Page 362 of Hunters and Prey

Will was still paralyzed with fear, hands up to ward off the beast, and yet the beast didn’t attack immediately.

Far to the left, the two mercs distracted the other Wyvern, working as a well-oiled machine—a team. There would be no help for Will from those two, and he probably knew it. He slowly lowered his arms, accepting his fate.

The Wyvern closed its eyes in a slow blink as if considering something, and then it swung its head away from Will, its intention clear—it wasn’t going to attack.

Jasper let out a strangled sob of relief.

Will climbed to his feet, relief etched across his slender face. And then the Wyvern’s body began to shudder. It let out a roar, part rage and part pain, before whirling back toward Will, its collar spitting sparks. This time there was no hesitation. Its head whipped forward and its jaws clamped around Will. The crowd went wild, cheering and chanting as Will’s body was torn in two. Jasper’s scream was a sound of devastation; it tore at my heart and scraped at my brain. Two dead. Only the mercs remained, and now they were one-on-one with the Wyverns, but the timer was almost at zero. Ten seconds to go.

“Come on!” Bran yelled. “You can fucking do it.”

His words rang clear and loud, rising over the hum of the crowd, catching on and becoming a mantra.

“Do it, do it, do it!” the Bloods shouted. Whether in encouragement of the Wyverns or the Skins, I wasn’t sure.

The Wyverns took their time, stalking and lashing out but missing. The collars sparked and they went wild, almost taking out one of the mercs. They moved so fast, they blocked our view of the Skins.

“Dammit, fucking dammit!” Bran punched the bars.

A siren wailed and the Wyverns’ eyes rolled back in their heads. They went down hard, causing the ground to shudder and sending a dust cloud up into the air to obscure the arena. The crowd fell into pin-drop silence.

Slowly, painfully, the cloud cleared to reveal the mercs, each standing over a Wyvern, bloody and dusty but alive.

A cheer like a cresting wave rose up and washed over the arena. My blood pumped harder, filling my head with the roar of the sea. The wall behind the mercs opened and they ran toward it and out of sight. Two Skins in brown uniforms came running out a moment later. The body clean-up crew. Jasper moaned and looked away as one of the Skins dragged Will’s torso out of the ring. His legs were on the other side of the pit, mangled and barely recognizable as limbs.

The pit was clean now, and the Skins ran back out as the ground began to rumble. It gave way around the sleeping Wyverns, as if someone had cut neat rectangles in the ground and sucked them in before rising up, new and untouched.

“What the hell just happened?” Bran asked.

My fingers tightened around the bars. “The ground is one big machine. Like a chessboard.”

“So, they can whip it out from under us whenever they like?” Helgi said, incredulous.

“They can do whatever they want,” Dante said tightly. “Question is: what do they have in store for us?”

“What a show,” a disembodied voice blared from hidden speakers. “What a game. And it’s not over yet, folks, because we’re about to up the ante and raise the stakes in a game of pin the collar on the Wyvern.”

The crowd fell silent.

“As you know, the collars allow us to keep the Wyverns in check. And in this game, we’re going to bring the pain. The next group of Skins, our highest-ranked unit, will be up against berserker Wyverns. All they need to do to turn them off is insert a chip into the collar around the Wyverns’ necks. Three chips, three Wyverns. Let’s see what the unit can do. Let’s find out who is worthy of being Vorn.”

The other unit?

The other unit was us.

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