Minotaur Read online

  Riptide Publishing

  PO Box 6652

  Hillsborough, NJ 08844

  www.riptidepublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All person(s) depicted on the cover are model(s) used for illustrative purposes only.

  Minotaur

  Copyright © 2015 by J.A. Rock

  Cover art: Imaliea, imaliea.deviantart.com/gallery

  Editor: Delphine Dryden, delphinedryden.com/editing

  Layout: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design.htm

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Riptide Publishing at the mailing address above, at Riptidepublishing.com, or at [email protected].

  ISBN: 978-1-62649-312-4

  First edition

  October, 2015

  Also available in paperback:

  ISBN: 978-1-62649-313-1

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  Know this: I am not a warrior. I am a disease.

  When I was six, my parents died.

  When I was sixteen, I was locked away in Rock Point Girls’ Home. Nobody wants to deal with a liar. An addict. A thief.

  Nobody except Alle. She is pure, and she’s my friend in spite of all the rotten things I am.

  There was once another girl like me—long ago. A cast-off daughter. A lying little beast who left a red stain across the land with her terrible magic. She’s imprisoned now in a maze high up on the cliffs. They say she’s half woman, half bull. They say she dines on human tributes and guards a vast treasure. They say she was born wicked.

  But I know her better than the history books or stories do. She and I dream together. Our destinies are twisted up like vines.

  Except I’m not going to turn out wicked like she is. I can save myself by destroying her. I’m going to break out of this place, and I’m going to enter the labyrinth and take her heart.

  And once I’m redeemed, maybe Alle will love me.

  For my sister.

  About Minotaur

  Prologue

  Book One: Rock Point

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Book Two: The Labyrinth

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Book Three: Twenty Years

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Dear Reader

  Acknowledgments

  Also by J.A. Rock

  About the Author

  More like this

  Know this: I am not a warrior.

  I am a disease.

  If I go down in history a hero, it will be someone scraping half-truths off the floor and the undersides of desks, sculpting something ugly and defiantly off-center. It will be a careful rearrangement of facts, and it will involve so many lies of omission that the truth will end up amputated from me like a limb. I’ll stagger around, a lopsided idea of who I was, everyone too polite to discuss what I’m missing.

  I don’t trust heroes; I don’t think I should. At Rock Point, many of the girls liked stories that ended happily, or at least offered a sense of closure. But I liked tales with abstruse people screwing and killing their way toward ambiguous outcomes. I liked shadows. And I liked gore.

  And secretly, I liked redemption. I liked monsters who regretted and heroes who mustered a revolted sort of compassion for their enemies. Even better were the heroes who saw villains as a mirror—not one that reflected the world precisely as it was, but one that showed the hero what she might become. Like when you and someone else are staring through the same window, and you shift to make your reflection line up with hers. You become an awkward mutt—eyes in the wrong places, too many mouths, but you can almost fit yourself to her outline.

  We are all a step away from goodness cracking under our feet and collapsing us into villainy. There are few unbreakable things in the world, and I have cataloged people’s stress points with the same earnest vigor with which little Rina once cataloged Rock Point’s fauna. Loss, violence, bullying, starvation, boredom, the promise of beauty or fame or sex—chances are there is something somewhere you’d turn wicked for. Innocence starts to look haggard with age, same as skin. I once knew a man who murdered his wife because he couldn’t stand that one of her eyebrows was higher than the other. Some people will turn wicked for nothing.

  Me, I was born ready to break. I had so many soft places. My tantrums, my rotten words, the joy my fists took in meeting flesh—those were to distract others from seeing all the spots the spear could go.

  Until one woman stripped me truly bare, and together we built an armor that rendered me both powerful and humble. It looked so right on me that seeing myself in it for the first time was, I imagine, much like those women who search for the perfect wedding dress and finally find it—they look in the mirror and see that their breasts are high, their stomach cinched, their hips arched like the sides of tombstones.

  My sister felt that way about the dress she got married in. In fact, I thought at first the best place to start this story would be at her wedding, at the ceremony I ruined. But I have since discarded that possibility. I then thought of beginning the moment I entered the labyrinth. But there are things you need to understand first. I don’t care so much whether the story is appealing, whether my actions make sense to you—my reasons why are thin and pale and will flee at the sound of footsteps. But I want you to meet the beast I went up against, in a place that, long ago, people called both palace and dungeon, fortress and ruin. Because I so prefer antagonists to heroes, and because the story you will hear from others likely casts me as the latter, I want to do something kind but ultimately self-serving. I want to make you see her.

