“Opal!”
Coughing out dust, I looked up to see a door rising from the filthy, gum-covered pavement. It opened the moment it was clear, and Dr. Kowalski burst through. “Come on!” she yelled, holding out her calloused, wrinkled hand.
I didn’t wait to be asked twice. I threw my whole body at her. If she hadn’t been so stocky, I would have knocked us both to the ground, but Dr. Kowalski was an immovable object of a woman. She caught me without so much as a stumble, hauling us both out of the way just in time for my father to rush inside, punting the guard who was trying to grab him off our tail before slamming the door behind us.
Silence fell like a sandbag. I hadn’t realized just how many people had been yelling for our blood until they fell silent. As I thought about that, though, I realized I was wrong. The deafening screaming hadn’t been coming from the guards. It had been inside me. The arena magic I’d been using to hammer the walls had been roaring through me like an angry mob. I could still feel the echo of it bouncing around inside my soul, making me feel bruised and dirty from the inside out.
“Hey,” Dr. Kowalski said, squeezing my shoulders. “Are you okay?”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak yet for fear that I’d start screaming too. I was still working my way though it when my teacher’s concerned face shifted, and suddenly I was looking into the delighted, orange-glowing eyes of the DFZ.
“That was amazing!” my god cried, throwing Dr. Kowalski’s stocky arms around me. “I’m so proud of you!”
I could feel it. As the screaming magic drained away, the DFZ’s joy flooded in clear and strong to fill the void. The city magic felt like heaven after all that bloody rage, but also slightly maddening. I was so used to being a failure, I didn’t know how to act when someone thought I wasn’t one, especially when my success was so small. I’d gotten us away from the Gameskeeper, sure, but everything else about our situation was much, much worse.
“What were you thinking?”
My god jerked back like I’d bitten her. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean!” I pointed at the empty space where the door had been. “You knew he was a spirit! Why didn’t you warn me? You let us go in there blind!”
I was screaming by the end. In my defense, it had been a very stressful night, but even I was shocked by how angry I was. I just couldn’t believe that the DFZ—the god I’d started to think of as my god—had left me to dangle so bad. If I hadn’t thought as fast as I had, I could have lost everything tonight, and from the look on her face, she knew it.
“I wasn’t trying to keep secrets,” she said, her glowing eyes locked on the ground. “As I told you before, I had my suspicions, but I didn’t actually know for sure that the Gameskeeper was a spirit until I went in there with you.”
“How could you not know? He runs a murder arena below your city! And not a secret one, either. He has billboards.”
“Blood sport isn’t illegal if everyone involved agrees,” the god said in a small voice. “He’s done everything by the book, so—”
“He kidnapped Nik off the street as a child and trained him to be a teenage hitman!” I yelled at her. “He has his own magic that feels like screams and blood! Even if you didn’t know he was a god, you should have done something!”
“I know!” she yelled back. “But I couldn’t! How many times are you going to make me say it? The Gameskeeper followed all my rules. I hated what he was doing, but unless I was ready to go against myself, I couldn’t stop him. And before you accuse me of lying again, I really didn’t know for certain he was a spirit before tonight!”
“How is that possible? You’re a god too! Can’t you recognize your own?”
“I should have,” she muttered, scrubbing a hand through Dr. Kowalski’s curly gray hair. “But I’m not an ancient power like the Empty Wind. I only woke up twenty years ago. I don’t know everything yet, and the Gameskeeper doesn’t behave like any other spirit I’ve met. I share my city with plenty of gods, and none of them have ever tried to hide from me or take my territory. Not to push stereotypes, but I was actually leaning toward him being a dragon. At least that would explain his greedy behavior.”
“Dragons aren’t the only ones who want more than what they have,” Yong said dryly.
“Yeah, gods can be assholes too,” I agreed. “That’s basically all of mythology. But I still don’t see how you didn’t know.”
The DFZ shrugged helplessly. “In my defense, he has convoluted himself pretty hard.”
Couldn’t argue with that. In the short time we’d been trapped in his office, the Gameskeeper had named himself the god of arenas, champions, the strong, the DFZ, and a whole bunch of other stuff I couldn’t remember. He’d claimed so many domains, I didn’t know which one he actually came from.
“He’s the god of the arena,” Dr. Kowalski said.
I blinked, looking up just in time to watch my teacher take her body back over, which was still pretty damn creepy even though I’d seen it happen dozens of times.
“I did some research while the DFZ was in there with you,” she said, taking on the lecturing tone that was apparently an inborn trait of all professors. “There have been many gods associated with arenas from dozens of cultures all over the world. The current Gameskeeper
