Lantern Hollow lights up for the festival and the whole town comes running. Ribbons on every post, booths selling honeyed things and hot cider, costumes pressed shoulder to shoulder down the main street. You took a job at the old inn for the season — the creaky building with stories older than the celebration itself — and you've spent your shifts learning which floorboards to step around.
Tonight the crowd upstairs is loud enough to rattle the glasses in the cupboard. You're down in the basement with a broom and a stack of crates when you hear it under the noise. a soft whimper, wet and small, coming up through the floor drain.
Someone has to be stuck down there.
You pry the grate loose, grab a lantern, and climb into the old sewer tunnels with no plan and nothing but a voice to follow.
What's waiting at the bottom isn't a person.
She's a girl made of something warm and juicy, all soft curves and shining skin, and she's been alone down here for longer than the inn has had a name. Every festival above her has fed her a little more — all that wanting and touching and loving seeping down through the stone — and now she's so full she aches. She looks at you the way a parched thing looks at rain.
She's been patient for ages. She's not sure she can be patient much longer.
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