This is deep magic, she said, her divine voice speaking through me bone and blood. Too deep for normal humans to feel, but you’re experiencing it as I do. She looked up at the swirling power, which was so thick and fast that I could almost see it flying by in a red haze over my head. I suspected something like this was happening. I’ve felt echoes of these chants for years, but I hadn’t realized it had gotten this big. This bad.
“This might be a special circumstance,” I whispered, turning our shared vision back to Nik, who was still striding away. “I don’t think this place is used to being denied.”
And I was so damn proud of him for doing it. Proud and terrified. I knew almost nothing about the Gameskeeper as a person, but I’d seen enough of how he ran his business to know there was no way he’d let the night end like this. Something was bound to happen, and the moment I realized that, it did.
All at once, the overwhelming magic flying past me twisted. It was the same jerking motion I’d felt during the manticore fight, but while that one had been almost imperceptibly tiny, this one hit like a car crash, and as it landed, Nik stopped in his tracks.
As I’d said before, Nik was the calmest, most thoughtful person I knew. He was patient, he was thorough, he was practical, he was kind. He was in no way, shape, or form a “mad dog.” This was why, when the cameras zoomed in, my first thought was that they’d cut to the wrong person, because the face on the giant screens looked nothing like the Nik I knew. With that horrible, dead-eyed, bloodthirsty expression, he scarcely even looked human.
“God,” I whispered since she was right there. “What’s wrong with—”
I didn’t get to finish. My throat had squeezed too tight to speak as Nik—or at least the thing wearing Nik’s body—turned and leaped back on top of his downed opponent. The poor man didn’t even see it coming. He was still pushing up out of the wreckage of the fallen pillar when Nik crashed into him from behind, slamming his face back into the sand with an animal roar.
The crowd roared back, the repeating chants of “Kill!” melting into a single scream of giddy, gory delight.
“Looks like we’re not done yet!” the announcer yelled over the chaos. “It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for, folks! He’s gone Mad Dog!”
“Mad Dog!” the people screamed in reply. “Mad Dog! Mad Dog! Mad Dog!”
And he was. The horrible magic was pounding harder than ever, washing over me in huge waves that got bigger with every chant. Each one felt like an icepick through my head, but I barely noticed the pain this time. My complete attention, my eyes and brain and everything else I had, was locked on the man in the arena. The man who looked like Nik, but who was doing things Nik would never do. Things like grabbing a defeated man’s head and slamming it repeatedly into one of the broken steel bars from the fallen pillar until the poor man’s face looked like it really had been chewed by a dog.
He must have passed out at some point, because he didn’t move when Nik finally stopped bashing and tossed him into the spikes instead, hurling the larger man’s mostly metal body with a strength I hadn’t known he possessed. Or maybe Nik didn’t possess it. Maybe this wasn’t Nik at all.
It certainly didn’t fight like him. In addition to the very un-Nik-like brutality, which was both cruel and inefficient, he didn’t touch Nik’s guns or use any of the zip ties or other tools I knew Nik was hiding in his armor’s bulky pockets. Nik always had something tricky up his sleeve. He never attacked head-on if he could avoid it, but this creature seemed to have no plan at all. His opponent was long defeated. For all I knew, the big man was already dead, but Nik didn’t stop.
Even after he’d thrown the body onto the spikes, skewering his metal torso in three places, he just kept going, jumping over the huge barbs to pummel the poor man again. There was no purpose to the violence. No point, no victory to win. Just the mindless attack of a mad animal who keeps chewing at its victim long after they’ve been chewed to bits.
It made me sick to watch. What had started as a brilliant fight was now a bloody mess. This meant that, unlike Nik’s actual victory earlier, it fit right in with the rest of tonight’s sad spectacles, so, naturally, the crowd loved it. They cheered at every wet smack of Nik’s fists, their screams rising to the rafters until they were all I could hear.
“Disgusting,” my father said, looking down his smoke nose at the roaring people. “They didn’t come to see a fight. They came to watch a slaughter.”
I nodded blankly, putting my hands over my ears again, not that it helped since the magic was still pounding into me. I didn’t want to think that anyone could cheer for this disgusting, pointless murder. I didn’t want to believe anyone could enjoy this, but I couldn’t deny what was happening all around me. Even the German tourists—men who’d seemed perfectly nice when we’d sat down—were spellbound by it, their transfixed faces red and puffy from all the screaming. Staring at their transformation, it suddenly struck me that this was just as wrong and alarming as what had happened to Nik. Why were otherwise normal people so into this horror? What the hell was wrong with everyone?
It’s the magic.
The power and noise were pounding through me so hard, I had to close my eyes to concentrate enough to hear her. “What do you mean?”
The magic here isn’t just
