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  My precious iron rod dropped to the cave floor with a clatter as the leader gave another command. A few of the demons went to work on the rock pile. In no time, they created a small body-sized opening.

  A red, hazy glow permeated the room.

  This world was more than just creepy—it was downright hellish. And from the looks of the light outside, it was getting worse by the second. “Fen!” I screamed as the minions bent down and began to squeeze through the hole. The ones left tossed me on the ground. One grabbed on to my ankles and began dragging me through like a sack of meat, cackling as it went. I still couldn’t move.

  “Phoebe!” Fen called from somewhere behind me. He was human again. “I’m almost to you. Hold on!”

  I heard a loud scuffle and another shout. He was still fighting them off. The ones in the main cavern must have caught up to him.

  The demon yanked me farther through the hole. Others helped by shoving at my shoulders. Their voices and shouts had become frantic, their movements jerky and impatient.

  They knew they were running out of time.

  Fen wasn’t going to make it in time. “It’s too late! I can’t move!” I yelled. “They’re taking me away.” I was fully ensconced in the hole now, closer to the outside than in, my feet feeling a major increase in temperature.

  There was a hoarse growl behind me, and Fen came into view, his body battered and bloody. He crouched down, tossing away the remaining demons, and extended his arm into the hole, but I was out of reach.

  “Valkyrie, grab my hand!” Fen shouted. “Grab it now!”

  “I can’t. They spelled me!” I cried as I slid a few more feet out of reach. “Fen, I can’t break free! They’re going to take me. Please help me!”

  Fen cursed as he started to tear at the rocks around the opening. He was much too big to fit in the tunnel. His strong arms ripped at the hole, trying to make the opening wider, but it was going to take too long.

  Full heat hit my legs.

  “Valkyrie! I will come for you!”

  It was the last thing I heard as the demons yanked me into the red, reedy glow of their world.

  12

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  I inhaled and choked. The air outside was thick and dense, much more so than inside the caves. It coated my throat. The demons wasted no time hoisting me in the air again, and this time I had no weapon to aid me.

  But even if I had, it wouldn’t have helped. I still couldn’t move.

  As they ran, I coughed, my eyes watering. I struggled to take in the landscape around me as we passed by. A thick, hazy smog floated around us. It was tinted scarlet and hung in the air like a cartoon. It had to be well over a hundred degrees. Sweat beaded on my brow and tumbled down the side of my face as the demons jostled me along.

  We descended a mountainous slope at a quick clip. By the light, I couldn’t tell if it was day or night. There was no orb hanging in the sky to gauge any kind of time. I had the sinking feeling it was perpetually dusk here.

  Their world was a sullen, ugly place that reeked of despair.

  I gave a halfhearted attempt to rotate my body, but it was no use. Nothing cooperated. Blood still leaked from my arm and hand. My camisole and ripped skirt were saturated with my own sweat and blood and covered with holes where the demon blood had eaten through the fabric.

  All the wetness should have made me slippery in their grasps, but their skin was bumpy and abrasive, and they had no problem holding on tight.

  At the bottom of the slope, the beasties set off at a run, full speed across the red moonscape. There was no cover that I could see, other than a few scattered boulders here and there. The horizon was peppered with what appeared to be deep, dark craters. I did not want to know what lurked in those holes.

  There were no trees, no greenery, no life.

  It was a world devoid of any hope.

  My head started to spin in earnest after a half hour of being tossed around on the shoulders of the minions. The blood loss made me light-headed, and the pain, which had thankfully held off under the adrenaline of fighting back in the caves, had come rushing back with a vengeance. My body pulsed in tandem to the pounding of the demons’ feet hitting the ground mile after mile.

  I struggled to keep conscious.

  Abruptly, after what seemed like several hours, most of which I’d spent blacked out, the demons slowed. I was half delirious but managed to open my eyes and hold my head up a few inches to try to see what was happening. A thin crust of dust had hardened along my eyelashes, and it took me several tries to get them all the way open.

