Chapter 9 Maeve
MAEVE
I stared at the clock on the wall of the tunnel and felt my stomach sink: three hours. I felt like I’d been underground for ages and it had only been three hours.
I reached into my pocket for one of the granola bars I’d brought.
I wasn’t super hungry yet, but at least it was a distraction.
I’d been prepared for the Barbarian to confiscate the three granola bars and two packets of powdered electrolytes I’d brought to the Hunt, but he’d surprised me by chuckling and shaking his big meaty head.
“You’re a piece of work,” he’d said.
He’d been referring to Rose, the Sig P365XL that I’d tried to smuggle into the first Hunt.
That had been a different kind of preparation, back before I’d known weapons weren’t allowed.
Now I knew better, knew what to expect, and I’d known if I lasted long enough in the tunnels, I’d get hungry and thirsty.
I’d also have to pee, but there was nothing I could do about that problem.
I walked more slowly while I ate my granola bar, feeling like I was the only person in the world now that I was on the other side of Main on the north side of town.
I’d finished my granola bar and was stuffing the wrapper in my pocket when I spotted four packs of bottled water stacked up against the tunnel wall.
I tore into the pack on top and uncapped one of the bottles, then dumped one of my electrolyte packets into it before guzzling half of it in one shot.
Then I took another bottle and stuffed it in the pocket of my jacket for later.
I’d dump it if I had to run, but I didn’t know how long it would take to come across more water, so it made sense to grab it while I could.
I kept going and passed a stack of old pallets covered with cobwebs and a couple wooden barrels.
It was weird to imagine the business owners of Blackwell Falls using the tunnels a hundred years earlier, weird to imagine them opening the occasional locked doors I passed as I made my way deeper into the maze.
I’d thought about using the doors during my research of the tunnels. I’d even snuck down into the basements of a couple of local businesses until I’d found one of the doors that probably led to the underground system.
Gaining access to one of the doors — assuming I could find it once I was underground — would have given me a way out of the tunnels. I could have dipped from the Hunt, ridden out the clock in the basement of the used bookstore or the flower shop that had been a jazz club in the 1920s.
But the thought had made me feel strangely guilty. I wasn’t a cheater. If I was going to agree to the game and all its rules, it was only fair that I play by them like everybody else.
What I wanted wasn’t a small thing. If I won, I’d be asking someone to commit a crime on my behalf.
Asking them to take a life.
Maybe it was my dad in my ear — he’d been quoting Mark Twain (“It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them”) since I was little — but it felt cowardly not to compete fairly for the win.
I was lost in my thoughts, thinking about my dad and wondering what he’d think about what I was doing, when voices stopped me in my tracks.
A few seconds later they sounded again and my heartbeat kicked up a notch as I realized they were coming not from behind me, but from somewhere up ahead.
I’d suspected there were switchbacks and shortcuts in the tunnels, but it had been impossible to confirm.
The tunnels themselves had never been drawn or planned by the town: they’d been created by the townspeople to funnel alcohol to local businesses during Prohibition, when alcohol had been illegal.
Now my suspicions were validated. No one had passed me during my initial sprint into the tunnels, which meant someone had taken another route to cross under Main, placing them somewhere in front of me instead of behind me, where I’d assumed the teams of men still were.
Shit.
I told myself my pulse was racing because of the potential threat, but deep down I knew there was another reason: seeing the Butchers again — up close and personal, alone in the tunnels — did all kinds of unfortunate things to my mind and body.
I stopped cold and looked frantically for a place to hide when the voices got louder, but this stretch of the tunnel was barren, nothing but the dirt floor and dank stone walls.
I was contemplating going back the way I’d come, taking my chances on running into one of the other teams, when I heard the voice of a woman from beyond the intersection up ahead.
In the last Hunt I’d come across one of the girls chained naked to the wall. I’d tried to get her out of the heavy cuffs around her wrists, but it had been impossible without a key, and eventually I’d been chased off by the team wearing hockey masks.
That girl had been screaming for help. This one was talking in what sounded like a normal voice.
I bit my lip. Back the way I came where I might run into one of the teams of masked men in the Hunt? Or forward toward the girl’s voice, even though I could have sworn I’d heard male voices too?
I hesitated, then started forward.
The girls and I were on the same side. If one of them was up ahead, she was either alone or already claimed, in which case I was safer.
Safer than taking my chances going back the way I’d come.
I approached the intersection, looked both ways — and spotted the source of the voices.
One of the girls — a girl with blue hair and a nose ring — was ass naked and chained to the tunnel wall, blood smeared across her forehead and cheeks.
But unlike the girl I’d come across in the first Hunt, this girl wasn’t alone.
The team in bird masks surrounded her, one of them standing next to her and sucking on her neck, another on the other side of her, sucking on her tit. The third bird man knelt at her feet, his face buried between her thighs, eating her pussy with a vengeance.
And the girl might have been chained to the wall, but she wasn’t complaining.
Her head was tipped back against the stone wall of the tunnel, her breath coming in shallow gasps as the guy between her thighs shoved his fingers inside her while he ate her out.
The bird men were shirtless, and there was something wicked and primal about the sight of them in their masks, licking and sucking at the flesh of the naked girl in chains.
The red light cast an eerie glow over their bodies and the whole scene felt otherworldly, like I’d landed in some kind of fucked-up storybook porno.
The bird man sucking the girl’s tit lifted his head to look at me. “Oh look, it’s the Butchers’ girl.”
The other one removed his mouth from the girl’s neck. His dark eyes glittered from behind the bird mask. “Want to play, Butchers’ girl?”
“Fuck that,” the first one said, fondling the girl’s tit while he stared at me from across the tunnel. “I’d like to keep my balls, thank you very much.”
The blue-haired girl barely seemed to register my presence, her eyes feverish as the third bird man continued lapping at her pussy like a thirsty animal.
“Run along then, Butchers’ girl,” the first one said. “Unless you want us to call for them.”
This time I didn’t hesitate. The blue-haired girl clearly wasn’t in any kind of distress, unless you counted an impending orgasm as distress, and although I had no way of knowing how close the Butchers were, I wasn’t going to risk having the bird men call out for them.
I headed the other way, the sound of the girl’s moans growing more distant behind me.
I tried to focus on putting as much distance between myself and the bird men as I could, but the truth was, I was kind of hot and bothered.
It wasn’t that I wanted the bird men to chain me to the wall and have their way with me: it was that I instantly imagined myself in the same position with the Butchers.
It was all too easy to imagine myself stripped and chained to the wall, Bram eating my pussy while Poe and Remy claimed the rest of my body with their fingers, their mouths, their tongues.
I hated the fact that wet heat rushed to my cunt at the thought.
I should not still want them — especially Bram — and I definitely shouldn’t want them to strip me and chain me to a wall where anyone walking past could see them taking possession of my body.
I forced myself to rally some resolve. My arousal at the thought of the Butchers fucking me was all the proof I needed that this time, I had to win the Hunt.
Because I wasn’t sure I’d survive another three months with them, not without handing them my body — and my heart — on a silver platter to do with as they pleased.
And that just wasn’t an option.