Free Reluctant Mates - 21 Paranormal Romance Stories (Werewolf, Vampire, Minotaur and Monster collection) by Francis Ashe

and then I cursed my weakness, and then, just like he said, I fell into a sleep so relaxed and so deep that I wasn’t sure whether I’d fallen into slumber, or into death.
    Two
    I woke, shivering and wracked by hunger and thirst.
    Never once did I think that when the elder, arch-Druid rattled his hand in the ancient bowl, groping for tiny pieces of pottery to decide which of the Academy’s virgins would be tossed into this hellish cavern that when he said ‘sacrifice’ what he meant was ‘slave’.
    And slave I was. The beast, which I quaked to look upon, even as he threw a sack over my head and sinfully ravished my body with his rough hands, was said to leave my village at peace only for an exchange of flesh. Either he got one of us in sacrifice once every decade, or...well, the alternative was too horrible to imagine. Stories told of the first time he emerged from this ancient temple, built to house his awfulness, and slaughtered every one of the townspeople, save ten. He warned the survivors that they had one year for each person that he left alive to find a tribute that would please him. If they didn’t manage, he would return to wipe the rest of them out.
    So the story went, anyway. I wasn’t sure I ever really believed it until it was me in the pit. Until it was me in the labyrinthine temple stretching gods know how far underground.
    The building itself was a mystery, too. My village elders, who told the story of the monster and his demands for sacrifice, also told the virgin girls of the village – for we were the only ones the monster would accept, and were trained for this eventuality from the time we came to womanhood – that one of the gods built this place to hide his shame at fathering a beastly son on a human woman.
    As I said, growing up the stories just didn’t grip me. It all seemed so far-fetched and impossible. Monsters in labyrinths? Gods and twisted bastards? No, even for an imaginative girl like me, such beliefs were a bit much to ask.
    My fingers traced the lines between the massive blocks that made up the smooth, cold floor of my prison, and outside a grinding noise like metal on metal – the sound of a blacksmith honing an axe – echoed through the halls. It was followed by a snort. I pushed myself off the floor and stood, stretching my arms above my head until my shoulders, which had been bent in strange angles against the floor, creaked and popped. That’s when I realized that not only was the sackcloth off my face and I could see, my arms were no longer tied behind my back.
    A soft orange glow came from outside the door I remembered being slid shut, and when I put my face to it, I saw my captor’s massive, muscular back hunched over a forge turning a piece of metal. The tiny slats in the door only allowed me the vaguest view of him, but from this angle it seemed that my memory was wrong – he was just a man.
    That was a relief.
    I took a deep breath, considering my next move and sliding my hands down my sides to smooth out my dress.
    My dress? I didn’t have a dress.
    As I watched, trying to figure out what happened to my clothes and why I was in a dress I’d never seen before when he stood up and straightened his back. It took a moment before I noticed that the head sitting atop his flexing, tense muscles was no man, not at all. Those terrible stories the arch-druid told, the awful tales that my parents and everyone else in the village recounted, they were all true.
    Atop his sloping shoulders, a great black bull’s head rose like a fertility monolith.
    “She wakes,” he said in perfectly clear speech that resonated deep in my stomach. “It’s only been a half a day. Usually it takes...hrrrn...longer than that to recover from the fright.”
    I opened my mouth to respond, but I was so completely stupefied at what I saw and what I heard that no words came, only a squawking sound in the back of my throat. He turned halfway to me, and then seemed to change his mind and returned