Reluctant Mates - 21 Paranormal Romance Stories (Werewolf, Vampire, Minotaur and Monster collection) (14 page)

“You, Adria, are destined for greatness. You will be queen of the greatest kingdom in the world, and swept away by a man more handsome than Paris, more daring that Achilles and more clever than Odysseus. His hair will be long and blond, and you should recognize him by a small scar on his right temple.”

Adria started to jitter. “Is he here, father? Is my hero here? When do I meet him? I knew that’s what it was.” She looked across at Derik. “I knew it was a suitor!”

“Adria, child, let him finish. There is a dark side to all this. Derik, continue.” King Harrald shifted in his seat again and waited for the steward to speak.

Derik cleared his throat and continued:

“His path, nor yours, will be easy to tread. Your savior must complete three trials, each more horrible than the last. Only then can you rest. While your hero quests to win your hand, you too will endure a trial, in the clutches of a beast so terrible that his countenance cannot here be described. The gods will it, child, and the will of the gods must be done.”

Derik rolled the paper into a cylinder and secreted it back inside his robe.

For a moment, Adria stared, thoughts rumbling around in her head. “What was all that about a monster? I haven’t heard of any monsters around here.”

The steward opened his mouth to speak, but Harrald interrupted him. “You have not, because you have been protected. Mostly thanks to Derik. But, you have now lived for twenty summers. Only when the King of Laradale has a virgin daughter of twenty years does the beast stir. And, only when the beast stirs does a hero come. You, Adria, are the first of my daughters, the first of the daughters of our line, to live to see womanhood for over a hundred years.” He drew a deep breath and sat back.

“Adria,” he said, “my daughter, my heart. I wish it were not so, but this man – this hero – is the only way that our kingdom can be saved. You will be given over to the clutches of this monstrosity, of this scourge, and you must hide. He lives in a great labyrinth built for him in a past so distant that no one remembers exactly how long ago it was. But this has always been the way. It is alternately said that the beast results from magic, or evil alchemy, or an infernal affair between a god and a man. But have faith.  Have faith.”

Adria was ash. All color faded from her cheeks, and her eyes turned to frosted glass.

“Can I see him? The man who is to save me, I mean?”

“No, alas. You are permitted to hear his voice, and only briefly, so that you’ll know him when he calls. But you must have faith in the prophecies. Their truth is your salvation. It is the only way.” The King cleared his throat. “Theoric,” he called, “make your voice known to my daughter. My daughter whom you swore to rescue from the beast of the labyrinth. Speak now.”

“Adria,” a voice called from beyond a thick, purple curtain, “Adria who is to become my queen. Rest easy.”

The man’s voice was melodious, deep and rich. She could practically see the golden curls framing his face, but he spoke no more.

King Harrald gestured to his guardsmen, who stepped close to Adria, one on either side. “Take her,” he said. His voice was dark and hard, and he choked back tears he knew mustn’t show. “Take my daughter now, give her to the beast. Go! I cannot bear to look again.”

She looked back as the guards dragged her from her father’s feet, but the king refused to meet her glance.

“Be brave,” he said as the door closed between Adria’s weeping body and the only world she’d ever known, “be brave and the gods will see you home safe.”

Two

Thick, earthen dampness filled Adria’s nose. Behind her, she heard a door close, and a heavy bar slide across, then an ominous
thud
of a lock closing fast. As she slid the blindfold off, she was surprised that the world didn’t get any lighter. But then, thinking about it, she was underneath a monastery in a place she’d been told as a child never to venture.

“Never even think to go there.” Her father’s words of warning bounced around Adria’s head as she fumbled in the dark for the small pack given her by the soldiers. Her hands closed around a flint and a tinderbox. A number of torches lined the walls, at least near the entrance of the place, so she grabbed one, struck a fire and began to wander through the twisting, winding passages.

She was surprised to find that the stone making up the labyrinth’s walls to be smooth and intricately carved. Adria stepped from a narrow passage out into a wider, cavernous sort of room, and her breath caught in her throat. Columns dotted the vault-like space with frescoes running around the tops. Laradale was famous, long ago, for being home to a type of bull that people came from far and wide to see and to buy. Skulls of those animals lined the high ceiling, and more frescoes marked the top third of the walls.

