Chapter 23
Chapter twenty-three
Raegan
The room isn’t a room at all. It opens to a massive cavern, as large as a football field, covered with sand.
An eight-foot wall borders the ground in an oval shape, and stacked levels with tables and chairs circle around it so every seat has a clear view.
People in suits and dresses fill the stadium, cheering, shouting, drinking, talking…
“One of the big money-makers for them is throwing a bunch of gifted into a locked down area—a cage, an arena, you name it—and betting on the one to survive.”
“Fight me again, and you won’t just watch. You and those boys will be participants.”
“I’ll leave it up to you to decide which of you will have the advantage.”
So, that was it. If we’d stayed put, he might have agreed to our deal. And if not, we’d end up here.
I wasn’t a fan of the last deal anyway.
“It’s the fight Elias was talking about,” I share, now that I’ve realized what’s happened. “Because we escaped.”
Kellan holds my arm, tugging me back. “We’ll go another way.”
There are dark shapes scattered about the arena, and movement off to the right catches my attention. I step forward, pulling against Kell. “Wait.”
Aiden moves around us to look further in. He curses. “They’re ours.” Pits fighters and Guild members.
They’re already here.
Fuck. Did he capture the members at the Tower with Cibrina? Was this his plan all along, to use our deaths to regain whatever money we’ve lost him?
I recognize Knight and a few others who fought in the Pits grouped together, watching each other’s backs. Trinity and Parker—Guild members—are the only ones from their team still standing. Both were strike teams like us. I don’t see any members who stayed behind. And then...
A vine lashes out at someone still moving out there. The agent dodges. A flower blooms on the vine, and then shoots something at him, and he drops.
I try to follow the vine, but there are already so many out there, either motionless in the sand or poised in the air, ready to strike. A green ball draws my stare, and I see Silas crouched and panting in front of it, one arm out protectively.
Another agent creeps up behind him, targeting whoever must be within Silas’s makeshift barrier. “Aiden,” I gasp when I see them, taking another step into the room. We won’t make it in time. Not unless… I snap my head around to find Jackson. “Jack!” I shout.
He nods once, then throws a knife at that agent. They fall. He pulls out three more knives, sending them around the ring to strike any remaining agents.
Silas’s expression melts to relief when he sees us running toward him. “’Bout time,” he pants, leaning into his ball of vines for support. His other arm hangs limply at his side, and his face and arms are covered in scratches and bruises.
“What happened?” I ask him, even though I have a sinking feeling I know the answer. Kell and Aiden check the nearest fallen members while Jackson retrieves his knives.
A bell rings. Doors around the arena drag open, and the audience cheers. A loud click sounds overhead where a black box blinks to life, its digital scoreboard updating with our names and numbers.
Silas grips his arm and taps his temple against the vine ball, closing his eyes.
“Portals appeared under us at the board member’s house.
We fell into cages, and then we were dragged out here an hour ago after a day with no food or water.
” He swallows hard, and I wish I still had some of that water left for him.
“It’s a fight between us and them. For their entertainment,” he spits out.
His eyes flip open, pinning to the scoreboard above us.
“Charles said we made our choice, so he made his. They’re betting on how long we’ll last, and the fighting agents get rewards for killing us. ”
The half a sandwich I ate now churns in my gut. Maybe eating that wasn’t a good idea.
When I look at Aiden, he’s checking the pulse of a Guild member.
He drops his hand, his face tight and hard.
He surveys the arena, the agents striding from the doors and then standing to the side, as if they’re all waiting for a signal.
Aiden stands, his whip sword stretching and sharpening around his feet.
A bright light and buzzing snaps my attention to the left. Jackson’s blade is stuck in some sort of electrified force field above the bordering wall. There’s a flicker of energy that runs through the air, revealing a dome over us. The door we came through is already blocked by a wall of concrete.
Even if I had the time to break through it, could we all escape together in time?
I peek through a break in the vines. There’s a body in there, but the vines are so dense I can’t make them out. “Who’s in there?”
“Evie,” Silas answers. “She got thrown into that fucking electrical field and stopped breathing. I got her back, but…” He clenches his jaw and stares at the ground.
