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The odds of getting out of here, of seeing Loren and his family again… He didn’t want to know them.
Terror had gripped him so tightly that he could barely see, could hardly make sense of the faces in the crowd as he scanned them with a frantic gaze, looking, pacing inside the cage, the tips of his fingers catching in the metal as he moved.
And then he spotted him—the Butcher, standing near the south wall with two of his men.
Darien banged both fists on the cage. “Casen!” he shouted. “CASEN! CAAAASENNN!” He kept calling Casen’s name, kept banging, metal rattling with every blow. Magic zipped up his arms and crackled in his teeth, the smell of blown-out candles choking the air. But Casen didn’t hear, didn’t notice.
The trapdoor in the centre of the platform slid open with a whir.
A chill ran up Darien’s spine, raising the hair on the back of his neck. But he didn’t turn. He kept staring at Casen, willing him to look, to hear. To fix this before they were all dead.
Finally, the Butcher’s eyes locked with his over the heads of the crowd. His smile faltered, confusion washing across his face. He mouthed, “What’s going on?”
“STOP THE MATCH!” Darien bellowed. He gestured wildly over his shoulder, at the trapdoor that kept whirring, sliding open inch by inch. “CLOSE THE FUCKING DOOR!”
But the door kept opening, cold air drifting up from the cement enclosure deep below ground. Casen cupped a hand to his ear, his lips forming a sentence that looked something like, “I can’t hear you.” He gestured to the crowd and the music thumping from the speakers.
One of the men in the cage spoke. “What’s the matter, Cassel?” he taunted. “You scared?”
Darien turned. When the men grinning in the cage took in the look on his face, their smug smiles faded, the weapons they held—useless, all of them—falling slack at their sides as they put two and two together.
Something struck the underside of the floor, and several of the men nearly fell. They steadied themselves against the cage, muttering questions no one had answers to. The reek of fresh fear was worse than the sweat, worse than the odour coming off the oily skin of the monster lurking beneath their feet.
“I’m terrified,” Darien said, his words hollow as a drum. The door slid open all the way. A snarl that curdled his blood ripped through the building, silencing the cheering of the audience and the final words of the ring announcer. “And you should be, too.”
PART IV
COTTON CANDY CARNIVAL
58
The creature that leapt through the trapdoor was just like the one in Angelthene Academy, but bigger. Faster.
It ripped into the fighters in a white blur, pulpy blood and bits of flesh misting the air as it got to work. It took chunks out of them, swallowing limbs whole. It threw the contestants into the cage so hard, their spines snapped on impact. Darien barely felt it as a spray of blood and guts and who knew what else colored his skin and jeans like paint.
Five out of seven were dead in under thirty seconds, and just like that, there was no one left in the cage to kill except Darien—
And a sobbing warlock, who banged on the cage and screamed his throat raw, begging the gods he believed in to have mercy on his soul.
The creature ended the man in a flash, tearing into his chest cavity with one swipe of a huge claw.
It whirled toward Darien, its fleshy throat rumbling with a growl that traveled up from deep in its belly.
Rising up out of its half-crouch and to its full height, the monster clinked its blood-soaked claws together, the nose that was nothing but slits in its face twitching, picking up on the scent of its next kill.
Darien tried to think, but the words in his head tripped over themselves, and he was sweating bullets.
If he let this creature get in one strike, he would likely be done for. Its brute strength was something he had never seen, not in all his years of hunting every monster in the book. All his usual tricks, all his skills, every weapon he had ever wielded—they were useless against this thing. And if he didn’t think of something, and quickly, he wouldn’t be walking out of here tonight.
Shit, if he’d known this was going to be his last night alive, if he’d known he was going to face this nightmare…he would’ve done things differently.
But he was out of time to worry. Out of time to think of a plan because the monster was lunging for him with a maw of bloody teeth.
It was instinct alone that pushed his magic out of his body, forming a forcefield between himself and the creature.
The thing slammed into it, the impact rattling Darien’s brain.
He stumbled back, steadying himself with a hand braced against the cage. His magic was an extension of himself, so the collision hurt as if someone had physically run into him on the street. It took all his willpower to keep that wall of magic in place, to not let it fall under the waves of pain rippling over him.