  You may not believe me when I say I owe her a debt. You’ll claim I was deluded by a powerful witch whose spells were haphazard and crude. And you’re half right. Her magic was often as ugly as its consequences. When she attempted to control the weather, for example, she grew to an ashy and shapeless enormity, swollen with her o
wn storm. The rain she conjured came in burbling sheets, as if the clouds had been sword-swiped across their bellies and were bleeding out. Her thunder was clumsy and overdone, knocking you down and then kicking like a bully.

  But sometimes, she was precise. And when she thought—truly thought—about what she wanted and how to get it, her magic retreated and her power became real. She seduced me, but she did not delude me. She manipulated, but I could have followed the thread back to the truth anytime. I wanted to be under her spell. And for making room for me under that vast overhang of power and agony, secret torment and bold skill, love and whatever preys on love—reason, perhaps—for that, I am grateful to her.

  But I am already making a hash of this. I should have started with the wedding. Instead I’ll start with the day I arrived at Rock Point Girls’ Home. You will think I have gone back on my word, that I am telling you all about me and nothing of her. But to understand her, you must look at my incomplete idea of myself. Because I have very much fitted my reflection to her outline.

  Enough.

  I do, indeed, have too many mouths.

  ROCK POINT GIRLS’ HOME

  Logbook

  New Intake Form

  Name: Thera Ballard

  FID #: 11305094

  Age: 16

  Height: 5’8”

  Weight: 145

  Hair: Dark

  Eyes: Brown

  Distinguishing features: 1-inch scar behind right shoulder blade.

  Intake Processed By: Darla Ling

  T was admitted last night around 11 p.m. She was uncooperative and could not be trusted to shower on her own, so she was cold hosed and then strapped down for a medical check. She kept yelling things like “I’m a queen where I come from,” and just generally deriding the staff’s appearance but also not making a lot of sense, so I do think this kid was snowed. As we are not permitted to discipline new intakes (ahem, Rollins—ha-ha!), the whole process was quite frustrating. A good slap would have settled her right down. I told her Rock Point provides tributes to the Beasty. That got her quiet. We finished examining her, gave her the grays, and put her in a solitary room for the night. I heard her stomping around in there till morning.

  Morning Report: Bessie Holmes

  T didn’t have woke up when i entered her room. Lissen, if you give a kid a tranqilizer, you have to document it. No mention of T been doped & yet it was clear she was. i’ll also say, whatever she was gave, it worked, because she didn’t fight like she supposably did last night. She was very compliant & leaned against me while i led her from the room. She got more lively when we reached the bathroom & she didn’t want me to stay in there with her. i explained it was necessary for me to make sure she has regular bowel movements. She screamed that i was a bowel movement. Urinated but did not defacate. I was took her to the breakfast hall.

  Breakfast Monitor’s Report: Darla Ling

  I was alerted to a disturbance in the breakfast hall around 7:15 at the older kids’ table. I went to investigate. P Farmer had a bloody nose. T Ballard, the new intake, was sitting beside her. T asked me if she could leave the grounds this afternoon, “just for a little bit,” to meet a friend. I ignored her, and that was when she spit at me. I was furious and may have socked her; I don’t remember. This possible socking may account for the bruise I’m told she has now under her eye. Anyway, security staff took her out of the hall. She ate nothing but her eggs.

  Security Staff Report: Officer Molly Grenwat

  Rose Van Narr and me shut the new girl up in her room because CLEARLY she is not fit yet for decent company. Now I’m sure Dr. DuMorg will talk to her and go on about her FEELINGS and other New Theory puppyshit. But if you ask me, this is simply a waste of time because this kid needs a tanning to kingdom come. You should hear what she said about Van Narr’s upper LIP HAIR, and now Van Narr is hurt, and I hate working with Van Narr when she’s in a pissy mood because she takes it out on me. One more thing: I’ve been saying for a long time we shouldn’t take JUNKIES. I’m telling you, this facility is not equipped for that. Of course we have Riley Denson, and now Riley’s taken a special interest in this hophead.

  Rollins’s Note: Please remember this log is not a place for your personal opinions. Stick to factual information about the new intake, please. Rock Point has dealt with many problem children in the past, and we will deal with T Ballard with patience and compassion. End of discussion.

  Darla Ling’s Note: Ha-ha, actually, it’s good if Riley’s interested, because she’s got a way with the girls. P.S. Learn to spell, Holmes. It’s “defecate.”

  Officer Grenwat’s Note: Also, it’s “supposedly.”

