Volume 3 Chapter 50 : Minotaur s*x II

The heart of the dungeon.... The heart of the maze... The heart... of the Minotaur...

Izzy wakes in a bed far too large for her; her ears are filled with a deep sound or maybe a feeling—she isn't sure.

THump THump THump THump.

Izzy kicks at the blankets, trying to find an edge of them, but they are seemingly endless, a sea of blankets. She turns and crawls toward the side of the bed, the pleather costume sticking to her unpleasantly. She considers taking it off, but until her vision clears as she wakes up, it seems unwise to get naked. She looks up, rubbing her eyes, and finds herself face-to-face with the gruel-eating child, now 5 feet tall and looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger on a very bad day where he is seasick. Oh, and a lizard person.

Izzy stops and looks around the rest of the dimly lit room. The walls are concrete and heavy in both the physical and the mental sense.

As Izzy looks back at the lizard person, he stops looking at her and drops and does pushups. Izzy thinks this can't be the first round of push-ups the child has done today, as there are salt stains on his light green skin. like war paint running down his sides. He does 30 pushups, then turns and glares at Izzy like he is an English bulldog.

Izzy raises an eyebrow. "Hey, I have been looking for you; we should go. Your family misses you," she says, leaning forward and whispering as quietly as possible while still communicating with her exaggerated facial expressions to the less than a month old lizard person.

The lizard person looks at Izzy with a blank expression.

Izzy looks at her wrist and sees the red marks where the cheap nylon rope had caused abrasions. She follows the memory to hanging from the stripper pole while upside down. She remembers feeling lightheaded, then feeling sweaty, then nothing.

"I passed out," Izzy whispers. "Minotaur"

There is a snort from beside her, and she turns and sees the Minotaur sleeping on his back, his heart beating with a deep, resonant

THump THump THump

Izzy, on hands and knees, stays motionless, waiting to see if the Minotaur is going to wake up. She feels conflicted. She has always said she isn't going to be the person who says, "Hey, what's that noise?" and investigates. And in this case here, she is watching the Minotaur sleep instead of running.

After far too long for survival's sake, she moves one hand and waits to see if he wakes up, then shifts a foot forward slowly. Step by agonizing step, she creeps to the edge of the bed. Then the moment of truth: she puts one foot onto the ground, and the child lizard person rushes over and glares at her, flexing his muscles.

"You're a little strange, aren't you, kid?" Izzy says, confused. She slips her second foot onto the ground, and the bed lifts up behind her, free from the burden of her weight.

The apprentice lifts a hairless eyebrow, then the other, and dances them up and down in rhythm, but when Izzy does nothing in return, he shrugs and walks over to a crate of Vienna sausages and pops the ring pull; he empties the container into his hand, then carelessly tosses the can into the garbage that is overflowing with empty containers. He greedily eats the pink logs that resemble his species' child food grupples. There is a faint sadness in the lizard child's face as the sausage lies there unmoving in his hand and in his stomach as he eats.

Izzy takes another step on the concrete floor and trips over a stack of magazines about bodybuilding. She flails and falls and screams "FUCK" as she hits the concrete floor.

The Minotaur lurches awake, sits up, and steams from his nose. He scans the room left, right, and left before he bends down and glares at Izzy, his form towering over her. It watches her expectantly, its eyes examining her body for weapons and only finding appealing curves.

After 20 seconds of this, Izzy works up the nerve to say, "Let me go and let the boy go with me." She says her fear awakens her overly full bladder; she struggles to hold it but fails. She clenches her muscles tightly, determined not to pee more.

The Minotaur snorts and looks at her from just over his nose. He flexes his muscles. The message is clear: "You and what army?"

"Jack Harrington sent me to get the boy and go. I will be doing that now," Izzy says as she reaches out and grabs the boy's wrist and tries to walk toward an archway, hoping that it's the way out and that there is a convenient bathroom on the way. She stops dead in her tracks when the boy doesn't move an inch. She pulls harder, and nothing happens.

