Page 86 of Death is My BFF

The animals circled the perimeter of the arena at full sprint, clawing at the walls and howling, earning heckles from the crowd. Food was hurled into the pit, hitting the poor animals, and aggravating them further. Men with spears ran into the arena and corralled the jaguars to the center of the space. Petrified and riled up, the feline beasts turned their attention onto us, the fighters. They stalked closer to us, their heads lowered and ears flat.

I sank to the ground to mirror their movement, my golden plate guard scraping against old scar tissue over my heart. The remnants of three years before, when I’d tried to take my life in the river outside my home. As I reached my last moments, I’d thought better—I wanted to live, and I tried with all my might to surface from the water. The boulder I’d strapped to my back had done its job, and my feet slipped on the wet stones beneath the water. My mother had discovered my body later that day on the riverbank and made an ultimate sacrifice. She’d used the unpredictability of black magic to resurrect me by combining my heart with a cat’s.

One of the jaguars charged across the arena toward me. I faced the animal as a predator myself, low to the ground and patient. I waited until the last second to bring up my sword, slashing the first jaguar with an explosion of thick ruby liquid and fur. The injury would satisfy the arena without killing the animal, an unspoken rule for most of the gladiators. Landing inelegantly, the jaguar rolled onto its feet and hurried away from me, blood trailing behind it. The injured feline was captured by the men with spears, chained, and hauled out of the arena alive.

The second cat stalked behind me, spring-loaded to pounce. I’d been distracted by my own thoughts, so I’d miscalculated its attack, and it knocked me hard to the ground. Its claws burrowed into the flesh of my shoulders and tried to rip apart tendons. As I was mauled, my challenger with the black cape made no move to help me, instead circling the scene with slow, calculated steps. I held open the animal’s jaw with my bare bloodied hands and planned on wrestling the cat into exhaustion so it would be pulled out of the arena. The other competitor had plans of his own, as he stepped in and speared the animal through the top of its skull.

I staggered back in shock, hot blood running down my leg and into the sand. Edging toward the dying animal, I crouched down to comb my fingers through the animal’s fur as it fought to live.

Turning my head away, I twisted my hands to break the animal’s neck and end its pain. The competitor’s boastful laugh grated down my spine.

I drew my sword and charged at the competitor at full force. Our massive blades crashed together. We shifted our weight as our weapons sliced through the air again, dodging each other at nearly equal skill levels. However, I had neither slept nor eaten enough to endure the physical demand of sword fighting, and the challenger’s attacks were ceaseless and exhausting. He swung his blade out with inhuman speed, the blur of the weapon coming down hard as it carved a deeper wound into the claw-marked lesions I already had. My teeth grated as I clamped a hand over the wound, my vision strobing in and out.

When I looked up, the challenger vanished. I spun fast, and he was somehow standing behind me, his cape billowing out over the sun like a dark doom as he sprang toward me. He kicked out a foot and connected with my chest armor, hurling me back with a powerful force into the compacted sand. I landed hard on my injured shoulder with an agonizing scream, and the crowd swiftly switched their favor to the conquering gladiator with deafening cries.

The gladiator in the black cape turned toward the crowd, acknowledging their eruption of applause.

“What kind of man harms a helpless animal?” I shouted. “You are nomanat all!”

Charging at him with my sword, we collided again. This time, I gained ground, negating each of his attacks, unleashing the full strength of my body into each hard blow.

The challenger bled from multiple small wounds, an oily black blood drenching the sand that I did not care to notice, and soon his weapon was knocked out of his hand. Tears blurred my vision as I carved the air with my entire body, slicing into his forearm between his armor sleeves. He buckled to the ground, clutching the space of skin where I’d cut him to the bone. One look at his injury, and his head went back. He’d fainted.

The crowd went crazy.

Energy pulsed in the air, retribution beckoning, raising the hair at my nape like a sixth sense. Slowly, I bent to pick up the challenger’s sword. My shoulders stiffened, a powerful sensation washing over me from the moment my fingers clenched the handle. A key clicking into place inside a lock. My head tilted down and I dragged the rough pads of my fingers along the unusual engravements in the hilt and the metal of the weapon. As I did so, a dark whisper unfurled inside my mind.

The one you hate the most. . .must die.

Heat flushed my body with the rise of a lethal fever, and my fury amplified with it. I clenched the sword tighter and glared at the unconscious gladiator, imagining his veiled face was my father’s.

He had killed them. He’d killed them all. And now I’d killhim. Kill him for betraying us all, for all the abuse I’d suffered because of him!

“DRU THE BEAST! DRU THE BEAST!”

Sweat poured down the sides of my face, the world pulsing in hallucinations. They played out on the arena sand like ghosts on puppet strings. Sinister memories of my youth, my father’s constant berating and abuse. His fist colliding with my small, boyish body and knocking me down. I’d blocked it out, blocked it all out, but now his wrongdoings were coming back to life, the fury of a childhood robbed fueling an uproar of retribution.

The mirage rippled, and I sawmyselfacross the arena. False fabrications of me, as the full-grown man I was now, driving my sword through my father’s heart. Mutilating his body until it was unrecognizable. The engraved sword grew hot and wavered in my hand as these thoughts spiraled out of control.

Your father destroyed your family, hissed a serpentine voice,andyou let him run away. Coward. You died in that room with your wife andunborn child. If anyone deserves to die, it’s him. It’s Malphas Cruscellio.

Do it. Kill him, kill him now!

I lifted the sword with a madman’s intention, when my head turned, and in the reflection of the weapon, I saw my eyes. They were consumed in black with filaments branching outward like veins, and I recognized I was not myself. I threw down the weapon at once, feeling as though a vise had released my soul.

The sound of the arena warped back into full volume, and the sorrow tucked deep inside my heart exploded. My shoulders collapsed inward, a wheezed breath escaping me in a pained sob.

Weak, broken, pathetic. I’d never killed anyone before, and I’d never planned to. It was an oath I had made myself long ago.

I stared at the fallen sword, fear stricken at what it had done to me. Something vile, inherently evil had beckoned me from the blade, and how seamlessly it had sunk its fangs into my vulnerable mind.And I liked it.

Like a coward, I ran. Hurried toward the corridor to escape the arena. Faster, faster. The civilians in the stands became violent, booing and heckling, throwing objects into the arena. Scorching heat rippled off the sand and their faces transformed, undulating between human and demented creatures. Creatures possessed by wrath.

It halted me in my tracks

Something was terribly wrong.

I turned to look over my shoulder. The silent challenger, who was very much awake, lifted his head. His injured arm mended back to normal, stretched out toward the ground. My heart hammered as the sinister engraved blade slid across the sand to him without any touch. The challenger rose from the ground as though in slow motion, his head lowered like a bull’s before he kicked off, hurtling toward me in a blur.

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