37. The Sixth Game
THE SIXTH GAME
Seraphina
Rather than being greeted by the familiar floor of The Meet, or any recognizable room in Vulcaris for that matter, black-veined stone stretches out around my ravine battered boots.
Though we stepped into the hellgate as a group, my friends and I aren’t together now, we’re wherever it’s decided to spit us out.
I see Khali first as she rushes over to Az, then quickly find Reiva just as he spots them, racing over to the giant warrior’s side too.
The two of them don’t waste a moment, assessing the damage from the journey. Repacking and tightening bandages that were only meant to make it as far as Vulcaris and its infirmary.
As I cross the distance to help them, I take in our new surroundings and notice that any influence greed had been trying to force over me at the ravine moments ago is gone. Replaced by something else.
Something much uglier.
The hall is circular and silent, and as I pass the cadets who beat us here, my brain is scrambling between worry for Az and trying to figure out what’s going on.
Most of the cadets look as confused as I am.
A double game.
I gasp. Silver’s warning…
‘You’re not listening, Scar. You have just over one week until the final game.’
Of course.
If only I’d worked it out sooner.
Would it have helped? Probably not. Az would still be injured and my friends still distracted.
I have to fight this hideous feeling sinking into my chest and help them.
At the hall's center rises a low, smooth stone dais, bare except for the column of light pouring down from a jagged opening in the ceiling high above. Dust drifts through it, slow and weightless, catching the glow like suspended gold.
A stage.
Surrounding it, mirrors form a perfect ring and as I move around it, one of the cadets, the lone survivor from Stannum, cuts in front of me to stand before a mirror.
The surface ripples and he freezes as a voice soft as silk wraps itself around my mind.
“Dare to look and you will see.”
Something begins to form on the dais. Not all at once, more like a memory assembling itself piece by piece.
I force myself to look away, knowing how these wicked games work by now. If I dare to look, I likely won’t be able to look away until I either beat it or become consumed by it.
Reiva and Khali’s gazes rise up to the dais like they’ve been compelled.
“Don’t!” I call out, picking up my pace to a run. “Don’t look at the dais or mirrors, focus on Az.”
I’m almost to them when Lilliana steps into my path and I stop short.
Her eyes lock onto mine, but rather than the normal cunning calculation I find in them, they are too wide, chaotic.
“If it isn’t the perfect prude, Seraphina Scar-vo.”
“Move Lilliana. I don’t have time for whatever this is right now.”
“You don’t even realize, do you?” she asks, voice tight. “The way he watches you. The way they care about you. The way everyone hangs off your every holier-than-thou word.”
“What are you talking abou—” I gasp.
Envy.
A weakness for the demoness, and it’s already taken hold.
“You’re not thinking clearly,” I tell her.
Her jaw clenches. “There you go again, thinking you are better than me, that you can take the higher ground and leave me down here in your shadow.”
“Stop before you embarrass yourself. This isn’t you, it’s the game talking. You’re letting envy poison your mind.”
“Am not!”
“Yes, you are,” I sigh. “Good luck surviving this one.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“If you hadn’t spent so much time burning bridges and screwing people over, I might care enough to help. But as it happens—”
“But you have to help me!”
I scoff. “Sure,” I mutter, moving to step around her. “Need I remind you of my book that you still haven’t given back?”
“But you owe me!” she snaps, stepping in my way and I go still, remembering the Triad. Our deal.
‘And if you win?’
‘You will owe me one favor. Anything I ask, you will do it.’
“Not now,” I shake my head, glancing over her shoulder at my friends just as Reiva steps over Az’s scarily still body toward a mirror. “Reiva. No! Stop.”
He doesn’t seem to hear me, and keeps moving like he’s in a trance.
Lilliana’s hands wrap around the tops of my arms, her claws digging in. “Listen to me, halo-rat! You owe me one favor. I’m calling it in. You’re getting me through to the next part of the games. Alive.”
My heart skips a beat. So fast, so careless. So out of character, but I’ll take it.
