Hunting Julian
Page 30
She touched him again and he reacted as if she had burned him. He recoiled, an agonized roar splitting her ears as it tore from the huddled black mass before her.
“Leave me alone!”
She fell back away from the booming power of his voice rattling the treasures around them in their casings. It must be the acoustics and the vastness of the room that made it amplify in such an ominous way!
She felt icy cold fingers of dread stroking at her throat.
There’s something familiar about that voice.
Her nightmare! He was the one who had been in her…
But no! Then that would mean it…all of this…either all of this was still the same dream or—
Or it was all real? If so, then he was the one who had touched her time and again in unwelcome ways. It didn’t seem possible, by why else would she know his voice if it hadn’t somehow been real? And it was this monstrous man who had somehow spirited her away from her home and had subjected her to all this awful terror and fear! Trapped her there like one of these shiny baubles to be gaped at and toyed with.
Bastard! she thought with unaccustomed vileness. Soulless bastard! Her family had been dying and he had violated them and her by stealing her away! Kidnapping her!
“Bastard!” she screeched, the thought of her abandoned and helpless family riling her up like a madwoman. “You bloody bastard of hell!”
She was no longer sympathetic to his pain as she flew into him, pummeling him with her relatively small fists. Somewhere in her enraged mind, a quiet voice told her she was probably doing him little or no harm. He was so much bigger than she and Kathryn could now feel the thick masses of muscles beneath her battering hands. But regardless of that, it made her feel better to fight back. Then she, who had never wished harm on the slightest of creatures, felt joy that he was in pain. Utter, mind-numbing joy.
She was completely unaware of the ripple of renewed strength that was shuddering through her victim. She was oblivious to the fact that his agonized moans were replaced with a soft sigh of something slightly but distantly akin to pleasure.
The next thing she was aware of was a bone-chilling, wickedly rolling laugh. Then he was surging up before her like a monolith of black rage.
She froze, her entire body locking. No breath. No blink. Not a glimmer of movement as her shocked eyes tried to absorb the impact of the face looming above hers.
He was hideous!
She had never seen such a grotesque compilation of features and was paralyzed with panic that she was seeing it now. The entire face was bloated over warped, distended bones. His forehead and jaw jutted out in a way that would give his profile a crescent-like shape. Cheekbones, fat with flesh, protruded starkly before falling into the contrasting concave cheeks themselves. His eyes were enormous, though sunken, the lids above and under colored in brown shadow in severe contrast to the pristine white of the rest of his complexion. The eyes themselves she had seen before. They were such a brackish, swamp-like black and green. The blackness in them twisted into horrifying shapes and mysteries her mind could not bear.
But the worst of it. The utmost horror of him was his mouth. The upper lip was abnormally larger than the lower one. And as he released a malevolent laugh, she saw the wicked gleam of two fangs.
Vicious, monstrous fangs.
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Copyright © 2010 by Jacquelyn Frank
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