In the green light of an ominous morning Chrio moved at a different pace. Over the course of the week he'd done a good job of disappearing for long stretches at a time, appearing at daylight's close and leaving by the following sunrise like an illicit lover. Not that I wanted him as one. So he had the nicest body I in my short life had ever had the chance to get up close beside. (Excluding, of course, nude models from art class whose parts I'd gone blind to. I'd never been the kind of artist who found leaning into a stranger's privates particularly romantic.).  

I knew, when I smooshed my head back into the comforts of a pillow for the last time in who-knew-when, maybe ever, I knew exactly what I was doing: delaying the inevitable. Last night I'd only drifted into restless sleep when I stopped imagining what'd happen to me if any of the demons caught me.

And now I was face to face with one of them, and my mind was on the defensive, trying to paint Chiro into something better than he was. Yes, he the closest thing I had to a friend after Shail and the Walrus, but he was part of the reason I was here.

"Let's go," he said.

Groaning, I convinced myself to throw off my blanket and abandon the pillow. Chiro had played his part in putting me here in this world that felt like a dream most days. He forced me into this cursed landscape that had me fighting for survival. I was still angry at him for that, and he was still annoyed that he had a human and her marginally trained wild cat stinking up his room every night.

This morning the Prince didn't rush out the door. A quiet intensity possessed his steely eyes with a terrifying focus. When he turned them on me, I shivered, feeling like a spring antelope before a leopard. And somewhere deep down in my lizard brain, a primitive instinct rather liked it.

"Let's go," he repeated, reaching for his shirt.

I propped myself on my elbows. "Don't mind me," I hummed, pretending to stretch. He turned away with an impatient grunt. A cotton undershirt covered the inked sabertooth on his muscular shoulder and I caved into temptation, letting my nervousness hid behind physical admiration.

He was hot. Back in my minuscule hometown, I'd have bragging rights forever in my small town if I bagged a man like that.  Lucas would've been so jealous. The officer wasn't mine, but I missed his friendship. I could've used his advice right about now.

And so anger for the man before circled back around. My one chance to leave that tiny town, to see the world, to make new friends and find love... and Chiro had stabbed it in the chest.

"What the hell are you doing?" the Prince snapped. He stood over his desk  now,  flipping quickly though small documents. When he found whatever he was looking for, he shoved it into a small breastpocket and hit my shoulders with a pillow. "You aren't anyone's bride yet. They won't be content to wait for you."

And at his sharp tongue the foggy, dreamlike morning dissolved. My stomach felt off. My hands shook. I lost the energy to rebuke him. Instead I slunk around to the far side of a yawning Shail to get changed into proper attire. 

Turned out that heavy armor was easier to draw on my female characters than it was to actually wear it. They had experience and muscle and in some cases, supernatural abilities. I just knew what bits went where. On a week's notice, 'light armor' was as good as it got for me. After experimentation with the Walrus, we'd decided that leather worked best. I wasn't terribly agile or quiet in anything else. I was either getting stuck, creaking, or smashing around roots in the dark forest. I couldn't hide from Shail and I couldn't sneak up on a castle rat. So flexible, supple leather it was.

Of course, in the Walrus's personal assessment, if I got hit in the vitals by any one of the Hunt Lords, neither steel nor leather was going to save me. "Besides," he'd said, clasping my shoulder in his giant, sweaty palm. "Sneaky bastards belong in quiet material."

The leather itself was beat and deep brown, but it bore a pleasant warmth and tightness to it when I slipped it on over my shirt. Only a bit of bronze riveting added some burnished flair to the muddy hues. Beneath that I had a reasonably comfortable bra, tailored by the tongueless women from the market after a long morning spent trying to instruct her. The floral pattern on it made me feel better, made me feel like I still had a piece of my old life out here in the Mid while I looked, from an exterior viewpoint, like a twig-armed, reject Valkyrie. 

