A chair goes flying, crashing into the dealer, as the player screams about cheating. He barely gets a few words in edgewise, though, before another wolf is on him, strong fist around a neck. And that’s when all hell breaks loose. The player was obviously a troll, because a mess of trolls descend on the wolves’ game en masse, which leads to a bunch of wolves doing the same thing.

Blood and bodies are flying as Remy hustles us along, but the commotion doesn’t last long, because two of the guards hit the game running. The biggest one skewers a wolf through the shoulder with one of his long nails and then holds him up so everyone can see, while the second one grabs the troll who started everything and rips his leg clean off…right before he starts to eat it.

The troll is screaming, blood is flowing freely, and the other guards are circling with their teeth bared and their claws at the ready. My stomach roils at the carnage, and I almost vomit but just manage to swallow it down. I can only imagine what weakness that would have shown in a place like this. I’m terrified to see what happens next but even more terrified when I realize that most of the people in this place barely even notice.

Remy and Calder do little more than give the bleeding troll a look before moving on with their agenda. I, on the other hand, can’t stop seeing the windigo start to eat the troll’s leg, even though Hudson has his arms around me and my face pressed into his chest.

“We need to get out of here,” I whisper to him as my stomach twists and turns in a desperate effort to throw up what’s left of the chicken from earlier.

“It’s only two hours,” he tells me. “It’ll be over—”

“No, not the Hex. This prison. We can’t stay here. We can’t—”

“Not so loud, Curls,” Calder says, her mouth inches from my ear. “The last thing you want to do is broadcast our agenda in this place. We’ll end up in solitary confinement in three minutes flat…and probably missing a limb or two while we’re at it.”

After what we just saw, I believe it. What kind of a prison employs guards who actually like to eat the inmates? I mean, yeah, it probably does away with that pesky prison overcrowding problem, but it’s also murder. Why put people here to punish them—and make them atone—for violent crimes if you’re then going to let the people who run it commit as many violent crimes as they want?

It makes no sense, but even more than that, it’s wrong. Just plain wrong.

“Keep walking,” Remy says, and for once there is an urgency in his voice that refuses to be ignored.

So we do, stepping one foot in front of the other, even though all three of us are shaken.

Hudson seems the most unaffected by what we just witnessed, but he did spend a huge part of his life in Cyrus and Delilah’s Court. Who knows what he saw there?

We don’t stop moving until the commotion has died down and we’re right in the center of the Hex, standing in front of a table of “infergins,” or marks, as Calder calls them.

They all look a little lost, a little confused, and a little scared, but none of them runs away when Calder plops herself down on the tabletop they are all sitting around and asks, “Who wants to play a game?”

122

What the Hex?

“Are you going to eat us if we do?” asks the lone demon from his spot at the end of the table.

Calder blows him a kiss. “Only if you ask nicely.”

“Does that work in reverse?” calls one of the two vampires who have been eyeing her ever since we got here.

“Only if you ask nicely,” she says again, and this time the whole table laughs. “I will tell you one thing, though. To the victor go the spoils. Right, Hudson?”

My mate doesn’t say anything to that, simply inclines his head in a whatever-you-say-goes kind of way.

But he looks adorable when he does it—which is not lost on much of his audience. That and the eyebrow wiggle Calder gives the group of them is all it takes to set off a stampede.

I don’t know if it’s because one of the regulars is finally acknowledging their existence or if it’s because they’re just that taken with Calder and Hudson, but the infergins nearly trample themselves in their enthusiasm to get to the front of the line. Before I know it, every single one of them has put up a gold coin for the privilege of wrestling either Calder or Hudson.

Calder puts up money for each of them as well, and I wonder how many coins she’s got with her. Both of them have long lines—nearly twenty-five people deep for each of them—surely they won’t win them all. Some of their competition is huge. There are also other vampires, and while I’m sure Hudson can take care of them, I’m not so sure about Calder.

