Page 147 of Monsters in Love

As she raced down the hall, she noted the change in the vines and plant life as it became tighter and the walls narrowed. She swallowed a panicked cry. This wasn’t right either. The only blessing was that the silence around her was only broken by the sound of her rapid footfall.

She drew in a ragged breath. Had she lost it—them?

Hope loosening the cold grip on her chest, she slowed her pace to a walk, her hand resting on the painful stitch in her side as she dragged in large gulps of breath. Listening.

There was a faint click and then another, sending a prickle of horror over her skin. To her dismay, the terrible sound resumed at a fiercer pace, the growls louder and far more numerous, nearly drowning out the chittering. Ducking to the left, she flew, stumbling, down another path, and then dove again down another. One twist led to another, and she sprinted for all that she was worth, praying for an end to come into view, praying that the wild sounds pursuing ever closer would quiet.

It was maddening, and, somehow, as one unfamiliar hall became another, she was certain that she was now lost in some sort of labyrinth of halls.

Jagged rocks scraped against her skin and thorned vines ripped at flesh and cloth as she battled her way past every obstacle.

A scream tore from her throat as she ripped through a thick clump of vines hanging in her path, her fear-clouded mind unable to determine if they had moved or were naturally suspended there. She didn’t care; she couldn’t focus with any clarity. All she knew and breathed was the instinctual need to escape. Her light flickered and died with the last bit of fuel expended, plunging her into darkness. The chittering and growling rose up behind her, getting progressively louder, drowning out her cries until it too was interrupted by a deep, ferocious bellow that rattled the hall.

Sightlessly, Vicky stared ahead, her flight down the corridor coming to a stumbling halt as the clicking silenced. The chitter-growls continued in faint, hesitant bursts, but it was as if she were not the only one pausing warily. She heard a click and another, but it didn’t sound as if it were getting any closer. Instead, if she wasn’t mistaken, it sounded like a slow, reluctant retreat of a predator facing a superior one.

She swallowed thickly, bile trying once again to choke her.

Gods, she was fucked. At least without fuel in her lighter, she wasn’t going to be forced to witness her end. She certainly wasn’t going to be able to outrun it, not with the heavy thumps that approached in a ground eating pace. Whatever it was, its stride had to be huge.

Squeezing her eyes shut may have been foolish considering how dark it was, but she did so anyway. She could feel the hot billow of its breath caress her skin, and her chest tightened as her breath seized in wait of the killing strike. Her hand raising to her charm, she gripped the coin tight.

“Daddy,” she whispered, hoping that he would be waiting for her on the other side.

Asterion paused, staring down at the female curiously, the haze of blood lust clinging just barely to his mind. The flush of her blood roaring in her veins incited his terrible hunger, but it was dulled by another warm, seductive scent mingled with it and the startling sight of her submission, her head bowed to him.

Unlike other prey that had tried to evade him or attack him, her eyes were squeezed so tightly shut that her nose wrinkled up from the effort. Where she had desperately fled from the flesh-eating satyrs who had infested his labyrinth in recent centuries, there was a sense of surrender in her submission that gave him pause.

More than that, her single word startled him as she whispered a soft plea.

Daddy?He was oddly intrigued and… charmed by the complete submission held within that one word, yielding everything up to his whim and control. It was perplexing too that it should strike a chord within him. It made him want to dominate and consume in an entirely different fashion than his cursed nature.

He huffed and snorted, blasting back wisps of her hair from her face. He had the advantage over her that he could see her as clearly as if it were day. She couldn’t hide anything, not even the tiny grimace of her full lips pressing together, in the dark. Asterion cautiously stepped back a pace, his nostrils flaring as he drew her scent deep into his olfactory glands. Sweet feminine flesh, ripe with health. Her scent was arousing, flooding his cock with blood so that it stiffened uncomfortably beneath the swath of material around his hips.

Curious.

One of his broad ears flicked in consideration.

Was this a trick or some trap designed by men to capture him. Surely the sweetness that enticed him was nothing more than a clever potion rubbed into her flesh to bait him.

A blasting gust of air left him. That had to be what it was.

His ears pricked toward the corridor ahead of him, listening for any other signs of human life as he scented the air. Outside of his unnatural hunger, he did not especially enjoy killing humans, but he would have no compunction over killing one invading his labyrinth to seek his death. He had dealt with would-be Theseus-enamored “heroes” often enough over the ages. The isolation of his labyrinth had relieved him of that particular burden, for a time. If they had returned as well, he would deal with them with ruthless efficiency. There was a time where he had once enjoyed the challenge of facing a warrior, their taste being all the more succulent for the effort, but that time had long since passed even before the labyrinth pulled away from the mortal world. Now, he was merely tired.

His eyes fell again on the female in front of him. He should cease hesitating and kill her. He could promise her a quick death at the very least before he dealt with her accomplices. Still, he had to admire the courage it took for a female to go along with such plans. He hadn’t recalled a single one willingly coming into his labyrinth since the days of Ariadne’s presence there.

Grunting, his gaze fell upon her hand fisted tightly around an item strung on a ribbon around her neck.A token from the gods of some kind, no doubt.Not that it would save her. Such things never saved anyone who entered and stirred his hunger. Yet never before had his hunger for blood and flesh warred so strongly with the carnal hunger that currently pulsed within his shaft.

He dragged his wide, flat tongue over his fangs, and silently stepped back several paces before falling into a watchful silence as he observed her, uncertain of what he wished to taste first. He knew from experience that the blood of women could be intoxicatingly sweet, and yet there seemed to be a sweeter elixir promised from the scent drifting up from her body.

One of the female’s eyes pried open as she glanced sightlessly in his direction.

“Uh… are you there?” she whispered, her voice broken and trembling with obvious fear.

His stomach soured with the knowledge that his presence alone put that there. While he couldn’t ignore that it was a natural part of his relationship with his human prey, he disliked the scent of her fear overwhelming the sweeter, more delicious flavors in her natural perfume.

He grunted, his ears turning toward her. “Are you so eager for death?” he rumbled out in a low, quiet voice.

His voice rasped with barely contained violence and bloodlust, and she visibly shivered at its sound. Her skin pebbling, she shook her head frantically, a pale, crystalline tear escaping from beneath her lashes.

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