Page 2 of The Alien Minotaur's Bride

I made myself tighten my grip on the torch and take another breath. The smell was still there. If anything it was thicker. The skin on my arms had gone to gooseflesh, but not from cold. My heart rate had dropped. I could feel it, beating slow and heavy in my chest, and that was wrong too, because I was standing in a dark corridor that smelled like another planet and my body's response was apparently to relax.

"Okay," I said quietly, to the empty corridor. "That's unexpected."

I moved forward. Not because I wanted to, but because I was the only person on this station, and if the environmental system had ruptured or a cargo seal had failed or some piece of equipment was leaking a smell that made the night-shift operator go funny in the head, it was my job to find it. That was what I was here for. Nine years of relay work had trained me to walk towards the thing that was wrong when every sensible person would walk the other way.

The corridor opened into the cargo bay anteroom, a wide low space with storage racks along both walls and the main bay doors at the far end. The overhead light was out. My torch cut a narrow beam through the dark, picking out crate edges, the dull gleam of plating, the bay door control panel blinking standby-amber on the far wall.

The smell was everywhere now, thick and warm, like standing in a field in August. My skin was tingling. The back of my neck prickled with something that sat right between awareness and comfort. I couldn't decide which it was, and that bothered me more than either would have on its own.

I swept the torch left. Storage racks. Empty. I swept right.

A shape.

Enormous. Standing against the far wall so still that I'd swept right past it without seeing it, the way your eyes skip over a thing your brain can't make sense of. My torch beam caught the edge of a curved horn first, dark and almost black, arching upward from a head that was too high. Way too high. The beam tracked down and found shoulders broad enough to fill the space between two storage racks, dark fur thick across them like a pelt, a barrel-deep chest of pale leathered skin. Hands hanging at his sides, each one big enough to make my stomach drop.

He was eight feet tall. Maybe more. I couldn't tell, because my brain had given up on measurements and was just repeating a single word on a loop, and the word was huge. The torchlight found his feet, and they were hooves, dark and heavy on the cargo bay floor.

He looked at me.

His eyes were huge, dark, almost all pupil, catching my torch beam the way an animal's catch headlights. And the expression in them, I had no framework for. He looked at me the way you'd look at something you'd spent a long time searching for. Recognition, and underneath it a certainty so total it made my skin prickle.

I should have screamed. I should have turned and run back through the hatch and sealed it and hit the emergency beacon and done any one of the fifteen things the station manual said to do when you encountered an unknown entity in a restricted area. (I’d always wondered why they’d included a chapter on this - now I knew.)

I didn't scream.

I stood there with my torch pointed at his chest, my mouth open and my heart still beating that strange slow rhythm, and the smell rolled over me in waves, that impossible earth-and-musk warmth, and my body said yes, here, stay.

He moved.

I saw it happen and couldn't react in time. Couldn't have reacted in time even without whatever was wrong with me, because he was fast. Faster than anything that size had a right to be. One stride closed half the distance between us, and I heard his hooves meet the plating, near-silent, barely a whisper of sound, and I thought, He was being quiet before. He was being quiet and I still couldn't hear him.

I stumbled back. My shoulders hit the storage rack behind me. The torch dropped from my hand and hit the floor, spinning, throwing wild arcs of light across the walls, and in those spinning flashes I saw him whole: the horns, the thick fur, the slow steady sweep of a tail behind him. And those eyes, fixed on me.

His hand came up.

It was so big. His fingers curled towards me carefully, and I noticed the care even through the panic, as if he were reaching for an eggshell. As if I were the most breakable thing he'd ever had to touch.

He said a word. So low I felt it in my sternum before my ears caught it, a rumble of sound in a language I didn't know. His voice went through me like a bass note through a thin wall. I felt it in my teeth.

His hand cupped the back of my head. His fingers spanned from my crown to the base of my neck, the skin of them rough and warm, and the smell of him this close was so thick I could taste it. Earth and heat and musk, and something underneath all of it that was just him, specific and unmistakable, and my eyes were closing, my body leaning into his palm like a bloody traitor, and I thought, Why am I not afraid? I should be afraid–

A sting. Small and precise, in the side of my neck. Cold bloomed under my skin and spread fast, down through my chest, into my arms, into my legs. My knees buckled. I would have gone straight down onto the metal floor, but his other hand caught me, scooped me really, the way you'd scoop up a child, my whole body gathered against the breadth of his chest. I could feel the fur against my cheek, rough and warm and dense.

He was careful, some fading part of my brain noticed. He caught me before I fell. He was ready for it.

The cold spread. My fingers went numb first, then my toes. My vision softened at the edges, the torchlight on the floor going blurry and gold. I tried to lift my hand, to push, to hit, to do anything, and managed only to press my palm flat against his chest. His heartbeat thudded under it, slower than mine. Steady.

His tail swept once. I saw it at the edge of my failing vision, a slow arc.

He's calm, I thought. He's completely calm.

The cold reached my head, and the thoughts started to go. Not all at once. They slipped sideways, one at a time, like cards sliding off a table.

Station. Emergency beacon. Run.

Gone.

Who. What. How.