“I-I beg forgiveness,” the matron whispered, staring up at Samina without blinking. “The girl had no part in—”
With a swipe of her claws, Samina lashed out. Seized the matron’s windpipe in her left hand, she adjusted her weight and balanced everything on her right foot—placing the left on the matron’s chest. And with a snarl, the pregnant Anhur queen pushed and pulled at once.
Too shocked to do more than gape, the girl watched with wide eyes. Her entire body going slack as the matron’s sinew was stretched beyond all hope. Something vital crunched, trapping the matron’s screams where her throat bulged. Unheard. And then the skin began to simply… pull apart. Leaving her fat exposed and glistening yellow-white in the gloomy dying glow of the evenwood sapling.Muscles ripping off her spine and jaw with the squelch of torn meat.
Though aged, the matron’s frail body had every intention of remaining whole—Samina had to work to claim that fistful of shredded flesh and cartilage.
But it wasn’t real.
The horror too vibrant, tooloudto be anything but a hallucination. A terrible nightmare.
Tendons snapped, leaving thick arteries and veins exposed. Red and blue ropes growing thinner with each passing instant. Pulsing and going pale where the arteries were weakest, tiny little tears began to show through the walls of those rubbery tubes. Misting the air red until they snapped, only seconds apart.
At first, the girl was startled by the color splashing across the bridge of Samina’s nose. Almost hypnotized by the beauty of pure crimson. But when the Anhur female fully extended her leg, pressurized streams of gore painted chaos in the air. When blood sprayed hot and sticky across the girl’s face—burning her eyes and tinting the world red—she scrambled back at last.
It wasn’t far enough.
Limp, the matron fell away from her murderer, a boneless heap making a terrible mess of the grotto. Her head struck the earth with a hollow thud, breath foaming where her voice box should have been. A red lather that spit and hissed and wouldn’t stop until the matron’s eyes went glassy. Her pupils claiming slow millimeters of watery blue until everything she’d been was nothing more than meat. Empty. Waxy.
The girl choked on a single sob, tasting iron. Gagging when the eyes she’d loved so much rolled, the left one twitching and lurching in the socket. Moving independently of its twin, the right half-hidden behind a hooded eyelid, sightlessly gazing at the ceiling.
Death was ugly. Fucking hideous and wrong.
A whimper burbled up from the girl’s chest. Some poor attempt at a eulogy, she could offer those dying eyes no comfort. No parting words of love or a promise to see her again in the arms of the Nine.
She could only see a garish, fleshy mask, drooping where the lips sagged open. Forever slack. A cruel mockery of the kind face that had been smiling only minutes before.
Something crunched and the girl flinched. Scrambling to her feet.
It was Samina.
Nightdress soaked through with blood, her gown clung to her skin. Her distended belly bathed in red, every generous curve of a pregnant female revealed.
It was a grotesque image, but a perfect metaphor for everything that defined the Anhur. Life, born from death.
Samina dropped the chunks of flesh and sinew, letting it splat.
And then she smiled.
Chapter 4
“Omega! Come get this cock, you eager little slut.”
The girl shivered, hunkering down into a tiny ball. Trying not to see the hands reaching for her through the steel bars, her tail curled around her thighs in a pathetic bid to shelter from their attention. Shying away from the raspy voices begging her to come closer. To submit and take their bloated girth as deep as they knew she could. It was what she was born and bred for.
“I can smell it on you, Omega,” another said, openly jerking off, in spite of the dozen other males in his cage. “You want it, don’t you? Come have a taste…”
With a grunt, he came. Spraying fetid cream across the tacky grime coating the floor around her.
And though her heat was easing, her mind clearing of the poisonous hormones that drove her to seek her master, she couldn’t help but look. Couldn’t help glancing at the ropes of sperm splashed in her direction, her tongue darting out to wet dry lips.
Laughter exploded all around her, the prisoners delighted by her reactionary instinct.
“Can’t help herself, poor little breeder.” He offered a smile through chipped and blackened teeth. “Daddy has more where that came from, but only if you crawl for it. That’s it,” he said, eyes gleaming in the dull light. “Lap it all up, and I may just feed you another dose of what you need, baby girl.”
Teeth bared, she tucked tighter. Burying her face between her knees, palms pressed to cover her ears. To fold them down and seal them off from the gloomy world around her.
It was dank in her cell. Moist and cold. Unspeakable filth on every surface, but at least she hadn’t been thrown in with the males. At least she wouldn’t be torn apart between them while fifteen fought over three holes. A small mercy, really, given what she was beginning to understand about herself. About her place on this carnival ride of horrors she’d been born into.
