Then she screamed and started to run for me.

  It both felt great—the ease with which I stepped aside and fisted her on the nose, breaking it in the process while she howled in pain—and it made me a lot angrier. She was coming for me when I was the one to knock down Baldie so she could have a nice and easy time killing him? Ungrateful was the word that came to mind, but I doubted she cared when she charged for me again, though her eyes were teared up and her nose hurt like hell and she couldn’t see shit. Again, easy to slam my fist on her face and knock her to the ground. She was featherlight.

  I was going to finish her off, too. This time, I wasn’t going to make the same mistake and let someone else take my kill, except I never got the chance.

  A hand wrapped around my hair and pulled back hard.

  I never even thought my body had the capacity to be as angry as I was right now, but I was thankful for it. I was thankful for the mayhem going on around me because all this anger I was feeling needed to be let out somehow.

  Or else I was going to drive a knife into my own fucking eye and be done with it.

  Which was very…unlike me, I thought.

  And that was the first time it occurred to me that something might not be right here.

  But the fight continued so there was no time to ponder. Plenty of time to pound my fists onto people’s faces, though. Blood sprayed everywhere. Iridians hit me from all sides at the same time, and eventually I had to bring two of my smaller daggers into it. They were small and they were practical, and most importantly they cut through skin and flesh with ease. I was saving the bigger ones and my bullets for later because these people weren’t trained fighters. Sure, some of them hit hard, and I fell on my back and on my face at least a dozen times, but the wounds they caused with their hands and the weapons they’d smuggled through the gates were superficial.

  Meanwhile, mine weren’t. The blades of my daggers cut deep, and I knew exactly how to use them.

  Body parts on the cobblestones, though I hadn’t cut anyone apart like that myself. Yet. The fight didn’t seem to be close to ending at all. Instead, we moved in perfect tempo with the music that the instruments were still playing, and the microphone was singing by itself. The faster and louder they played, the faster we spilled blood all around that stage, and I could have sworn the sound of people laughing—a lot of people—reached my ears in an echo every once in a little while.

  Even so, I never wanted to stop—and that was my second sign that something was most definitely not right here.

  The more blood I spilled, the thirstier for it I got. The more violently I stabbed a guy on the side of his neck, the angrier I became because I was an orphan and I was a traitor and my only family couldn’t care less about me and my grandmother had brought me here to die.

  All the bad and the ugly that was my life was there, sitting in the front row of my mind, making my blood rush, my limbs move, and keeping my heartbeat racing.

  It went on for quite some time.

  Only when I slammed the butt of my dagger to a man’s temple did I begin to urge myself to try to slow down. He was on his knees, barely dragging himself forward from all the wounds on his body inflicted by other people, and he’d grabbed me by the leg and was trying to bite me.

  That’s how crazy things had gotten—he was trying to bite me.

  The players weren’t turning to their magic at all, just like I wasn’t reaching for my guns because I wanted to feel this, all of it. We wanted to get dirty, fight with our own bodies in pure rage.

  Like mindless fucking zombies.

  When the man hit the ground and his chubby fingers slipped down my leg, I moved. Players were still trying to reach for me, grab me, stab me, but it was easy enough to navigate away from their hands until I reached the stage and hid behind the corner, just until I caught my breath. I sat on the ground, brought my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them, and I tried to become as small as I could so that nobody noticed me there.

  Not that hard to do when the players who were still standing were perfectly involved in fighting one another, trying to spill as much blood as possible.

  Wrong, wrong, wrong, a voice whispered in my head, but I couldn’t keep my eyes closed for long because then I’d focus on everything that was fucked up about my life again, and then the anger would surely take over.

  I looked at the players instead, tried to see what was so wrong with this place that my instincts were so fired up.

  Goddess, they were so mad. So angry their eyes were red and their skins were flushed and most of them were covered in blood.

  Except a woman.

  She looked to be older than me by at least decade, and out of every other player fighting in front of that stage, she had a straight face and she was walking on the other side, moving away from the fight without so much as a glance at the others.

  But what blew me away was that they didn’t glance at her, either.

  It made me angry, at first, but not at her. I was angry at the other players. I didn’t want to attack her at all—I wanted to attack the stupid people who’d let her get away.

  She’s getting away!

  Just like that, in the middle of a bloodthirsty crowd. She was simply walking away.

  An alarm rang in my ears, forcing my mind to clear. So much anger—like a red cloud hanging over my head, pouring acidic rain on my thoughts only to ignite them further.

  My heart was beating like crazy, too. These feelings were so powerful, so intense. So raw and all-consuming.

  Typical Redfire magic.

  Realization was a hard and cold slap across my face, so much more painful than any hit I’d received in this fight.

  Nobody was coming to give us instructions. The game had already begun, and we were in the Redfire challenge.

  Some believed that Redfire magic was about chaos, about letting raw power loose, setting it free to assume whatever shape it was always meant to have, and create order in that manner.

  It was an old concept, one very few people believed in anymore, but what if this was what they’d done here? What if the very air we breathed was spelled to bring out the worst in us?

