The most horrible smell I’ve ever encountered clogs my nose. Like raw meat tossed into a putrid public restroom.
My stomach lurches, sending a spurt of acid up my throat. I sputter and raise my head, and then I just stare, frozen in place.
The scene around me is just as deathly still.
The scene around me isdeath.
None of the horrors the guardians subjected me to prepared me for this.
Bodies lie sprawled all across the stands around the arena, but they look nothing like bodies should. My gaze jars at the twisted shapes formed by the limbs and torsos, splattered with blood where the skin has cracked.
It’s like a giant stomped all over the crowd—and then stirred them a little more for good measure.
My eyes jerk to the nearest body—the corpse of my former opponent, stretched out on the floor just a few feet from where I’m crouched.
His mouth gapes in a vast, broken maw as if someone grasped his chin with one hand and his cheek with the other and slammed them in opposite directions, taking his jaw right off its hinges. Uprooted teeth dapple the puddle of blood beneath his head. His lifeless eyes bulge so violently they’ve almost popped from their sockets.
His limbs lie akimbo, snapped and bent in a half a dozen places to form far more joints than any arm or leg is meant to have. Jagged ends of bone gleam where the flesh has totally split.
His torso is a crater, the ribs collapsed inward. A dark stain marks his neon-green training shorts, seeping into a yellow-brown puddle beneath his ass that suggests he both pissed and shit himself.
As I take the wreckage in, more bile shoots up my throat. I lurch forward in a full-out vomit.
My half-digested dinner of spaghetti and meatballs—because the boss always wants me primed on carbs before a fight—splatters the floor. I jerk my hands back, my stomach still roiling, and push myself to my feet to study the wider arena again.
As my attention trails over the carnage beyond the cage, where dozens of bodies lie wrenched and deformed like the one next to me, I become distantly aware that my legs are holding me perfectly steady. My gut is churning, and my chest has constricted with horror, but the dizzy unsteadiness brought on by whatever the boss drugged me with has vanished.
The boss. My gaze shoots to his high seat, and I suck in a ragged breath that floods my lungs with more of the awful stink.
He’s strewn buckled backwards over one of the chair arms, his spine bent so sharply his head could touch the backs of his knees. His eyeballs dangle from their sockets, his jaw torn right off and resting on the seat next to them. The one arm I can see is rippled as if it was wrung out like a wet towel.
What the hell—what the hellhappenedhere?
The last few moments before I blacked out rush through my mind. My desperation and fury, the boss’s smirk. My attacker’s hand clamped around my arm, and the scream reverberating up my throat like a bolt of lightning.
Like some kind of power.
My arms stiffen at my sides. I pull them up to wrap them tightly around my chest.
Icouldn’t have done this… could I? I’ve never had any kind of vocal power before—I’ve never damaged a body through anything other than physical combat.
But I’m the only one left standing, with all but one of the corpses lying far beyond my physical reach while I’m trapped within the cage. And that scream…
The memory of it sends a shiver up my spine, one that feels like anticipation almost as much as revulsion. I shudder and hug myself tighter.
Only a monster could have done something like this. A much more terrifying and inhuman monster than I’ve ever been.
Than I’d ever want to be.
The bouncy melody of a pop song erupts from the stands and shatters my shellshocked daze. Flinching, I jerk into a defensive stance—and realize it’s a ringtone.
Someone’s phone survived the carnage.
There are so many people here. So many mangled corpses. It won’t be long before someone on the outside realizes there’s a problem and comes looking.
But for now, I’m all alone.
My heart leaps high enough to overtake my horror. This is my chance. No one is standing in my way.