Injured or no, he was bigger than me. I got him to the ground, crawled over his body, opening mark after mark after mark in his armor. But that lasted only for a couple of minutes before he flung me away. I let out an oof as my back smacked the sand, knocking the breath out of me.

No time to catch it as he crawled over me. I barely managed to move my left hand down, so it was trapped between our bodies as his weight pinned me. Suffocating. I couldn’t move. He grabbed my right hand and wrenched it above my head with a violent CRACK.

“I always liked you,” he panted.

“Me too,” I said, and twisted my left arm just enough to bury the blade in his gut.

His eyes widened. He opened his lips—maybe he intended to speak, but the only thing that came out was a wet, wordless grunt of pain. The poison worked fast, sizzling as it dissolved his skin. It ate at my hand, too, where his blood dripped down.

I pushed him off me. He was alive, but barely conscious, clawing at his abdomen. It had become a disgusting mess of tattered leather, pus, and blood.

I grabbed his arms and pulled. Fuck, he was heavy. I dragged him over to the slab and dropped him onto the stone.

The door opened behind me, but I stared down at Ibrihim as his head lolled, eyes slitted to meet mine.

He’d live. Miserably, and even more maimed than he was before, but he’d live. I had to put an end to that.

It shouldn’t have been hard. I had killed countless times. I didn’t know why I found myself hesitating as Ibrihim looked up at me. Maybe because we had always seen something familiar in each other, even if we never acknowledged it.

“I’m sorry.” The words slipped from my lips without my permission as I prepared to slide my blade through his chest.

But before I could bring it down, the ground shook. A deafening groan filled my ears.

My head snapped up just in time to see the walls crumbling.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I narrowly dodged a falling boulder as I dove through the door. The walls undulated. Not just collapsing, I realized—moving.

I almost laughed. Of course. In legend, Alarus’s realm was ever-evolving. The path to morality was forever changing, and thus the path to the afterlife was, too. If this trial was meant to represent the underworld, the changing maze was just one more thing to conquer.

I ran. With the stone crumbling and floor shifting, I didn’t know how long I had before my path through would be cut off completely. The mist was thicker in here. That strange smell was stronger now, too—that sweet scent.

I made decisions based on nothing but gut instinct—left, right, right, left, right, left. I skidded to a stop as I rounded a corner to see another door, this one bearing an engraving with Alarus’s eyes wide open and a fistful of flowers in his hand. Beautiful—though I had no time to appreciate it, because standing before it was Kiretta, the Shadowborn.

Neither of us hesitated.

We hit each other at the same time—my body slamming against hers as her magic encircled us. I hadn’t gotten the full force of it during the last trial. Green-tinted smoke enveloped me. Pain burst through the back of my head, her magic cracking open my mind.

I pushed her to the ground as she clawed at me. Squeezed my eyes shut.

Don’t look at her. Don’t listen to her.

Open your eyes, a sing-song voice whispered within my thoughts. Look at me, pretty girl. Look at me.

No. If Kiretta was as good of a caster as Vincent warned, she would be able to charm me this close. The Shadowborn’s gift for mind magic was just as dangerous as any weapon.

It took all my focus to hold her down while resisting her call.

Shadowborn magic was an open passage—they controlled the door, but the hallway went both ways. I pushed through her distractions, turned my mental gaze to the other end of the corridor that connected us.

Pain. Hunger. She was injured. Weak. Reckless. And I saw exactly how sloppy that desperation made her. She was a stronger magic user, but right now, I was the better fighter—and I could see all too clearly how she had underestimated me.

I let her think that she won. Slackened my mental walls. Let my head roll back. Let my eyes open. Her stare, hypnotic and mesmerizing, was so close that even that split second was almost too much. A satisfied smile began to spread over her lips.

And then I drove my dagger into her throat.

Instantly, the poison did its work. A fleeting stab of her agony rushed through my mind before I pulled away from her, severing our mental connection. She clutched her throat on the ground, which heaved and billowed with the shifting halls. She was still fighting for breath, fighting for her feet, when I dragged her onto the stone slab. I didn’t give her the opportunity to pull herself up before I dove through the door.

The scent hit me in a wall, intoxicatingly sweet.

I was now in a field of poppies. Dense white fog hung in a gentle curtain over the flowers, an expanse of bleeding red. The thunderous grind of stone echoed behind me, but here, it was eerily still. Light rippled in delicate dapples over the flower fields.

Poppies were the flowers of the dead. If the hallways behind me had been the path down, then this was the threshold of the underworld. Four arched silver doors stood before me, each revealing paths that soon faded into silver fog. The clash of steel against steel rang out ahead, as did grating rumbles that told me I wasn’t done dodging falling stone.

I had to be near the back of the group. Which meant, as much as it pained me, running towards the sounds of fighting was probably my best choice. I pushed through the middle hallway. Halfway through, I passed a bloody body, which made be hesitate in confusion.

At a glance, I assumed it was a contestant. But the blood was very, very red, and the corpse wore not battle leathers but plain once-white robes, now in tatters. The red smear on the wall implied that he had been flung against it and left to slowly die on the ground.

Human. That was a human body.

I didn’t understand. Why were there humans here?

A strange sound echoed in from down the hall. A sound like—like a cry. At first I thought I must have imagined it, because it didn’t make any sense. Maybe it was a warped noise from the crowd or another contestant, or—

Another quake of the ground jerked me from my trance, a reminder that I didn’t have time to waste. I sprinted down the rest of the hallway, until I reached another arch leading to another field of poppies—fuller now, a sea of red.

The cry echoed once more.

Not imagined. Very real.

A door stood open on the other side of the field. I stepped closer. Another lifeless—distinctly human—body lay on a stone slab. And beside her, clad in the same white robes, was a child.

My mind stopped working. Froze. Stuck on that little girl, who kneeled beside the mutilated body.

This was why my blood didn’t seem to be a draw for the other contestants, even those that were hungry. Because there were many humans here.

The white robes. The white cast on their faces. The humans were not accidents. They weren’t even prey. They were… decorations. Playing the part of the souls that occupied the underworld.

A gift. A distraction. Or simply a dramatic flair.

The little girl wept, tears streaking chalky white over her cheeks. She looked up at me and her eyes went wide—watery blue, peering between oily tendrils of black hair.

Where did these come from? There were no human children in the inner city of Sivrinaj. Did she come from the human districts?

Why was a child here?

Behind me, the sound of grinding stone drew closer. I needed to go. I needed to go right now.

I took several steps towards the door.