Chiro rather begrudgingly helped me get the fastenings right on the corset and pauldrons. The bracers for my arms and greaves for my legs I managed to lace on my own. What I liked most I saved for last- the knife, whose sharpened edge I was getting braver and braver at using for tasks other than shaving bits of steak for Shail. Over all my protection was sparse and pathetic, but I had protection where it mattered, a good pair of boots and a warm cloak to cover it all.

I braided my hair back behind my head, and stuck my fingers into the inkwell Chiro kept on his desk. The man watched me, confused, as I carried it over to the mattress. Sitting crosslegged, I took a small, polished mirror from I'd gotten from the seamstress. Holding it up and setting the well in my lap, I darkened the area around my eyes. Ink didn't make excellent makeup, but for the start of the Hunt I wanted to take a page from nature and practice a little deception. I wanted them to see me as toxic. I wanted them to see me as poisonous, as dangerous.

"Fierce?" I asked, turning toward Chiro.

He tilted his head to one side, didn't say anything until I added some finger streaks to the side of my left eye for increased effect.  "I'm not sure you'll survive," he finally decided, shaking his head.

The Prince insisted Shail's hide was near impenetrable, but that hadn't stopped me from getting armor fashioned for the crag cat by name-dropping the King down around the local blacksmith's forge. At the very least, I'd racked up quite a hefty bill in the King's name, but I'd never been summoned back to the tower, so I presumed the cost was tolerable for the time being, or that he planned to tax it out of whatever demon ended up killing me or taking me in.

Since Shail slept apart from the rest of the palace mounts, the Walrus and I had hauled his equipment to tower and it was up to me to get it fixed on the lazy cat. Shail's lack of a smooth back and zero desire to have anything slid over his head mostly just resulted in several scratches up and down my arms. All that hard work (and money, I presumed) went down the drain the second I tried again this morning. The cat went belly-up and that was end of the discussion.

The Walrus had given me a saddle and cat-bridle as an early wedding present. That, even if Shail refused to humor me and wear the armor, was an absolute necessity. The crag cat fidgeted when I hefted it onto his back. I needed Chiro's help to get everything situated behind me: a pack loaded with food, a blanket, and some extra supplies the Walrus had thought I needed.

When we'd wrestled the cat into a standstill, Shail bumped his face against mine, rumbling loud protests- but he was all business afterward, as if he sensed something was different this time when I strapped my pack and saddle to him. I'd admit, I felt a little ridiculous, riding an oversized cat into battle, but I was determined to act like he was the most badass mount in this Hunt.

Between getting myself and Shail ready, the time passed quicker than I'd have liked. Within seconds it seemed like Chiro was holding the door open for our exit. He was handsome enough in a cloak the color of stormclouds. His own armor was a lot dimmer than I'd expected from a Prince. Everything—except the cloak, which was pinned in place with a miniature silvered sabertooth skull—was a grungy, lowkey mixture of chainmail and boiled leather. A short-sleeved leather jerkin covered the mail on his chest. His sword, a broad blade similar to what he'd killed me with, rested in an ornate sheath at his hip.

Shail cut down the stairs in front of me, banging his tail down the tower steps the entire way. I walked in the crag cat's echoes, vaguely aware of Chiro coming down the steps behind me. He wore heavier pieces than me, but I could barely hear him. I wondered if when we were out there in the wild, if I'd be able to hear anyone before they crept up on me.

As we were walking past the dour eyes of dead, demonic kings, I took a deep breath and grabbed Chiro's gloved hand. He wrenched it free with an angry hiss. His steely eyes were large and round, hungry like a lion before the hunt.

"Enough," he said, eyes fixed down the hall. He picked up his pace.

I walked faster to keep up. "Before this all happens and you become my enemy—"

"I always was," the Prince corrected, brushing past me in a swirl of his cloak. "That's why I kept you close."

"Yeah," I said with an eyeroll. I let my hand settle down to my belt and the knife that rested there. "Look, I know you didn't have to do what you did for me. I know what I was facing if you weren't here and I wanted to thank you for helping me."

"Thank the King," he said shortly.  "He told me to."

