Page 139 of The Shadowed Oracle
“Get your ass over here!” Tyla screamed through her tears.
Raidinn obeyed, leaving Haxus trying to locate his shifty opponent, and evading the very surface of Ealis fracturing beneath him all at once. The beast huffed, roaring in vexation, his left foot slipping as a chunk of the ground crumbled.
“Die! Just fucking die!” Raidinn begged.
Haxus braced himself, watching as his surroundings turned to rubble, a whimper now evident in his growls. Raidinn had been a thorn in his foot, but this new invisible opponent, taking the very ground from underneath him, it was enough to send the beast into a rampage.
Haxus pounded his chest. Those bottom tusks of his seemed to dig into his cheeks as he gritted his mammoth maw. He flinched, shaking like a panicked dog. Then the stadium went quiet as the beast bent his knees, placed a hand on the shrinking patch of stable ground, and then rocketed up and away from the quaking soil. It was a denial of gravity itself, leaping twenty feet in the air and finally landing in the middle of the stable arena.
He whirled himself in every direction, looking for his next victim. He looked at the twins. He looked to the queen, the baldachin, and even the crowd. All were in his line of fire now. His eyes held horror and pain and anger beyond any beast. He was death itself. And he would slash and claw and chomp until nothing was left.
But he fixated on Callinora first.
Standing on that platform like a sacrificial lamb, barely able to keep upright if not for the pillar she was chained to, she was too inviting to ignore any longer.
Wild and flailing and unsheathed, Haxus barreled toward the princess with such power and speed that the crowd behind her split in two to avoid the inevitable carnage to come behind the beast’s target.
The gap closed. Thirty feet. Ten.
And Haxus leapt, vaulting face-first and jaws wide to devour his prey whole.
Chapter Forty-Two
Ingrid pleaded with Dean.She went over the plan that she, Monia and Lucilla had spoken of the night before, begging for him to take a chance. To trust her.
Their original scheme had been different in its inception, but they could still get the same result.
Both,she promised.They could protect both herself and the princess, if only they trusted Raidinn, Tyla and Veston to keep holding off the beast long enough. Long enough to get in position, and draw Haxus back to them, and by extension, to Callinora.
The second Haxus leapt, Ingrid pushed the Princess of Maradenn behind the pillar she was still shackled to and took another leap to the muddy arena floor. There was no margin for error. Only a split-second for Dean to emerge from below the sacrificial platform, and fire the arrow into the monster’s right eye.
Haxus squealed, going limp as his shoulder cut into the marble pillar like an axe, slicing it in two just above Callinora’s slumped head. The beast wriggled to his back and cried in pain, clutching and pulling at the arrow until the long, blood-soaked shaft was free.
It was all the time Dean needed to leap upon the beast’s chest and drive his sword into the untouched eye, angling it up toward the skull.
The entire stadium went still as Haxus shrieked out in an animal roar one last time. Seizing, gasping, and finally drawing his last breath. The half-god of the arena was no more.
And the curse faded along with it.
Tusks slowly turned to teeth. Claws turned to fingers. Hair shed. And the people of the Occi Isles now gaped at the truth. Haxus and Horace—they were one and the same. Their former king might’ve been blinded and bloodied, but they remembered that face. Remembered that noble jaw. That sunny-blonde hair. They’d known him, and loved him, and served him for hundreds of years. Their king. He had been reduced to a caged circus act.
Mayhem erupted in the stands.
“Silence!” Enitha shouted in the orator’s stone scepter. “I demand silence!”
The chaos drowned her out. Cries for answers replaced chants for death. The people wanted justice. Whether their guilt drove them, or their anger, or their loyalty, it did not matter. A small rebellion sparked, and in that fast-spreading outrage, Ingrid and her friends had an opening.
Enitha was too stunned to keep track of them. The enemies of the arena had been conquered, and Sylan, up on the baldachin, still where Ingrid left him, still caught in Lucilla’s web—he made no move to stop his prey.
Even in the rush to flee, Ingrid couldn’t help but take notice of him. His lethal calm. His almost amused posture.
Just as she started to turn from the bastard prince, she saw him smile.
I swear it, she’d said to him. Her loyalty. Her allegiance to him.Him. Not his Kingdom, Ingrid remembered with a shudder. Was that why he looked so unbothered? Had he bound her insome way? Or was that oath simply for his pride? Making her declare it loudly in front of her friends. The friends he wanted so badly for her to doubt.
“Ingrid?” Dean called out in a panic. “Are you hurt?!”
She came around the corner of the platform to show herself to him, already shining her attention on the princess. “I’m okay.”
