Radley's Labyrinth for Horny Monsters by Annabelle Hawthorne (highly recommended books .txt) 📕

his knees and forming a large vortex. Beth’s body thinned out, the water sucking away her sandy exterior. She fell apart like a sandcastle blasted by ocean waves and vanished beneath the surface. The brackish water circled the fountain, and a muddy pair of hands kept grabbing at the rim, the homunculus trying to pull itself to safety.

“What are you doing?” Mike asked, his shoes and socks ripped free of his feet by the current. If Naia hadn’t been holding him, he would have been sucked under as well.

“Getting rid of the trash,” she said, her eyes flashing. A large, watery orb formed at the fountain’s edge, the spinning waters pulling the contents of the fountain into the air. Multiple hands formed and emerged from the sphere but then were sucked back inside. A large, distorted face formed inside of the water, opening its sandy maw to scream silently at them.

“Holy shit,” Mike muttered, watching the sphere float out over the backyard. A thin stream of water blasted itself into one of the nearby drains, and the high-pressure stream forced the remains of the homunculus into the small vent in the ground. The drain backed up, the sand trying once again to form into a human.

“Oh no, you don’t,” Naia told it, her face screwed up in concentration. Tendrils of water formed above them and blasted the drain with tremendous pressure, her fountain emptying itself at a rapid pace.

“That should buy us plenty of time,” Naia told him, her eyes on the drain. It was now bent in the middle, and not a single grain of sand could be seen nearby it. Zel reappeared, holding a large potted plant. Her muscles strained as she lowered it over the drain, plugging it from above.

“Is it gone?” Mike asked.

“Nope. It’s in the sewer system now and will probably clog up a waste treatment plant before coming back eventually.” Naia let out a sigh. “It was the only thing I could think of doing. I just hope it buys us some time.”

“Well, it was better than anything I had planned.” He kissed her lightly on the lips. “Thanks for saving me.”

She beamed. “Of course, lover. But the question you should be asking yourself right now is this: If someone made a homunculus that looks like Beth, what happened to Beth?”

The implication hit Mike in the chest like a truck, and he opened his mouth to reply but was interrupted by the sound of screeching tires and splintering wood.

The stolen car slid sideways on the street, and Beth let out another scream, clutching the door handle for dear life. So far, the ride to Mike’s house from Beth’s apartment had been an utter nightmare, with Lily dodging through traffic, at one point taking a side street to avoid a cop that Beth never saw, all the while filling Beth in on a tale that was too fantastical to make any sort of sense.

Apparently, monsters were real and lived among mankind. That much she got, and for whatever reason, Mike’s home was full of them. Beth had been inside the home dozens of times over the last year and had never once spotted any sign of life. Every neuron in her brain told her to run from Lily the first chance she got, to flee the city and seek refuge somewhere where Lily, Mike, or even the Historical Preservation Society could never find her.

However, she had just escaped a mirror world where she had fucked a demon, had watched her intern grow a tail to shatter a window, and was currently screaming at the top of her lungs while Lily forced the car to slide sideways through an intersection, traffic narrowly missing them on both sides. One of the side mirrors was gone when Lily straightened the vehicle, shards of metal and plastic dangling from the car door.

“How?” It was all Beth could say, her heart beating so fast that she had one hand firmly planted on her own sternum. She was riding a rollercoaster of adrenaline, and her brain was officially numb.

“I have supernatural reflexes,” Lily answered with a smirk, taking the car onto the sidewalk and through a park. It was early enough that they crossed the large field with no trouble, the tires screeching when they met back up with pavement on the other side. Beth could see the long trail of mud streaked on the road behind them.

They were in the old part of town, steadily climbing the hill to where the Radley house awaited them. She could see its familiar turrets, make out the large stone walls at the end of the street. The neighbors rarely asked questions about the house, and it suddenly occurred to Beth that it was strange that they had never once dropped by, even out of curiosity. She knew she would have.

“Almost there,” Lily told her, yanking the wheel and making the car drift. The stone lions on top of the entryway stared stoically at the sky, and Lily pushed the pedal to the metal, tires screeching as they jumped the curb and climbed the sidewalk.

“There’s a driveway!” Beth yelled, suddenly aware of the two figures standing in front of the house. A black woman in a white outfit and Sebastien, the society’s attorney. The black woman turned to look at them, mouth open in surprise, then she ran across the yard, something long and thick trailing behind her, to take refuge behind some bushes. Sebastien, however, tried to limp out of the way before Lily adjusted the car’s trajectory, slamming the car into him and sending him flying. Patches of dirt and grass flew into the air as the car spun out of control before slamming into the front porch. Beth’s face met the airbag that had deployed, and all she could see was a dark, narrow tunnel.

The whole world no longer seemed to make sense, not since last week when she had lost a day. She had heard of lucid dreaming