"If he told someone like Akta instead, I'd be limping to the Hunt if I still had my legs underneath me."

"Which is why he told Akta no such thing." Shail plunked on ahead of us. Chiro watched the cat go, then turned back to me. "You're afraid" he said pointedly, as if he could read my mind, as if he knew that I was terrified of being caught out there.

Glancing down, I rubbed my forearm. "In my other life my crowning achievement was bottlefeeding a calf, who'd lost her mum" I said, "I'm not sure I can be a wolf."

Chiro sighed and kept walking. But as we reached the grand oak doors to the main hall he stopped, put a hand on my shoulder and caught my chin with the back of his other hand. "You're a Lady of the Hunt," he told me, looking past the ink and the fear and straight into my soul. "Don't go out like a demon. Go out like you."

*

The main hall was a broad, grandiose statement of winding architecture, a place that had held feasts and gatherings for centuries. The walls and floor both showed it in cracks, chips, nicks, unrepaired and in repair: there was a little bit of everything in the space. But today, the focus was not on food or revelry. No, it was on rivalry between thirty-odd men and me.

Akta was at the forefront, leaned up against one of the supporting pillars. His neck was craned as he talked with the giant of a Minotaur I'd seen in the past week. Covered in gleaming silver armor, with an antlered helm tucked beneath his arms, the stag was impossible to miss. 

I kept my hand on Shail's shoulder. The crag cat relaxed onto his haunches as Chiro moved on past us. There was a distinct, loud howl and the click of claws across stone. The Prince's wolf rose jumped against the man's chest. In that moment, as heads turned for their reunion, we were spotted.

"I knew it!" Akta exclaimed, pushing himself from the pillar. A long finger stretched toward me. "You've been sleeping together."

Shail, maybe because I was so squished against him I was stepping on his toes, drew into view his long white fangs and rattled a warning hiss. Akta kept his distance, but he took enough steps forward toward me that my sweaty palm found its way back to knife's cool hilt.

"So the lady deigns us peasants her equals at long last," he continued, opening his arms. The men behind him had moved in closer. They were intimidating, each of them, but the only monster I could see held my reflection in his handsome green eyes.

"I don't consider myself an equal to you," I hissed at him. "And I didn't sleep with anybody." I glanced in Chiro's direction, but the Prince had already moved through the men. He was headed for the courtyard, without a nod of greeting to anyone. 

Akta took another step forward. "At least let me escort you to the gate."

Shail rumbled off a second warning. I glanced down to the cat's feet and spotted claws.  I smiled, satisfied, and hopped onto the crag cat with more grace than I'd expected from myself. With a gentle squeeze of my feet, Shail moved through the men in the direction of the set of double-doors that would take us into the courtyard, and then out to the palace boundaries.

"Run fast, little lady," Akta called after me.  The men whooped and hollered obscenities. I sat stiff in the saddle, numb to their words. What I imagined was going to be a lot worse.

Chiro's wolf trailed behind his master. While Chiro himself disappeared into the courtyard, the wolf bounded back my direction. Shail grumbled, but at the moment he didn't maul or attack anyone, though I felt his back arch beneath me a tad. Wolf and crag cat stuck out their necks to sniff each other, then eased off. A temporary accord had been reached. The canine slid past the front of the cat and allowed its serpentine, orange tongue to roll over my fingertips.

"Gross," I murmured, wiping my hand on my leg. The wolf was impervious to my disgust. As we moved along he trotted beside us, sniffing my feet and legs, tacking a careful lick here and there as his noxious, sulfuric breath wafted up to my face.

I was so glad when the scent of a cold dawn wind rushed along my neck. I couldn't stay in that hall with Akta and those men, not for any second longer than I had to. The Prince was on ahead. In the distance a black iron gate was solidly shut.

"Gabriel!" Chiro snapped, realizing at last where his pet had run off to. The wolf's eyes met mine, and then it whined and raced back to its owner. The man bent and scratched the demon wolf behind its ears. Near him stood a waif of a young stablehand, holding the reins to a burly horse with a thick black coat.  It was decorated with the typical armor of a paladin, more royal than the Prince himself, but I didn't mention this. You didn't get to be prince of a pack of demons because you looked good in pauldrons.

