The Witch's Daughter - Laken Cane Page 0,58
the harsher the land became.
The air smelled of burnt blood, scorched flesh, and dead, dusty things. It shrouded her in secrecy and oppressiveness, so heavy and thick it was like walking through quicksand.
It was no longer beautiful. It no longer called to her.
It made her afraid and filled her with dread.
The bones crunched beneath her boots as she walked, and it was unavoidable. The ground was carpeted with them. Piles of them.
“This is not a good place,” she muttered. “Not a good place at all.”
“Shhhh…”
Her heart stopped.
“Shhhh…”
And suddenly she realized exactly where she was.
She was in the territory of the crawlers.
The sound they made as they crept over the dry bones was like a rush of wind through dead leaves. And she couldn’t remember any other sound striking such terror into her heart.
“Shhhh…”
She caught a glimpse of some of them as they scuttled behind the trees, edging closer to her.
She and Z had been attacked by some bad sons of bitches.
These were different.
Worse.
She didn’t know how she knew, but she knew.
Cousins, perhaps, to those crawlers.
She turned to run.
They swarmed over the bone hills, bringing her down before she was even aware she hadn’t managed to take off.
They had her.
The crawlers had her, and she was alone.
They couldn’t kill her, but she knew a very deep truth.
There were many, many things worse than death.
Chapter Thirty-Two
They forced her down into the earth, deeper and deeper, and she had no choice but to go. Kicking, screaming, shredding them with her claws, she went.
They rode her down, their voices assaulting her ears and shocking her mind, numbing her to everything but her terror.
She fought in the blackness, blackness so thick she could feel it like spider webs on her face. She could see nothing, and she could not fight her way free.
They took her to their nest.
Their hidden, impregnable lair.
Slowly, gradually, she could see.
The room was enormous, with high ceilings, gray rock walls, and smooth, wet floors. A grim underground cavern of horrors.
She shuddered and backed slowly away until the cold, hard wall pressed against her back.
They had her.
She couldn’t kill them.
They couldn’t kill her.
But they outnumbered her and they could torture her.
They would torture her.
She could see eagerness in the wide-eyed faces—pale faces with tongues hanging wet and limp, sharp, crowded teeth dull with the stain of old blood, cracked and broken from the habit of devouring bones.
Get ready for it, Rune. You’ll survive. You’ll be okay.
You will.
She moaned.
Being at the mercy of the sadistic monsters was a terror unlike any other.
She didn’t want them to see her fear, but as they lifted their round faces, sniffing and biting at the air, she realized they already did.
They tasted it, and they wanted more. They craved her fear like the berserker craved her blood.
Her fear fed them.
“Shhh,” they said, because they couldn’t say anything else. “Shhh…”
“Fuck me,” she whispered. “I’m fucked.”
If it would have done any good, she’d have begged them not to hurt her. She would have tossed aside any pride she might have had and begged them to leave her alone.
She could only scream.
They bore her to the ground, so many of them, piling on top of her, under her, around her, biting, licking, smothering, crushing.
She fought hard.
It did not matter.
They couldn’t be touched. They melted away from her claws and her fangs and her desperation, only to appear again like impossible ghosts.
“Shhhh…”
She couldn’t take Z’s advice and cut her head off. Her deep, deep terror of being a brain in a jar was too strong.
Stronger, even, than the crawlers.
She tried to concentrate, to listen for the echoes—if she’d found them she would not have hesitated. She would have left the worlds to the witch and she would have escaped the crawlers.
But she couldn’t hear the echoes. She couldn’t escape.
“Oh, God,” she begged. “Take me or save me.”
On Skyll, she was not Rune Alexander, super monster. She was Rune Alexander. Period.
She begged for death long before they tired of playing with her. Long before they grew bored watching how far they could push her, how severely they could hurt her, how easily they could terrify her.
They dominated her. They infiltrated her mind, shredded her heart, and violated her body.
Over and over and over.
Until she could no longer remember what pain was, and her fear was hidden beneath the weight of too much horror.
When she was numb and they could neither taste her fear nor kill her, they withdrew.
And when her body and mind began to heal and she stirred, weeping, they came