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.

Ethan draws his gun. “Back up,” he says, like he gives a damn about shards hitting me.

I do it anyway.

The blow digs out an inch of glass.

“How many bullets do you have?”

“Not enough.”

The water laps at my waist and I grit my teeth to stop them from chattering.

“Look,” Ethan says.

I follow Ethan’s finger to a bit of flashing gold near the top of one of the walls. We move toward it. The water pushes against me, fighting my every step.

Fear, colder than the water, bites into my bones. I can’t swim. Ten minutes. I calculate ten minutes until I’m drowning.

We stand together, looking up at the one and only anomaly in this glass wall—a solid gold keyhole. I pull the key from my pocket. “Looks like the magic loves me best.”

“How are you going to get to it?”

There are no footholds to climb, nothing but smooth, unyielding glass. The keyhole itself is buried two inches beneath the glass.

“We can wait until the water rises enough to take us there,” he says.

“We can’t risk it. We’ll only have seconds before the water fills in.” Plus, I’ll be dead by then.

I plunge into the water and pull two of my thicker knives from my boots. The water steams off them as I pour heat into the metal. I plunge one at chest level and the other above my head. The glass takes the blades and leaves the flat hilts visible. My wet boots and hands slide as I try to pull myself onto them.