Agile and animal-like, instinct drove her across the lawn, slowed only by her gown, twelve pounds of beaded silk determined to restrict her strides and catch on every branch and stone. The heavy material swished and rustled with every step, announcing her location like a wrecking ball in the silence of distant motion.
Dashing into a cluster of trees, careless of the flowers she stomped on the way, she gathered fistfuls of fabric and hauled the hem to her hips. The beading bit into her palms.
“Come on, damn it.” She grit her teeth and pulled where a split had started to form, but it wouldn’t rip any higher.
Someone is coming.
She didn’t think. She only reacted to the approach of danger. She became a raw nerve. An endless receptor to approaching threats.
Racing through an archway, under a trellis, into a corridor of hedge so narrow her shoulders swiped the vines and leaves, she rushed for cover. A branch snagged her hair, yanking her head back, as a tiny hairpin gave way.
“Shit,” she hissed, her curls unraveling with a sharp pull. Fine threads of hair tickled like spiders, and she instinctively swept the sensation away.
Another bell clanged. Nightcrawlers chirred. Voices howled and hollered. More flesh slapping. More men grunted as women moaned in vigorous defeat.
Daisy kept moving.
The world transformed into a tunnel. Green walls, black sky, the pale ribbon of path unspooling before her.
Her breath raggedly beat out of her lungs, burning her dry throat like a pendulum keeping time. Each exhalation a small violence against the silence that couldn’t be helped.
Her heartbeat had migrated into her throat, her fingers, her temples, and down her legs to her numb toes. Her pulse throbbed wildly at soft hollows behind her ears.
Then…music.
Subtle yet overwhelming as dawn, the melody intruded on every crevice until it penetrated the shadows like the creeping light of the unstoppable sun. It drifted through the fog like a drowned memory of civility, resurrected and waterlogged, until it surfaced with blaring clarity.
Daisy’s feet slowed as her brow knit in confusion. She looked up, wondering where the music was coming from. It clung to the breeze like an acid trip, haunting and taunting, as the evening’s surrealness reached new levels of strangeness.
“What the fuck,” she whispered, trying to find the source. It surrounded her, tampering with the choir of moans and the clumsy fumbles that broke the majestic spell of this place.
What sort of twisted psycho designed this?
Strings purred in a symphony, mocking her and every tribute out there running for their life. A requiem. An epic soundtrack for their inevitable doom.
Classical. Beautiful. A mask, just like the ones covering their faces, blurred cruelty behind gilded facades.
Bells tolled.
Tributes fell.
The melody breathed in waves of sorrow, each phrase a small funeral for something unnamed. It came from everywhere and nowhere, from the hedges, from the fog, from the hollow spaces between her ribs where fear had taken up residence.
A chorus of voices joined the instrumental refrain, chanting in foreign tongues. Their words carried like Gothic prayers. A stunning taunt that stole her breath.
Their sacrifice was a goddamn game to them.
A mind fuck of a race, they knew they would win.
As the music stirred visions of candlelit churches and black-draped coffins, steel hardened inside of Daisy, callous and resilient. She let it galvanize her determination not to fall as another bell rang.
How many hunters had feasted off them? How many tributes had fallen?
Trisha was right. They were the fucking menu. Those hunters, every last one of them, had a power seat at the table, licking their chops and reaching without manners, taking whatever they wanted as if it were their God-given right.
Daisy’s lip curled. An animal response to this patriarchal design, meant to represent a twisted natural selection of order in which might equals right.
She bared her teeth at the sense of countless approaching threats. Masked villains chased the underprivileged out of shadows into the dangers of night.
