Men surrounded the cage, taunting the beast and poking it with spears. It roared and snarled viciously, snapping and yelping as it was stabbed and prodded.
He hated cages. He hated them.
“There’s your jackaltooth,” Gerald said. “They’ve worked it into a frenzy. It’s gonna tear ’em apart and feast on their innards.” Then he spit on the stone, showing his disgust. “After that, they always kill ’em and serve ’em at the cake shops. If you don’t want jackaltooth, you might avoid cake for a few days.”
They were going to bully him into a mindless frenzy, drive him to massacre people, and then eat him? Did he know who he was? Did he know what was happening?
The men stopped pulling the ropes, the wheels slowed, and the cage slid to a halt. One of them jabbed a spear into the jackaltooth’s side, and his throat rattle erupted into a rage-filled howl.
“Mari?” Justice squeezed my hand.
“That’s not a jackaltooth,” I whispered.
“Yeah. I was afraid you were going to say that.”
“Knock me out, and I’ll kill you.”
Justice grinned, his expression full of self-mockery. “It’s all over, huh? Well, whatever else, you can’t say we didn’t have a fun time while it lasted.”
“Right.” I smiled and pulled my hand free. We were back to being Mari and Justice—friends. Where he loved me one way, and I loved him another.
Then a chill raced over me as the crowd’s screams increased. “We have to rescue them.”
“We don’t necessarily have to.”
“Justice.”
“No skin off my back,” Gerald said. “She’s your friend.”
Not a friend, I almost said but didn’t.
Below, the men backed away from the cage and ran toward the tunnel. Then, at the entrance, they pulled a lever, and the cage door crashed open. The metal shuddered as it hit the ground. The crowd roared, and the portcullis closed, locking the victims in with the jackaltooth.
The people in the arena—Last included—waved and smiled, throwing flowers in the air.
Then the jackaltooth—Luvic—burst from his cage.
He snarled, filled with bloodlust. He was going to massacre them. He was going to kill them all. He crouched, his muscles rippling, and then launched himself into the air.
I screamed. “Luvic! No!”
His answer was a violent roar.
27
Luvic’s roar was swallowed by the wild echo of the crowd. The swell of their screams twisted and merged so the arena was filled with the bloodthirsty howl of a single depraved beast. Thousands rushed to their feet, rising with the noise. The pull of it jerked me, yanking me to join in with the violent glee. It was almost impossible to resist. I wanted to throw my fist in the air and add my voice to the vicious howl. I wanted to become one with the crowd.
I recognized this. It was the tide of emotion that birthed creatures like Winnie and carried reasonable humans into mindless hysteria.
Oftentimes, the spirit of an emotion could capture large crowds in its net. The larger the crowd, the better. It was what caused spontaneous standing ovations, deadly stampedes, and suicide charges during war. There was something in the human psyche that was incredibly susceptible to being subsumed by the emotion of a crowd. If you were unlucky enough to be caught in the net, your own psyche would abdicate its individuality to become one with everyone else. You were no longer you; you and everyone else had become the spirit of the emotion, a giant, beastly personification of awe, rage, courage, wrath, depravity. It happened at Hell Gate sometimes—usually at one of Jagger’s feasts—but never to this scale.
Every being in the arena was jerked upright, as if on puppet strings, as they howled in tandem. The stone vibrated from the roar, and the twisted, bloody-hungry, hateful emotion pulsed through me, trying to capture me in its grip.
In the field below, Luvic landed in front of a bearded man. The man held out his flower bouquet, grinning stupidly at Luvic as if he were a Pomeranian, not a jackaltooth.
I sprinted down the stone steps, flying toward the arena. My bare feet pounded on the stone, and the Den’s oppressive heat burned my naked skin.
“Don’t!” I shouted. “Don’t, Luvic!”