The boy, the kid, the unmoving rock of muscle, blinks at Izzy.

"What are you doing, kid? We got to go," Izzy says, grabbing his hand harder and pulling with everything she has. "Let's go," she says, hissing through her teeth. "Your people are going to wipe out humanity if you don't go with me," she says through gritted teeth, falling over from trying to pull even harder. She swears under her breath as the force of hitting the ground makes her pee more.

The Minotaur steps out of the bed and grabs Izzy under the armpit, picking her up and carrying her with one hand to a gigantic chessboard, the grid laid out in spray paint. He plops her down on the other side of the board and assumes the thinker pose.

He makes a sweeping gesture for Izzy to take her turn.

"What? I don't want to play chess," Izzy says, walking toward the lizard person. The Minotaur takes two steps and picks her up and sets her on her side of the board. He blows out steam, and the steam lingers near the floor like fog.

Izzy resists the urge to dance from holding her painful bladder.

The Minotaur waits 14 seconds and grabs a black pawn and moves it forward.

G6

The heavy piece hitting the ground is like thunder to Izzy's ears in the near silence of the room. The pawn is belly button height on her; no wonder the Minotaur can pick her up and move her like she weighs nothing.

Izzy tries to remember the rules to chess; she's not good at it. Jacob is the one who was somewhat decent at it, enough so that she had refused to play with him because she always accused him of cheating.

The Minotaur stretches his chest wide. He looks down at Izzy, his brown eyes looking cool and calm and demeaning, like it's an impossibility for her to win.

Izzy stares at the giant chessboard for a moment; her imagination changes the pieces into living people to be moved across the board and die for the masterminds. Her pleather outfit is chilly on her skin so far down in the maze. She swears softly under her breath as she shivers.

She walks up to a random pawn and grabs it. She lifts with all her strength; the weighted giant chess piece doesn't even rock under her insistence. The chess piece is cold against her stomach; it feels like it's made out of concrete, but she has no idea.

The Minotaur barks out a laugh and snaps his fingers. The apprentice appears from nowhere and moves with speed to the pawn; he grabs Izzy's hands and removes her from the pawn. He grabs it and lifts it, waddling it toward the center, one space.

G3

Izzy blinks. "No, I can move that one more space outward," Izzy demands, waving and gesturing until the lizard person does as she asks.

Correction G4

The Minotaur's nostrils flare in humor. He immediately grabs another pawn and moves it forward one space. He moves his piece forward and to the right, setting it down with finality.

E6

Izzy is trying to think 5 moves ahead, but she can't with her bladder aching like it is. 'Where the hell is the bathroom, and how do I ask the scary monster where it is?' she thinks, not realizing 3 minutes have passed. Her bathroom concentration is broken when the Minotaur stomps a hoof on the ground to hurry her up.

Izzy gestures and calls for the apprentice. "Hey, move that other pawn forward 1 spaces," she demands. then adds a "please"

The apprentice looks at the Minotaur, and the Minotaur waves the lizard person on. The lizard person moves the piece and looks at Izzy expectantly.

"Uh, thank you?" Izzy says, waiting for the Minotaur to make his next move.

F3

The Minotaur laughs a deep, hearty laugh, hands on hips and head facing upward. He laughs so hard he bellows.

The apprentice imitates him, and Izzy smirks too. "So did I get checkmate and not know it or what?"

The Minotaur grabs his queen and moves it diagonally to the edge of the board. He stands up straight and runs a finger across his neck.

Qh4

Izzy watches confused. "What?" She examines the board carefully and sees she is the one in checkmate.

The Minotaur reaches across and knocks her king over. Izzy ducks out of the way as the piece rolls across the ground. That's when she notices the king has Jack Harrington's face.

Izzy wraps her arms around herself and hugs tightly. She looks over at the Minotaur. "Now can I use your bathroom?" she asks desperately.