Chapter 12

The ice shattered beneath me faster than I could register what was happening, and a vice grip clamped down on my ankle. I nearly blacked out from the shock of the frigid water engulfing my body, but I still managed to claw at the ice for leverage, scraping my numb fingertips on the surface in hopes of stopping my descent. I hadn't even managed to shave frost beneath my fingernails before my head was underwater, and I was flailing like a ragdoll in open blue. I watched in terror as ice froze between me and Theron, the surface became distant and out of reach, and this unknown monster plunged me towards certain death.

Panic was the only emotion left. I was alone, frozen, drowning, and in the grasp of a new evil I had no power to fight against.

Theron wouldn't save me. Why would he? He didn't care. There was no vested reason for him to risk himself for some girl he barely knew. Especially not one who was nothing but snippy with him, and was trying to get through the Labyrinth to take on the king of his world. I'd been ungrateful for the help he'd already given me, and my death would surely be a relief.

I was only a burden to him. I hadn't proven my worth. I didn't deserve his respect, and I certainly didn't deserve his sacrifice.

I looked down at the darkest depths, only to see two, three, six, seven— ten hands now dragging me downwards, gripping me up and down my bare legs. My skirt plumed upwards from the downward force, and I felt rather silly when my first instinct before my imminent death was to shove my skirt back down to hide my underwear. Lord have mercy if the army of thumb nails were to see my lacy hip huggers.

The deeper we dived, the darker the shade of water. I couldn't discern what all these hands were attached to in the hazy visibility. Maybe they weren't attached to anything. That seemed within the realm of possibilities in a place like this.

Three more grabbed me, now adding restraints all the way up to my waist. They held my skirt down for me, like the considerate kidnappers they were. I might have been disgusted by the feel of their fingers all over my skin, but if not for the little visual I had, I wouldn't even know they were touching me. I was so absolutely numb from the cold at this point, and once again, I felt like I was losing my senses.

I survived that once, but I didn't know how. I wondered if Theron had saved me in the forest. I woke up on his table after all. Nightmare or not, he was the face I saw when I came to—not the putrid worms or Jericho. As much as I complained, the Dream Weaver hadn't actually been the worst companion thus far. He was growing on me. That was probably the trauma, distress, and hope talking—like thinking these sweet nothings might work as a prayer to entice him to rush to my aid—but realistically, I had no reason to think he was a decent person outside the hints he offered and the little mercies he showed me. He probably just stuck around in hopes of getting another chance to emotionally torment me in my dreams. That actually seemed like a likely conclusion. Much more likely than the idea that he cared.

That wasn't really fair to say. If I got out of this mess, maybe I'd be a little more trusting of the people who weren't blatantly hurting me. At least of the ones who held my hand to keep me warm.

I swallowed the sob in my throat, and it settled among the squeeze of sadness and dismay constricting in my chest. I couldn't afford to give up the little air I'd managed to sneak into my lungs before I went under. I needed that as long as I could hold onto it.

I could have laughed at the ridiculousness of it all. The hope, I mean. The foolhardy but pervasive belief that I was going to find a way out of this, alive and intact. How I somehow had any of that positivity left in my mental database was beyond me. It wasn't like I had recourse or that I could fight. My only claim to being a badass was in the context of a white collar office environment. I wasn't some martial artist gunslinger. I was going to drown or freeze or maybe be strangled and eaten by whatever creature owned those hands. It was hard to know which would take me first.

Which of those deaths was the worst? Maybe they were all about the same. Though at least if I froze to death I wouldn't feel anything anymore. It would just be a quiet sleep .

That was better.

What the fuck am I saying? None of those options were acceptable. Letting Jericho win, letting down Pumpkin, being a pushover who rolls over at the first sign of adversity—that wasn't me. I'd carved a name for myself from nothing. I'd forced people to respect me when they thought I only showed up to work every day and dedicated my entire life to my craft because I wanted attention. I was a fucking fighter and always had been. And water was going to be what killed me? Some ice cubes? A couple ugly, unmanicured fingers?

I think the fuck not.

I may not have been the physically toughest person in the world, but I'd been fighting a war inside my heart for as long as I'd been alive, and my own thoughts wouldn't be the battlefield where I took my last breath.

I started thrashing, like I might have a chance of freeing myself. I wouldn't be able to hold my breath much longer, but I had to use the little strength I had to do something .

I kicked three of them off my legs, using their complacency against them, but that just resulted in more hands appearing from the darkness around me, grabbing me from every direction. A palm wrapped around my mouth, another fisted my hair, ten more restrained my arms and my legs. I didn't take in water when I finally choked out my long held breath, but I couldn't take in air either with the way I was engulfed in so many hands. They all seemed to be connected to some sort of monster, but how many were there?

Suffocation had blackness bleeding into my vision when my body was yanked through the surface tension of an air bubble with a sudden pop. We burst from blue into black, in a cave with barely illuminated, jagged rock walls tinted by the hue of the icy sea outside.

I was allowed a single desperate breath as soon as we were in the chamber, only to end up being flung into a wall, and having the air knocked right back out of me.

I choked for resuscitation, heaving until the stale air in my lungs had all been expelled and replaced. The smell of death was strong in the cave, but I was so desperate to refill my oxygen bank that I couldn't be bothered to gag. Full equilibrium was a distant dream for once the threat was gone.

I committed to facing the monster and lifted my gaze, where I took in the overwhelming vision of… hands.

