Another possibility, even more terrible, entered my mind. What if this wasn’t the exit at all? What if Francis had hidden in here and exited while I checked out Diana’s arm? He was a vampire and could move in perfect silence. I probably wouldn’t have heard him.
I groaned and then yelped as someone rammed into me from behind, sending my skull into the rock wall a second time.
“Ow!” Andre yelped. “What’s going on? Why are you stopped, Odette?”
“It’s a dead end. We have to backtrack to the fork,” I said, my voice small.
Andre spat out a curse, and I heard Diana moan.
“I’m so sorry.” My voice came out in a defeated squeak. “I chose wrong. I should have—”
“Don’t blame yourself,” Andre interrupted. “You’re the only reason we’ve even made it this far, and there’s no way you could have known which direction to take. We’ll figure out how to back up and get out of here.”
And that was exactly what we did. Painfully slowly, we inched our way backward. What seemed like an hour later, we got to the fork and, reversed the order of our witch train, and took the right tunnel.
When light began to pierce through the darkness, I nearly burst into tears of joy. Or maybe it was frustration. If I had just chosen correctly the first time, we would have been out of the mountainside forever ago.
Don’t dwell on it.There’s no going back. Just forward.
I was still telling myself that when I emerged into the brilliant sunlight. Air filled my lungs, and a sense of appreciation for how fresh it tasted rushed over me. I was about to close my eyes to savor it when a voice from the tunnel we’d just emerged out of cut through my serenity.
“I can smell the witches. The trail is fresher this way. Go right,” Dasha instructed.
I loosed a sigh. The shifters were hot on our tail.
I raised a hand over my eyes to shield them, and spotted the third flag. “Everyone ready to warp?”
Andre had been trying to clean Diana’s wound out with snow, but at my word, Diana shook him off. She stepped forward with a look of determination on her face. “Let’s finish this.”
“Alrighty. Here we go again.” I conjured up the warphole.
The instant we stepped out of the warphole, a powerful, horrible stench hit me so strongly that I almost wished I was back in the tunnel.
We were in a large clearing. The pristine white snow was dotted with copious amounts of red blood. Horrifyingly enough, the source of the smellandthe blood was a massive creature lying on the ground a few feet away. Blood poured from its neck, and a mouth full of rotten teeth was open wide in death.
My stomach heaved, and I clapped my hands over my eyes, wanting to block out what I could never unsee.
“Released the Spellcasters’ troll!” a voice boomed from above.
My spine stiffened. The Spellcasters’ troll? Was that what the thing on the ground was? Now we had to face one too?
In answer, the sound of lifting metal gates hit my ears, followed by a groan—Andre’s.
“Don’t tell me that is what I think it is?” I whispered, still unable to uncover my eyes.
“Okay, I won’t tell you, but I’m guessing you know, seeing as some asshole just announced it,” Sam muttered, her tone dark.
Somewhere in the woods, a creature roared, deep and furious. My stomach tightened.
Fine. We had to defeat a mountain troll. I opened my eyes once again. Hesitantly, they flitted to the dead creature on the ground. Someone—the vampires, I suspected—had already completed their task. No doubt they would finish the event at any minute.
Confirming my beliefs, cheering arose from down the mountainside. A whistle pierced the air, and celebratory music began to play. Yep. The vampires had just finished the first event of the Spy Games.
I didn’t have time to dwell on that annoyance for much longer, because the next second, our troll made an appearance through the trees. He was bounding toward us, knocking over full-grown pines with a sweep of his arm as he went.
The creature was at least twenty-five feet tall, with a forehead like a Neanderthal’s, and lips that were puffy and red and covered in blood. I didn’t want to think about what the troll had been eating before they’d released him, although I was glad that he’d eatensomething. Surely a troll that had just been fed would be less likely to want to chew on us, right? I hoped so, but truth be told, I didn’t know the slightest thing about trolls. They weren’t something that spies had to deal with—at least, I hadn’t thought they were.
Clearly, whoever designed the Spy Games believed differently.
