“The queen’s mark,” someone gasped. “The queen has returned.”
As the mark lit, my hellfire broke through Ares’s and Lucifer’s spells, but my Titan fires were still bound.
They would break out eventually.
No one could contain me forever.
I laughed viciously.
The rest of the demons and their minions cowered in front of me.
“Burn,” I said with a sweet smile.
But I didn’t waste my fire on the demons.
I levitated into the air, thirty feet from the ground, and blasted my fire toward the royal balcony where Lucifer and Ares sat.
“Burn, motherfuckers!” I howled, willing my fire to toast them crispy.
Gasps rose and fell all around the arena.
Was I the only person who’d ever openly challenged the devil? My bad. I was first, and I’d be last if I could vanquish him with my fire.
I doubted it, though, yet I wouldn’t give up this opportunity to undermine Lucifer’s authority and to shame him.
Both Lucifer’s fire and Ares’s energy beam shot toward me, slamming into my hellfire.
“Such a darling,” Ares said with a smile that was both approval and disappointment. “I wonder if she’ll ever bend to us.”
Once again, their combined forces doused my hellfire, and I dropped onto the sand in a crouch, but not before the devil pushed his two-toned, rampaging fire further toward me, and I felt my bones sizzle from the burn inside.
With every ounce of my will, I rose slowly, crossing my twin swords in front of my chest in defiance.
“C’mon, you two bitches,” I said.
I bet no one had ever called Lucifer and Ares bitches. I tried to paste a sardonic grin on my face but failed.
The pain in me was too much.
I conjured my remaining strength with all the will I had left in me before I fell. My eyes glowed with hellfire, yet my lips breathed out frost.
The entire arena was deathly quiet. No one dared to make even a hushed sound.
Then a whoosh of black wind whipped around me.
Loki, Asmodeus, and Leviathan materialized and surrounded me, shielding me.
I wasn’t fool enough to believe that they were my protectors, but Loki would try his best to keep me alive. I was his asset that he’d gone to great pains to acquire.
Now he had to clean up the mess I’d left behind. I’d made a fatal mistake by challenging my worst immortal foes before I was ready.
I’d let my rage overcome me.
I’d killed with cold clarity in the pit until I’d heard the devil’s order, “Enough!”
I refused to take an order from him, so I’d tried to further defy him, forgetting that I would never defeat the devil and the god without my active Living Flame.
“Father, allow me to take Princess Celeste away from the arena,” Loki said. “According to the contract, she’s mine to train and tame.”