Labyrinth: The Keeper Chronicles, a prequel

Author:Katherine Wynter
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2015-11-23T06:00:00+00:00

* * *

Rebekah woke to something brushing her face. She smacked it aside, scrabbling back until she saw what it was that had scared her. Grass. It’s just grass. Calm down. She took a couple deep breaths, her heart hammering in her chest. Someone had dressed her in a gauzy white dress that reached halfway down her thighs. The edges were trimmed in lace and the straps on her shoulders were thin. She shuddered.

She was outside somewhere, in a woods or a forest, but the colors felt too bright, almost neon, and the edges of her vision swirled and blurred. Red alder trees surrounded her, their egg shaped leaves serrated like knives reaching out to stab her flesh. Pines were sprinkled in here and there, taking more of the lower coverage so that sunlight spotted the ground like the holes in Swiss cheese. A brook burbled somewhere close, the moisture so heavy in the air she could feel it in her lungs. Drowning her. Hundreds of different shrubs and grasses and brush filled the space between the trees, lined in strange rows that towered above her head almost as if they’d been planted into one of those British garden mazes she’d seen on television.

A monstrously large ant crawled across her bare foot, its six legs hairy and tipped with wicked claws. Screaming, she hit it off and backed away through the grass until her back brushed up against something hard.

Panting, she clawed her way to her feet. “I’ve gotta get out of here.”

She turned around.

A large wooden fence rose behind her, twelve feet high at least, topped with jagged barbed wire. To her left and right, the fence extended as far as she could see through the tall shrubbery.

“No,” she muttered, running her hand up the wood in search of a handhold or foothold or anything she could use to climb her way out. “No, this can’t be happening. Let me out!” The last sentence she screamed. Someone had to be nearby. Someone had to hear her.

“Now why would I want to do that?” a masculine voice threatened from the other side of the wall. “We’re going to have fun together, you and I.”

She touched her cheek where he had licked her and stumbled backwards. It hadn’t been a dream. That thing had been real. Oh god. I'm going to die.

The thing on the other side of the fence snorted, its breath coming in rapid pants. Was it…excited? Something sailed over the fence and stuck in the ground. He continued. “If you survive my maze till morning, tasty little bird, I’ll let you go free.”

“You’re lying.”

It laughed, a sound like death had a sore throat. “I never lie about food. Or the hunt. When the first light of the morning pierces the land, you will be freed. If you still breathe, that is.” This time a bag flew over the fence. “There. Wouldn’t want you to think I was being unfair.”

“What is it?”

“Water. Some food.”

Rebekah stumbled over to the grey

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