Running her hand along the figure of a muscular man wearing gilded armor, she found a torch holder and placed her light in it to examine the artwork. The same character appeared time and time again in the frescoes, and each figure was inlaid with golden leaf that made him glitter when the orange fire flickered across. A thin layer of dust covered words underneath each image.

Further down, she found another abandoned torch, which she struck to life, and on and on until most of the room was bathed in warm yellow-orange light. Then, she realized that there was a full story on the wall. Beginning on right hand side as she entered the vault, an unfamiliar myth played out.

Paying no mind to the places along the walls where the dust was missing, Adria took a deep breath and blew what must have been centuries of accumulated debris from the carved lettering. Adria recognized the sloped, curlicue letters of Old Larandian, a language which died long before she was born. She refused to learn more than the basics, but that was enough.

“Jaco,” she read aloud. “From the beginning of Laradale, Jaco hunted the great horned beast.”

Several panels followed of the gold-clad hero searching through ancient pyramids, stone circles and caves. Jaco seemed to her one of those characters from a storybook that had never existed, but little girls desperately wished that he did. She continued along the wall, blowing at the dust as she went.

“Jaco found him after eighteen years of searching. Jaco was an old man by the time he came to the end of his journey, but the worst was still ahead.” She ran her finger along the figure of Jaco, resplendent and regal with his sword drawn and held high above his head. A sun, inlaid with silver, shone down. The characters were about half as tall as she, but were so high up on the walls that it was sometimes difficult to make out particulars. Sshe pressed her hand against the scrolling text and with her thumb and forefinger stretched, the script went almost the full span of her hand.

“What is this place?” She asked aloud, her voice bouncing off the walls. “And why have I never heard this tale?” Adria shook her head and tried to collect her thoughts. Finally, she reached the end of the story, immediately to the left of the door by which she entered.

On this panel, no dust at all was gathered in the letters. “That’s a bit odd, isn’t it?” She shrugged. “Draft, probably.”

The first torch died just as she began to read, and she had to fetch another from nearby. Upon returning, Adria almost choked when she saw the image. Jaco, gold armor glittering, was impaled on the horn of a great bull-man. The creature had the legs of a bull – thickly muscled, crooked backwards and tipped with hooves. His torso was that of a man, and then atop his neck the most terrifying image the young princess had ever seen.

Black eyes, terrible horns longer across than Jaco stood tall, and an elongated bull’s snout, covered in black hair, with flames spouting from his nostrils. As Jaco’s armor was made of gold leaf, the bull creature’s black parts were made of obsidian so dark it drank the torchlight.

She put her hand to the monstrous figure, and immediately recalled the dream that Derik interrupted when he woke her. Black hair, horns as big as her arm. She trembled as she put her finger inside the engraved letters.

“Mino... Mino-something,” she said, squinting and wishing she paid more attention to her tutor. “Mino, come on Adria. Think.”

And then it struck her – her eyes and her finger slid along the text again and she looked back to the figure, glorious and awful. She had heard of this beast before. He was what nannies used to warn children off of poor behavior.

“The Minotaur,” she shuddered. “The Minotaur slew mighty Jaco. Jaco’s corpse was never seen and never burned. His ghost haunts these cursed halls.”

She began to worry about what her dream meant, why that savage monster had taken her and stolen her innocence. In the leather bag she was given by the soldiers, she found a hunk of bread and an apple.

The apple was sweet, but she tasted nothing but fear.

Adria, for the first time in her young life, knew helplessness. The girl who had berated her steward not three hours before began to wish beyond wish that she could see anyone she knew. Even that damned old steward.

“No! Wake up! Wake up Adria! This is not happening! Wake up!” She pinched herself, but got only a sore spot on her arm. She hurled the apple across the room and watched it burst against a pillar near the ceiling. The juice ran down onto the skull beneath with the horns wider than she could spread her arms. After a moment, the sweet liquid formed a drop on the tip and dripped to the dusty stone beneath.

