Rough hands grasped me as a bag was thrown over my head. I wasn’t sure how long it had been since the director had left the room or who the men were who’d just entered it. I heard the handcuffs click open, and an instant later I was jerked to my feet.
This is it, I thought, unsure of where they were leading me or what might be waiting there.
I heard the creaking of metal. A door?
A hand in the middle of my back shoved me forward, hard enough to send me to the ground. My knees hit first, my hands catching the rest of my body moments before my face would have slammed into the ground. My palms registered the texture beneath them—sand—just before the hood was torn from my head.
I blinked against the blinding light, my eyes adjusting slowly enough that by the time I could make out the world around me, the men who’d brought me to this place were gone. I turned in time to see a metal gate slamming into the ground behind me.
I was locked in.
In where? I forced myself to concentrate. I was still indoors, but the ground was covered in sand, almost too hot to bear, like the desert sun had been shining down on it for days. The ceiling overhead was high and domed, made of stone and carved with a symbol I recognized.
Seven circles ringing a cross.
The room was circular, and recessed into the walls were stone seats, looking down on the sandpit below.
Not a pit, I thought. An arena.
And that was when I knew. You poisoned me. You healed me. Buried deep in my memory, I could hear the words Nightshade had spoken to me all those weeks ago. He’d told me that we all had our choices. He’d told me that the Pythia chooses to live.
Perhaps someday that choice will be yours, Cassandra.
The Masters had a history of taking women—women who had traumatic histories, women who were capable of being forged into something new. They
brought their captives to the brink of death, close enough to taste it, and then…
A figure stepped forward from the shadows. My gaze flicked to either side, and I noticed seven weapons laid out along the wall behind me.
Seven Masters. Seven ways of killing.
The figure on the other side of the arena took another step forward, then another. I was aware of hooded figures filing into the seats above us, but all I could think was that if they’d brought me here to fight the Pythia, that meant that the woman walking toward me was someone I knew very well.
Her face was hidden by a hood, but as I made my way to my feet and stepped toward her, drawn like a moth to the flame, she lowered it.
Her face had changed in the past six years. She hadn’t aged, but she was thinner and pale and her features looked like they’d been carved from stone. Her skin was porcelain, her eyes impossibly large.
She was still the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
“Mom.” The word escaped my throat. One second, I was stepping hesitantly toward her, and the next, the space between us had disappeared.
“Cassie.” Her voice was deeper than I remembered, hoarse, and when her arms wrapped around me, I realized that the skin on her face looked smooth in part because of contrast.
The rest of her body was covered in twisting, puckered scars.
Seven days and seven pains. I made a choking sound. My mother pulled me up against her, laying my head on her shoulder. She pressed her lips to my temple.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said.
“I had to find you. Once I realized you were alive, once I realized they had you—I couldn’t stop looking. I would never stop looking.”
“I know.”
There was something in my mother’s tone that reminded me that we were being watched. Over her shoulder, I could see the Masters—six men and one woman, sitting in a line. Director Sterling. Ree. I tried to memorize the others’ faces, but my gaze was drawn upward.
Malcolm Lowell sat above the others, his eyes locked on mine.
Nine is the greatest among us, the bridge from generation to generation….
“We have to get out of here.” I kept my voice low. “We have to—” “We can’t,” my mother said. “There is no out, Cassie. Not for us.”
I tried to pull back so that I could see her face, but her arms tightened around me, holding me close.
Tight.
In the stands, Ree caught my gaze and then shifted hers to the far wall.
Like the one behind me, it was lined with weapons.
Six of them. Not seven. Six.
“Where’s the knife?” I choked on the words. “Mom—”
The hand that had been stroking my hair a moment before grasped it tightly now. She jerked my head to the side.
“Mom—”
She raised the knife to the side of my throat. “It isn’t personal. It’s you, or it’s me.”
I’d been warned, over and over again, that my mother might not be the woman I remembered.
“You don’t want to do this,” I said, my voice shaking.
“But that’s the thing,” she whispered, her eyes lighting on mine. “I do.”
