Chapter 13: Ready, Player One

A sudden jolt shocked Libby awake, and she opened gritty eyes to a world transformed.

She was curled on her side, her heavy head propped on a bent arm. With a groan and a wince, she slowly tilted her face upward and blinked through a glassy layer of tears.

Night had fallen.

Above her, the narrow circle of sky at the arena’s zenith opened like a portal to another world. The tumbling belt of pitted asteroids that streaked across the sky during the day now glowed like a string of oblong moons, their deep craters washed in a stark silver light.

As eerie as it was ... it was ... hauntingly beautiful all the same. An ethereal marvel in an otherwise bleak, hostile reality.

An emotion she thought she’d never feel again, a faint, tentative sense of wonder, quietly unfurled in her chest. She lifted a shaking hand and reached toward that narrow circle of freedom.

The pads of her fingers met cold, unforgiving steel. Dread pooled in the hollow spaces between her ribs and chilled the blood in her veins.

Then it all came crashing back in at once; the swelling volume of the crowd, her shoulder digging into a hard floor; the lustrous, parallel lines slatted across her field of vision.

A cage. They’d placed her inside a fucking cage.

Her fragile thread of wonder snapped as quickly as it had formed, and she was abruptly torn back to the present. To the bright light of the moons that highlighted the dried streaks of pearlescent cum and drow blood that marked her body. To the memory of that room where they’d reduced her to a desperate, quivering mess and violated her with the severed organs of a metamorphosized king.

A constant pressure sat heavy in her middle, and she winced as she rolled over, trying to alleviate the cramping weight that branched through her insides and made every breath feel too tight.

She blinked harder, her vision finally clearing. Her domed enclosure was a gleaming red construct, the entire structure at least twice her height in length and about the same in width. She’d been left inside the mouth of a dark alcove, one of four wide, half-circle passageways recessed around the main portcullis. The round courtyard that served as the arena’s entrance took shape first, followed by the levels of tiered seating that rose like a sheer cliff in the distance.

Her dread solidified, then sharpened as she took in the yawning expanse of the ancient arena.

Only the arena wasn’t a vacant ring of pale sand anymore.

Her mouth suddenly went dry.

It fell open.

The platform was gone. In its place, a monolithic structure stretching nearly as high as the arena’s uppermost tiers dominated the sunken ring. It spanned at least two hundred feet across, the remaining sands circling it around half its diameter.

Enormous iron chains, their links each the size of a small car, snaked through the bars of its gleaming frame. They plunged deep into the sand before rising to connect with iron loops set into the arena’s concentric inner spine. Their criss-crossing paths held the towering monument upright by some unholy marriage of infernal engineering and demonic magic that defied every law of physics she knew.

Her dilated gaze panned across it, more details taking shape the longer she stared. The ostentatious construct had a vaulted crown with interlocking, ornate struts, and the metal itself was burnished with a rich, garnet patina.

It took her several heartbeats to recognize what she was looking at.

It was another cage.

An identical copy of her own made of the very same blood-red steel.

Except that behemoth was large enough to house an entire fucking army.

An entire legion of demons.

Nausea built in her core alongside an insistent throbbing sensation just behind her navel.

Great braziers had been lit between the first level of seating and the outer curve of the installation. They cast the dark amphitheatre in a shifting dance of flame and shadow, the beveled crimson pillars at its center reflecting the wavering firelight like swathes of rippling blood.

The angle of the drafty corridor obscured her location from the swarms of demons roving the stands. Libby knew it was only a matter of time before she was dragged back into the blazing light of the ring and forced to participate in the next event designed to destroy what remained of her soul.

A wary glance over the side of her cage confirmed it was mounted to a hulking, two-wheeled, wrought iron pull cart. The two bars at its head were tilted down, the heavy bulk left to lean against the cobblestones. The precarious angle made it next to impossible for her to sit up, and she gripped the bars at her back to keep herself from pitching forward and rolling to the other side.

Her gaze flicked back up to the towering structure, unable to stop her eyes from cataloguing every terrible detail.

It looked like an abyssal terrarium dredged up from the flaming pits of Hell itself. Its interior was lined with jagged cliffs of slate and basalt that jutted from the sand at irregular intervals toward its crown, some soaring as high as nine or ten stories tall. An oppressive molten glow emanated from its center, sending embers spiraling into the night that winked out like dying stars.

Fuck.

She was so fucked.

This couldn’t be real. There was no way she could survive that. It was so, so—

“Red,” Fenrow right next to her ear.

She jerked so hard her back completely arched off the velvet-lined floor. Her clammy grip around the bars at her back slipped, and she went rolling for two breathless seconds before colliding with the opposite side of the cage. She gasped, barely registering the impact, and shot startled, panicked eyes across the enclosure.

“Easy, easy,” Fenrow cooed, holding up both hands as he sauntered around the perimeter. Libby was already shaking her head, her heels digging into the carpeted bottom.

“You were the one narrating your thoughts aloud, by the way,” he said with a roll of his eyes. “How could I not join in? Oh, come now, sweetheart. If you keep thrashing around like that you’re going to hyperventilate and pass out. Again.” He shook his head and snorted, as if he found her so very amusing. “And we can’t have that, now can we? Not when everyone out there is waiting for the woman of the hour!”

He barked out a mean laugh and offered her a round of mocking applause, his features contorting into a smile much too sharp and much too wide for his face.

His wolfish teeth and the gold caps on his eight largest fangs were still stained scarlet with her blood.