  Spread out in front of us was a wasteland of broken, dead trees. It resembled a petrified forest from this vantage point. As the demons moved closer, I discovered it wasn’t a forest of trees at all. It was a forest of dead bodies!

  All different kinds.

  As the beasties wove through it, I could only recognize the ones shaped like ettins. The rest of the monsters were unfamiliar. The wicked forest boasted a variety of strange creatures, each hanging limply from long sticks, arms spread. The sticks had been driven into the ground. None of the bodies looked remotely human.

  Small relief.

  Most were burnt and charred beyond all recognition. As the demons ran, the bodies swayed from their repulsive sticks like brittle leaves in the hot, dusky, red-tinted air. Every mouth I gazed upon was frozen open in pitiful agony. It was hard to feel sorry for an ettin, but I came close.

  Bile rose in my throat for the seventy-fifth time. I struggled to keep some kind of containment cap on my ever-leaking sanity. I knew I wasn’t going to survive whatever was coming, and a wave of sorrow took hold of me, rocking me to the core with blinding emotion.

  I didn’t want to die!

  I half cried, half gasped in the putrid air, my face wet with tears, my mind numb with memories. I tried to focus on what was happening around me, but I couldn’t see anything clearly anymore. Thoughts rushed through my brain, but nothing was coherent, nothing seemed to matter. Instinct and pure determination had saved me thus far, and I had to grasp on to that. I desperately wanted to live! I had so much more to experience.

  I yelled in agony, my teeth clenched as I struggled to hold my fracturing mind together. With new resolution, I yanked fiercely at the hands restraining me, the ones hurting me, and thrashed my body. The demons growled, flashing their jagged, coal-stubbed teeth and snarling their nonexistent lips.

  It took me a second to realize I was animated.

  I could move again!

  Just barely, but that meant the spell must’ve been wearing off. It gave me a small nugget of sunshine in this sad, desolate landscape. I forced my eyes open and made myself see.

  If you give in to the darkness, you may as well roll over and die, Phoebe. You’re going to have to keep fighting. Ingrid’s voice was in my ear, urging me on. She was right.

  The demons neared the end of the forest of death, approaching a short, fenced enclosure, possibly a barricade. It extended as far as I could see on either side and seemed to be made out of the same black tree branches that held the bodies aloft. And to make it more designer fabulous, on the sharp, pointed tips of the fence rested more charred heads, haphazardly hooked through empty eye sockets or gaping maws.

  The demons stopped before a large gate.

  In moments it swung open, and the demons hurried through.

  Inside the enclosure was row after row of rickety stone or stick hovels cobbled together like no thought had been given to longevity. They must not have a long life-span. The entire area resembled a living ghost town that was still somehow thriving against all odds.

  As we passed, more beasties stuck their heads out of the shacks, and even more followed us.

  Every muscle in my body tightened, screaming to escape, to lose consciousness, to claw out my own eyes—anything to make this all disappear.

  Please, please, make this go away!

  I willed myself not to cry, swall
owing back the stinging tears again and again, forcing myself to keep seeing. Make yourself live, Phoebe. You have to do this!

  The demons brought me into a large arena separated from the rest of the living quarters by a huge circle of smooth, onyx stones. The rocks were perfectly round and sat aligned, one about every two feet, like evil sentinels. As we passed through the boundary, I shivered and my reflexes convulsed uncontrollably.

  A large lava pit churned in the middle of it all, with several contraptions rigged beside it.

  Nothing good will happen here.

  A huge throne, carved out of the same black onyx stone, sat with malice to one side. Just beyond the large chair lay several boulders with smooth tops, like long tables.

  Or altars.

  The beasties marched over and threw me down onto the smooth boulder closest to the bubbling pit of lava.

  It was stained with a sticky, dark residue and smelled like death.

  More bile.

  Four minions held my arms and legs steady, while others brought up some material hanging from the sides and proceeded to restrain my wrists and ankles. The cloth was the same burlap mesh they all wore. When they were done, I was immobile. The fabric was harsh and unforgiving, scraping against my already sensitive skin.

