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She hurried along each of the back walls of shrubbery, running her hands through the leaves, searching…searching…Head pounding, heart thrumming wildly, her ears seemed filled with the roar of the ocean, the battering of the ocean against distant cliffs…though she was nowhere near the ocean in this closed labyrinth. But it had always been this way. She had always heard these oddly familiar sounds, always sensed a remote place with thick salt air…
But here she found no opening. No escape. Nothing but thick, unbroken branches.
She swallowed hard against her fear. This was it. There was no escape.
Kneeling at the statue, she mouthed, “Mother Mary, save my soul…”
She hadn’t been good.
Oh, God no.
But she wasn’t all bad, either.
Behind her she heard him move ever forward. No rush, no rush at all.
He knew he had her. Terror crawled up her spine.
She kept silently, desperately praying, again and again, Mother Mary, save my soul. And then another voice. Deep. Rough. Echoing hollowly through her skull: She can’t help you. You have no soul to save.
Were they his words? Was that his cruel voice inside her head?
She thought with sudden clarity: I’m sixteen years old and I am going to die. How stupid she was to have goaded him-teased him. Dared him.
What had she been thinking?
This was the crux of her problem: Not only could she see the future, she sometimes tried to change it.
And now he was going to kill her. In the middle of this maze, in the cold of winter, he was going to end her life. Desperately she slipped one hand into the pocket of her jacket, curled her fingers over the jackknife hidden within.
With all her strength she prayed for her life, her soul. Above her pulsing heart she heard the hunter’s footsteps. Nearer. Relentlessly closer. She rose, turning, facing the yawning opening in the thick shrubbery, the only means of escape. From the depths a dark figure appeared.
Tall.
Menacing.
Lucifer Incarnate.
Her beginning and her end.
“Leave,” she ordered, holding up the knife.
He kept walking.
“I swear I’ll kill you.”
A slow, self-satisfied smile slid across his face. You think you invited me here, whore, when it was I who found you, who hunted you, who will do the killing. He didn’t say a word, yet his voice reverberated through her brain.
“I’m not kidding,” she warned, brandishing her small blade, the jackknife she’d stolen from her father’s drawer.
Nor am I.
She lunged. Driving the knife downward, intending to slice into his abdomen.
Quick as a snake, he coiled strong fingers around her wrist.
“Ah!”
Stupid cunt.
