That was… strange. So strange, it did nothing to endear him to me. Far from it. I was certain he hadn’t done it out of the kindness of his benevolent heart.

“What do you want?” I demanded.

“I want an apology. For stabbing me. Especially given that I could have turned you over to your victim’s brother, and didn’t.” He leaned a bit closer, and I matched the movement by stepping back. “Because you did kill that bastard, didn’t you?”

I scoffed.

He frowned. “What?”

“I’m not a fool.”

“Oh?”

“You wanted him to give you an excuse. You just wanted to swing your cock around.”

Because in the House of Night, everything was a power game. His spectacle at the feast? That was a performance.

Well, fine. I’d rather have my enemies looking at him than looking at me. But that didn’t mean I had to put up with it. Maybe he was curious about me. Maybe he just liked to toy with his food. I didn’t need to know why he was playing the game to know I had nothing to win.

I raised my blade. “Now let me pass.”

He arched his brows. “I ask for an apology, and I get threats.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t aim higher.”

He looked pointedly down at himself. “A little higher, or a lot higher?”

That was almost funny. It caught me a bit off guard. It was rare that vampires made jokes. Hundreds of years withered away a sense of humor. When I was fifteen or so, I gave up on trying to make Vincent understand. I was lucky I’d had Ilana to—

The casual thought of her triggered a stab of pain so intense it took my breath away.

“Let me pass,” I snapped.

He gave me a strange look. “What was that?”

That caught me a bit off guard, too. That he noticed the brief emotion I had allowed to flinch over my face.

“Let me pass.”

“Or what?”

“Or I’ll stab you again.”

“How much higher?”

For a moment, I actually considered doing it. Maybe this was the best opportunity I’d get, right now, when he was acting like it was all a big fucking joke. What a luxury that must be.

It was only the thought of that flash of black, then white—Asteris, I was sure of it—that stilled my hand.

Instead, I made a dramatic show of looking him up and down—lingering at his thigh and trailing up to the crotch of his leather pants, and said, “A little.”

I ducked under his arm. This time, he chuckled softly and didn’t try to stop me.

The moon gleamed bright and full, hanging heavy with challenge. The minutes since it rose had been tense and still. From my place in the greenhouse, I couldn’t hear a single sound from the Moon Palace halls.

It was nearly midnight when the ghostly thread of shadow appeared again, summoning us from our rooms. I followed it to the great hall, where the Ministaer had addressed us all the night before. The room slowly filled with people as more and more threads of shadow joined mine, until no more arrived and the shadows dissipated, leaving us all standing in awkward silence.

Everyone had taken the last day to prepare. Contestants were armed with new, freshly cleaned weapons, leather armor strapped tight to their bodies. Some wore protective sigils at their throats or etched into the armor itself. I noted those carefully—it didn’t necessarily mark them as magic wielders, but it did make the possibility more likely. Magic would be an ugly surprise in the ring.

Overnight, some had already formed little factions. The House of Blood contestants, of course, stayed together. Now, there was little doubt that the tall, muscular woman was their leader, as I’d suspected. The others listened, rapt, as she whispered to them in hushed command. Her mostly-silver hair was now bound up in a long braid, the tight pull of it emphasizing her sharp cheekbones and strong brow. As she turned to speak to one of her companions, I noticed a faint crimson crawling up from beneath the collar of her white leather armor.

Her curse. I’d never met a Bloodborn vampire before, but I’d heard that red marks on their skin signaled the end stages of it. If that was true, this woman was far along. The next step would be insanity. And beyond that…

Well, people murmured about what the House of Blood’s curse did to them. Turned them into little more than animals in the end.

I shuddered and looked away.

Some of the other contestants had formed little groups overnight, too—probably seeing the temporary value of strength in numbers. Almost certainly, too, thinking ahead to the Halfmoon trial. It was the only trial structure that was the same every year: in which contestants would need to fight in teams or partners, and half the field would be eliminated.

My eyes found Raihn at the other side of the room. Beside him was the cheerful woman with the short hair. She leaned close, whispering excitedly, while he surveyed the room.

What an odd pair.

Only a few now remained notably set back from the rest of the group: me, several members of the House of Shadows—known for their staunch independence—and Ibrihim, who was one of the last to reach the great room, visibly limping on his mangled foot.

The Kejari was no place for pity. Still, I felt it anyway as I watched him hobble down the hall. I knew better than anyone that no one should be dismissed out of hand. But it was hard to imagine any version of today’s events that wouldn’t end in Ibrihim’s death.

The minutes passed. We waited in tense silence.

I unsheathed my blades, adjusting my grip around the hilts.

I’d studied each of the twenty Kejaris that came before this, and I had thought long and hard about what this trial could be. The first trial usually represented Nyaxia’s departure from her home in the White Pantheon. She had ventured out beyond the borders of her land and was attacked by beasts during her midnight walk. They pursued her for miles, and in her panic, she grew impossibly lost. Sometimes, the trial involved blinding contestants, as Nyaxia was blinded during her attack. Sometimes, it required contestants to run and fight over treacherous terrain. But most often, it involved beasts—sometimes many, sometimes one.

The long silence gave way to uncomfortable whispers of confusion. Eventually, one of the Hiaj contestants asked what we were all wondering:

“So what now? Are we supposed to—”

The Moon Palace simply disappeared.

CHAPTER NINE

The screaming of the crowd shook the ground. Light blinded me—so bright that at first I questioned whether it was somehow sunlight.

But no. Torches. Thousands. Lining the rounded rim of the colosseum, floating hundreds of feet above of our heads, clutched in the thousands upon thousands of hands of the thousands upon thousands of spectators—all of whom were screaming, screaming, screaming—

Screaming like Ilana had screamed—

For a moment, nothing existed but the sky and the light and the roar of the spectators. I craned my neck up to the stars that were barely visible over the flare of the lanterns. They smeared in a circular blur, punctuated by rails of silver metal—like the top of the greenhouse. A glass ceiling.

Move, Oraya! a voice roared in the back of my head—Vincent’s voice, it was always Vincent’s voice—and I did, just in time.

Massive claws shredded the packed sand where I had been standing seconds ago.

The world snapped into violently harsh focus.

Another shriek rang out, much closer, as a Hiaj contestant was torn to pieces—one shattered wing clenched in a dripping maw, his body clutched in claws, black-red blood pouring onto the dirt.

Not just a beast. A fucking demon.

I’d only seen a demon in real life once, and I had been so injured that I barely remembered it. Even that horror had been nothing compared to these. They moved on all fours, hairless and dark-gray, with blackened veins that pulsed beneath their skin. Serrated black claws capped too-long fingers on hands made for grabbing and killing. Their faces—flat, with sharp cheekbones, slit noses, and white, mucus-coated eyes—were mostly mouth, which extended from pointed ear to pointed ear, dripping with blackened saliva over layers of jagged teeth. They were, at once, chillingly animalistic and sickeningly… humanoid.