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covered him with a torrent of arrows, but there were too many incubi diving right at them.
    Blood sprayed up from Cade’s body, and he bellowed with fury.
    As she screamed, something dragged her back in frenzied yanks. Mari clawed at the stones, shrieking as it snatched her into the darkness.
    5
    Pit of the Fyre Dragán, Yélsérk, Hungary
    Finale of the Talisman’s Hie
    Prize: The blade of the blind mystic Honorius to win
    Tonight he would have Mariah back.
    One last contest. One last struggle to put his wasted body through. Then his reward.
    As he loped through a sweltering tunnel toward the Fyre Dragán’s pit of flames, Bowe felt a sense of expectation, an almost light-headed anticipation that warred with the pain from his many injuries— injuries that weren’t healing .
    The Hie had been as cutthroat as he’d expected—and as he’d been prepared to be—but the witch had had the last laugh.
    The spell from the tomb that he ’d believed was harmless had actually taken hold of his body. Creeping through him like the strongest roots, day by day it leached away his immortality. No longer did he have the ability to regenerate, and for the first time in twelve hundred years, he felt that he was aging. In fact, he’d barely made it to the finals of this competition.
    There could be no worse timing to lose his strength than in the Hie.
    When the prize would bring back his Mariah.
    For one hundred and eighty years, since the night he’d found her—with her thin body gored and her green cloak spread out in the blood-soaked snow—he’d searched relentlessly for a way to resurrect her.
    Lingering on in a kind of half life, not dying but not really living, he ’d continued to believe he could bring her back to him, when most Lykae would have found a way to die if they ’d lost their mates. Others in his clan thought him mad, wondering why he continued to exist in that miserable twilight. Even his cousins, Lachlain and Garreth, who were like brothers to him, couldn ’t understand him.
    But he would show them all, because after searching so long, a mad Valkyrie soothsayer, of all people, had alerted him to this competition—and had told him it was the means of reaching his mate. Desperate to try anything, he’d entered. When he’d learned the ultimate prize of the Hie was a key to go back in time, everything had made sense.
    Bowe hadn’t foolishly been hoping for something that could never be. The chance to bring Mariah back was within his grasp, and he’d fought mercilessly for that key.
    Yet so had his two main competitors: the Valkyrie Kaderin the Coldhearted and Sebastian Wroth, a vampire soldier. Just two nights ago in a minefield in Cambodia, they’d forced Bowe into an explosion that had threaded a rusted length of shrapnel between his ribs and had blown away his left eye and part of his forehead.
    Because of the witch’s curse, those gruesome injuries remained.
    Now, half blind and weak beyond measure, Bowe was only confident of winning because just two competitors vied in this last round, and the other finalist was Kaderin. Yes, the Valkyrie was a single-minded competitor, but in the end she was still a female.
    He slowed, struggling to detect if she was already here. During this final part of the Hie, killing was allowed. On this night, would Bowe kill a female to bring Mariah back? He had no doubts that if given the chance, the Valkyrie would take her assassin’s sword and slice him crotch to collar without blinking her cold, emotionless eyes.
    One thing Bowe did know was that if he lost, he would definitely kill the witch for weakening him so much.
    A roar sounded deeper in the earth, and the cavern quaked, sending rock and dust falling over him. The Fyre Dragán—rumored to be a serpentlike beast, as large as a basilisk but with a body of fire—must be sensing Bowe’s trespass.
    This place was known in the Lore as where immortals go to die . Most immortals could die only by beheading—an