Page 155 of House of Lilith

And besides, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I just need to open all the doors and the ‘only one’ working.

So I walk up to the trap again, to assess it once again. Then I walk as far back as I can, take a deep breath and start running, kicking myself off the floor as soon as I’m just close enough.

And for a second, I find myself flying straight towards the third door, already picturing myself flinging it open.

But then the spikes beneath me start shooting further up, and I do a flip in the air to avoid them and get higher, but once I do the three-sixty and my eyes land back on them, I’m falling straight onto their sharp tips.

And there’s this tug I feel somewhere behind my navel and I realize that the Box is about to zap me out of the Game.

But the next thing I know, the silence is getting switched out for fucking chaos, I’m crashing onto solid ground back in the room in which we started the Game, and there’s a stampede of people around me.

Wincing, I push myself off the ground and jump to my feet, my mind struggling to comprehend what’s going on, mostly because of all the people and shifters in their animal forms running around, scared, some of them casting magic at the only entrance into the room.

Have we been locked in, I think as dread starts seeping into my bones.

What the fuck is going on?

My eye darts to the Archon’s chair, finding the Pied Piper standing in front of it with a pissed-off look on her face. Frowning, I see the Archon seemingly trying to pull something out of the Box. The way she’s failing — her hand twitching — suggests that the Pied Piper is using Mind Magic on her.

I guess she has things under control, I think as my head snaps to where Nikolay was sitting, finding him splayed on the ground, panting and looking bewildered, blood trickling out of his nose, his ears, his eyes.

Holy shit, I curse as I rush over to him. “Nikolay. What’s wrong? What happened?” I demand, fighting the urge to shake the answers out of him.

“It just stopped,” he says. “And then the Archon…” He breaks off, the look in his eye wild and absent all at once. “I don’t know what she’s trying to do.”

Just as he says that, I hear panicked yells from the people behind me and I stand up, turning around with my muscles clenching in anticipation.

And I see these people dragging the Archon out of her chair as the Pied Piper watches, but my mind doesn’t linger.

Because there’s Dahrian’s fox stalking over to me, its eyes fixed on mine.

I freeze.

“Get away from her,” I hear Max yell out.

But the next moment, there’s chaos, the fox jumping to land between me and the people around me, Nikolay scrambling to get out from under my feet, Max and a lot of the others lunging at the fox, the fox snarling and snapping its teeth as it keeps pressing me back and away from everyone else.

Are we all just going to die here, I think to myself just as Ricky appears from the crowd and shouts, “Dahrian.”

And the fox snarls at him, making him double back, white as a sheet, but then it shifts back into a human in a tattered, bloodied uniform. It remains standing there for a second, turns to push past me without throwing me a glance and practically rips the door out of the doorframe, marching out and letting the others start spilling through as well.

*

Trying not to think at all, but still more rattled than I’ve been in ages, I make my way to the top of Grimm Tower, where they’ve taken the Archon.

“I’m sorry, I’m just not at liberty to say,” I hear the Pied Piper’s mousy assistant’s voice even before I walk through the door. “For now, at least.”

I take a deep breath and I step into the anteroom. There, I find almost all the players and professors waiting, all the armchairs already occupied and even some plain chairs brought out. I pause for a second and I see people nodding at me, and I nod as well, but my eyes immediately dart to Dahrian, who’s standing leaned against the wall with his arms folded, eyes fixed somberly ahead.

“And what’re we supposed to do until you are?”

Finding a chair near the entrance, I shift my focus onto the person asking the question. A Grimm talking to the assistant, who’s got her back turned to the door into the Pied Piper’s office. Closed door.

“Listen, everyone,” she says as she scans the room in front of her, obviously uncomfortable but pushing through it, “we’ll figure out what happened and we’ll make sure everyone who was still in the Game when this happened,staysin the Game. Alright?”

At that, a low murmur, a content one, spreads through the room, making my eyebrows pull down. The Grimm goes back to his seat and the assistant gets back in the office, closing the door behind her.

What the… Do they really only care about the results?

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