Page 24 of The Satyr's Wood

Her eyes snapped toward Mayor Don Rickman as he stood from the table at the other end of the room. He grinned at her as he adjusted the cuffs on his worn suit-jacket. He had been hailed as the best dressed, most influential man in town but after her time with Barbasa, all Tiffany saw was a pitiful aging male with thick jowls and girth to his belly despite everyone else suffering so long with carefully rationed food and wearing suits that were on the verge of falling apart.

She swallowed in an attempt to work some moisture down into her dry throat. “Mayor Rickman,” she croaked. “Where am I? What is going on?”

He gave her a bright, friendly smile that didn’t make it to his dead, faded blue eyes. “Glad to see that you are mentally with us. For your first question, naturally, we brought you home. We couldn’t have you wandering out there. Who knows who you could have met and what you would have told people of our little town. As for your second—that is an excellent question. See, here’s the thing, after you escaped several of our good, married women—who were lawfully claimed in our town’s labyrinth I might add—also decided that they too would flee. Now, Miss Tiffany, you know that we cannot have that. Not only did you have no right to leave and deprive our good men here of a potential partner, but you have stolen wives from other good men by your example. What do you have to say for yourself?” he asked as his thick eyebrows arched in inquiry.

She smiled weakly. “Only that is a hell of a lot of good used all at once. Clearly some other adjectives are required—less pleasant ones considering that I know for a fact how few men in this town are considered good. And those who are actually of decent character are beaten down by the rest.”

The mayor sighed and shook his head. “See, that is what I’m talking about. That is the wrong attitude to have.”

“Mea culpa,” she croaked with a chuckle. “And I try so hard.” She squinted at him and sat forward so that her weight rested on her arms against her knees, suddenly giving no fucks. Whatever they had planned for her, she was certain that she wasn’t going to come out of it on the right side. So why pretend anymore? And it could also be the lingering edge of whatever they drugged her with giving her a bit of faux courage, but she would take it. “But perhaps instead of just trying to sneak out I should have just told you all to go straight to fucking hell. I sure as hell am not fucking anyone in this backwards town.”

He gave her a cold smile. “That is where you have me all wrong. Initially we were going to allow someone to claim you and make a decent woman of you, despite the fact that you refused to behave properly ever since you arrived and took shelter in our little town. Not that I ever had an issue with your strangeness. You are too old to be useful in a meaningful way a woman should be, so it was useful to allow you to contribute in other ways. Live and let live. And you could have enjoyed that if you just had been a little less selfish.”

“Less selfish,” she echoed in disbelief. “I shared everything I had... everything I found or produced, I shared with my neighbors and others within the town.”

He nodded. “True, true. We cannot discount that. But it is not what I’m speaking of. There is something you have that you could have shared freely without any cost to you that would have provided so much comfort to our menfolk.”

His meaning sank in, and Tiffany’s lip curled with repugnance. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Not at all. Of course it’s too late for that now. We’ve seen what you’ve been allowing between your thighs. Hell, we saw the evidence all over the place. Disgusting,” he replied with a shudder as he began to pace back and forth in front of her. Wearing a hole in the carpeting her mother would have said.“No man in town will touch you now, at least not unless he is depraved, and we have something far better in mind. As for your lover, we would have killed him as a punishment for touching a human woman if not for the fact that the blood trail would have had us hunted down by those creatures. As it was, finding a monster willing to drug him was hard enough—especially finding a willing person who knew enough about satyrs to be capable of assisting us.”

“Sounds like you went through a lot of trouble to get me,” she said wearily. “So why don’t you just cut to the chase and tell me what’s coming next.”

A smarmy smile lit his face. “As I said, you were a bad example to the women of our town. Thankfully we managed to catch most of the women who escaped but now we need to counteract the damage... and how better than to do so with the woman who started the trouble to begin with. And you do seem to be a troublemaker,” he added with a chuckle. “It is fortunate that we ran into some men who were also looking for you or we may not have such a good lead. It was only a matter of calculating where you might eventually show up from there. Of course, we were banking on the fact that we were looking for the same woman—but the odds seemed to be in our favor. Fortunately, those men were morons, and we were able to throw them off and get them looking in a different direction.”

A man stationed by the door cocked his head toward the door as if listening to someone speaking from the other side and shifted uneasily. “Boss, don’t you think we should get started. Everything is prepared and folks are getting a little antsy.”

The mayor nodded sharply. “Right. Right.” He turned to her and smiled coldly. “So, this is what is going to happen. Bill here is going to take you down into the labyrinth and get you ready for the big show.” His smile widened into a terrible grin. “As it happens, when we were searching for you, we came acrossa rather fascinating creature with a hungry prick and teeth hungry for human flesh. We managed to trap it and now keep it sequestered in a very special part of the labyrinth that we have modified for our special brand of punishment. We will see how eager the women are to run away when they watch that monster defile and devour you. Take her away, Bill,” he ordered with a chuckle as he turned away and walked over toward the window that she was now certain had to overlook the street below.

Eyes widened in horror, Tiffany leapt to her feet and attempted to run so as to remain beyond the reach of the guard who stalked toward her. She quickly discovered, however, that the drug had affected more than just the sluggish movement of her thoughts. The moment she attempted to run, she stumbled off balance, her muscles weakly protesting the sudden movement. Bill’s laughter filled her ears as he easily snatched her off her feet.