  Or maybe…

  I looked up at the stage, at the instruments playing themselves, the microphone singing that song. It was that melody that had guided my anger, that had nourished it, watered it, willed it to grow. It was in rhythm with that melody that all of us moved.

  No, it wasn’t the air at all—it was the music. They’d put Redfire magic in that music to make us lose control, and they had succeeded better than I could have imagined.

  There was nothing more chaotic than this anger that I was feeling. Nothing more chaotic than the scene developing right before my eyes in the front of this stage, of grown people behaving like fucking animals.

  The more we fought the angrier we got. The faster the music played, the faster my heart beat.

  And I wasn’t going to be able to get out of this place unless I got rid of this anger first.

  This time, when I closed my eyes, I was more in control of myself. I wrapped my arms around my knees tighter and I forced air down my throat.

  Then I began to talk to myself, to remind myself that this wasn’t real—not any of it. Well, except for the blood and broken bones and the body parts—those were definitely real. But the anger wasn’t.

  If I could get it under control, I could walk away from here. I could simply leave, go to whatever was behind this stage, just like that woman had done. Nobody had stopped her. Nobody had attacked her.

  That’s because she’d freed herself from the anger. To do that, I needed to be in control of my thoughts, my emotions. And to do that, I needed to start with my body, with relaxing my muscles, and most importantly, slowing down my heartbeat.

  I’d done this before a million times. I did this regularly—it’s how I taught myself to stay neutral when Madeline was around, and then when anybody else was around, too. It was just easier to pretend I didn’t feel anything. If they didn’t know when I was hurting or when I was vulnerable, how could they ever use it against me?

  The problem was that melody was full of magic that forced my mind to ignore any good memory I had and to focus only on the bad, on the unfairness of life, of things I’d done that made me angry at myself, too. If I focused hard enough, I could see the magic like dust particles hiding in the waves of sound that came from the instruments and the speaker. It was in my ears, inside my head, and the magic was steady, shooting bad thoughts up my veins like a damn drug.

  It took a while for me to accept that my standard process of controlling my muscles, my heart, then my mind, just wasn’t working. With a heavy heart—and a very pissed off and wounded ego—I accepted that it was time to bring out the big guns.

  Namely my memories of Taland Tivoux.

  Not all worked.

  In fact, most didn’t. Most had my pulse racing like wild, much more effective than Redfire magic, but there were some that calmed me down when I was alone in my room at night, going through a panic attack that just wouldn’t let up for hours.

  It wasn’t anything in particular, just thinking about the way he was. The way he used to sit in class, one arm behind the bench, the other always busy playing with something. The way he smiled—first, when he found something funny, he’d take a split second as if to think about whether he wanted to react or not, and then when he couldn’t contain himself, he would lower his head and close his eyes, then let his lips stretch into a perfect crooked smile every single time. Not the grin he’d had on when I was chained to his basement, no—an actual smile that lighted up his eyes all the way. The way he’d always—always touch the tip of my nose first whenever we saw each other, before he even said hi because he was ‘making sure that you’re still real, sweetness.’

  And my absolute favorite, the one that worked better than any magic spell, was the way he woke up.

  I pictured it now—his hair all over the place, his eyes swollen. His narrowed brows and lips pressed tightly to make the most adorable duckface in the world because he slept like he was angry. The warmth of his skin. The way, even when he was deep into sleep, he never let go of me, never moved away, was never not touching me when we slept together.

  It was perfect, that entire visual. It was peace. It was happiness.

  For me, it was life.

  And just like when my panic attacks let go of me when I was all alone in my room, shaking in bed, the magic that had gathered inside my mind, pulling the bad and the ugly to the surface, let off little by little.

  Whenever the image tried to slip away from me, I’d focus harder, and it was easy to do. The hard thing was always to not think about him so this I didn’t mind at all. And when I no longer felt the pull of the magic, I opened my eyes as two tears slid down my cheeks and found all that anger had been replaced by raw desperation.

  Because I’d never see Taland like that again. Because I’d never wake up in his arms again.

  And that was indeed the tragedy of my life.

  Then someone slammed against the ground right in front of my feet.

  A man, skinny and with long limbs, face bloody and eyes red, pushed himself up on all fours, and my heart skipped another beat. I expected him to reach for me, to try to kill me, bite me, scratch me—anything at all.

  Instead, he looked at my face and saw right through me, like I wasn’t even there.

  Just like that woman earlier.

  My pulse quickened right away with excitement, so I had to sit still for another minute while the skinny guy went back to the fight. I sat still until I was perfectly calm once more, and when I stood up, none of the people, bloody and wounded and fighting, even turned their eyes my way.

  It had worked.

  I pulled myself up on the stage just to get a bit higher up, to see better, to understand what surrounded me. I even considered calling out to the people, telling them that they needed to let the anger go and calm down if they wanted to stop fighting any time soon. What a brutal way to start the Iris Roe, but at least nobody had used spells. No, the magic of this challenge had wanted us to make it last, to make it extra bloody—extra entertaining for the audience, I’m sure. But I doubted I’d be this lucky in the other covens’ challenges.

