“Fine, fine. Let’s get this over with. I have a bad feeling.” Willow and Lily cut her a hard look.

“You do?” said Willow.

“Since when?” asked Lily.

Chloe sighed and wished like hell that she hadn’t opened her mouth. Her sisters never took “senses” lightly.

“It’s nothing, just a belly ache.” The both looked at her as if they didn’t believe her.

“Listen, I’m just nervous, okay? How would you feel if you knew you were to be given to a cold-hearted killer vampire man? It’s like some horrible nightmare where I’m living in the 1400s and have no worth other than my ability to bare children.” She shivered hard while her sisters smirked at each other.

“We do know what it feels like. That’s why we’re here. Listen, let’s do this but if it’s more than nerves then you need to tell us,” Lily said.

Chloe did feel like there was more to it than what she’d said, but she wasn’t going to say so. She didn’t like lying to her sisters but honestly, there was nothing any of them could do about it. And maybe she just had food poisoning or something.

One errant thought kept floating around in her mind. If this spell didn’t work, then they were all royally screwed. They couldn’t fail. This had to be perfect. This spell had to work.

“Go ahead and start, Chloe. Remember when she’s done you go, Willow.”

The wind seemed to calm around them as Chloe lifted the small square piece of paper with the spell written on it. The candles stopped dancing in the night and stood straighter, brighter as if asking her to read aloud the passage.

“Wait, before I start, what does it mean?”

Lily looked up from her own paper. “It means ‘Let no man take me. Let no man keep me.

Let me choose the man who will take me or else he will never keep me.’ Something like that though trying to translate all that into a dead language was difficult. I think I managed it pretty well.”

Chloe let out a deep, unsteady breath. Well, here goes nothing. Her sisters started to hum and the candles lit up even more brightly. Chloe squeezed her arm tighter around her stomach and read the strange words aloud.

“Eengurra Kading gir Gibil Zi Ding’er Kia Kanpa! Eengurra Feerana jobe! Eengurra Ha’zin tia heteo!” Her words were barely above a whisper.

Chloe winced, closing her eyes as she waited for something to happen. Slowly she

popped open one eye then the other. When all she heard was the sound of her sister’s humming, she relaxed.

Willow spoke next. Her words were different in a few areas. Her voice sounded even

huskier than usual as she read the old, strange language. When she finished, Chloe heard a scraping noise, like a person scratching their nails on a slab of wood. Spinning her head around, she squinted into the night, still humming, yet trying to hear. The sound disappeared.

Lily started on her part. Her words were soft and light as always. She somehow managed to make the old words sound beautiful like a song.

As the last word floated gracefully into the night air, Lily nodded at them. They stood and grabbed the remainder of their belongings, leaving the candles lit and the sage burning in an incense bowl. It looked like offerings left to the dead.

They were silent as they headed away as if speaking a single word would ruin the effect of the spell or bring something horrible about. Or at least that’s what Chloe’s gut was telling her.

The pain in her stomach suddenly spiked. The ground started shaking under her feet as if a stampede of cows was coming. Chloe squealed and went tumbling down to the ground with her sisters.

“What the hell was that?” Willow said, eyes wide.

Chloe had no time to answer because a horrible, ear-piercing rumble escaped from the ground. That horrible feeling that had been sitting in her gut just got a whole lot worse. Chloe reached for her sisters’ hands, holding tightly as she stared at their candle-lit blanket.

The earth shook like a giant was moving a mountain, making her vision blur and her legs give out on her. She fell back on her butt but stared harder at the blanket.

Something was there.

She faintly heard Lily screaming and yet Chloe could still barely hear her over the tremendous roar coming from the ground. Someone tugged at her hands, but she fought them.

She had to see. Then two hands were pulling at her, trying to pull her backwards, away from where she needed to see. No! She fought them with a desperation that surprised her. This was what her gut had been warning her about.

This.

The earth gave one last, hard shudder. Her sisters, who had tried to pull her with them, collapsed in a hard heap on either side of her. Chloe didn’t cast them a glance, she stared at the blanket that now was dipping down as if it was spread over a crater and not a flat spread of grass.

“What in the...”

A deep, inhuman growl came out from beneath the blanket. The sound spread goose

bumps across her arms and shot fear down her spine.

Run, her mind screamed at her. Run! I can’t. Not yet.

She had to see. She had to know.

A thick, gray arm reached out from under the blanket, knocking the candles and sage over. It gripped the blanket with a hand the size of a giants, then disappeared with it back down into the earth.

Wide-eyed and shaking, Chloe came to a stand. She tried to process what she was seeing but it was...impossible. There was no other explanation for it. An enormous hole was where their blanket had been, and whatever was roaring with such bone chilling screams, came from there. A pit. It had made a pit. Or had it come from a pit?

She stood on her toes and tried to look in closer. All she saw was pitch black nothingness.

A massive void.

“What was that?” Lily said in a panicked voice. She bounced from foot to foot looking eager to get the hell out of Hades.

Chloe opened her mouth to say something, when that same arm shot out of the pit. It swung hard and landed in the grass with a thump. It was gray, the color of dead flesh, and had lumps pushing under the skin like rocks and marbles were stuffed in there. The arm was much too big. This thing had to be the size of a giant. Impossible.

The arm tightened its hand in the grass, grabbing hold, and then another, similar arm came out, reaching and grasping. Then the arms were moving, pulling it up.

Chloe and her sisters watched with mouths hanging open as a great beast lumbered out of the black hole. A horrible stench suddenly found her and Chloe gasped, tears coming to her eyes as the raw scents of decayed flesh and blood tore through her senses.

She blinked quickly to get rid of the tears and covered her nose with her hand to block as much of the smell as she could.

“That is...”

“Disgusting,” Willow supplied with a gag.

The thing was over ten feet tall. Its arms hung too long, down near its knees, and its head was like a scary Halloween mask. The eyes were slits that when it blinked, blinked far too many times with too many eyelids opening and closing at odd times. Its nose was two holes on a mound in the middle of its huge face, and its mouth was too big even for how big the thing was.

It looked like it was made to eat sharks for a living. The thing had more teeth than a piranha and just as sharp looking.

The monster opened its mouth and let out an ear-screeching bellow. Chloe and her sisters screamed and covered their ears, backing away from the horrible sound that threatened to burst their eardrums.

It took a step towards them. The girls stumbled three steps back.

It roared again, the sound leaving them gasping with pain throbbing from in their ears.

Then the monster did something Chloe never, ever would have expected in that moment.