So many hands. Open palms, fists, spread fingers, twitching fingers—ten, twenty, thirty, maybe one-hundred, all attached to thickly muscular arms jutting out from every available inch of flesh on a beastly figure. The small head at the center of the twitching muscles had neither eyes nor ears, but its excessive torso was rippling with massive muscles, and its stout legs barely looked big enough to hold the thing up.

The beast felt around the cavern, as if translating its environment to its brain exclusively via touch.

As much as I wanted to give up, close my eyes, and look away, that wouldn't fix anything. Nothing could save me but quick thinking and action.

That might not be enough either, but it was better than giving up.

I scrambled to my feet, picked a direction, and started moving as far from my last known position as possible, hoping the missing sensory organs would also mean it could neither see nor hear. A bold assumption, perhaps, but the thing lived deeply enough under the water that it was a reasonable conclusion. There were lots of blind fish in the ocean, after all, and I felt way more composed if I just told myself this porcupine of arms was like a big, dumb, blind fish.

If nothing else, I was buying time until I figured out a better plan. As cute as stories like David and Goliath might be, I wouldn't be slaying the hulking monster with one-hundred thick, overbuilt arms using nothing but my own strength. If I could find some sort of weapon in this cave, however, I still had a chance. Escape wasn't an option, but survival still was. At this point, my most realistic option was that I find somewhere to hide, wait out Jericho's time clock, and let the King of Devils intervene.

Was Jericho still watching me? Could I signal to him somehow? Would he save me if I forfeit?

No, it's not over yet.

I wasn't some damsel in need of saving. I never have been.

I've never been allowed to be.

If there was one thing I'd come to understand over the years, it was that men didn't save women unless it might benefit them, and when you were the only woman in a world of men, you were either a prize or a problem, depending on how attractive and high ranking you were. I was never simply a person who was assessed on their own merit. No one ever stood up for me, and my personal hell was in needing someone to. Even if I got cut down a thousand times, I'd come back a thousand-and-one out of pure spite.

So let's play a fucking game.

Predictably, the monster started feeling around the wall it had chucked me against, probably hoping I was still lying there limp and unconscious. It thoroughly searched every crevasse, crack, and outcrop, while I stealthily rounded its bizarre body, and tried to assess my options.

On its back, the monster had a porcupine-esque conglomeration of limbs. I struggled to wrap my head around what I was looking at, even while literally staring at it. Theron and Jericho, despite their horns and striking eyes, were both largely human in build and structure, whereas this was something else entirely. My devils only had, at most, a foot of height on me, but this thing was four or five times my size, and the only thing vaguely human about it was the shape of a few key components.

In all of its magic and horrors, Tartarus had still been familiar enough. Walls, plants, people—those made sense. But this… it was no wonder these men were such psychopaths when this was their normal. I could only imagine what kind of nightmare Theron might find in my head the next time he stopped into my thoroughly traumatized psyche.

It roared as it swiped at the walls—an ear shattering, booming scream, that was ironically loud and intimidating from a beast who couldn't hear itself—then it continued to feel around for me in its cave. I did my best to play keep away, ducking and running and rolling to stay behind it and out of its grasp. Though that was easier said than done with the sheer number of fingers feeling their way around the walls, the floor, and the ceiling. Fortunately, the space was huge, and I still had plenty of directions to run.

I bolted deeper into the cave, outside the reach of the light coming in through the mouth of the demon's lair, and now I was as blind as the beast searching for me. My shin hit something hard, and I tripped, falling forward onto my hands into a pile of hard sticks.

Not sticks.

The long, smooth rods, the hollow spheres with eye inlets, and the rounded, broken cages were one thousand percent not sticks. I swallowed hard as I clattered through the pile of bones, swimming through death to get further away from the nightmare.

Nightmare.

What if this was just Theron messing with me again? The last thing I'd done before everything went wrong was land on top of him. Was that how he transferred a vision into my mind? None of this could possibly exist otherwise, so maybe this was some strange manifestation of my insecurities again.

I didn't know what psychological disturbances, mental health issues, or low self-esteem, would appear as a man with one-hundred arms, but with how terrifying my life had been lately, it wouldn't surprise me if my brain had started to craft something weird. I'd never imagined getting fucked while nails pinned me to a table either, so why couldn't this be another highly disturbed image he was feeding me? The hands were probably a metaphor of some kind. Maybe something about how I never ask for help, or some pretentious reference to feeling held back.

The last dream had felt at least this vivid anyway, so that was all within reason.

Nice theory, but just in case it was real, I still kept scrambling and looking for a weapon.

In my frantic escape, I started making a list of what I knew that might help me come up with something.

1) It only has a sense of touch and taste. I doubted it could smell, considering how much this place reeked of rot and old, sweaty, unwashed beast.

2) It didn't move very fast. Short legs, a big body, and two tons worth of arm muscles all seemed to slow it down.

3) It could scream despite not being able to hear. Maybe that was some sort of echolocation based on vibration instead of sound?

4) It could swim, but still lived in a cave with air, so it presumably needed to breathe.

5) It ate people, obviously.

None of this seemed terribly helpful at the moment, while I swam through dead people like a highly disturbing ball pit. I knocked a skull with my foot, and heard the sound of it tumbling down the pile. It hit the dirt with a thunk, then the rolling stopped short.

That was a fraction of a second before a giant icy hand wrapped around my ankle, and I was dragged violently and rapidly across the pile of bones towards the mouth of the waiting monster.

.

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