Kellan walks up behind him and squeezes his uninjured shoulder.
Aiden and Jackson join us.
“Just stay here and protect Evie. We’ll take care of the rest,” Aiden says.
“Are any of the others…?” I start, but he shakes his head, and another wave of nausea rolls through me.
Closing my eyes, I take a slow breath and reach for my gift. It responds eagerly, permeating my body with a soft burn that I revel in now. It floods my veins, burning away the nausea and replacing it with anger. Resolve.
Another bell rings.
The dozens of agents surrounding us break into a run.
“Cover me,” I shout, sprinting far enough away from Silas to try drawing their fire toward us instead of him, and then crouch.
The guys circle me without question, blocking any attacks that come our way so I can concentrate.
I push my fingers into the gritty sand and send my gift down. Down, and out.
My gift runs deep beneath the surface, hidden as it stretches in every direction. The arena echoes with grunts, screams, and the clash of metal. But I keep my focus on my gift as I keep it going, on and on until it’s beneath the entire arena.
And then beyond it.
I don’t know who the people dining at the tables are. All I know is that they’re betting on our lives, finding entertainment in the bloodshed, eating and drinking while our members were murdered in front of them.
I mark them all.
If I’m lucky, there might be board members in the crowd as well.
I don’t even feel the strain of spreading my gift so far and wide. It fills the massive room from end to end like an invisible trap.
Now.
I draw my gift to the surface, seeking out the bodies above and spreading destruction like a disease.
Agents and spectators alike scream when my gift touches them.
Stone cracks and shifts under our feet. The attacks stop as people try to run.
Or they fall from the pain, and my gift attacks more of them at once, eating away at them until they’re nothing but husks.
Aiden, Jackson, and Kellan suddenly fly off their feet, thrown halfway across the arena.
I whip around to see what caused it, preparing for an attack, just as Charles raises a gun at me from only a few feet away.
Fuck.
A gunshot fires before I can think of what to do next. I’m frozen in place, staring at the gun when the sound registers.
Charles lands face-first at my feet, a hole blown through the back of his head.
My heart thrashes, shock seizing my lungs as I try to work out what the fuck just happened.
I’m not dead.
Is Charles?
How?
“Rae!”
Dane stands on the wall bordering the arena with a gun in his hand. Our eyes connect for a heartbeat, and then hands outside the arena yank him off the wall, and he disappears.
“Dane!”
A grunt at my feet reminds me of Charles.
Lifting my boot, I slam it down with my gift.
He vanishes just before my attack hits, the ground cracking instead.
Damn it.
I draw more of my gift out. It’s going to take everything I have to kill him.
More than last time. More than I ever had before.
I call on all of it. Even when my body’s thrumming with magic, overflowing with my gift as it scalds my nerves and red lightning crawls up my limbs and strikes the area around me.
The sheer force of my gift brings my feet off the ground. I hold my hands out, building it up, feeding it with everything I am.
Charles watches me rise, the bullet hole through the side of his face already closed in and a patch of hardened skin in its place. He aims his gun.
Bullets fly at me one after another. My gift seeks them out, red lightning flashing in jagged arcs to disintegrate anything they touch.
The bullets are dust before they can reach me.
Agents in the arena are struck at random, held captive by my gift as it eats away at them, before releasing them to the sand.
Lightning hits the people in the audience as well, destroying without thought.
Only the Guild members remain unaffected.
I aim it at Charles. I don’t have to physically touch him now, not as long as my lightning can reach him.
He starts cutting his own skin in shallow swipes, forcing Kellan’s gift to activate. My gift skates over his scales, burrowing into any areas he’d missed but not dealing nearly as much damage as I’d hoped.
I catch Kellan hopping the wall after Dane from the corner of my eye, no sign of the electrified barrier there. More agents have swarmed the room, and I realize a group of them is trying to throw their attacks at me, but Aiden and Jackson are fighting them back.
Aiden’s whip sword sails through the air, cutting through agents as far as it can reach and swinging in a half-circle. Jackson’s using his gift to cut the agents on his side with slashes of air.
Something shoots around the arena, taking down one agent after another. Reid appears by another agent, cutting him down with one of his twin blades.