The focus that had locked it onto the fleeing contestant shifted completely, narrowing onto the shell in my hand with a terrible animal certainty. Its shoulders lowered. Its lips peeled back from those crushed-bone teeth. The silver eye brightened with something that looked almost intelligent in its hatred.
It knew what I held.
I felt Finn's attention sharpen hard beside my soul.
"He used you deliberately."
"Yeah, I can fucking see that."
The wolf let out a howl.
Vicious didn't feel like a strong enough word for it. The sound tore down the corridor, harsh and hungry and furious all at once, carrying enough force that I felt it in my ribs more than my ears. It echoed off the stone walls, doubled, tripled, came back around me from every direction.
Then it lunged.
I ran.
The egg made everything worse immediately.
My first instinct was to shift the sword properly, get both hands where I wanted them, set myself for a turn, a strike, something. But the egg was in my left hand, and I couldn't grip it like a weapon or tuck it under my arm without risking crushing it if I hit a wall or went down. For half a second I tried running with the sword in one hand and the egg in the other, which made me slower and more off-balance than I wanted to admit.
The wolf's claws hit the stone behind me in accelerating bursts.
"Right!" Finn snapped.
I threw myself right at the next branching corridor just as the beast slammed through where I'd been, its shoulder clipping the corner hard enough to chip stone. It recovered instantly and came after me.
The maze had become one long bad idea.
Tight turns. Sudden forks. Shifting wall sections that groaned before moving and sometimes didn't. Narrow corridors that forced me too close to one side. Open chambers that looked like obvious kill-zones. Twice I nearly chose the wrong route only because the more open corridor seemed easier, and twice the walls there began sliding closed in ways that would have left me trapped for a second too long.
"Faster," Finn said.
"I'm holding an egg."
"Yes. Inconvenient."
I hated him.
That helped.
I risked one glance back.
Bad choice.
The wolf was closer than it should have been, its huge body eating distance with terrifying ease. Its mouth hung open just enough to show wet rows of teeth and the darker red of its throat. The thing did not run like an ordinary predator. It ran like it had already decided the outcome and was merely waiting for my body to catch up with it.
I turned forward again and nearly ran straight into a shifting wall.
The stone to my left began moving outward with a deep grinding shudder, slowly enough to watch but far too quickly to ignore. I veered, shoulder striking the opposite wall, and just managed to slip past before the corridor narrowed into a stone throat too tight for clean movement.
The egg knocked against my palm.
A flash of panic hit so hard it almost made me stop.
If I dropped it, it would shatter.
If it shattered, I didn't know what would happen. Maybe nothing beyond losing whatever this creature wanted. Maybe the whole reason it was chasing me would evaporate. Maybe I'd survive because of it.
The thought arrived ugly and practical…
Drop it.
My hand tightened instead.
No.
Why?
I didn't have a clean answer.
Because the bastard who threw it at me wanted exactly that.
Because it was alive.
Because I had felt that thread of connection when I caught it and couldn't un-feel it now.
Because if I was going to be used, I wanted at least some say in what came of it.
Because maybe the beast wanted it badly enough that keeping it mattered.
All of those were true.
None of them were good enough on their own.
The howl behind me cut off that line of thinking entirely as the wolf snapped at my heel and missed by inches. I felt the rush of its breath against the back of my leg.
I slammed one shoulder into a corner, bounced off it, nearly lost both balance and egg, and kept going with a curse torn straight out of my throat.
"Can I put it away?" I hissed.
"If you can do so without dying."
"Wonderful."
The corridor opened briefly into another chamber. Smaller than the last. Four exits, two already shifting. One low stone pedestal in the center, definitely trapped.
I didn't slow enough to inspect properly. I just chose the exit that looked least like immediate suicide and lunged for it.
Wrong.
Not fully wrong, but not clean either.
The corridor beyond angled sharply downward, slick in places with fine dust over polished stone. My boots slipped. I pinwheeled hard, barely kept my footing, and smashed my hip against the wall. Pain flared white. The egg almost tore free of my hand. I clutched it tighter and heard Finn say something about dying stupidly, but the blood pounding in my ears swallowed half of it.
The wolf hit the slope behind me and adapted better than I did.
Of course it did.