  Even though I was restrained, I struggled. “You bastards, let me go!” My movements were getting stronger and stronger by the moment. The spell was definitely waning.

  Too little, too late.

  Then, without warning, the demons parted like water as something lumbered toward me, its footfalls vibrating the ground.

  I spotted its terrible sword first.

  The blade was curved and at least three feet long. But it wasn’t metal.

  It was made completely of flames.

  Orange flickers lashed out of it, dancing along the invisible edge, jumping with a fiendish intensity. The color of the licking heat matched the color of all the demons’ eyes as they peered at me, awaiting my death, yearning for it.

  The thing coming was as big as Junnal, but that was where the similarities ended. Its skin was charred black, like the rest of the minions, but its face was more human-shaped—oblong rather than round. Its eyes blazed a hideous, deep red, but the very worst was its nose. In place of a normal nose were three terrifying slits. It opened its maw, and not one, but two forked tongues lashed out as it spoke.

  “You. Human girl,” it rumbled. “Trespass. My land.” It slapped its chest, in case I wasn’t sure whose land it was talking about.

  It spoke English? Please tell me this isn’t a demigod!

  I blinked. It was all I could do. This beast was the most terrifying thing I’d ever set eyes on in my entire life.

  The demons gathered closer, crowding toward me, not wanting to miss any of the impending action. They were more aggressive now that their boss-man was here, and they wrestled each other for a prime viewing spot.

  “Me. Surtr,” he boomed in a gravelly tone, which sounded less like rocks in a blender and more like his tongues regularly got stuck in the back of his throat.

  He didn’t wait for me to answer before arcing his fiery sword down on me, sweeping it along the length of my body.

  I screamed as my skin bubbled and burned.

  The flames licking me were hotter than anything I’d ever felt before. My skin steamed, blisters and blood erupted. The pain was overwhelming. My eyes rolled back in my head. I was one breath away from passing out.

  “Weak. Not Valkyrie,” Surtr bellowed.

  “Please!” I cried, forcing myself to stay awake, to endure. “Please, let me go. I didn’t come here on purpose, I swear. I wasn’t trying to trespass. I just want to go home. If you let me go, I’ll leave this place and never come back!”

  “No.” He paced menacingly in front of me, swinging his awful, flaming sword of doom too close for comfort. “Price for you. Too high.”

  “I have money,” I pleaded. “I’ll give you anything you want.”

  “Verdandi will have…when I finish.”

  “Don’t do this. If you torture me, I won’t survive!”

  “Silence!” Surtr commanded. He raised his hand aloft, and his beasties flooded around him, cheering, shaking their stick fists in the air. He peered at me, his tongues grotesque as they alternated in and out of his mouth—a mouth filled with razor-sharp black teeth. “Human blood…is good. We take flesh…before deliver to hag.”

  “No, please, no,” I moaned while squirming in earnest, the fabric chafing deep bloody furrows into my wrists and ankles. “If you do, I swear I won’t make it. If I die, Verdandi will be angry.” She probably didn’t care one iota if these demons killed me. They would’ve done her job for her. “I’ve seen her wrath, and it’s terrible. You don’t want to get close to that! I’m human, like you said. I won’t survive!”

  Surtr shot his head back, and something close to laughter boiled out. “You will…thank us…human.” He sounded like death. “We will not…roast you…like others. Close to death…but not dead.”

  There would be no thanking going on.

  He meant to torture me, just like Fen said.

  Surtr turned and issued commands in his language. The demons sprang into action.

  “No,” I whispered, crying to myself. “Oh my gods, no.”

  As the demons flittered away, busy with their new errand, Surtr stalked toward the lava pit and took a seat on his big, black, shiny throne.

  I closed my eyes.

  Convincing myself to rally wasn’t anywhere in my mind.

