She reaches behind her, grabs the stake I dropped, and tosses it on my chest. “They’re going to kill me one way or another, and it’ll be less pretty than this. You should do it.”

The stake is heavy on my chest. “I can’t.”

“You’ll never see your brother again if you don’t.”

“You’ll never see yours again if I do.” I can’t stop picturing a sad girl outside the window of a house full of family—stuck forever as a teenager with nobody at all. The image pulls at me. I don’t want to have something in common with her, but I can’t stop myself from relating.

“Like I said, I’m already dead.”

I shake my head.

“Do it!” she screams. She grabs my hands and forces them around the stake. “Do you know how many people I’ve killed?”

My fingers clench around the stake.

Her lips twist into a smile. “Do it or you’re dead.”

And then she lunges. My hands move on instinct, and I can feel the moment I break her skin—the grotesque pressure of it—and I keep pushing and watch something like relief flicker across her face, and then she’s turning to dust on top of me. I close my eyes so I don’t have to watch.

Her power slips into me like a song I don’t want to hear.

When the weight of her disappears, I sit up, and the ash clings to me like regret. I climb to my feet and stare at Ethan, smiling over a body that’s slowly crumbling.

He glances at me. “I thought you were a goner.” He sounds disappointed.

“What’s next?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer me, but the arena does. Water flows down the glass, distorting the already gruesome faces of our audience.

The freezing water is at my ankles in seconds, stirring the ashes of the vampires into a sick cloud around my legs. I try not to look down. I can’t think about it.

I slosh toward the wall, slapping a hand against the glass. It must be about a foot thick.

I move around the perimeter, ignoring laughing faces, and some worried—those few magicians with enough humanity left to care about this outcome and not just the show. I try not to look for Roman or my own troupe. I need to focus. I reach the other side, finding nothing.

Ethan shakes his head, slamming a bloodied hand against the glass and leaving a print that washes away in the waterfall in an instant. “I thought this was about killing vampires, huh?” he yells. “Pretty sure we passed.”

All we get is laughter from the other side.

The water hits his knees and my thighs.

We look at each other and back at the glass.

I pull a knife and slam it with all the force I can muster. My hand aches from the impact, and a sliver of glass breaks away. I try again. This time I heat the knife until it burns my skin, then plunge it into the glass. It breaks through, sinking hilt deep. I try to take it back out again and fail. One knife down.