Page 109 of The Incendiary

At its words, I felt a strange burning sensation along the fingerprint-shaped bruises on my neck from my nightmares.

“No!” I screeched as I unsheathed another blade from my side and drove it through the monster’s unwounded eye, right to the hilt. “No, no, no!” And again.

Blood gushed and spurted down my forearm, and the beast was finally dead.

I did it. I was alive. I won.

You won, you won, you won…

My mind believed it. I repeated it until my body did, too. My vision struggled to focus, but I managed to crawl free, panting and covered in blood, brain matter, and drool. When I looked up, Elias had his arms crossed over his chest, and he wore a satisfied grin. Still an asshole. Even more so, for this.

My body buzzed with adrenaline as I scanned the faces of the other fighters and cadets. Everyone else was silent and wide-eyed as they stared down at me.

With my head held high, I crossed the enclosure, ignoring the snapping jaws of the other four beasts as I passed. My legs wobbled a little, though I did my best to hide it. The attention made my skin itch as I climbed out of the enclosure.

The twins greeted me at the top, their freckled skin unsettlingly pale, but both smiling in relief.

“You fucking did it.” Mavic reached to pull me into a hug but stopped upon realizing I was covered in gore. I couldn’t blame him. I wouldn’t have touched me right then, either. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

I grinned and took it as a compliment.

“Next team!” shouted a lieutenant from the other side of the enclosure. “Please descend into the pit!”

“Wait!” I darted through the cadets toward Elias. They parted for me. Jumped out of my way, rather, to avoid touching blood and guts. “Commander!” I shouted, walking right up to him. He dragged his eyes up my body, widening as they went. I kept my voice low. “They could die.”

He merely chuckled. “You didn’t.”

“Yes, but…” I looked around. A quarter of the cadets, Draven Finch included, looked eager for the challenge. The rest were terrified. Some cried. One was currently vomiting behind a tree. And the twins.

“Let me help them with the other four beasts,” I insisted.

Elias arched his critical brow. “The others aren’t on your team.”

“So what?” I hissed. “I’m not going to let my peers die!”

“This is my training, Fera.”

“Yes!” I snapped. “Training! Not a mass execution!”

Elias scrutinized me in that way that raised my hackles and made my skin prick. His lip curled in disgust at the sight of something on my leathers. I stiffened when he reached forward and removed a bloody piece of tissue from my shoulder, studied it between his fingers, then flicked it away. It might have been a piece of the lizard’s eye.

“Go back to the fortress,” he ordered. “You have succeeded. You are no longer needed here.”

“But the other cadets⁠—”

“Go.” He tightened his jaw. “Now. The rest of them are not your responsibility.”

But they were my responsibility. If I showed him who I was, I could put a stop to this. He wasn’t going to listen to me as Fera. The time for sacrificing lives in the name of war might come, but today wasn’t that day.

I was seconds from undoing my disguise when I recalled what he’d said to Valda the other night, about not throwing his own cadets “to the wolves.” For him to throw them literally into a pit of ravenous beasts didn’t make any sense. There had to be some sort of catch. This conversation wasn’t over.

“Fera!” Mavic called from behind me. I turned and moved quickly toward where he and his team waited. He reached out and squeezed my hand. “We have to prove ourselves, too.” He gave me a reassuring nod. “And you have to go.”

I muttered a prayer to the gods that everyone would be okay and obeyed, making my way back to the Barracks.

I threw up twice while waiting for the twins. Once on the way back, once inside the walls. I couldn’t stand the thought of pacing alone in the cabin we shared, so I paced in the courtyard until the door to the fortress opened, and I saw two flashes of red hair.

Seeing they were unscathed, I ran straight for them, refraining from launching myself into their arms upon remembering I was still covered in blood and vomit.