Chapter 20
Rosabel La Rouge
Present Day
The darkness swallowed me the moment I stepped between those walls made of stone. It cut off the sound of the cheering spectators so abruptly that for a moment, I wondered if I’d lost my mind. So much noise had been in my ears one second, and complete silence the next.
I stopped, closed my eyes, breathed in deeply. No need to panic—I was in the game now. Billy said we would be separate from the outside world, and this was exactly what he’d meant. Probably.
And even if he didn’t, even if I’d lost my mind for real, that wasn’t going to change the fact that I needed to keep moving.
Footsteps everywhere around me. I reached for my two M17s as I moved ahead and saw nothing but a little bit of red light coming from the west. I followed it, just like everyone else around me did, and the closer to it I went, the more I heard the noise.
No— the music .
The walls to my sides that were making me claustrophobic finally ended. I walked out the other side with my breath held and took in my surroundings, confused.
Red lights were everywhere on tall lampposts. A thin mist hung around them, taking away half their intensity. The street was wide and set with cobblestones, and there were houses on either side—houses without light, without windows, some even without doors. They looked completely abandoned behind those lampposts, and the red light gave them a haunted kind of vibe, like, if you went close to those houses, you were bound to run into a ghost, no matter that they didn’t exist.
The music was coming from ahead, near the biggest source of red light, and people, a lot of players but not half as many as I’d seen coming down those stairs, were looking around, too, as disoriented as I was.
I stopped, breathed, turned back to see the stone walls exactly like they had been on the other side. About twenty of them, and between them was only raw darkness.
More players poured out of it like they were coming through a portal from a different realm altogether.
Then I looked up.
My breath caught in my throat and my heart skipped a long beat to see rows upon rows of seats filled with people surrounding us on all sides. They were everywhere, whichever way I turned, looking down upon us, cheering, though the sound of them couldn’t get through to me over that music.
Lab rat . That’s exactly what I felt like. A fucking lab rat trapped in this massive colosseum with no way out but through, surrounded by people watching me, by cameras, by supervisors—by everyone and their mother.
I thought seeing them like that was going to make me panic even more.
Instead, it pissed me the hell off.
I started walking again, trying to calm the race of thoughts in my mind, trying not to want to set everything on fire— real fire—just to hear these people screaming while they died. Watch their eyeballs melt and their hair burn. Watch their bones turn to ashes.
Fuck, I hadn’t wanted to see someone die as much as I wanted to see Madeline cut into a thousand pieces—preferably at my hand—in a very long time.
The deeper down those cobbles I went, the bigger the haunted-looking houses became. Two stories, three, then four, until I couldn’t see the spectators at all anymore, just the dark sky far, far above us. The music became louder, too, and then more players were coming from between those tall buildings all around us.
All around what looked like a stage with a big red floodlight on the top of a metal structure at its back that marked the end of the street.
That’s where the music was coming from. There was no actual band making it, no people or any kind of creatures, only instruments spread across the wide stage. Only instruments that the air itself seemed to be holding up and playing.
Or maybe ghosts really did exist here but we just couldn’t see them.
The guitar strings were playing themselves. The glossy, black piano let out a beautiful sound from those keys that were moving up and down fast without anybody touching them. The drums, too—the sticks beat them in perfect precision.
And then the microphone standing at the head of the stage on a tripod began to sing, too.
Red, red, red is all we see
It’s what we’re made of, you and me
Red, red, like blood and fire and pain
Red like all the rage that hides in this game
It went on and on about the color red, and it sounded like country music but not quite, and the voice coming from the speaker attached to the microphone was female, but not quite.
For a good long while, all of the players just gathered around that stage, looking left and right, waiting for someone to come instruct us on where to go next.
Nobody did.
That pissed me off more.
I shook my head, taking in a deep breath, but that song was getting on my fucking nerves. Red, red, red —it wouldn’t fucking stop.
Yes, we were aware that we were all from Redfire here, so it could stop saying that fucking word for one second because my head was going to explode soon.
Breathe, I kept reminding myself, and I was breathing, but it wasn’t doing anything to calm me down. Because I was exhausted. Damn it, I was fucking exhausted by the past four days, and I just wanted this nightmare to be over. I wanted to be home, taking a bath and reading a book—but no. I had to be forced into this fucking game that was going to kill me, probably as soon as the first challenge began.
And if that wasn’t enough, everything that had happened to me since the second I got that text came back to my mind with a vengeance, each scene crystal clear, the memory of each feeling so powerful that I relived everything all over again.
The laughter of that siren in the interrogation room. The look in Michael’s eyes as he made it clear to me that he planned to kill me. The look in Erid’s face as she felt bad for trying to kill me but tried anyway. Jim and Jam, being the fucking cowards that they were, stepping away and letting them.
That bullet going through my leg — fuck, that pissed . Me. Off!
He fucking shot me while we were on a mission! He shot me, my own team leader—and that wasn’t even the worst of it.
