A Mischief in the Woodwork - By Harper Alexander Page 0,42

the pupils of my eyes expand, honing in on the field around me. I could not hope to see past the mist, through the grass – but I had to watch. I knew the instant I turned my back to retreat, I was done for. Predators knew this game.

Bless the heart of she who had never played, but knew it too.

There sounded a rustle.

Nothing.

A taunting extent of nothing.

Then the motion of a four-legged demon manifested through the grass.

The wardog filtered through the curtain of weeds before me, head low on its shoulders, the mist dissipating around its warm body. A horrible prickle ran over me, a wave of nerves, like the tide coming in to claim the shore, cold and frothy and chilling. Those eyes convicted me, wicked and mocking. The savage void of a mind that lay beneath that skull was wrapped around me, and I felt it pull as the creature slunk closer.

The rules of the game scattered to all corners of my mind. I would be shredded in an instant.

The moment the voices of the slaves trickled through the mist, I bolted. If I needed one thing right now, it was a bearing.

A gruesome snarl barked into the quiet, ripping it to shreds in my place. I felt the earth heave as the beast lunged after me, and the slaves' voices were lost in the blind panic that followed. Nothing could be heard over the ravaging of grass and vicious snarling of the beast giving chase. I saw nothing but the veil of my fear and my bearing.

When I emerged from the grass, the voices of the slaves cut off in alarm, and they scattered. Had the mist tampered even the ruckus of the wardog?

I realized only after they scattered and I fell silent that I had been screaming at them to get inside. They ran at the house like horses, hard and fast.

I could feel the charging beast nipping at my heels with its great, gaping mouth. I heard the cloth of my skirt rip on its fangs.

Breath rasped into my lungs, going ragged on the barrier edges of my illness.

A strange, glazed relief washed over me as the door to Manor Dorn was wrenched open and the last of the slaves disappeared inside. But relief coupled with raw desperation was a sour, fleeting thing indeed. I was mere lengths behind them, but in the wake of their exodus I was suddenly abandoned to the rabid fate boring down on me, and I knew I would not be so lucky.

I reached the porch, was just short of the door, when the beast lunged. That door was centered in my reach, so close that I could see myself inside.

Instead, I felt the battering-ram weight of the wardog slamming into me full-tilt, and I in turn crashed into the face of my haven, and slammed that fateful door closed with the weight of my own body.

I was stricken senseless for an instant – then instinct arrested me. Great, trap-like jaws were around me, ripping at me, shredding my clothes and cracking my ribs beneath my corset. Soon they would penetrate that too, and I would be a soft bite from being torn open completely.

I thrashed around, bracing myself with my back against the door, shying my face away from the onslaught that tore at my body. I smelled blood, rotten meat, and greasy hackles. The beast's motley fur rippled over frenzied, brutal muscles as he ravaged me.

My arm flung out against the side of the house, banging against the bucket that hung by a chain there. The wardog ground me into the door, and my reach faltered, my elbow grazing against the wall. My arm went limp a moment, senseless from the raw shredding of nerves. But I was reaching again, fumbling for purchase, and my fingers alighted on the lip of the bucket.

I hauled it across my body, ramming it into the side of the wardog's face. The beast faltered, surprised, but the wild look was rooted in its eyes. It was possessed for the feeding.

I dealt another blow, and then another. Again and again I slammed that bucket into that snarling body, beating the creature bent on devouring me. The desperate task blurred into a painstaking eternity, a pathetic sense of perseverance that was my only hope. At center stage was nothing but my desperation, but I knew in the back of my mind that no one would come for me. I was pressed against the