  Think of that place: not a prison, yet still a trap, with its narrow halls and its water-stained plaster ceilings. The rooms were small. You were a ballerina in a music box, waiting for a lid to open, waiting for the chance to do one fixed performance and be shut away again. You could be drugged to the gills—past the gills; drugs were leaking out your fucking gills—when you arrived, and still realize that this place housed a trophy room of sorrows. That girls suffered here, not in the routinely beaten, chimney-sweeping way I’d always imagined orphans suffered, but deeply. Rivulets of grief sliding down their bones, blushes of it in their cheeks. They suffered because they were lonely in a way people seldom talk about, a way that affects grace and movement and dreams and memory.

  If you have seen a dog in a cage—and you know that dogs are all love, that they were born to scavenge and to love and to quarrel over bones and to keep loving even in sleep and in sickness—then you have seen this loneliness. It is frightening because it is not hopeless. Just as a caged dog will wake at every sound, wag its tail, and wait—the girls at Rock Point Girls’ Home hoped. They tempered that hope with jokes and anger and their fists, and while I was treated like an especially wretched specimen, in a sense I fit right in.

  I met Riley Denson my first morning at Rock Point. She entered the solitary room with caution, though she didn’t seem afraid of me. I wanted to make her afraid. I was lolling, my mind cotton, my eyes burning, and my mouth dry. I wanted something to swallow. Something to inject or lick or chew or anything. Anything that would make me feel different.

  I sat on the bed, staring out the small window, and watched her approach out of the corner of my eye.

  “Hi, Thera.” Her voice was sweet. I remember even now, she always sounded like she was inviting you on a fucking picnic.

  I wanted something that would thump my heart like a fist, something that would leave ruts in my brain. I glanced at her and tried to imagine she was lickable, drinkable. Her skin was pale—a rarity in the town of Rock Hill and its outlying lands. Mine was brown with washed-out spots, like a fucked-up watercolor. She wore glasses and had hair colored like the crud you’d scrape off the bottom of a pan after dinner. Her eyes were too small, her glasses too thick, her hair pushed flat on the sides so it looked like the cap of a mushroom. I was thrilled by her plainness. Pretty girls never did much for me. Goddamn, but I’d rather look like a killer than a princess.

  The only lovely thing about her was that, from the side, her features slid neatly into one another. Her profile looked drawn by a skilled master, while mine, I knew, looked scrawled by a child—bulgy forehead, upturned nose, wide lips with clumsy edges, chin round and sagging slightly.

  “Riley Denson. Afternoon staff. I brought lunch.” She set the plastic container on a small night table that was bolted to the floor. All the furniture was bolted—the cot and the narrow dresser. I supposed if it hadn’t been, I’d have loaded it all into my damn hot air balloon and sailed off toward whatever clouds the sky was farting out that morning.

  My arms itched. I sat on my hands and waited. She’d introduced herself by her full name, not “Miss Denson.” Maybe that was why I didn’t mind her so much. I’d arrived here blown out of my fucking mind by various shit I’d found in Auntie Bletch’s bathroom cabinet, but the hosing last night had sobered me, as had my terror at the way people here wer
e so quick to grab at my body, pull me where they wanted me to go. I needed to believe in Denson’s calm.

  I went back to looking out the window. After a moment, she crouched near me. She wore a dress, but she crouched anyway. She had long stockings on, so I didn’t get a glimpse of leg or anything. She gazed at me. “That’s quite a shiner you’ve got.”

  She was ready in case I lashed out; I could see it in her shoulders and in her gaze. My cot was low enough that even crouching, she was almost at eye level. I tried to hurl all my hate into her eyes—stuff it down those black centers. Behind those unfashionable slabs of glass, her pupils contracted slightly, fans of gold and green around them.

  There was something odd in her expression, the look you might get if you’d spent a particularly pleasant day at the seaside and were now driving away, toward nightfall and work the next day, peering back at the vanishing ocean and the setting sun. I stared at her hand. Small and pale with cracked nails. “I gotta leave here,” I told her conspiratorially, as though she might be grateful to know this secret of mine. I didn’t really know where I’d go, but I figured anywhere but here would do.

  She stood slowly. “Rec’s in half an hour. Soccer today. Think you can play nice with the other girls?”

  “I can go outside?” I was genuinely surprised. Despite Auntie Bletch’s assurance that this was a place where I’d be “cared for,” I’d been convinced it was one of those asylums I’d heard tales about—ghost children leaving bloody footprints in the bathroom; lobotomized women lurching through corridors, oblivious to the screams echoing behind steel doors. Rock Point didn’t have steel doors, from what I’d seen. It wasn’t a homey place, but it wasn’t a white-walled institution either. It was more like a very large house with long halls and high ceilings and dirty corners. But I hadn’t forgotten the wretched feeling I’d had last night as I was dragged through those halls and up the wooden staircases. The wide eyes watching me as I’d screamed and struggled. Those suffering girls with their waiting hearts.