“Which way?” I asked, taking in the three choices we had, trying not to slow down.
“Right,” he instructed.
I headed right, looking back, but Aster was close behind me, still facing backward, his sword poised for a fight.
“Forward or right?” I asked, getting to the next junction.
“Right,” he said again and added, “Keep your right hand on the wall, turn right at every junction. It won’t guarantee our way out if the walls continue to move, but it will do if they stop.”
My heart soared at this information as I took the next right.
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?” I said, my breath hitching as we continued to hurry through the labyrinth with an unknown entity not far behind us.
“I didn’t think it would be helpful to add that if the walls continue to change, we’ll die of starvation, exhaustion, or dehydration beforehand.”
I nearly stopped dead at his words. Words that didn’t help keep the fear at bay one bit, but then again, humor was my friend.
“Yeah, that doesn’t sound like fun.”
“No, not especially.”
The red in the walls began to pulse brighter, and the rhythm beneath our feet shifted to a more exciting beat. As if it were enjoying watching us being chased or getting lost within its walls. Then the whispers returned, louder, overlapping until they filled my ears. Voices calling in languages I couldn’t understand, laughter twisting through the air, the sound of claws scratching against the stone.
“Just ignore it, Alex. It’s all in your head.”
“Regardless, it’s giving me a fucking headache,” I snapped.
I gripped the dagger Bronte gave me so tightly that my knuckles ached, keeping it in its sheath, just waiting till I needed to use it. But I also knew that if I were forced to use thedagger, our plan would be ruined. The lightning was needed for Demetrios only, not the Labyrinth’s bullshit games. Regardless of this fact, I also knew that ending up dead wasn’t a possibility either, which was why I didn’t let go of the handle. Its grip seemed to ground me, to calm me.
“It’s the part of the Labyrinth we are in, which means the quicker we get through it, the quicker the voices will stop.”
We sprinted forward, Aster now running alongside me. Without him at my back, I felt exposed, but I tried not to think about it, not wanting the Labyrinth to know anything about what I was thinking or feeling.
Aster grabbed my arm and pulled me ahead of him. My legs twisting around each other and took me down. But before I could hit the floor, he had me tight under his arm, just like the Chihuahua I had thought about earlier. He sped up, and I realized that he had been holding himself back significantly so that he wouldn’t run ahead of me and leave me to fend for myself.
His footsteps slammed against the floor, rattling me in his hold, the passage stretching out endlessly, no junctions, only the path ahead and the walls on either side of us. Behind us, something shrieked like a high-pitched animal, but I forced myself not to look. I didn’t want to know what it was, though visions of Harpies flying close behind us, their talons reaching for us, entered my mind.
The walls shifted again, closing in, narrowing the path. Narrowing it so much, I worried that if it continued, we might be squashed between the walls. Our compressed and decaying corpses becoming a part of the Labyrinth’s architecture forever.
We plummeted along the path and turned right into a wider path, one that luckily had walls that weren’t moving. The voices stopped, giving me some reprieve, though I knew that there was the possibility that something was chasing us. My curiosity gotthe better of me, and I twisted around in Aster’s arms to see. However, what I witnessed next brought the fear right back, only tenfold. A horror that was only added to when Aster confirmed the grim truth.
“We’re surrounded.”
And he wasn’t wrong. There were creatures crawling from small cracks in the stone, creatures so terrifying that I screamed. Long-limbed monsters blocked our path directly ahead and from behind. The Labyrinth's walls blocking us in on either side, too.
We were trapped.
I wanted to vomit just looking at them, and I had seen some horrifying shit in my time since the Rift. Burnt skin hung from the creatures, exposing rotting muscle and charred bones beneath. They looked like children of the fabled Slender Man… well, that was if it had produced babies from a threesome with a rotting corpse and a shriveled up, crusty vampire! Lots and lots of terrifying babies.
“Oh my god!” I cried out. “They look like fucking zombies!” Make that zombies on brain-flavored steroids because they certainly moved faster than any zombies I had seen in the movies! They crawled toward us at startling speed, and I screamed…and I mean really screamedbecause I was faced with my biggest fear! I would have preferred to have faced a Chimera, or a rabid pack of hellhounds, than fucking zombies!
I screamed again as one lunged forward, clawing at Aster’s shoulder. He spun, striking with his sword, the impact sending black dust scattering through the air as the creature's shrieks died with it. Another took its place, and then another, more coming by the second. The only saving grace was the fact that they were turning to dust with one strike. We would have been screwed if they needed to be hacked to death.
I jostled violently with each movement as he fought, my body pressed tight against his chest, one of his massive armslocked around me like iron as the other wielded his sword. He didn’t retreat, didn’t hesitate. He planted his hooves into the stone, lowering his center of gravity, turning his broad body so that his back and shoulders became a shield between me and the swarm. When another creature lunged, Aster didn’t even bother swinging the blade. He drove his horns forward instead, impaling it mid-air with a brutal snap of his neck, the force so immense I felt the impact shudder through him…through me.Black dust exploded outward as the thing disintegrated, coating the air in a foul, ashen mist.
More came, scrambling over one another, clawing, shrieking, their elongated limbs stretching too far, bending the wrong way. Aster roared, a deep, thunderous sound that vibrated through the Labyrinth itself, and surged forward, using his bulk like a battering ram. He slashed low and wide. The blade carved through two at once, then he twisted, using his body to shoulder another back into the wall, where it shattered on impact. One managed to latch onto his side, claws scraping fur and flesh, and I screamed again as he snarled and headbutted it without mercy, horns cracking into its skull before it could dig in.
He never loosened his grip on me. Even as he fought, his arm adjusted constantly, pulling me higher against him. He would tuck my head into the safety of his chest whenever one came too close, his movements instinctive, protective, practiced. Blood and dust filled the air, the stench of rot thick enough to make my stomach churn, and still they kept coming. He backed up slowly, every step measured, every strike lethal, using the narrowness of the path to funnel them toward him so they couldn’t surround us all at once.
