“I didn’t.”
She threw her hands up in the air. This conversation wasn’t going anywhere.
“Come on,” Kai said, setting his hand on her back. “Let’s get you some lunch. You need to replenish your magic before your next match.”
“Pizza?” she asked hopefully.
“I was thinking we could try something different.”
“Different as in other-than-pizza different?”
“Yes.”
Hmm. “Why?”
“Because you can’t always eat pizza,” he said.
“Sure you can. There are more than enough kinds of pizza to keep even the biggest glutton busy for months. Thick crust, thin crust, square, circle, mini pizzas, pizza bagels, pizza cookie—”
“Pizza cookie?”
“It’s a thing,” she assured him. “A type of dessert.”
“It sounds awful.”
“Yum.” She grinned. “Now, where was I? Ah, yes. Red sauce, white sauce, cheese, extra cheese, red tomatoes, yellow tomatoes, sun-dried tomatoes. Mmmm. Pepperoni, mushrooms, peppers, corn, pineapple—”
“Bananas?”
“No.” She pretended to retch. “That’s just gross. Then there’s New York Style, Chicago Style, Italian Style, California Style, and, best of all, Wizard House Pizza Style. Pizza is versatile. It’s practically its own food group.”
“Except that it’s not,” he said.
“Merely a technicality. When I’m elected Empress of the Universe, that will all change.”
“Empress of the Universe?” he asked as they set off down the hall.
“Yes. Right now my platform hinges on the pizza referendum, but I’m sure I’ll come up with a few more gems. I figure I’ve got the 18 to 25 demographic in the bag.”
He glanced over at her, the expression of complete and utter bewilderment a welcome change to his usual hard and confident dragon face. “You are a very peculiar woman.”
“Of course.” She nudged her shoulder against his arm. “I thought you knew that already.”
“I’m beginning to know it in new and unexpected ways.”
They walked a few more steps in silence, then Sera said, “Kai? I’m worried about my upcoming match. That last fight was intense. The fairies went straight for the jugular. It’s like they knew exactly what they needed to show me to get under my skin. And the mage…well, let’s just say the fight seemed engineered to force me to use my particular abilities.”
“The whole Magic Games are engineered. You heard Blackbrooke earlier. He’s figured out your abilities. Now he wants to test them to see how deep your magic runs. With each match, he’s learning from your responses.”
“To make harder tests?”
“Yes.”
“This is all going downhill fast.”
“You can do it, Sera. And I’ll help you. The good news is you only have to get through one more fight, and then you’ve completed all the required matches.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad.”
He scrolled past a few things on his phone. “We’ll discuss strategy over lunch. I have your final opponents here: the Summoning Sisters.”
Sera abandoned her despair long enough to snicker. “Another stellar name. It’s like we’re trapped inside the world of professional wrestling.”
“It does often feel like that,” he agreed, though without the snicker.
“And Blackbrooke is staging it all. This whole thing with him being attacked by vampires…”
“Yes?”
“Attacked by vampires when I just happened to be there. Twice,” she continued. “I wonder if that was all staged too. He must have known I was hiding my magic, right? What if he set up the vampire attacks so he could test my abilities in ways he couldn’t within the rules of the Magic Games—at least not until he could hone in on my flavor of magic and design challenges with a better chance of breaking me? The first time was a bust, and when I got through the first day of the Games without using magic, he decided he had to do something. So he went bigger in round two. More vampires. And someone cast a spell to make them immune to fire. Only a mage could have done that, not some magic hate group of humans. What if that mage was one of Blackbrooke’s people?”
“Interesting theory. There are just two problems with it.”
“Oh?”
“Ego and cowardice. Blackbrooke is too self-absorbed to lower himself by serving as vampire bait, and he’s too much of a coward too.”
“It all depends on how much he wants to break me,” said Sera.
They’d reached the door to the lobby. As they passed through, Sera’s phone dinged. The cursed thing was practically on a timer. She glanced at it just long enough to see that she’d gotten another message from Finn. It was a picture of her from her match against Weather Wizard. The delay between taking the photo and sending her the photo was shrinking every time. What had started as hours, was now down to minutes. Like a countdown. But a countdown to what?
“Sera?” Kai asked, looking back.
She’d stopped just past the door but rushed to catch up to him. “Promise not to flip out.”
“About what?” he asked, his face cool, cautious.
“And not to blow up my phone.”
His aura went from cool and cautious to fire and brimstone. “Finn sent you another message, didn’t he?” He held out his hand. “Let me see.”