“Give.”
She shot me a sly smile. “First, I got to listen to Jim’s ‘it’s all my fault; I did it all by myself’ speech. Then I got to listen to Derek’s ‘it’s all my fault and I did it all by myself’ speech. Then Curran promised that the next person who wanted to be a martyr would get to be one. Then Raphael made a very growling speech about how he was here for a blood debt. It was his right to have restitution for the injury caused to the friend of the boudas; it was in the damn clan charter on such and such page. And if Curran wanted to have an issue with it, they could take it outside. It was terribly dramatic and ridiculous. I loved it.”
I could actually picture Curran sitting there, his hand on his forehead above his closed eyes, growling quietly in his throat.
“Then Dali told him that she was sick and tired of being treated like she was made out of glass and she wanted blood and to kick ass.”
That would do him in. “So what did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything for about a minute and then he chewed them out. He told Derek that he’d been irresponsible with Livie’s life, and that if he was going to rescue somebody, the least he could do is to have a workable plan, instead of a poorly thought-out mess that backfired and broke just about every Pack law and got his face smashed in. He told Dali that if she wanted to be taken seriously, she had to accept responsibility for her own actions instead of pretending to be weak and helpless every time she got in trouble and that this was definitely not the venue to prove one’s toughness. Apparently he didn’t think her behavior was cute when she was fifteen and he’s not inclined to tolerate it now that she’s twenty-eight.”
I was cracking up.
“He told Raphael that the blood debt overrode Pack law only in cases of murder or life-threatening injury and quoted the page of the clan charter and the section number where that could be found. He said that frivolous challenges to the alpha also violated Pack law and were punishable by isolation. It was an awesome smackdown. They had no asses left when he was done.”
Andrea began snapping the gun parts together. “Then he sentenced the three of them and himself to eight weeks of hard labor, building the north wing addition to the Keep, and dismissed them. They ran out of there like their hair was on fire.”
“He sentenced himself?”
“He’s broken Pack law by participating in our silliness, apparently.”
That’s Beast Lord for you. “And Jim?”
“Oh, he got a special chewing-out after everybody else was dismissed. It was a very quiet and angry conversation, and I didn’t hear most of it. I heard the end, though—he got three months of Keep building. Also, when he opened the door to leave, Curran told him very casually that if Jim wanted to pick fights with his future mate, he was welcome to do so, but he should keep in mind that Curran wouldn’t come and rescue him when you beat his ass. You should’ve seen Jim’s face.”
“His what?”
“His mate. M-A-T-E.”
I cursed.
Andrea grinned. “I thought that would make your day. And now you’re stuck with him in here for three days and you get to fight together in the Arena. It’s so romantic. Like a honeymoon.”
Once again my mental conditioning came in handy. I didn’t strangle her on the spot.
Raphael chose this moment to walk into the room. “The Reaper bout is about to start. Curran said to tell you that your creep’s going to fight.”
CHAPTER 26
THE ROWS OF SEATS, EMPTY AN HOUR BEFORE, were filled to capacity. Individuals in their own lives, here the spectators melded into a single entity, a loud, furious, excitable beast with a thousand throats. The night was young and the beast was fickle and bloodthirsty.
Someone, probably Jim or Derek, had found a narrow access staircase that connected the second and third floors. Recessed deeply into the wall to the left of the Gold Gate, it lay steeped in shadows and was practically invisible to the crowd concentrating on the brightly lit Gold Gate and the Pit itself.
I squeezed through the door behind Raphael and Andrea, who sat nicely next to each other. Everyone was there, except Doolittle. I perched on the top step, the cement cold under my butt.
The Reapers fielded only two fighters against the rival team’s four. The first was Mart. The second was a woman: small, curvy, sensuous, with a waterfall of dark hair falling down her back. She looked so much like Olivia she could have been her sister. Derek saw her and tensed.
Facing them were the four members of the opposing team. The first was a huge Asian man, solid and thick like a brick. He had to be their Stone. Behind him stood Sling, a lean, dark-skinned archer armed with a bow and a belt filled with knives and darts. At least thirty arrows protruded from the sand in front of him, ready to be grabbed. To the left their Swordmaster waited, a young white man with blond hair who apparently thought he was Japanese: he wore the traditional dark blue kimono and lighter blue hakama garment with a pleated skirt over it. He carried a katana—no surprise there. The last was a woman, a mage, judging by her position in the very back. A wise choice, given the magic was up.
The gong sounded.
The archer fired. The arrow sliced the air and fell harmlessly into the sand as Mart dodged in a blur. The archer drew and fired again, with preternatural quickness. Mart dodged left, right, left, his sword held passively by his side. They thought they had him pinned. Not bloody likely.
The Stone advanced, surprisingly light on his feet. Behind him the female mage began to work something complicated, waving her arms through the air.
The Swordmaster charged the Reaper woman.