  In the end, I decided no amount of screaming was going to get through to these people, so I didn’t bother. They needed to figure it out themselves if it was going to work. Instead, I went around the instruments that played themselves, the microphone that did not stop picking up sound that didn’t exist and spilling it out of the big speaker near the metal structure at its back. I jumped off the other end of the stage and ran toward the back.

  Darkness awaited me—a deep darkness like the one between those walls in the beginning. As soon as I stepped into it, I no longer heard the music of the instruments nor the players fighting.

  All I heard was the sound of my own footsteps, and I walked for what felt like a long time.

  Chapter 21

  Rosabel La Rouge

  Present day

  Blood.

  Puddles of blood were everywhere in front of me. The more the darkness let off, chased away by some red light coming from far away, the clearer I saw them spread out onto the muddy ground.

  So many of them, possibly close to a hundred blood puddles.

  The metallic scent was in the air, as intense as the magic had been around that stage. I was used to blood. In the beginning when I started my training, it had almost killed me to see it. I was constantly wanting to pass out that first week, but I’d grown used to it eventually. I didn’t mind being covered in it by the end of my training, but something about puddles on the ground, some bigger than others, some darker, some lighter…

  And they all had a tiny stream as thin as my finger that connected them farther away, and poured somewhere below, off the edge of the ground where I couldn’t see.

  Iris, I was thankful that I couldn’t see where all the blood was dripping off to.

  Movement caught my eye on the other side of the edge, and I turned to find that woman on her knees, the one who’d walked among the enraged players and had helped me figure out how to get out of there, too. She wasn’t alone. A bit farther away on her other side were two men, and all three of them were on their knees in front of the puddles, and they had their hands inside the blood.

  Bile rose up my throat. I grabbed my daggers again because I felt safer like that. If somebody wanted to jump me, I’d be prepared to fight back, at least.

  Except these people didn’t look like they planned to attack me. They looked perfectly calm instead—just like I was.

  “Excuse me,” I whispered as I went closer. None looked up at me—they just continued to stick their hands in the puddles like they were looking for something down there. “Excuse me, what are you doing?”

  “Searching the blood we spilled,” said the woman, her voice low, passive—like she was half asleep.

  This was the blood we spilled? “For what?”

  The man—or better to say boy, as he didn’t look older than eighteen—at the very end turned to look at me, eyes wide and judging when he said, “The key.”

  Duh, Rora. The fucking key.

  The next moment, I sheathed my daggers again, lowered to my knees in front of a puddle, and convinced myself that this had to be done in order to finish the game. I had to get the key—the worst was already over. It was done. I hadn’t died, and now all I had to do was stick my hands in this blood and find a damn key.

  Bile burned my throat while I pulled the sleeves of my jacket as high up my arms as I could.

  Then I put my hands in the puddle in front of me.

  It was thick and warm and bright red, the blood, like it had just spilled right out of an artery. The smell was so intense, so bad that I couldn’t breathe through my nose at all, and every time I opened my mouth to draw in air, I almost threw up all of my insides.

  Fuck, how was this worse than fighting for my life?!

  And that wasn’t even the worst of it. I soon realized that the key wasn’t in the puddle I was currently searching, and the others were searching every puddle in front of us for theirs.

  “Each of us will find our key when we find the blood we spilled,” the woman told me, her voice just as dead still, though she was a bit breathless. She was trying to keep her calm, just like the others and I were, but it was easy to see she was having a hard time of it.

  “Who told you that?” I asked when I was done with my second puddle and moved on to the one she’d been searching until now.

  Because there had to be another way. There had to be a faster way to figure out which puddle of blood belonged to me, which one held my key. This couldn’t be the only way, damn it. It was disgusting!

  But the man in the middle raised his head, the one who hadn’t spoken to me at all until now. He had a silver beard and cropped hair and eyes that looked almost violet from the reflection of the blood and the dim red light coming at us from Iris knew where.

  “The ghost,” he told me, as if that was supposed to answer my question and make perfect sense to me.

  The ghost.

  I shook my head, gritted my teeth, and continued to search the puddles.

  Nine more players came to the puddle area, for lack of a better term, by the time I found my key in the seventh puddle I searched. My stomach didn’t get any stronger and I didn’t get used to the feeling at all. Everything was so red and thick and warm, and the puddles kept on growing bigger with the more blood spilled by that stage, so when my fingers grazed metal at the bottom of the seventh puddle, I wrapped my fingers around it, turned to the side, and threw up.

  Impossible to hold it back, but at least it was over quickly, and I wasn’t the only one spilling my guts in disgust. Dragging myself back on all fours, I just wanted to get away from the puddles before I suffocated on that scent. I just wanted to be somewhere where it smelled nice, and where there was no muddy soil beneath me.

  Then I could stop and breathe and get myself together. Then I could look at what I’d found in the puddle and see where to go from there.

 

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