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One-eighth was mean to the bone, but she usually didn’t curse. I might have hit a nerve.
“Thanks, but no,” I said, ducking and bringing up my sword to block her. “I’m not interested in chicks, and definitely not in pretentious lowlifes like you lot.”
Patricia thrust her sword toward me from the side. They had learned not to sandwich me, so she attacked from my blindside. Neither of them had seen how I wielded a weapon. They thought I was the same Marigold their friend Jack had once brutalized and beaten to near dead.
I wheeled and ducked left to avoid Patricia’s hack. Before her sword could follow me, I booted her in the jaw. Bones cracked, and the brunette dropped in a heap.
“Oops,” I said. “My bad. I didn’t expect to knock you out so quickly, but I’m tired, so I’m not in total control at the moment. I do suggest you give the name Patricia to someone else. Patricia is a generous name, but it doesn’t suit you. The last person who didn’t heed my advice ended up dead.”
I turned back to Demetra. “This trash is too tired to flirt, so I’ll have to cut our fun time short.” I gave the crowd a friendly scan. “If it’s okay with everyone.”
“It’s perfectly okay with me,” Nat said, echoing my smile.
“Take out the real trash, Marigold,” Yelena shouted. “It stinks in here.”
I pointed two fingers at them. “We need more good soldiers like you.”
I slashed my sword toward Demetra, and she blocked just the way I’d expected. I twisted my weapon and rolled with hers, and before she could blink, I’d disarmed her. She dove for her sword, but I stepped on it. She swept her leg at mine, and I kicked her right in the face. She snapped her head back and fell backward.
The gods’ Blood Runes had enhanced every initiate’s power. It hadn’t done the same for me. But it had broken the seal holding back my true abilities.
Now I was as strong as a demigod.
One-eighth didn’t stand a chance.
I planted a foot on her chest and stuck the tip of my wooden sword against her soft throat.
Yelena jumped up and down clapping her hands, which was unbefitting a future Dominion soldier, but at the moment, she was beyond herself.
“I have a question for you, One-eighth,” I said. “They might’ve let you out of your cell, but I don’t think your hands are that clean. Did you send your dead friend Brittney to do your dirty work?”
“You’ll pay,” she said with black hatred. “I wish you were dead instead of her.”
“That’s enough,” Murphy said. “My class isn’t a circus.”
Right, he’d come to the show and enjoyed it all.
Suddenly, poison vines shot out from Demetra, faster than lightning, and wrapped around my neck. They closed around my throat, thorns cutting into my flesh.
My eyes rolled back as the air was cut off from my lungs and the poison numbed me.
“Fucking bitch!” Yelena shouted, tossing her icy current at Demetra, ignoring the instructor’s warning for her to back off.
Nat’s hands turned into blades as he frantically severed the extended vines.
“Demetra, pull them back right now!” Marie shouted, sprinting toward us.
I dropped to my knees, blood oozing from my neck.
Demetra pulled back her power, but the vines wouldn’t leave me.
She widened her eyes. “I can’t. It’s out of my control.”
Everyone rushed toward me at the same time while the vines, unlike any kind of plants I’d encountered, kept choking me as if they had a will of their own and had marked me as an enemy.
I got it. I wasn’t an Olympian. I was a Titan, one of the immortal enemies of the Olympians, so somehow the power Demetra had inherited from the goddess Demeter recognized who I was.
But then how could the demigods be drawn to me when I was half-Titan and half-demoness? Maybe our bond was beyond the designs of the universe, beyond our births?