Its claws bit in. Its body lowered. It flew down the incline with predatory certainty and made up half the distance I'd just gained in two breaths.
I reached the bottom and cut left through the first opening I saw.
The wall behind me shifted.
Stone slammed half-shut between corridors with a crack that shook dust down from above.
The wolf hit it so hard the sound rang through the maze like a struck bell.
For one hopeful, idiotic second, I thought that might buy me real distance.
Then the beast's howl rolled around the new corridor from some other route, and I understood immediately that the maze was not going to save me from this.
It knew the place too well.
Or it didn't need to know it at all.
Maybe the whole structure simply favored monsters better than it favored panicked candidates holding fragile things.
I kept running.
A side corridor opened.
I ignored it.
Another opened seconds later with a long direct stretch that looked almost too good to be real.
I almost took it.
Then I saw the floor near its mouth shimmer faintly with the same wrongness I'd learned to distrust and veered away instead.
"Good," Finn said.
I was too busy not dying to answer.
The egg pulsed once against my palm.
Or maybe that was my own heartbeat echoing through it. Hard to tell. Harder still to ignore the fact that the slight connection I'd felt earlier seemed clearer now, not stronger exactly, but more familiar. Not enough to understand what was inside. Just enough that holding it no longer felt like carrying an object.
It felt like carrying something waiting.
"Why does it feel like that?" I muttered.
Finn answered with annoying calm despite the chase.
"Because it is not ordinary."
"Again, very helpful."
"You continue to ask bad questions while fleeing."
The maze widened unexpectedly into a long corridor with no visible branches for at least forty yards.
A dead run.
Bad.
I knew it instantly.
Long enough to build speed. Narrow enough to prevent clean evasion. Nowhere to turn if the wolf committed.
I almost stopped anyway because there was no better option. The walls behind me had already shifted. The side routes were gone.
So I ran through the corridor.
The beast came after me.
Its nails threw sparks from the stone now. That was new and profoundly unwelcome. I heard the shift in its gait right before it committed fully, one deeper strike, one longer exhale, the sound of mass folding for a lunge.
I threw myself sideways just as it launched.
It did not miss because I was smart.
It missed because I was desperate and lucky.
Its body slammed into the wall where I had been a heartbeat earlier with enough force to crack the stone. Dust burst outward. I hit the ground hard, rolled, nearly crushed the egg under my own chest, and came up running again before it finished rebounding.
It recovered in frighteningly little time.
Of course it did.
The corridor ended in a fork.
I took the left branch blindly.
Two turns later, I saw the wall.
Dead end.
No exit.
No gap.
No shifting seam promising mercy in five seconds if I only waited.
Just pale stone rising cleanly in front of me, absolute and indifferent.
I skidded to a stop so hard my boots screamed against the floor.
For one second I just stared.
No.
No, no, no.
My chest heaved. Sweat ran down my face and neck. My left hand ached from gripping the egg too hard. My right still held the sword, but the weapon suddenly felt much too small for the corridor I was trapped in.
Behind me, the wolf slowed.
Didn't stop.
Just slowed.
Its claws clicked once.
Twice.
It knew.
The sound of it approaching through the corridor was somehow worse now that it no longer needed speed. Deliberate. Certain. A predator walking up to the final mistake of its prey.
I turned around.
The beast stood at the mouth of the dead-end corridor, framed by shifting shadow and pale stone, shoulders low, head slightly dipped, silver eye and yellow eye both fixed not on me but on the egg in my hand.
Saliva dripped from its jaws in slow ropes.
Its chest rose.
Fell.
Rose again.
Finn's voice came very quietly.
"Well."
I didn't look away from the wolf. "Please tell me you have something useful."
A pause.
"You are out of the corridor."
"Brilliant."
"Yes."
I shifted the egg carefully, protecting it against my body without taking my eyes off the beast.
The wolf's lips peeled back.
Its howl didn't come this time.
It didn't need to.
We were past warnings.
Past pursuit.
Past the part where running had any meaning at all.
I tightened my grip on the sword, felt the dead stone at my back, the living egg against my palm, and the monster in front of me drawing itself together for what came next.
There was nowhere left to go.
So whatever happened now, I was going to have to face it.