She leaned back, her arms flung out like the wings of a bird about to take flight. Mart made no move to assist her.
Ten feet from her the Swordmaster drew his blade in a flash. Should’ve waited . . .
The woman’s bottom jaw unhinged and dropped down. Magic lashed my senses, hard and searing hot. The woman strained and vomited a dark cloud into the swordsman’s face. The cloud swarmed and clamped on to the swordsman. He staggered, his charge aborted in midstep. A faint buzz echoed through the Pit.
“Bees?” I guessed.
“Wasps,” Derek said.
The swordsman screamed and spun in place.
Mart charged across the sand, a trail of arrows pinning his shadow to the sand, and thrust straight into the Stone’s gut. The man folded.
The swarm plaguing the swordsman split in half. The new swarm snapped to the archer like a black lasso. He ran.
As the Stone crumbled, the female mage jerked her arms. A cone of fire struck from her fingers, twisting like a horizontal tornado. Mart leapt into the air. She swung the cone up, but not fast enough. He landed on her, hammering a hard kick into the side of her neck. The impact knocked her off her feet, but not before I saw her head snap to the side.
“Broken neck,” Andrea said.
The swarm caught the archer. He veered left and ran straight into Mart’s sword. Mart cut him down with two short, precise strokes and walked over to the swordsman, who was still bellowing like a stuck pig. The Reaper watched him flail for a long moment, as if puzzled, then ended it in a single cut. The swarm vanished. The swordsman’s head rolled on the sand.
The crowd roared in delight.
The shapeshifters next to me didn’t make a sound.
“HERE IS HOW IT WORKS,” JIM SAID SOFTLY, WHILE the cleaners loaded the bodies onto stretchers and raked the sand for stray body parts. “There are four fights in all. First, the qualifying bout, then second tier, third tier, and the championship fight. Only the championship fight has the entire team. The rest give us a choice. We can field one to four people for each fight. If we field four and lose all, we are automatically disqualified as ‘unable to continue.’ ”
He paused to let it sink in. Apparently he’d been busy acquiring the information: he actually had a clipboard with notes written on a legal pad, as if he were coaching a baseball team.
“Despite this rule, most teams field f
our. Fielding three is risky.” He looked down the steps at Curran.
Curran shrugged. “It’s your game.”
So Jim retained Stratego. That was big of His Majesty.
“We break into two teams,” Jim said. “Three and four.”
So far, so good.
“This will minimize our risk of being eliminated and will permit us to rest between the fights.”
Made total sense.
“Raphael, Andrea, Derek, and I will be in group one, and Curran, Kate, and Dali in group two.”
Full break. “You want me to fight with him? On the same team?”
“Yes.”
Suddenly I had an urgent need to run away screaming. “Why?”
“Derek, Raphael, and I have similar fighting styles. We move across the field. Andrea is a mobile range fighter. She can shoot and move at the same time. Dali can’t,” Jim said.
“I do shodo magic,” Dali said. “I curse through calligraphy. I have to write the curse out on a piece of paper and I can’t move while I do it. One smudge, and I might kill the lot of us.”
Oh good.
“But don’t worry.” Dali waved her arms. “It’s so precise, it usually doesn’t work at all.”
Better and better.
“Raphael and I aren’t good defensive fighters,” Jim said. “And Derek isn’t up to speed yet. I have to put Dali behind Curran, because he’s the strongest defense we have. He’ll need a strong offense and you’re the best offensive fighter I have.”
Somehow that didn’t sound like a compliment.
“Also the three of us have undergone similar training,” Jim said. “We know what to expect from each other and we work well as a team.”
He didn’t think I could function in a team. Fair enough.
“Group two will take the qualifying bout and the third tier. The qualifying bout should give you little trouble and third-tier fighters shouldn’t be that fresh. Group one will take the second-tier bout. We will come out together for the championship fight.”
Jim flipped a page on his legal pad. “You’re going up against the Red Demons this afternoon. From what I’ve heard, they will be fielding a werebison, a swordsman, and some type of odd creature as their mage. You will have magic for the fight. They try to schedule the bouts during the magic waves, because magic makes for a better show. Try to appear sloppy and incompetent. The weaker you look, the more our opponents will underestimate the team, and the easier time we will all have. My lord, no claws. Kate, no magic. You’ll need to win, but just barely.”
He looked at his notes again and said, “About the murder law. Doesn’t apply in the Pit.”
Curran said nothing. Jim had just given the shapeshifters permission to kill without accountability with Curran’s silence to reinforce it. Just as well. Gladiators died. That was the reality. We had to be there. The rest had volunteered. And given a chance, every member of the opposing team would murder any one of us without a second thought.
THE SAND CRUNCHED UNDER MY FOOT. I COULD already taste it on my tongue. The memories conjured heat and sunshine. I shook them off and looked across the Pit.
