Blood splattered Kane and evaporated instantly. He stumbled out of the hearth’s edge, fighting down vomit as he hopped over the crumpled body of the sorcerer to join Adeline.
“That was wild!” he panted. “How—”
“Later,” Adeline snapped. “Right now we need to get the real people out of here before the next plot twist. Give me a hand.”
She was wrenching lengths of chain from the hand-shaped altar. Kane couldn’t figure out how she’d gotten free, but then he saw an ancient lock by her feet, popped open with a single hairpin.
“That actually works?” he gasped, helping a girl off the altar.
“The reveries love a good trope,” Adeline grunted, “Get ready for the twist.”
“Another twist?”
Adeline dragged her chains up, coiling them again, as the last girl ran off. None of what just happened pleased the crowd, but it appeared to be the virgins saving themselves that fundamentally offended the reverie, and not the sorcerer’s defeat. Kane sensed another distortion boiling through the fabric of this universe.
“Here it comes. Get behind me,” Adeline said, putting herself between Kane and the crowd.
“Where are the glowing lobsters?” Kane asked.
Adeline glanced at him. “How’d you know about that?”
“I was in the boiler room. I heard you talking with the Others. That’s what you call yourselves, right? The Others?”
Adeline unraveled a length of chain. She was looking past Kane now, her face unreadable as several barbarians vaulted onto the court. They were the biggest people Kane had ever seen, each one a tower of mass and muscle, glaring with pearly, white eyes that matched the polished blades of bone they swung.
Adeline shrugged. “Okay, Nancy Drew, I hope you’re ready to fight. Do you remember how to do that snappy thing with your fingers?”
“What?”
With a shriek, the closest warrior lowered into a gallop, sword held high over his head. Adeline grabbed Kane’s arm and held it up, his hand aimed at the warrior’s chest.
“Snap!” she commanded.
In a flash he remembered the jet of magic that had burst from his fingertips to stop Ursula. He wiggled his fingers and, when nothing happened, Adeline heaved them out of range of a slicing blade. The warrior snarled, ready for another jab, and his friends were close behind him.
“I said snap, not jazz hands!” Adeline screamed.
Kane snapped.
The sound was loud like thunder, sharp like a gunshot; the sight was a vein of iridescent brilliance carving the air apart. It was hard to see anything else as the flare slammed into the warrior with such savage ferocity that he was blown backward, very quickly and in a great many pieces. And then the other warriors were upon them.
Adeline didn’t let them get close. She swung her chain in elegant sweeps and slashes, flicking the metal whip with remarkable precision. She struck where the joints of armor failed. Throats, elbows, groins. The warriors barely had time to gnash in frustration as she drove them back.
“Kane. Focus,” she commanded, but Kane was transfixed by the remnant blaze that played across his knuckles. Every color he had ever known vibrated in the pale magic. The prints of his fingertips glowed, as though he’d pressed his hand into liquid light.
Adeline was breathing hard. “Any day now. Just take your freaking time.”
Kane shook off his stupor, ready to attempt another snap.
“Not you.” Adeline pushed his hand down, drawing them into a retreat as her eyes searched the crowd. “Save your energy. We’ll need you fresh.”
“For what?”
A chorus of cries broke out from the crowd, and Kane saw entire bodies tossed upward in the distance. Adeline grabbed Kane’s wrist. “Get ready to run.”
Whatever it was, it was getting closer with amazing speed. Something burrowed through the crowd, and it was heading right for the altar. Just before it reached the rim, Adeline dragged him into a protective huddle, but he couldn’t look away.
The crowd split open and admitted, by force, a dashing bolt of magenta, a girl swathed in pink. She hurtled into the air, her rosy dress splashing around her hips as she contorted into a flying kick.
Kane heard himself laughing. It was Ursula!
Her heels were the first things to land, and they struck the throat of one warrior. He went down without resistance, and Ursula leapt off without hesitation. If it wasn’t for the sparkling leather of her shoes it would have been impossible to see her leg sweep out and slam sidelong into the next warrior’s ribs, forcing him down. A blink later, Ursula was on him, his neck caught in a two-arm choke hold while his legs kicked wildly. Then there was a crunching noise and the man dropped. Lifeless. Ursula’s punches just kept coming, each hit sending a shock wave of magenta light crackling into the super-heated air of the arena.
“We should back up.” Adeline said, pulling Kane toward the hearth. He watched, transfixed by her speed. Her power. The fact she was zipped into a housewife costume and the further fact that it didn’t stop her in the slightest. If anything, the costume helped. Now Ursula was atop a pile of bloodied, wriggling men, beating them in turn with one of her shiny pumps. And through all this, her hair didn’t move. Not even a little. Kane thought that whatever hairspray she used deserved as much credit as Ursula herself.
Adeline’s hand wrenched Kane’s face away from the action. “The reverie is collapsing, which means it’s about to get even worse. I don’t know how you got in here, Kane, but since you’re here, you’re going to have to do your job.”
“My job?”
“Yes. You need to unravel the reverie.”
Adeline might as well have told Kane he needed to drink the Caspian Sea. There was no sense to that phrase. No action Kane could even conceive of taking.
An especially loud crunch drew them back toward the fight. Ursula had gotten hold of a spiked bludgeon and was using it to block the simultaneous attacks of two more warriors. In unison they brought their immense blades down onto her, and the stone beneath her feet—one heeled and one bare—fissured.
Adeline pulled Kane back. “Now, Kane. You’ve got to unravel it now.”
“How?” Kane screamed. The cracking stone and the heat from the blaze dizzied him. More warriors were spawning from the crowd, all of them lumbering toward Ursula.
“Usually you clap your hands and—” Adeline was cut off by a sudden belch from the mouth-shaped hearth. Something within the inferno was moving. Something solid and slithering. Something worse than anything they’d encountered thus far.
The chants of the crowd suddenly synchronized. It was not the sound of a demand, like before. It was the sound of celebration as they cheered, “Bloood sacrifiiice!”