Bloodguard

chapter 17

Leith

I dive, swimming toward the shark instead of away.

I’m no match for this thing power for power, but I’m superior when it comes to wit. There’s no need for me to destroy it. I only need to damage it enough to win.

With the trident out in front of me, I’m protected to some extent. I swim straight toward the shark. Its maw is already open. At the last moment, I thrust my trident forward, using the shark’s momentum to stab its own nose. It’s not much, only enough to briefly daze and piss it off. Then I push myself over it and tilt the trident so it rakes the shark’s skin as it passes me.

The points of the trident do their job. Blood spews into the water and swirls like red clouds from the wounds I create. The shark thrashes, and the turbulence rips my only decent weapon away. I use its moment of confusion to flee, but I know it will follow soon, its injuries magnifying its rage.

And alerting the others to new bait.

My body weakens with every stroke. My lungs beg for air. But my mind knows better than to stop.

I may be a skilled swimmer, but I’ve developed far different muscle groups and strategies over the years to stay alive on land, not water.

My body betrays me, falling into motions that resemble more of a crawl. I bump into something and finally look up. I’ve reached another wall, opposite from where I started. It’s only now that I can gauge how far I swam.

With a pained groan, I surface. I flip onto my back, floating, permitting myself to rest long enough to slow my haggard breathing.

I’m fucked for losing my trident.

Then that fucking wooden sword bumps me on the side.

I don’t slap it aside or question whether it’s the mage taunting me. She’s gone, taken away by the guards. I need a weapon, and I need it now.

The hilt maintains that strange, thick wrapping held together tightly with twine. I think I should peel it free until I realize it cushions my sore hand and makes my grip more comfortable. It’s remarkably easy to hold. Pressing my back to the wall, I transfer the wooden sword to my injured hand and pull the dagger out of my belt with the other.

An eel skims over the water, its thin back cutting zigzag lines through the turbulent surface, but my focus jerks to the shark almost upon me. I turn and thrust the sword forward, praying my grip holds. In my weakened hands, the blow is only enough to nick the shark in the gums. I kick off the side of the wall and plunge my knife into its eye.

The blood spurting out of the shark lures the eel away from me. It takes a bite of the shark’s nose, causing it to retaliate and clamp its rows of razor-sharp teeth down on the eel.

Currents of energy zap across the surface of the water and rake like burning needles across my spine. I bellow my torment for all to hear.

The crowd cheers—thrilled, applauding, and eager for more.

As the eel and shark go to war, more currents of lightning shoot through me, burning and stinging in simultaneous song. I roar, then scare myself when I abruptly quiet.

I’ve finally hit my limit, it seems, my vision taking turns dulling and sharpening beneath that gray and unforgiving sky. I don’t know what happens. I can’t hear, save for the buzzing that follows every twitch of my limbs.

This trial of strength feels like such a waste.

Drowning is the sweeter way to go.

It’s my only thought…until I think of Dahlia, sick but surviving on the meager coin I send every month. My little shadow, who’d follow me to hell itself if I were to lead, needs my bravery more than ever. Self-pity won’t save her life.

I try to lift a leg. It doesn’t work. I’m stuck to the water like a fly on honey.

As I’ve done so many times in my miserable life, I force away the despair and gather my wits. But my wits don’t matter so much when my body is unresponsive. I float away, somehow still holding on to that damned wooden sword. Still, I have to keep trying.

In my periphery, scorched pieces of shark and an eel head bob past me.

They killed each other. Good.

Not that it solves anything. I’m still screwed.

The remaining sharks and eels go after their dead. It’s only a matter of time before they remember I’m still here and vulnerable. A very short period of time.

Cooked meat isn’t more desirable than fresh to these things. What the eel tried to do to the shark, the dwarves, and me was strictly a protective response. They react out of fear and instinct.

Those poor dwarves. It’s why the guards burdened them with carrying the cauldrons. The guards knew the risks and would sell their mothers if it meant sparing their own hides. Maeve knew it, too.

My head bumps against something. I’ve reached another section of wall. But it could be the same wall for all I know.

An elf and a sprite peer over at me.

“He’s dead,” the sprite says, her wings drooping as if I rained on their parade. “What a knob.”

“About damn time,” her elven partner adds.

“Say one more thing about that gladiator, and I’ll feed numb nuts here your wings,” Maeve fires off.

It’s her voice that brings me back. Who needs a cheer squad when I have Maeve’s sweet disposition and vocabulary to spring me back to life?

When I blink, they can’t scamper away fast enough. They don’t want to end up like the humans who went for a swim with me. Damn me, they’re smarter than those fools.

I reach up, surprised I can move my arm. I try to kick. My legs are mostly working. I try out my other arm—it doesn’t work as well as my dominant one, but it’s more than I had moments ago.

And I know the sharks haven’t had their fill yet. When they finish, they will find me. If I’m lucky, maybe they’ll run into one another first. Except luck is a bitch I never was able to bed.

I strike the wall half-heartedly with my pathetic wooden sword. The point barely scratches the stone in my weakened state.

This thing wouldn’t scare away a squirrel. What the blazes was Maeve thinking?

My body jerks at the sound of bear traps. It’s the sharks snapping their teeth—the same monstrosities that chewed Luther to chunks. Wish he’d have given me a little bit more of a heads-up.

Although nothing would have prepared me for sharks. Nothing.

Well, except Luther mouthing “shark” instead of “water,” but coming from fucking farmlands, he’d likely never even seen one of these monsters before.

And had I not included those royal humans in all the sporty fun, the lords wouldn’t have tossed in the eels. The eels were my reward for a job too well done.