She shrieked angrily, fearfully, hoping that she at least deafened him as she struggled to escape. She slammed her fists against his back and attempted to bite any exposed bit of skin. Bill cursed loudly when she managed to sink her teeth into the back of his neck but a hard clip to the side of her head made stars explode behind her eyes and her jaw briefly slacken so that he could upend her completely over his shoulder and haul her from the room.

She blinked rapidly to clear her vision as he headed for a staircase and took the stairs that led to a door with a sign over it. The dull lettering without electricity brightening it made the stark red letter spelling out emergency all the more ominous if the dark hall hadn’t been scary enough. With a cry of alarm, Tiffany renewed her struggles and the arm pinning her tightened painfully so that his shoulder dug into her belly as he headed toward a balding man who waited beside the emergency exit, a cigarette clasped tightly between his lips. She was barely able tomake him out in the quick glimpses she caught of him as she twisted herself in Bill’s grip just enough to be able to peer around his body, but what she saw clearly wasn’t an ally as he greeted her captor with a silent nod,

Not a word was exchanged between them, but the door was opened leading out to grim walls of the labyrinth just beyond. Tiffany screamed but it did not save her. There was no remorse as she was dragged from Bill’s shoulder and chucked out into the dirty street.

Pain shot up her knees and through her palms as they bore the brunt of her weight, scraping against the hard, paved ground. She was certain that her dress was torn and bloodied without even looking at it. She could feel the mess on her knees as blood dribbled freely down her leg and from the heels of her hands. Pushing back the pain the best that she could, Tiffany forced herself to her feet, her eyes flying along her surroundings in terror. The walls of the labyrinth were high, and lit with torches along the top beyond the reach of anyone who might wish to use them to defend themselves. At the top, however, she could also see the townspeople gathered on the roofs of the buildings overlooking the labyrinth and peering out from upper storing windows, like the mayor. She trembled as she met the black hollows of their pitiless, staring eyes.

Suddenly a cheer went up and she froze as she heard the distant roar of something loose in the labyrinth with her. She hadn’t a clue what it was, but by the sound of it, she wasn’t going to wait around to find out. With the excited shouts of the crowd motivating her, Tiffany broke out into a jog, terror giving her feet wings as she ran into the labyrinth.

Chapter 18

Barbasa ran, his hooves carrying him quickly over the ground. The sound of elven horses following close were the only indication that the goblin guards who had detained him were keeping up. Dealing with them had been inconvenient but they had responded to a hasty, if somewhat maddened, explanation with a gratifying speed. He was not so lost to the taint that he was entirely unaware of it, or unappreciative even if he struggled to communicate it. There had only been a brief exchange regarding recovering his leash before the males were mounting up. He was not even sure whether to be offended or not that they called his mate a leash, but he laughed and laughed with a wild glee that made the goblins shudder and exchange uncomfortable glances.

It did not matter to him if they feared him. It only mattered that they followed him now to help him recover his Tiffany. He did not require their aid to find her—only to burn whatever human town that stole her to the ground. He certainly had no trouble tracking her. Even though many hours had passed since she was carried off, his nose found her trail with ease. And so, he ran tirelessly with the taint giving him an unnatural endurance. His heart hammered in his chest until it felt about ready to burst with exhaustion, and still he ran until he collapsed into short periods of fitful, nightmare fueled slumber.

Dreams of being stuck back in the labyrinth haunted him but this time the howls of the hunt had a more sinister cast as he searched for his mate in the dark, torch-lit corridors. Desperate to find her before another. And gentle Asterion had been maddened in those dreams, his sharp teeth tearing into his victims. The minotaur found Tiffany more than once in those nightmares, Tiffany’s blood coating him as he ripped her apartbefore Barbasa’s eyes. He jerked awake with the inability to do anything but run again. He could not pause to eat or drink, despite the grumbling from the goblins following him. He could not do anything but hunt.

And now that the human town was rising up ahead of them, he felt a sense of dark triumph and hunger rise sharply from the hollow pit of his being. It was a desire to rend the flesh of those he encountered and sink his teeth deep—but no, that was merely the taint speaking and somehow, he managed to shake himself free of the drive to refocus on his mate.

Tiffany. He would find his sweet Tiffany and take her far from there and back to their territory.

“Is that it?” one of the goblins shouted.

He did not answer in any intelligible sense, but they must have understood his blood-curdling growl because they drew their weapons and urged their horses faster as he sprinted for the gate that the humans laughably thought would keep him and his kind out. He did not wait for the trolls to dismount as he leapt and clawed his way effortlessly to the top of the gate. He perched at the top for only a moment to be aware of the males following after him with their own dark snarls before he was dropping to the ground at the other side as he followed his mate’s scent along the darkened streets. The sun was dipping lower but there was a strange urgency that flooded him now.

He had to find her—now. In the fog of his madness, he did not understand why but the need consumed him so that he was running blindly ahead. His pointed ears pricked at the sound of human shouts. There was something not right about them, an underlying cruelty and excitement that sped him forward, rushing toward the structure up ahead as he bounded off the sides of buildings and climbed over every obstacle in his path.

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