My entrance, or the Prince's exit, seemed to be the cue the others were waiting for. The men emerged from the hall, some moving to one side to collect a horse like the Chiro. Akta kept his distance to take a tawny, lean mount.

"Come to wish me good luck, Tay Wilson?" Chiro asked, glancing back toward the hall. "Or are you afraid to stay with the men?"

"No," I lied, trying to look sterner than I felt as I wracked my mind for a reason. "I came to ask you a question."

Giving Gabriel one last affectionate pat, the man collected the horse's reins. "And what is that?"

"Can I have your brides?"

Laughing, he got onto the horse. "Try not to die in the first ten minutes. What an embarrassment you will be to me." Casting one final look in my direction, he turned the dark steed toward our designated starting line. The iron gates opened at his approach, and the Prince became the first man out on the dusty road to the Malumbrian Oaks.

Watching him leave with a bit more anxiety than I'd anticipated, I stroked the back of one of Shail's blunt ears. "Please run fast," I murmured against the cat's cheek, giving him a little kiss.

The Walrus wobbled up beside the iron gates. "Take yer places, lady and gents!" he shouted, waving the remaining competitors through. "Let's go. Afore lunch gets made for the rest of us." 

 Feeling like a toadstool in a forest of giants, I urged Shail forward through the men. With his ears folded down the cat slunk his way forward, until the green sunlight shone across his dappled hide, and we were standing half a mile outside the shade of the twisted forest.

In that moment, with a cool breeze tussling loose hair from my braid, at that moment my stomach knotted and I knew just how deep in shit I truly stood. Subtly as I could, I clutched at my stomach, willing myself not to throw up. We hadn't done more than stand around and leer at each other and I was sweating like someone locked me in a sauna.

Demons fanned out to either side of me. The ones that hadn't chosen a mount, six or seven of them, excluding the Minotaur, were stripping out of their clothes as if going for a quick dip in a dust bowl. Prince Chiro had skirted all the way to a far end, his jaw set, his eyes focused on the Oaks. His horse seemed about as nervous as I felt, kicking and snorting, while his wolf snarled at one and all. Meanwhile, Shail's clubbed tail swung through the air behind us, leaving me at the very least vaguely assured that no one was going to grab me from behind at the word 'go.'

A howl broke through the crowd.

One of the naked men dropped to his hands and knees. His entire body vibrated. He rolled across the ground screaming, then went still. For a second I was ready to count him as the first casualty, and then the skin along his dark back split apart. Emerald ichor oozed through the cracks. Emerging from the skin was a new man, a small man, about five feet tall. He tore through the old husk, slipping out from the mess by dragging himself across the ground. First came the torso of a human man, followed by the abdomen and eight legs of a spider.

Eight eyes blinked into the green light. I caught the smallest glimpse of hairy mandibles, and then in a flash he'd scuttled into the shade of the Minotaur on the far side of me.  So transfixed had I been on that man's transformation from human to arachnid, I hadn't realized that the other six riderless demons had undergone similar shifts. Grunts and moans echoed down the line, as demons transitioned to monstrous forms. Skin rippled, the tattooed shoulders mere hints at the monstrosities they became. To my right stood a thin man on a slender horse. He gripped a narrow sword in one hand. Beside him, looking at me with a wicked, elongated grin, was a twelve foot giant of thick grey muscle. His skin was softly scaled, his neck thick and dewlapped, his head bald, his face a contorted mess of man and Komodo dragon. His tongue flicked my direction.

I turned away from the sight with a shuddering breath, trying to act like Chiro, trying to keep my eyes on the forest.

