on.

It was a look that hated what it was, and hated what it wanted.

She bunched her fist and thought about swinging at it, but the void in her sapped all energy now, and the hand just twitched.

The void was growing, and there was less Edie and more nothing because, in a horrible way, the mad bull’s-eye of the Minotaur was scooping out what was left of her. It was a hungry eye, a hot eye, a horrible eye.

The Hands of the Minotaur The Minotaur ran into a spiral staircase and, as its hooves stomped up the concrete steps, Edie tried to think of something to do. She felt she was dissolving from the inside out.

They emerged into the rain on a raised walkway. An old man with a cane was ahead of them, shuffling along in the wet. Edie reached a hand out and shouted.

“Help!”

He didn’t react. Of course he couldn’t see her. His mind wouldn’t let him see something as unbelievable as a wet girl being cradled by a striding, bestial statue.

The Minotaur stopped. Looked at her. At the old man. And its bull’s mouth twitched in a sneer and it roared again.

Now she was feeling so empty, the sound seemed to echo around her hollowness and shake every bit of her. She felt the rising blackness at the edge of her vision, and knew she wouldn’t be able to fight it this time.

The Minotaur suddenly pulled her close to its muzzle, and its nostrils sucked in long and hard. It shivered as if the smell of her was some exquisite stimulant, and then, most disgusting of all, she felt the thick swollen weight of its tongue curl out of its mouth and lick her, from her neck to her ear, then over her eye and into the hair over her forehead.

And the last thing she felt before the dark closed in were the hands of the Minotaur squeezing her body, her legs, her arms, the soft bits around her kidney, like a butcher testing his meat.

And then he swept her up and ran on, as her world went, mercifully, black.