  Instead, my thoughts went to my mother and father, my friends, my life. It all flickered before me in sharp detail. Christmas morning the year I got my first bike, the red one I had asked for. Splashing in the lake near our home on a warm summer day. My father’s infectious laugh. The year I made the swim team and broke two longstanding records while my parents proudly looked on. My first, sweaty kiss behind the hardware store and the feeling of the tingles as they shot to my toes.

  Too much to lose.

  I wasn’t sure if I’d blacked out or not, but when I opened my eyes, several demons were leaning over me, each fisting sharp objects that resembled shards of flint. They also carried small bowls chipped out of dark stone. The bowls were gritty and stained, and the smell coming from them was rancid. Like everything else around here.

  It felt like hours had passed, but I couldn’t be sure.

  I wrenched my head in the direction of the throne. It was empty.

  Please don’t die, I begged myself. You can do this, Phoebe. You have too much to lose. My mother’s voice floated in my ear, left over from a dream that had just dissipated. One that I’d dreamed many times before in my youth. She was sobbing, clutching me as an infant. She wouldn’t let go. We love you, Phoebe. Please, live.

  The demons began to touch me, and I screamed, “Get away from me, you little creeps!”

  “Greeza.” They all chortled as they brought the flints down to my exposed skin. “Hurt.”

  “Oh, now you decide to speak English? It’s too late to try to get on my good side. You’re all going to pay. Every last one of you! I promise—”

  Multiple flint pieces sliced my body at once.

  One of the minions raked a piece down my battered arm, tearing a deep, continuous, jagged line from the top of my shoulder to my wrist. The demon’s eyes flared hungrily, its mouth greedy, its hateful tongue flashing in and out in delight.

  Blood gushed from the wound, and the pain was beyond excruciating. I gasped for air, screaming and shouting in agony. The demons ignored me. Instead, they placed bowls under my body to better catch the gushing blood.

  “Please, no,” I moaned, shaking my head side to side. A sharpness pierced my thigh. I was going to lose my mind. “NO!” My voice hoarse. “You don’t understand. I’m not going to survive! Surtr, you will have nothing to give Verdan—”

  Agony seared my legs as they gouged and cut, my blood spilling onto the altar, splashing into the bowls.

 
; I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out.

  The demons paused, and I rushed to catch my breath. My throat thick and raspy. “You’re done, right? That’s enough. Torture complete.” I had no idea why I was still conscious. The pain had eclipsed into something else, something I didn’t have a name for. “Please, stop,” I whispered, my voice full of pleading. “You’re killing me.”

  “Take her flesh,” a voice roared. Surtr’s footsteps pounded toward the altar. “Her flesh…with her blood.” He spoke something in his language, and the demons jumped at his command. They peered down on me with opened mouths, hovering closer, their faces ablaze with anticipation.

  “You don’t need my flesh. The blood is enough—”

  “Take it.”

  A demon hungrily lowered his mouth to my side. “No! NO! I will pay you whatever you want. My father…he will pay—” Teeth grazed my skin. A forked tongue lapped at my blood. Sharp points sank in, tearing at my flesh. My skin ripped loose in its mouth. “Arghhhh!”

  Sanity-splitting agony rocked me to the core. Deep down, a current zipped through me. I could sense the energy sparking low. I was furious. I was delirious. I was out of my mind. Something was shifting in my body. Lightning struck above my head. Thunder clapped loudly, sounding terrifying in my ears.

  The demon holding my flesh in its mouth, still attached to my side, flew backward.

  “See?” I mumbled in a daze, barely conscious. “That’s what happens when you mess with me.” The hurt raging though my body was moments from overtaking me. The last of my energy was ebbing away, blown out in one last hurrah. I was almost happy to see it go. I couldn’t take any more of this, mentally or physically.

  I was done.

  The last thing I saw was Surtr leaning over me. “Not enough power…little Valkyrie. Still…too human.” He laughed. It was an ugly sound. Just before I lost my grip on reality, I heard him utter his last command. “Take…more.”

  13

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  Someone was screaming. It wasn’t me.