I nod. “Alright, fine. But if I do this, my debt is paid in full?”
Relief flickers across her face. She drops her grip on me and nods desperately. “Yes. I swear!”
A smirk tugs at my lips. She thinks I mean it the way she does. I let her, grabbing her wrist…
“What are you—”
“Getting you through to the next part of the game. This game. Alive.”
I pull her toward the nearest empty mirror.
She resists a step too late. “That’s not what I mea—”
“Too late,” I reply evenly, positioning her in front of it. Dead center.
“Oh, Lilliana. Poor, poor, Lilliana,” I mutter, mimicking her words of a few weeks ago. “You’ve not made many deals, have you?”
She frowns.
“No need to answer. It’s obvious. If you had, you’d know to be much more specific.”
Then I let go and look away just as the mirror ripples in my peripheral.
A soft, shifting sound, then silence.
I glance back and Lilliana stands frozen.
Eyes glazed.
Gone.
The mirror has her now and my debt is paid.
With any luck, whatever she sees will consume her but I’ll let fate decide that.
When I reach my friends, Reiva is kneeling before a mirror, completely transfixed, and Khali is climbing to her feet.
“How is he?” I ask her.
She doesn’t answer as she comes toward me. I reach out to hug her, assuming the worst and ready to comfort my friend. But Khali steps around me at the last moment and I whirl around, reaching to grab her.
She tries to shrug off my hold as she pushes forward toward the next free mirror.
“Khali, stop. Az needs you. He needs us. He can’t complete this game without us.”
I keep talking, begging, desperate to say something that gets through to her and wakes her up out of the mirror's compulsion.
That’s when I accidentally look at the dais.
My breath catches and my arm drops, releasing my grip on Khali.
On the stage, Silver stands within the light, composed and as in control as ever, with that usual quiet yet dangerous authority about him.
Beside him, stands a woman.
Her posture is easy, her presence captivating. When she shifts closer to him, there’s no hesitation, no calculation, just the quiet certainty that she belongs there.
With him.
She isn’t even trying how the likes of Lilliana would.
My chest tightens.
That’s the worst part.
Her back is to me but I know exactly who she is.
I don’t need to have met her before.
Hair as black as Khali’s.
Skin just as pale.
Two thin, symmetrical scars running down her exposed back.
Eurya.
Silver’s arms wrap around her as she steps into his embrace, and his magical hands softly trail up and down her back.
The ugly feeling clawing at my chest becomes overwhelming, until the very air I breathe to survive is laced with envy.
Her scars are much neater than mine, less ugly.
And the more I look, the more I don’t just see her, but I measure myself against her.
Without having noticed my legs moving, I’m facing a mirror and its rippling surface comes alive in front of my eyes.
I know I shouldn’t look.
I do anyway.
My breath leaves me.
The young woman with chestnut hair, amber eyes and a tattoo of scales on her collarbone is… whole.
Wings rise from my back, vast and powerful with the gray feathers of the nephilim, slightly darker than normal, but beautiful all the same.
I glamour them away for a moment, long enough to twist my body and see there are no scars there.
‘Like what you see? Step inside.’
I don’t, not yet. First I unglamour my wings.
Am I taller?
No. I’m just standing taller, like I’ve never once questioned my place in the world.
And I’m smiling.
Not a small hint of a smile, but so widely the angels will doubtlessly be able to see it sparkling bright from all the way up in the heavens.
‘Step inside,’ the voice entices again, more urgent, impatient.
I'm smiling like I’ve never smiled before.
Wide and bright and effortless.
It should feel as incredible as it looks.
It doesn’t.
The longer I stare, the deeper something cold settles under my ribs.
It takes me a moment to work out what is so off, so wrong. When I do, I can’t unsee it.
The smile doesn’t reach my eyes.
They’re empty.
Flat.
Like I’m wearing joy instead of feeling it.
Unease coils through me.
‘This version is better,’ the voice murmurs.
I shake my head. “This version is not real,” I whisper.