I needed to decide where I wanted to be: in the front, where I could be run down, in the back, where others might be ready and waiting, or in the middle. The chaos of the center seemed best. Shail felt nervous beneath me, which was fine. I had a feeling that he wanted to go home, and home was in the distant woods. The faster he ran, the better shape we'd be in. My main goal, at least for the time being, was find somewhere to hide. That's what a maiden would do. That's what I needed to do, if I was going to have any hope of making it through this thing. 

The dragon-man's long tongue flipped my direction again. In return, I flipped him the bird.

The Walrus, standing beside the iron gate, grunted a surly "on your marks." I could hear the rustle of his clothes as he lifted the hunting horn to his lips. I tensed and made myself smaller on Shail's back. My heels pressed into his sides. The cat lowered himself against the ground, long tail going still.

The Walrus sucked in a deep breath. My hands shook. The reins creaked against my hands. Then horn, a tremendous, loathsome bellow, blasted our eardrums and the earth exploded into a cloud of dust.

The Hunt began with screams.

Man and beast leaped forward at once—and some leaped sideways, knocking against each other with vicious blows and howls.

Shail surged forward into the fray, great strides pounding across the dirt. The Minotaur swiped the man beside me into the ground and rushed me. I pressed myself tight against Shail's back, passing beneath the shadow of a hairy elbow as it caught empty air where my head used to be. 

The Minotaur bellowed his frustration. He lunged again, narrowly missing our rump. The spider jumped on the bull's back, tearing its fangs into the larger competitor's meaty throat.  The Prince was already ahead of the rest, cruising without a soul nearby. His horse clicked off a rapid pace, until even the wolf struggled to keep up and got lost in the swirling dust.

And we ran on, dodging axes and hideous creatures.  

By then the Minotaur had dropped to the ground, flinging the spider off. The spidery demon slammed into the ground and cartwheeled into the dirt in front of me on eight hairy limbs.

Startled, Shail skidded around a twitching leg. I looked over my shoulder. The Minotaur had risen. He was gaining speed, sallow eyes locked on us. Nostrils flaring, he lowered his head. Sunlight gleamed off his polished horns. "Come on," I hissed, urging Shail back into a sprint. 

The first shades of the Oaks were just yards away. 

Something black darted through my vision. Before I could turn my head Shail and I were airborne.  I hit the ground hard on my side, tumbling into a cloud of suffocating dust and hooves. I couldn't find the space to stand. Something sharp nailed my back. A foot came down on my wrist and I kicked and clawed and tried to keep from being trampled. That dark black shape pressed its foot harder into my wrist and leaned down. Shail's filthy shape staggered to his paws a few feet away. The shape bent forward, blocking my view as horsemen surged around us, as the bones in my wrist cracked. A slender tongue flicked my cheek. With my left hand I pulled out the knife, grabbed the tongue and sliced it off. 

Howling in pain, the shadowed figure staggered backward just as Shail lumbered to my side. The crag cat whipped his tail around, drilling the man across the face. But then, as the man lay stunned and groaning, the cat tore off for the twisting, dark oaks without me. 

Behind us, the spider had flipped itself onto seven legs. The Minotaur had dropped to his knees, trembling and shaking. 

A riderless horse blew past my shoulder, dropping me back onto the ground.I staggered up again, one thought on my mind, one single pressing need: the Oaks. I had to reach the Oaks.

I picked myself off the ground, aware that I'd lost sight of most competitors, aware that I hadn't even seen Akta since this thing began, but his body, when I looked behind me, was not there. Only the Minotaur lay fallen.

Thirty demons and me. 

The spider scuttled past the Minotaur's spasming body.   

The first tree felt like heaven. I threw myself around the trunk, panting. I hunkered down there amongst the roots, waiting for the rustle of leaves and faint, mechanical click of the spider's limbs to pass on by. Shail had my pack. Even if he'd quit on me now, I needed to get to him. He'd head for the falls Chiro had first told me about, I reasoned. He'd find somewhere to hide, lick his wounds, or both.

And sleeping with a local out in these woods was a lot safer than being on my own.

But as the brush around me shifted and rustled, all I could do was wedge myself deeper into the dirt and listen for the spider.