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“None?” the witch asks, and she is obviously astonished.
“None,” I reiterate, and I feel like a jerk. The whole point of these games is money. How did I think to sit down without so much as a dollar to my name?
The truth is, I’ve been so annoyed at Calder’s comments about me that I just didn’t think. “I’m sorry. I’ll leave.”
“Not so fast.” The witch’s wizened old claw grasps on to my arm, keeps me in place. “Do you have nothing of value on you at all?”
I start to say no but then stick my hand in my pockets—and find one gold coin. I have no idea how it got there, but it had to be Calder or Remy. I’ll have to remember to thank them later.
“How many games does this buy me?”
Quick as lightning, her hand flashes out and grabs it as avarice burns in her eyes. “One game,” she tells me. “If you win—”
“One?” I ask, incredulous. “No thank you.” I reach to take it back, and she snarls—literally snarls—as she yanks it out of my reach.
“How about ten games?” the younger witch suggests. “You can play five. If, at any time, your numbers add up to win one of the prizes”—she gestures to the various pile of coins behind the winning combinations of twenty-six, eighteen, forty-one, and thirty-two—“you take the coin and the prize. If you lose the game, the coin is ours.”
The older witch is grinning now, and though I know the deal favors them—or so they think—I decide to go for it. All of Heather’s dad’s instructions are running through my head as I take the handful of marbles and roll them near the bottom of the board.
They land all over the place, and when we add them up, they equal nineteen. No prize.
The old witch hisses in delight.
“Four more,” the young witch tells me as she hands me back the marbles to roll.
I shake them a little more this time and roll them again. They end up totaling twenty-three—still no winner.
The older witch leans forward, a macabre grin on her face. “Three more turns, my pretty.”
I nod and then take my time shaking the marbles as I try to decide what to do. I threw the first two rolls, so do I throw a third to lull them into a false sense of complacency? Or do I start winning now, so they can’t call the last roll lucky?
There’s no easy answer, considering if they kick up a fit, I could end up like that poor troll with one less leg. Considering I like my legs—and my arms—it’s a real dilemma.
I throw the marbles one more time, and they add up to eighteen.
Both witches rear back in shock as I grin and hold out my hand for the eighteen coins that come with my win.
“How’d you do that?” the younger witch demands, her hand hovering over the bag of coins.
“What do you mean?” I ask, all wide-eyed innocence. “I thought the goal was to get one of the numbers on the board?”
“It is. You did well,” says the older witch as she puts a restraining hand on the younger one’s arm. “Before you receive your payout, shall we play double or nothing?”
“I don’t have another coin to put up,” I tell her, even though I know that’s not the plan.
“Of course you don’t. We’ll play for the same coin and double the money. If you win again, you get the coin back and double the winnings you would normally earn. If you lose, I keep everything.”
I pretend to consider. “That sounds fair, I guess.”
“Of course it’s fair. That many gold coins is a lot in the Pit.” She grins slyly. “That is where you are going, isn’t it?”
I don’t ask her how she knows. Instead, I smile at her as I roll the marbles…and they come up with thirty-two. Eighty-two coins—which I’m pretty sure is more than Calder has made arm wrestling at this point. Not that I’m counting or anything.
“May I collect my winnings, please?” I ask, using the most pleasant voice possible.
“You cheated!” the younger witch whispers to me, eyes narrowed and voice livid.
“I was just playing your game,” I tell her even as I hold my hand out for my winnings.
“There’s no way you won fair and square. No way at all,” she hisses at me.
“Why wouldn’t I have?” I ask quietly. “Unless you’re saying that you’re cheating?”
She doesn’t answer, but her fingers curl like she’s simply dying to rake them down my face. Instead, she shakes her head. “That’s not the deal we had. You don’t get to collect your money until you take your last turn.”
“But I’m good. I don’t want any more turns.”
She leans forward then, slides one razor-sharp nail down the side of my face. “Then you forfeit your winnings, my pretty. A deal is a deal, after all.”
I start to argue with her—our deal said nothing about combined winnings, so technically I should get paid for these two turns and then take the fifth, free and clear. But one of the guards is circling this way, and there’s no chance I’m about to get caught arguing.
So I just nod when she says, “Double or nothing,” again, and I take the marbles she hands me.
Then the younger witch shakes the board: “For luck, nothing more.”
But I can tell a difference in the board, can see how it’s listing to one side a little so that the stones will roll down and away from the higher numbers. Heather and I spent hours practicing when we were kids, determined to show up her dad. And after literally tens of thousands of throws, I know that the trick is to throw half from the low side and then twist my hand so that the other half come out near the top where the lowest numbers are grouped.
But that was on her dad’s board, which was so minutely slanted that you couldn’t even tell—kind of like this one was before she shook it. I’m not sure I’ll be able to make the same thing work when the board’s not flat, but I tell myself it doesn’t matter. I put a coin up at the beginning, knowing I could lose it. Worst-case scenario, I come out of this with nothing to show for it and all my limbs, because I’m not about to fight.
Best-case scenario? Calder learns my feminine wiles aren’t the only things I have going for me.
With that thought in mind—and with a growing crush of people shooting covetous looks my way—I take my time shaking the marbles in my hand before finally letting them fly.
Hex This
I hold my breath as the marbles roll around the board more than I like and will them to land in my favor. I thought my throw was right on, but as they bounce from side to corner to board and back again, I can’t help wondering if I made a mistake and overthrew.
Eventually the throw winds down, the marbles start to land, and I add them up—three, nine, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-seven, thirty-two.
I blink my eyes, double-check. The number is still the same. Thirty-two. It’s a winning number.
I look up from the board at the same time the witch does, and suddenly she’s in my face, an athame to my throat. I don’t know how she got it in prison—and at the moment I don’t care. All that matters is that she not slice my throat open.
And that the damn windigo guards don’t show up and tear either of us limb from limb.
“You don’t honestly think I’m going to pay you, do you?”
“You’re going to pay her, Esmerelda,” the slow, southern drawl comes from behind me. “And you’re going to get that knife away from her throat, or we’re going to have a real problem, you and I.”
Esmerelda snarls at Remy, who doesn’t say anything else as she glares over my head at him. But she must know about the last person taken out of his cell in pieces, too, because it only takes a few seconds before she lowers the knife and I take my first real, throat-expanding breath since she grabbed me.
“Thank you,” Remy says in his mild way, but when I glance over my head, I can see that his eyes are swirling in that strange, smoky gray-green way they have. And, not going to lie, out here in the middle of all this—it’s freaky as hell. Even before he looks at me and asks, “How much does she owe you?”
“One hundred and sixty-four gold coins,” I tell him and watch his eyes go big.
“She cheated,” Esmerelda snarls. “I shouldn’t have to pay her.”
Behind me, I can hear people moving restlessly, and I don’t know if it’s because of the argument or if it’s because a guard is coming. But if it’s the latter, I don’t care what Calder and Remy say about the Pit. I don’t need money badly enough to risk getting on some windigo’s bad side.
“We could forget the double-or-nothing bet,” I tell her. “You could just pay half—”
“A bet’s a bet,” Remy contradicts me. “Pay her, Esmerelda, or I will, and then you and I are going to have words. You don’t really want that, do you?”
Apparently not, because two sacks of gold coins hit the table pretty damn fast after that.
“Thank you,” I say as I reach for the money.
“Don’t thank me yet, little girl,” she says, her voice loaded with rage…and promise. “I’ll be coming for it.”