‘Isn’t it?’ the voice taunts. ‘It should be you on that dais with him. You deserve it. You’re owed it. Step inside.’
I shake my head. “It’s an illusion forged from envy,” I whisper. “The people on the dais are as false as the smile on my face.”
The ugliness inside me surges tenfold, like the more I fight it, the more I feed it.
‘You see it, don’t you? You see what she has.’
I don’t answer.
Because I do.
The voice decides to talk me through it anyway.
‘This version of you doesn’t wonder if she’s enough. She simply is. The woman on the dais is no match for this version of you. All you have to do is step inside.’
The words sink in like poison dressed as truth.
That’s what envy does.
It doesn’t scream or tantrum, it convinces.
I take a step closer to the mirror.
My reflection’s smile widens.
‘He will want only you, have eyes only for you. One more step and he’s yours.’
The worst part, the most dangerous part, is how reasonable it sounds.
Envy isn’t irrational, it’s logic, sharpened just enough to cut.
“The people on the dais are as false as the girl in front of me now,” I remind myself.
‘You’re overthinking. This is what you want.’
My foot lifts, ready to take the final step.
‘To smile, to love, to have wings at your back and the man at your arm.’
I look at the amber eyes again and swallow.
Empty.
“I don’t want her life.”
The mirror flickers and the smile falters.
‘You do,’ the voice insists. ‘Imagine it, scar free skin, no longer too ugly to love.’
Silver’s voice echoes in my mind.
“Nothing about you is ugly,” he’d said. But even if he hadn’t, I know all about envy. I spent years jealous of my seraphim siblings.
Then I learned that the moment you stop measuring, you stop shrinking.
“I don’t want her life,” I repeat. “I want what I think she has. And that’s not the same thing.”
The crack appears, thin at first, then splitting out across the glass.
My reflection’s composure fractures with it. ‘You need this,’ the voice snaps, this time moving the mouth of my reflection instead, like I’m saying it to myself.
‘Without it, you’re still—’
“Still me,” I cut in.
Another cracking sound, spreading faster now.
‘Step inside!’
“No. Anything that requires me to become someone or something else to feel worthy isn’t worth becoming.”
The words settle deep.
Another crack.
The mirror shatters.
I‘m back in the hall of mirrors, the first to shatter mine.
“Az!” I call out as I notice him trying to drag himself toward a mirror.
I race over to his side, the other cadets still transfixed as they fight their seemingly perfect selves.
“What are you doing?”
I glance between the free mirror he is pulling himself toward with sheer arm power and determination.
“Have to… get to… the mirror. Must complete… the game.”
“Fine,” I say, holding out a hand so I can help drag him instead, giant heavy body and what remains of the makeshift bed he’d been lying on, and all.
“Thanks…” he mumbles, taking my hand with his.
“In case you hadn’t worked it out,” I tell him. “It’s the envy game.”
“Figured as much… when my mind… started comparing… superior fucking fruit baskets… to mine.”
I laugh despite myself and the situation, but the amusement is quickly cut short when I see the trail of blood that’s followed him this far.
“I’ve completed the game, I know how to beat it. There might be a loophole. What if I try to shatter your mirror for you?”
He tsks, and a smile spreads across his face. “I’ve got this... Envy isn’t… a problem for me. Fruit baskets… aside.”
It isn't?
I think back over our time of knowing each other and everything I’ve learned about him.
Unlike Lilliana, Az has never really shown any.
Either he doesn’t have a jealous bone in his body or he is really good at hiding it.
Protective and possessive of Khali? Sure. Easily angered by the thought of having to share her? Absolutely.
“It’s like… my old dear… always said.”
I frown. “What did she say?”
“Envy doesn’t mean… they have more. It means… you’ve decided… you are less. Azazel Thorne… is not less.”
Not a lie.
If he wasn’t so badly injured and fragile right now, I might argue he is actually too much.
“Then good luck, I guess.”
But it’s too late, he’s already staring at the mirror.