Chapter 26 #3
My stomach rumbled. I was hungry. I wanted more cakes.
I wanted more pastries. My mouth was dry, and I wanted another pipe.
I was hot. I wanted to strip out of my underwear and my bra.
I stared at the green bottle. If I drank that, would it make me happy?
If I could see the festival show, would I be even happier still?
I reached for the bottle, then I tipped it back and sipped.
The cool liquid coated my mouth, sparkling through me with an effervescent rush. I handed it to Justice and smiled.
“It’s good,” I said, a rush of dizziness washing through me.
He frowned at the bottle. “You sure?”
I nodded, my head floaty and numb. “Yeah.”
The arena tilted and filled with sparkles. I swayed, nearly falling over. The clown shoved me upright. The tart apple flavor brightened and leaked through me. The tingles grew until they became electric shocks, and then, unfortunately, the electric shocks turned to pain.
I flinched. “That . . . that hurts.”
“Yeah.” The clown scowled. “Idiot. Of course it hurts. I lied to you.”
I gasped, trying to drag in a breath. But my lungs had filled with the green-apple liquid. They were flooded with it, and I couldn’t draw in any air. I was suffocating. I choked, clawing at my throat. Next to me, Justice dropped to his knees.
The arena slid again, and then the stone, the firelight, and all the people pixelated.
They became tiny colorful spots, sliding and shaking, so they looked like sugar cubes gyrating under a microscope.
Something in my mind exploded, and I gasped again, and finally, I dragged in a deep breath of air.
My vision cleared, and I drew in another shuddering breath. The air didn’t smell like star jasmine anymore. It smelled like I’d stuck my head into a barrel of crisp green apples and mint leaves.
I shuddered. Justice lunged past me and grabbed the clown by the throat.
“What was that?” he growled. “What did you give us?”
The clown coughed, his feet dangling off the ground. Justice shook him like a terrier shaking a rat.
“You have to let him go,” I said. My head pounded, and I felt horrible.
Justice dropped the clown to the stone bench but kept ahold of his throat. “Talk.”
“Good to see you’re a mirthless, murderous jerk again,” the clown growled. Then he flung his hand to encompass the arena. “Look around. Welcome to hell.”
I turned to where he gestured, taking in the stone arena and the field below.
It was different. Everything had changed.
The people weren’t happy. They weren’t healthy. They weren’t joyful.
Some were emaciated, sallow-skinned, with clumps of hair missing.
Others were so large they could barely stand under their own weight.
They held plates in their hands, the same china Justice and I had eaten off at the café.
But they weren’t eating cakes and tarts; instead, it was .
. . raw, rotting, moldy, oozing, black-blooded . . .
I turned to the side and started to gag. I was going to puke. I was going to throw up.
“If you barf, I will shiv you!” the slipshot snarled. “Don’t waste the juice!”
He wasn’t a clown anymore. He was himself. A short, angry slipshot with a too-big nose, dressed in the same clothes he’d been wearing the last time I saw him. Just dirtier and ragged.
“Did I eat people?” I asked, a violent nausea churning.
“Nah. They eat creatures from the forest. Giant slugs. Oversized millipedes. Besides, that’s what you’re worried about—what you had for dinner? Idiot. They’re about to slaughter your little friend.”
I frowned.
“What exactly do you mean?” Justice asked. His voice was pitched low. It was the tone he used right before he went out on a job and slaughtered a dozen people.
I looked over at him. His face was hard again, somber and angry. There was no trace of the carefree boyishness left. The juice, elixir—whatever it was—had wiped it away.
He didn’t look at me. Instead, he focused on the slipshot.
If Justice was feeling the same thing I was, he was infused with horror, embarrassment, and a violent need to get out of here.
The people I’d thought were kissing? Sadly, they were not. I won’t describe it. It’s not for pleasure. It’s for pain. It involves blood and screaming. Horrid things that would make even Jagger pause.
The singers? Screaming.
The gymnasts? Contorted in pain.
The laughter. Moans of fear.
The slipshot nodded to the grassy arena. I was grateful to see the white flowers hadn’t turned into body parts. They were still flowers. That was the only good thing.
A giant man with a whip was leading out a long line of about a hundred people.
They were dressed in white and covered in flower garlands.
The arena filled with scattered cheers and jeers.
The people in the line, though, must have been as mesmerized as Justice and I were, because they all laughed and smiled and threw flowers at the crowd.
“There she is.” The slipshot pointed toward a woman in white. “Having a great time, isn’t she?”
It was Last. It was the first time I’d ever seen her happy. Her face glowed, her eyes were bright, and she had a joyful, beautiful expression on her face.
“What’s going to happen?” Justice asked. His face was pale, and his freckles stood out.
If the slipshot hadn’t helped us, we would’ve laughed and cheered, until we’d . . . watched Last be slaughtered? Would we have known what was happening? Or would we have seen something else?
“Well, you see,” the slipshot said. “Every day here is festival day.”
