Forcing myself to my feet, I find Breise not twenty feet in front of me, her blond hair unbound and sopping wet, her face red as she coughs up water. When she lifts her eyes to mine, I see a very real fear in them, a desperation echoed inside my own heart.
Her weakness is water.
My eyes widen as I realize how truly cruel the universe is.
My family died by drowning.
The only way to save my own life is by drowning someone else.
“Fuck.”
Taavi and the hellhound are embroiled in a war of their own, leaving me and Breise in a strange, quiet place of our own, resting on the sharp end of a needle.
I can kill her now.
But … even if she wins, she can’t kill me, right? Not with Bain’s mark. So how can I end this without taking an innocent life? I’ve never been the superhero type, never even really been that good of a person. To be quite frank, I grew up privileged, loved, spoiled. Until I lost my family, I didn’t know the meaning of true suffering, of heartbreak. I was an awful brat. Even now, I’m a listless, sarcastic asshole without a single hope, aspiration, or dream.
To kill this girl … that would shatter whatever little good I have left inside of me.
I take a step forward as Breise struggles to find her feet, still choking, still coughing.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I say, and she flicks gray eyes up to me in disbelief and confusion. “But for us to get out of this, you’re going to have to hurt me.”
“What are you talking about?” she whispers as I bite my lip. Okay, so Breise can’t kill me, no matter what, right? But it has to at least look like she has. How do we do that? How do we get out of this?
She has to find my weakness, the thing that would kill me if I didn’t have the mark.
My attention turns to Dorothy, seated up in the stadium on her little throne, watching us. She knows I have the mark, that I can’t lose. So maybe I’m not thinking of the right solution here. What if Breise ‘kills’ me, but Dorothy doesn’t declare her a winner? What if she leaves us in here, waiting for me to get back up and fight?
Breise finally finds her feet, sweeping both hands over her hair and then flinging droplets of water back at me. In midair, they turn to icy shards, slicing through my flesh like knives.
I cry out as blood spatters, but the move is meant more as a distraction than anything else. Breise swirls her fingers over the open wound on her arm and then draws an iron sword out, swinging it down toward the ground and flicking off excess droplets of blood.
She raises it up like a proper weapon, like she actually knows what to do with it, leaving me to grapple with an ethical dilemma that involves drowning an innocent girl or getting one of my limbs severed.
My hand unconsciously rises to my chest as my body rebels against the idea of that sort of agony. Shit, shit, shit. I don’t know how to summon a sword out of magic. I don’t know how to do any of this.
My eyes close, and I taste the faintest whisper of honey and coconuts on the back of my tongue. When I open them, Breise is within swinging range of my neck, sending her blade right for my exposed throat.
I duck down and lunge forward, sprawling across the grass because I’m just a normal goddamn person, not some badass urban fantasy character in leather pants. This is not going to end well for me, I think as Breise turns on a dime and brings her sword down in an arc toward my belly.
I close my eyes again and kick out blindly, not truly expecting to hit anything. Through sheer luck, I manage to kick her in the belly, throwing her off just enough that the sword lands between my legs. The tip is about an inch away from my lady bits.
Taavi grabs me by the back of the jacket, yanking me across the grass as I spot the hellhound, arterial blood spraying from a wound across its neck. It stumbles, but it doesn’t go down.
Part of me wonders if Dorothy isn’t right to be afraid of wizards and their guardians.
They’re fucking invincible.
Taavi releases me, and I stand up, exhaling sharply.
The green shield above our heads abruptly flickers … and then disappears.
For the briefest of seconds, there’s complete and total silence. And then the sounds of the audience pour in like a wave, deafening me as I look around, as confused as everyone else. Even Dorothy and Tuala have risen from their chairs.
“We have a witch in the Emerald City.” Dorothy’s voice echoes around the stadium, as if from a loudspeaker, and I cringe, gritting my teeth against the noise. “Seek it out.”