Images spun in my head. The pain was still there as if fresh, as if my leg was still bleeding. It didn’t help that my head was still throbbing for real where that fucking guard had hit me with his gun to knock me out.
Oh, when I got my hands on that guy. When I got my fucking hands on that guy…
And then Taland Tivoux—my undoing.
The memory of his face, his smile, the look in his eyes as he watched his brothers torture me was in the very center of my mind, so clear I could be looking at him directly right now. He’d just stood by and did nothing but reminded his brothers that he had called dibs on my life. He would get to be the one to kill me, and as long as his brothers agreed to that, he had no problem standing in the corner, watching me scream .
But most of all, it was me that did me in.
You betrayed me— those three words. Those three true words he said to me twice that filled me with so much shame and guilt and pure rage .
And please let’s not forget that Madeline, my very own grandmother, would have to throw away her precious armchair because I sat on it and. Made. It. Dirty!
Laughter burst out of me all of a sudden. It was short and it sounded awful even to my own ears, and other players looked at me like I’d lost my damned mind, and maybe I had. Maybe I wanted to. Fuck, I was so angry I could kill all of them and flood this entire playground so that nobody would ever play this stupid game again.
I hoped they talked to me. I hoped someone said something to me, anything to get me moving, because all these emotions going through me right now were pulling me under. And the more they pulled, the angrier I became—because they were right.
I was weak, useless, a damn traitor. I was stained, filthy, worthless, just like Madeline said.
Then a small surge of electricity went through my right wrist, and I almost fucking shot my own hand off the way it fried my nerve ends so suddenly. The damn stupid chip those smugglers had branded me with.
If I ever laid eyes on them again, if I ever even smelled their scent or saw that fucking bandana, I was going to?—
“Are you Mud? ”
Everything came to a halt.
My mind emptied completely though my heart continued to beat like it was on a mission of its own.
I turned around to face a guy, a big guy with chubby cheeks, a bald head, and a very round belly beneath this red and golden vest that did nothing to hide the small curls going down his belly button. He was a head and a half taller than me, and his small eyes were bloodshot, almost completely closed like he’d been drinking. Maybe he’d even gotten high before coming in here.
And the circle that had appeared in the air about thirty feet over his head, connected to him with a thick dotted line, was a bright red you couldn’t miss even in the darkness.
Other players had their own circles revealed as well—and they must have all been high or something because I could have sworn all their eyes were just as bloodshot. And all their circles were red.
Except mine.
Slowly, I looked up at the dotted line that connected me with a muddy brown circle so far up in the air that all the spectators would be able to see it over those tall buildings at our sides, even if they couldn’t see us.
Everybody could see that I was Mud, and suddenly, I was glad for it. So fucking glad I was smiling by the time I met Baldie’s eyes again.
“That’s none of your business,” I told him, and I prayed—oh, how I prayed to all the gods—that he said something. Anything. That anybody around me bothered, but…
That was the thing. Everybody around me did bother, but with other people.
Is your shirt green ?
Did you just look at me wrong?
Weren’t you the guy who pushed me on the stairs?
You look a lot like my fucking ex, boy…
Yes, everybody was pissed. But none more than I was at this bald-headed bastard who leaned closer and closer, grinning as if to show me how proud he was of his crooked yellowed teeth .
“You don’t belong here, Mud,” he told me, and it was like he bathed the last of my calm in a fiery river, reducing it to ashes within the second.
Not only that, but the big fella reached out and wrapped his hands around my neck. Tightly.
Hell broke loose around us within the same second. People began to attack each other almost at the same time, and it was like all my dreams come true. The way it felt when my fist connected with Baldie’s jaw was heaven. Real, true heaven. His head flew to the side, blood spilling out, and then I grabbed his arm, twisted it and broke his bone before three seconds were over. My, oh my. Something about the sound of broken bones that was therapeutic.
The guy screamed like a little bitch as he went down on his knees, holding his broken arm, giving me plenty of time to kick him in the face and knock him on his back.
I wasn’t going to kill him, though. I really wasn’t. But then a woman who was shorter than me, with narrow shoulders and a face that promised she wouldn’t even be mad at you if you cut her hair in her sleep was suddenly right over his head with a piece of sharp wood in both her hands. She raised those hands and screamed, then brought that sharp piece of wood down on his neck over and over and over again while I watched, stunned. While Baldie died—probably just as stunned as I was.
I mean, she really didn’t look capable of committing murder in such a brutal way.
If I were a liar, I’d say I felt bad or disgusted or any kind of way about Baldie’s death except angry. Angry that she’d taken him from me, technically speaking. Angry that I hadn’t thought to kill him first, that I’d wanted to spare his life like a fool, when nobody around me was sparing anything they could get their hands on .
The woman stopped stabbing Baldie’s torn neck with her wood piece, her face splattered with so much blood.
Then she looked at me and smiled.
I flinched. “You have blood on your teeth.” She must have held her mouth open when Baldie’s blood sprayed her. Rookie mistake. You could just tell she wasn’t used to killing people violently like this.
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.