“Every day?”
He nodded. “Every day. But when every day is a party, it gets kind of boring. Nobody likes cake if you eat it every meal. So if you have to serve cake, you should at least light it on fire. Better yet, put a bomb in it, give it to somebody, and laugh when they eat it and explode.”
Justice lifted his eyebrows.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Gerald.”
“Go on,” Justice said.
“Here’s the thing. People always think they want utopia.
But give somebody everything they want—all the food, all the riches, all the luxury—and you bet, in two days, they’ll get bored and start lighting utopia on fire just to watch it burn.
They’ll pull out marshmallows for the bonfire.
For instance, everything here is free. It’s all ‘what’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine, free, free, free.
’ You think I still steal? Heck yeah, I do. I’m a slipshot.”
Justice scowled. “Get to the point.”
Gerald narrowed his eyes, and his lip curled.
Slipshots didn’t like being told what to do.
They liked to steal, and they liked to kill.
But they were also by nature pretty cowardly, so if you were someone like Justice, they’d back down.
It was why they’d attacked me as a little kid, but less so as an adult.
“Point is, when you show up here, you get flowers and cakes. A little bit later, once you’re starving for more—literally starving—you go down a rabbit hole until you’re doing things you never thought you’d do for that lick of pleasure.
It’s why those ones down there are potato-peeling each other’s skin—”
I winced. “Don’t mention—”
“Whatever.” He frowned at me as if he expected someone raised in Hell Gate not to mind the depravities happening in the arena.
“Anyway, some of the cake and flower people get shuttled into the arena for the pleasure of the depraved. Dancing and laughing doesn’t do it for them anymore.
They want to see the people dancing and laughing get torn apart by the forest beasts. ”
I stared at the people in the arena tossing their flowers into the crowd. Last was laughing and blowing kisses.
“If you want to save your friend—the one you fell from the sky with? You have about . . . ehhh . . . two minutes, give or take.”
“Until the beasts are let loose?” Justice asked, frowning at Last a hundred feet below.
The slipshot grinned. “Tonight will be a massacre. They caught that jackaltooth that chased you in.” He shuddered. “Friggin’ Bard monsters. Hate ’em.”
A cold chill swept through me. I reached out and grabbed Justice’s hand, squeezing hard.
“Justice?”
“Yeah?”
What I was going to say caught in my throat as the arena erupted into cheers and howls. An arched wooden gate in the far stone wall was slowly opening, like a portcullis on a medieval castle.
The boom of a drum sounded, rattling and shaking the stone. People stomped their feet, vibrating the arena. It was so loud it sounded like we were inside thunder.
Then a dozen men pulling thick ropes rolled a cage from the dark mouth of the tunnel. The cage was ten feet long and five feet tall, made of warped and twisted metal. Spikes lined the inside, pointing at the creature within. The cage was barely big enough to hold the beast.
Justice let out a harsh breath.
Men surrounded the cage, taunting the beast and poking it with spears. It roared and snarled viciously, snapping and yelping as it was stabbed and prodded.
He hated cages. He hated them.
“There’s your jackaltooth,” Gerald said.
“They’ve worked it into a frenzy. It’s gonna tear ’em apart and feast on their innards.
” Then he spit on the stone, showing his disgust. “After that, they always kill ’em and serve ’em at the cake shops.
If you don’t want jackaltooth, you might avoid cake for a few days. ”
They were going to bully him into a mindless frenzy, drive him to massacre people, and then eat him? Did he know who he was? Did he know what was happening?
The men stopped pulling the ropes, the wheels slowed, and the cage slid to a halt. One of them jabbed a spear into the jackaltooth’s side, and his throat rattle erupted into a rage-filled howl.
“Mari?” Justice squeezed my hand.
“That’s not a jackaltooth,” I whispered.
“Yeah. I was afraid you were going to say that.”
“Knock me out, and I’ll kill you.”
Justice grinned, his expression full of self-mockery. “It’s all over, huh? Well, whatever else, you can’t say we didn’t have a fun time while it lasted.”
“Right.” I smiled and pulled my hand free. We were back to being Mari and Justice—friends. Where he loved me one way, and I loved him another.
Then a chill raced over me as the crowd’s screams increased. “We have to rescue them.”
“We don’t necessarily have to.”
“Justice.”
“No skin off my back,” Gerald said. “She’s your friend.”
Not a friend, I almost said but didn’t.
Below, the men backed away from the cage and ran toward the tunnel. Then, at the entrance, they pulled a lever, and the cage door crashed open. The metal shuddered as it hit the ground. The crowd roared, and the portcullis closed, locking the victims in with the jackaltooth.
The people in the arena—Last included—waved and smiled, throwing flowers in the air.
Then the jackaltooth—Luvic—burst from his cage.
He snarled, filled with bloodlust. He was going to massacre them. He was going to kill them all. He crouched, his muscles rippling, and then launched himself into the air.
I screamed. “Luvic! No!”
His answer was a violent roar.