The lords are always generous that way.

Bastards.

Ripples shoot across the water. Given their speed and the broader current they create, they’re made by another shark. The eels move smoothly, skimming through the water in S-shaped trajectories.

“Move, Leith. MOVE! ”

It’s Maeve I hear. She’s right. I can’t let my baby sister down.

From where I float, the ledge appears, ten, maybe twelve feet above me. I can’t exactly scale it and escape. There are too many guards and too many beings with magic. If I so much as try, every battle before this one won’t have mattered.

Neither will the way my friendship ended with Sullivan.

Deserters face a death worse than the arena.

But, while I can’t leave the arena, there’s nothing that says I must fight what’s in here.

I only have to stay alive.

Stiffly, I try to move, and my body protests in spasms. It doesn’t like me any better when I try a second time. It punishes me with searing pain and a terrible throbbing that reaches my head in mad bursts.

I manage to turn onto my stomach and dip my legs vertically. I almost dare a stroke when an eel spirals from the water in a terrifying leap, its maw open and targeting my face.

I raise the wooden sword—it’s all I have. But as the eel reaches me, a wave lifts like a hand and slaps the eel away.

What is this?

The wave appeared in front of me and didn’t move me with it. If anything, it kept me protected. Which is unnerving—but not as much as the eel at this moment.

My gaze shifts from side to side. The eel recovers quickly and comes after me again. Another joins it. Like before, a large wave slaps the first eel. A shorter wave forms right after, shielding me and striking the second.

The shark I felt coming after me before the eels appeared inexplicably spins in circles, disoriented by the miniature whirlpool it has created and is now trapped in.

Murmurs reverberate through the crowd. Something else is here. Something that may be on my side.

The ripples batting my legs warn that a second shark is approaching. By the heaviness in the current, it feels like the largest among them. Another eel surfaces, quickly swimming away from the shark’s path, not wanting to meet its wrath.

I hold out my wooden sword, keen on jabbing it in the eyes or another vulnerable spot if given the chance.

What happens next can’t be explained. Not by me, and certainly not by the crowd going silent in awe. The eel that slithers past the shark reappears beside it.

Its tail smacks the shark all over its head and body, any place it can find, in awkward, unnatural motions. The shark cants its head and snaps its jaws, sinking its teeth into the prey that dared assault it.

I don’t lie in wait for those teeth to connect. Not after how incapacitated the last eel shock left me.

I push myself out of the water. There’s a small crevice I grasp tightly, feet scrambling against the slick wall of the arena as jolts of energy course through me in waves.

I swing from left to right, trying to find someplace to rest my foot before I lose my grip.

My toe catches on another indentation along the wall, offering me a small reprieve and enough time to find another section that will better support my weight.

“Hang on!” Maeve hollers. “Whatever you do, don’t let go.”

Yeah. Easier said. I’m mere inches from the ledge, but it might as well be miles. Each jolt from those eels makes me wobble on my already unstable footing.

With a warrior’s cry, I lurch upward and manage to catch the ledge.

At first, I can do little more than hang, my body elongating from the unintentional stretch. I barely stay in place, my torn hands begging me to let go.

Chaos has unleashed below.

The eels issue their painful currents in rapid succession. They sweep along the water in an assortment of spurts, engulfing the expanse with flashes of bright-green light. Two sharks are already dead, partially burned and floating belly-up. The one I stabbed is bleeding heavily but alive. Many more eels are shredded to mangled strings of meat.

It’s smart to let them fight it out. My best guess is that each gladiator was scheduled to fight a series of sharks or eels, or hell, a school of rabid fucking jellyfish for all I know. If defeated or satiated, the other sets of predators would challenge any gladiator who remained.

Cute. But feeding the audience to the sharks had the lords scrambling for other ways to kill me. They didn’t consider that their chosen instruments of torture would turn on one another, and it likely has enraged them further.

In the wild, river sharks, eels, and alike avoid each other unless there’s a shortage of food. Here, they are exactly like us—gladiators fighting to the death, each one battling to emerge the victor.

An eel leaves the melee and leaps out of the water to attack me. I instinctively curl inward, shrinking myself out of reach, but not soon enough. It catches my calf and sinks its fangs to the bone. The puncture is so agonizing—so inconceivably excruciating—that I honestly consider letting go. At least the sharks would kill me.

The monster writhes, using its weight to try to drag me back into the water and damn close to succeeding. I stab it through the head with the point of my mighty driftwood blade.

It retaliates with a shock to my leg that rattles my teeth, locking every muscle in my body into place. My hold on the ledge tightens involuntarily. Finally a fucking break. I hang tight, wailing in torment and stabbing at it until it falls dead into a shark’s maw. The water practically sizzles beneath me, steam rising up from the deadly waters below. Every droplet singes my skin. I reckon there’s enough charge built up in there to stun a giant.

The shark goes belly-up, joining my own victim to bob lifelessly in the waves.

Another eel. I swat it aside with my sword before it can sink its needle-sharp fangs into me. It lands in the remaining shark’s path and dies soon after. I am certain I will be next. Only the shark—the largest among them—doesn’t jump for me. It thrashes and writhes and chomps, and it is only when the shark breaches the surface that I realize my good fortune. The creature’s rough skin is riddled with puncture wounds, nose to tail, and its movements grow weaker by the second.

Good. I can only imagine the pain it’s in.

The eels keep coming. Or at least I think they do. I keep stabbing. There’s no strategy. It’s me against them, and we all want to live.

I manage to stab several more times in a last-ditch effort to survive before my cramping, damaged hand releases my only weapon at last—and Maeve screams.