Accidental Acquisition by Evangeline Anderson
22
Oh my God, I’m going to die. This is how I die, Jillian thought numbly as the enormous greenish-gray Grizzly bear rushed towards her. It was snarling as it came, its long white teeth streaked black with Trollox blood, its eyes blood-red with fury. The sight woke an old memory in her mind—a trauma she had long sought to bury came rushing to the surface.
It’s going to kill me—it’s going to rip my head off! Or maybe my arms and legs. I’m going to end up like cousin Lucy—or I’ll be dead.
She wanted desperately to run but she was frozen to the spot—as was the three-headed Trollox behind her. Jillian thought faintly of how huge and menacing she’d thought the Trolloxes were when she’d first encountered one. Anyone would feel that way about a ten-foot tall being who looked like an ogre from a fairytale. But the beast Kalis had turned into made the Trollox still holding her looked small and weak by comparison.
But not as small and weak as me, she thought, feeling sick with fright as images from her childhood rushed at her like a speeding train. Images she’d tried desperately hard to bury. I’m definitely the easiest prey in this situation. That thing could eat me in two bites—one if it’s especially hungry.
Of course, it had spit out the Trollox head, but maybe that was because Trollox meat tasted nasty. She was probably much more to its liking—tender and juicy, considering her overly generous curves. The enormous Grizzly would eat her like a strip of bacon and lick its lips for more. It would rip off her face, like poor Lucy…
Just as she thought this, the bear-thing reached her. It reared up, opened its mouth, and let out the most ear-splitting, terrifying roar Jillian had ever heard. But the roar seemed to have words in it somehow.
Don’t touch…Mine! Jillian heard—or thought she heard. Maybe she was just going crazy with fear. In fact, at this point she sank to her knees as her legs gave way from extreme fright. Earlier, she’d fought to get away from Ripper, but there was no getting away from this Apex predator. No surviving its bite—she was sure.
Gonna die now, she thought. Gonna die. Oh God…
The three-headed Trollox behind her must have thought the same thing because it suddenly released her wrist and ran.
It was the Trollox’s grip that had been holding Jillian upright at all. As it finally let her go, she sank all the way to the dirty ground and rolled into a fetal ball, her arms clutched around herself and her knees drawn up to her chest.
It was too much—too much. Part of her was screaming that she had to get up and run! Run as fast as she could and get way from here! But how could she run from a predator like that? Just one of its strides equaled five or six of hers! She couldn’t go far enough or fast enough to get away if it was tracking her.
Jillian could just see herself getting on the tram and making it all the way to her shuttle, only to be pulled out of the cockpit by one swipe of the bear-thing’s enormous paw. It would be like the ending of a horror movie when you think the heroine is going to escape, only to see her killed by the monster at the last minute.
So she lay in the dirt shivering, waiting to hear it come back for her, waiting for her death…
Which was why it was such a surprise when, an unknowable length of time later, Kalis put a hand gently on her shoulder and murmured,
“Hey, little Mistress—you all right?”
Jillian nearly jumped out of her skin. She screamed…and then, though she wasn’t the fainting type, she fainted dead-away.
