An especially loud crunch drew them back toward the fight. Ursula had gotten hold of a spiked bludgeon and was using it to block the simultaneous attacks of two more warriors. In unison they brought their immense blades down onto her, and the stone beneath her feet—one heeled and one bare—fissured.

Adeline pulled Kane back. “Now, Kane. You’ve got to unravel it now.”

“How?” Kane screamed. The cracking stone and the heat from the blaze dizzied him. More warriors were spawning from the crowd, all of them lumbering toward Ursula.

“Usually you clap your hands and—” Adeline was cut off by a sudden belch from the mouth-shaped hearth. Something within the inferno was moving. Something solid and slithering. Something worse than anything they’d encountered thus far.

The chants of the crowd suddenly synchronized. It was not the sound of a demand, like before. It was the sound of celebration as they cheered, “Bloood sacrifiiice!”

Adeline’s face twisted. “Kane, where’s the dagger?”

Kane searched his memory. “I kicked it into the fire!”

Adeline’s eyes widened. “You threw the ceremonial dagger with my virginal blood on it into the fire?”

“But you’re not a virgin.”

Adeline’s face twisted. “Oh, God. Oh my God. Kane, it doesn’t matter in this world. You fulfilled the sacrifice!”

At the lips of the hearth, the flames shaded a deep scarlet, pulling into a smoldering mounds. Then, like a bloated tongue, a gargantuan beast slithered forth from the throat of the earth and out into the arena.

Its body was a composition of blazing plates sliding over thousands of undulating legs. From beneath it, Kane could make out serrated mandibles large enough to chew apart a bus, and beady, ancient eyes that scanned the empty altar with hunger, then outrage. Whatever it was, it was furious to find its meal escaped, and it manifested its fury through an inscrutable language of clicks and squeals.

Elliot was wrong, Kane thought. There is a glowing lobster.

A new chant cut through the din, quickly gaining momentum.

“CY! MO! THO! AH! EX! I! GWA!”

The fiery crustacean craned back and let out an earsplitting screech in return, then turned its laser gaze upon Kane and Adeline. Its antenna twitched, then swung away as sparks gushed forth from its glowing mandibles.

They ran, but before they’d made it halfway across the altar the creature snapped open its great jaws and let forth a neon tsunami of fire.

“I got it! I got it!” Ursula shouted. She sped between them, toward the fire, her arm drawn back as though she meant to punch her way through it.