Page 95 of Mud

Just like that woman earlier.

My pulse quickened right away with excitement, so I had to sit still for another minute while the skinny guy went back to the fight. I sat still until I was perfectly calm once more, and when I stood up, none of the people, bloody and wounded and fighting, even turned their eyes my way.

It had worked.

I pulled myself up on the stage just to get a bit higher up, to see better, to understand what surrounded me. I even considered calling out to the people, telling them that they needed to let the anger go and calm down if they wanted to stop fighting any time soon. What a brutal way to start the Iris Roe, but at least nobody had used spells. No, the magic of this challenge had wanted us to make it last, to make it extra bloody—extra entertaining for the audience, I’m sure. But I doubted I’d be thisluckyin the other covens’ challenges.

In the end, I decided no amount of screaming was going to get through to these people, so I didn’t bother. They needed to figure it out themselves if it was going to work. Instead, I went around the instruments that played themselves, the microphone that did not stop picking up sound that didn’t exist and spilling it out of the big speaker near the metal structure at its back. I jumped off the other end of the stage and ran toward the back.

Darkness awaited me—a deep darkness like the one between those walls in the beginning. As soon as I stepped into it, I no longer heard the music of the instruments nor the players fighting.

All I heard was the sound of my own footsteps, and I walked for what felt like a long time.

Chapter 21

Rosabel La Rouge

Present day

Blood.

Puddles of blood were everywhere in front of me. The more the darkness let off, chased away by some red light coming from far away, the clearer I saw them spread out onto the muddy ground.

So many of them, possibly close to a hundred blood puddles.

The metallic scent was in the air, as intense as the magic had been around that stage. I was used to blood. In the beginning when I started my training, it had almost killed me to see it. I was constantly wanting to pass out that first week, but I’d grown used to it eventually. I didn’t mind being covered in it by the end of my training, but something aboutpuddleson the ground, some bigger than others, some darker, some lighter…

And they all had a tiny stream as thin as my finger thatconnected them farther away, and poured somewhere below, off the edge of the ground where I couldn’t see.

Iris, I was thankful that I couldn’t see where all the blood was dripping off to.

Movement caught my eye on the other side of the edge, and I turned to find that woman on her knees, the one who’d walked among the enraged players and had helped me figure out how to get out of there, too. She wasn’t alone. A bit farther away on her other side were two men, and all three of them were on their knees in front of the puddles, and they had their hands inside the blood.

Bile rose up my throat. I grabbed my daggers again because I felt safer like that. If somebody wanted to jump me, I’d be prepared to fight back, at least.

Except these people didn’t look like they planned to attack me. They looked perfectly calm instead—just like I was.

“Excuse me,” I whispered as I went closer. None looked up at me—they just continued to stick their hands in the puddles like they were looking for something down there. “Excuse me, what are you doing?”

“Searching the blood we spilled,” said the woman, her voice low, passive—like she was half asleep.

Thiswas the blood we spilled? “For what?”

The man—or better to sayboy,as he didn’t look older than eighteen—at the very end turned to look at me, eyes wide and judging when he said, “The key.”

Duh, Rora.The fucking key.

The next moment, I sheathed my daggers again, lowered to my knees in front of a puddle, and convinced myself that thishadto be done in order to finish the game. I had to get the key—the worst was already over. It was done. Ihadn’t died, and now all I had to do was stick my hands in this blood and find a damn key.

Bile burned my throat while I pulled the sleeves of my jacket as high up my arms as I could.

Then I put my hands in the puddle in front of me.

It was thick and warm and bright red, the blood, like it had just spilled right out of an artery. The smell was so intense, so bad that I couldn’t breathe through my nose at all, and every time I opened my mouth to draw in air, I almost threw up all of my insides.

Fuck, how was thisworsethan fighting for my life?!

And that wasn’t even the worst of it. I soon realized that the keywasn’tin the puddle I was currently searching, and the others were searchingeverypuddle in front of us for theirs.

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