In the far end, three people waited for us. The swordsman, tall and carrying a hand-and-a-half sword. The werebison, shaggy with dark brown fur, towering, angry. His breadth was enormous, the shoulders packed with hard, heavy muscle, the chest like a barrel. He wore a chain mail hauberk but no pants. His legs terminated in black hooves. A dense mane of coarse hair crowned the back of his neck. His features were a meld of bull and human, but where the minotaur’s face had been a cohesive whole, the shapeshifter’s skull was a jumble of mismatched parts.
Behind them reared a nightmarish creature. Its lower body was python, dark brown with creamy swirls of scales. Near the abdomen, the scales became so fine, they glittered, stretching tight over a human upper body, complete with a pair of tiny breasts and a female face that looked like it belonged to a fifteen-year-old. She looked at us with emerald-green eyes. Her skull was bald and a hood of flesh spread from her head, resembling that of a king cobra.
A lamia. Great.
The lamia swayed gently, as if listening to music only she could hear. Old magic emanated from her, ancient and ice-cold. It picked up the sand and rolled it in feathery curves to caress her scales before sliding back to the Pit.
Behind me, Dali shivered. She stood in the sand with a clipboard, an ink pen, and a piece of thin rice paper cut into inch-wide strips.
I eyed the swordsman. Weak and sloppy. Okay, I could do that.
The crowd waited above us. The hum of conversation, the clearing of throats, and the sound of a thousand simultaneous breaths blended into a low hum. I scanned the seats and saw Saiman on his balcony. Aunt B, Raphael’s mother, sat on his left, and Mahon, the Bear of Atlanta and the Pack’s executioner, occupied the chair to his right. Sitting between the alphas of Clan Bouda and Clan Heavy. No wonder Saiman had been persuaded to give up his spot to Curran.
Behind Aunt B, I saw a familiar pale head. Couldn’t be. The blond head moved and I saw Julie’s face. Oh yes, it could.
“You bribed my kid!”
“We reached a business arrangement,” he said. “She wanted to see you fight and I wanted to know when, where, and how you were getting into the Games.”
Julie gave me a big, nervous smile and a little wave.
Just wait until I get out of here, I mouthed. We were going to have a little talk about following orders.
“I know what the problem is.” Curran pulled his shoulders back and flexed, warming up a little. I stole a glance. He had decided to fight in jeans and an old black T-shirt, from which he’d torn the sleeves. Probably his workout shirt.
His biceps were carved, the muscle defined and built by countless exertions, neither too bulky nor too lean. Perfect. Kissing him might make me guilty of catastrophically bad judgment, but at least nobody could fault my taste. The trick was not to kiss him again. Once could be an accident; twice was trouble.
“You said something?” I arched an eyebrow at him. Nonchalance—best camouflage for drooling. Both the werebison and the swordsman looked ready to charge: the muscles of their legs tense, leaning forward slightly on their toes. They seemed to be terribly sure that we would stay in one place and wait for them.
Curran was looking at their legs, too. They must be expecting a distraction from the lamia. She sat cocooned in magic, holding on with both hands as it strained on its leash.
“I said, I know why you’re afraid to fight with me.”
“And why is that?” If he flexed again, I’d have to implement emergency measures. Maybe I could kick some sand at him or something. Hard to look hot brushing sand out of your eyes.
“You want me.”
Oh boy.
“You can’t resist my subtle charm, so you’re afraid you’re going to make a spectacle out of yourself.”
“You know what? Don’t talk to me.”
The gong boomed.
Memories smashed into me: heat, sand, fear.
The lamia’s magic snapped like a striking cobra. I jumped up and to the left, just in time to avoid the pit in the sand that yawned open beneath my feet.
The Swordmaster was on me like white on rice. He charged in and struck in a textbook thrust of wrath, a powerful diagonal thrust delivered from the right and angled down. I jerked back. His blade whistled past me, and I grabbed his leather and smashed my forehead into his face. There you go. Sloppy.
Red drenched my face. The swordsman’s eyes rolled back in his head and he fell.
Not good.
I turned in time to see the werebison arrive. It took him a moment to build up his speed, but as he ran now, massive, huge, blowing air from his misshapen nose, he seemed unstoppable.
Curran watched him come with a slightly bored expression. At the last moment, he stepped aside and stuck his foot out. The shapeshifter tripped and Curran helped him down by pushing none too gently on the back of his neck. The werebison flipped onto the san
d, hitting the ground like a fallen skyscraper. He shuddered once and lay still, his neck bent in an unnatural angle.
He must’ve broken his neck in the fall. His chest was still moving. At least he didn’t die.
Curran stared at him, perplexed.
Dali barked a sharp command in a language I didn’t understand and tossed a piece of rice paper into the air. There was a quiet plop and the paper vanished.
We looked at the lamia expectantly. Nothing. She waved her arms, gathering magic for something nasty.
Magic Strikes Page 26