Page 12 of The Catacomb King
And, unbelievably, my captor slowed his footsteps.
My heart soared with hope. I grabbed at the arms that held me. This monster’s skin was smooth and supple, not furred or plated at all. If I could hurt him, if I could get him to drop me…. My hands scaled his muscles, probing for a place I could scratch or jab. But my breath caught. He was obviously far too strong for me to escape. His biceps were as hot and hard and rippling as those of any human male I’d ever met.
Then his grip tightened. He quickened his pace again. My heart dropped. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t take you back.”
“You have to —”
“I’m the Prince of the Underworld,” my captor snapped. “I don’t have to do shit.”
I caught my breath. Oh, no. A prince?
I tried again. “You’ve got the wrong person!”
He laughed.
“Take me back or I’ll scream!” Even as I said it, I cursed myself. Was that the best I could do? He probablylikedhearing his victims scream.
Sure enough: “Then scream,” he said, with satisfaction.
Well, he’d asked for it.
I screamed my throat raw. I felt him flinch. Ha! I screamed harder. For good measure I pounded relentlessly on his muscled back with my free hand. My hand and arm grew sore but I didn’t stop, even though he wasn’t slowing down. Actually, it felt good to punch the shit out of something. This was what I’d wanted to do to Calix. I paused long enough to take a deep breath — the Prince dared to relax, more fool him — and then I screamed louder than ever.
The Prince jumped. “Monarch’s balls! You don’t quit, do you?”
“Let me go!”
“No. And I’d reconsider that screaming if I were you. Anyone you attract down here is going to be worse than me.”
That shut me up.
“Aha,” he said, with satisfaction. “Youdoquit.”
It occurred to me that my mouth was right next to his neck. I bet I could rip his jugular out if I tried hard enough.
I sank my teeth in. Fuck, his neck was corded under my tongue. The Prince jerked away and cursed. He almost dropped me — success! — but then he hurled me over his shoulder, where I couldn’t bite anything except the small of his back. I tried and failed. “Stop that!” he snapped. “You can’t escape anyway. Thereare millions of tunnels. Even if I dropped you, you’d never find your way up.”
“I know which wayupis,” I snarled.
“Oh, yeah? Can you climb a vertical slope a hundred feet or more?”
Gods almighty. As if it weren’t bad enough that I’d been kidnapped by an underworld monster; he also had to be a prince and a jackass. This time, instead of biting him, I scratched. He hissed. I snapped at him, “You might have abducted me but that doesn’t mean I have to listen to your shit.”
“Monarch’s balls,” he said again.
We were surging through tunnels I couldn’t see. I squinted over my shoulder through the blackness, trying to get a look at his hideous form, but even with my vision starting to adjust, I could hardly see a damn thing.
And then… I could.
Slowly, I realized that the walls were shining. The walls themselves were rough and black like onyx, infinitely faceted like cut jewels, but deep in the crevices between those facets, something glittered with an otherworldly, blue-white light.
“Bioluminescent fungi,” the Prince said. “Shiny mushrooms.”
I realized that I was staring at the walls, open-mouthed. I clamped my mouth shut and then opened it again immediately to say, “I know whatbioluminescenceandfungiare. I’m not stupid.”
“Sure. Just annoying.”
I craned my neck, trying to get a look at him, but I could see no part of his face except the square cut of his jaw.Just you wait, I told myself grimly. He probably had eight eyeballs.