Adria wept.

In the distance, barely audible behind an untold number of twists, turns, and heavy stone doors, she heard a scratching sound.

“What was that?” She whispered, forcing herself to stop crying.

She moved near one of the four open passages and listened. More scraping, like hooves on stone, echoed faintly through the halls.

“It can’t be,” she said, “it just can’t be. Such a thing could never exist. Such an abomination...”

The sound drew closer, she thought. And then, she heard the snort from her dream. A sound so awful, so horrifying that she had to fight against her every instinct screaming “run!” in her mind.

Adria held her breath, hoping that she was hallucinating. For a long moment, she heard nothing and began to relax.

Just then, she heard it again. The sound of a nightmare, the sound of a monster, it was coming closer. The sound was coming closer.

Another snort, loud and angry, followed by another scratch.

She looked back to the inlaid fresco of the Minotaur, with the flames spouting from his nostrils. Then, she began to feel dizzy. Her thoughts raced. Yet another snort. She could imagine the flames, the hellfire, coming from that beast’s nose. And then she happened to see the apple from which she’d taken a bite. It was melting. Green and melting.

“What have... poison?”

Her last thoughts before the world went black were of her father, of Derik, and of the hero coming to save her whom she had never seen. They flashed before her eyes as consciousness slipped from her fingers.

“What – what are...?”

Darkness took her as a hand, mighty, clawed and enormous, descended. She felt the thick, warm, rough fingers close around her wrists, one hand large enough to hold both.

And then, she remembered no more.

Three

Adria’s wrist burned and the backs of her legs smarted when she woke.

“Wh – what’s going on?” She tried to rub her eyes, but found her arms helplessly bound. By twisting her hands, she realized that there were cuffs around her wrists. No matter how she twisted and turned, she couldn’t move, at least in any way that didn’t just tear her skin.

The stone behind her was rough, and from what she could tell, she was in a tunnel of some sort, although there was quite a large pile of hay, or old stuffing or blankets in the corner.

“Hello?” She called. “Hello? Is anybody there?”

No answer.

Tears rolled down her face. She thought back to those trials that the prophecy talked about. How she was supposed to stay brave and be clever enough to survive whatever horror befell her while that warrior – what was his name? She couldn’t quite remember – found her and took her home to be his wife. She squinted, trying to make out the rest of the chamber, but the single torch at the other end of the room barely cast enough light to for Adria to see the texture of the opposite wall.

“Where am I? What is this place?” She pleaded, again, with the empty air, and again she wept. Sobs wracked her and reverberated off the cold, grey stone.
Grey stone. Grey back here. In that other part, that other place, it was all yellow and white and orange. Is this part older? Or newer?

Her eyes began to adjust, but there was too much darkness to be dispelled by one single torch. She stretched her foot out, trying to hook her toe through the strap and drag it back.

A few seconds of scrabbling and kicking resulted in a loop around her bare foot, and she fished the satchel near where she sat.

“Alright, Adria,” she said, “now just get your arms out of these completely immovable iron bonds, and you’re all set.” Sighing, she blew a curl out of her face. It fell back down.

“Grey stone, a torch sconce, some kind of bedding. I must be in a lair, or a prison. But what sort? And what lives here? My imagination must have run away with me after I ate that poisoned apple. Nightmares came back. Minotaurs aren’t real, they’re stories made up to terrify naughty children.” Even still, she shivered.

She took a deep breath through her nose. The air was musty, and it felt thick. Like a blanket that covered her, but didn’t keep her warm, just made it a little difficult to breathe. There was also a vague stench of rot, or garbage, she couldn’t tell which.

Still, her eyes were adjusting. More and more, little by little, her compartment came into view. For so long she sat motionless, with her legs splayed out in front of her, that they’d gone to sleep. When she finally realized it, and began to wiggle her toes, the pins and needles shooting up her feet and through her calves almost drove her insane, but once her blood was moving again, she felt energized. She did the same with her hands, squeezing fists into tiny, hard little balls, and then relaxing them, just to get her blood flowing.