She had me right where she wanted me, and she knew it.
The Queen of Hell stopped pacing and shook her head. “He was always so showy. Soostentatious. How did he approach you? With spectacle, I’m sure.”
An image of Xaphan and hundreds of demons looking down upon us like we were beasts to watch die in the Colosseum flitted through my mind. She was dead-on, but I would never admit it.
I didn’t need to.
Ishtar’s lips curled up knowingly. “Yes, of course he did.” She threw her head back, and roared with laughter.
The hair on my arms lifted. She was having fun with me—making a damn game of terrifying me. Of threatening the lives of those I loved.
Unable to help it, I darted a glance to my parents. Their eyes were locked on me.
Dad mouthed, “Run!”
I couldn’t. Just like I couldn’t watch them stay trapped for a second longer.
Throwing caution to the wind, I shot off the binding spell Merlin had taught me.
The demon queen seemed to anticipate it, and leapt out of the way, pivoting smoothly to face me.
“Poor choice, Dane. Now you’ll have to live with it.” She ripped a blade from a sheath strapped to her thigh. “Or come to my court and fight for what you hold dear.”
The blade in her hand glinted in the moonlight, stealing my breath. It was a dagger that I knew well, and seeing it covered in blood made my skin prickle.
My hand went to the injury on my arm. Whoever had made it had done so with the Realm Slicer.
Those damn sneaks,Tabitha growled inside my head.
The Queen of Hell grinned. “Thanks for the key home, girl.”
With that, she flung the powerful blade into the dirt. When the ground beneath her cracked open, my heart stopped.
Walls of fire twenty feet high flew up between us. I leapt backward, closer to the Shadows, who snarled. Instinctively, I twisted and hurled black magic at them. Dark tendrils wrapped around three necks, snuffing out their lives in a second.
When I turned back around, I was just in time to watch Ishtar descend into a pit of fire and darkness.
As she disappeared, the Realm Slicer glinted in one of her hands, and in the other, she held a tendril of dark magic, lassoing my parents together.
CHAPTERFORTY-THREE
My parents were gone. Dragged into the pits of Hell.
And as the Shadows from the Dark Court began creeping closer to me, sensing that their master wasn’t coming back, and they could do with me what they would, I knew I had only one choice.
I jumped.
Heat blasted over my skin, and the stench of sulfur choked me. The finest downy hair on my face seared away as I fell. I’d made a terrible mistake.
I mean,obviously. Who in the world jumps into Hell willingly?
As I fell, the heat grew more intense, like the sun was feet away instead of hundreds of thousands of miles. The fabric of my clothes began to melt.
Panicking, I called black magic to swath me in cold. It worked, and, while I was still falling, at least now I could concentrate.
Below me was illuminated, probably by the eternal flames that plagued the underworld. The floor, covered with jagged obsidian rocks, came at me faster and faster. If I hit those, I was a dead woman. A short ways away, maybe twenty feet to my left, I spotted a flat area and acted.
Calling a warphole to appear right under me, I fell into it. I was there for only a second before the warphole deposited me on the flat platform of black rock that I’d been picturing. I landed with anoomphon the rock.