I know she’s really strong—that’s obvious—but is she strong enough to take on a fully grown vampire in his prime? Especially if she can’t access her manticore side?

My stomach clenches nervously as the first two people come up to wrestle them. Each slaps his coin on the table next to Hudson’s and Calder’s and then slides into their chairs, arms up.

Hudson and Calder lean forward as one and lock hands with their competition. And then Flint—who has somehow been roped into acting as referee—announces the rules. “Butts in chairs at all times, one arm only, winner takes the bet, and the ref calls all ties. Those are the rules. If you don’t like them, hit the road now.”

No one moves or complains, so Flint continues. “We go on three. One, two, three!”

It’s over before he even finishes the word, Calder and Hudson slamming their oppositions’ arms down on the table so hard that I can’t help wondering if they’re going to leave dents.

They don’t, but I’m pretty sure at least one wrist got sprained.

The second and third matches go essentially the same way, but the fourth match pits Hudson against an actual giant. Calder wins her match against the demon, but Hudson gets his ass handed to him.

He takes the loss with a grin and a joke, and soon the tense atmosphere that’s invaded the competition goes away and everyone’s having a good time—unlike most of the other games in this place.

Soon after, Remy heads off with his two mysterious packages, and I decide to wander a little bit, as the other three are still all wrapped up in their arm-wrestling game. Normally I’d stick close, but I’m smarting a little over Calder’s comments about my feminine wiles being the only thing of value I’ve got.

At the same time, I don’t go too far—that seems like a bad move, considering what I just saw happen with the wolves and the troll. I like my limbs exactly where they are, thank you very much.

So instead of wandering toward one of the guards, I stick close to the tables at the center of the Hex, looking for something to catch my interest.

The first thing I come to are a bunch of dragons in human form who are running some kind of card game. They’re in bad shape, their human skin scraped up and full of sores that makes me feel horrible for them. The prison’s fault, I wonder, or maybe the Chamber’s?

I wander past a group of small paranormals with wings, multicolored hair, and rows upon rows of sharp teeth. Fairies, I wonder? Pixies? Or something else entirely? I don’t know, but one of them smiles at me and tries to suck me into buying some kind of iridescent powder from them. Near them are selkies who are selling vials of some kind of water…seawater, maybe? I end up watching a game of Razzle-Dazzle run by two witches—the younger of whom reminds me a lot of my friend Gwen, with her sleek black hair and shy grin.

Except the longer I stand here, the more I realize she uses that smile to her advantage, to convince people that there’s nothing shady about her game. But I’ve played this a bunch of times—Heather’s dad is a math professor and he loved nothing more than demonstrating to us how different games were sucker games…and also how to beat them.

When the last player gives up in disgust—but without throwing a fit to attract the guards’ attention, thankfully—I slide into the open seat.

“You’re new here,” says the old witch who runs the game.

“I am,” I agree.

“Who are you with?”

I don’t know what she means, and it must show on my face, because she laughs and says, “Who brought you here?”

“Oh, Remy and Calder. They’re—”

“Everyone knows Remy,” she tells me, and there’s a softness in her voice when she speaks of him that is unexpected…but also not. She must be one of the longtimers here, who’s known Remy since he was very little. “But I do have to say, I’m surprised he let you out of his sight.”

“He’s busy,” I tell her with a shrug. “And I thought your game looked like fun.”

The witches exchange a look. “Oh, it’s definitely that,” says the youngest one. “Want to play?”

“I do, actually.” I look at the familiar board, with its seemingly random arrangement of numbers between one and six, and try to figure out if there’s a pattern. Like Heather’s dad teaches his advanced math students, this one has a lot of fours, a lot of ones, and not very many fives or sixes. The big numbers are concentrated mostly in the center of the board, which very few people notice is slanted a little bit higher than the rest of the board, so the marbles I roll will fall away from the center.

“But I don’t have any money on me to bet with.”