by SM Reine
He drew back. Trouble looked…troubled. “I don’t know. I’ve never felt like this. But I’ve never been a werewolf before, either.”
“It scares me,” I said. It just slipped out. I hadn’t meant to be honest.
“Good,” he said. “What is this?”
His hand brushed over my shoulder, and I realized that he was looking at my scars. I pulled away from him.
“Nothing,” I said.
He had to have known I was deflecting the question, but he didn’t bother arguing with me. Cooper stood. He kissed the top of my head—a strangely tender gesture. And before I could think of how the hell I was supposed to react to that, he left.
V
I tried to throw away The Devil. It didn’t work.
I took the card out to the trash cans behind the bar after Cooper left me. I lifted the lid on the bin, put the card on top of it, and walked away before I could think better of it.
The sound of motorcycle engines built on the wind, rising and cresting and crashing over me. The storm came down the hills to the east—an army of glistening chrome belching exhaust into our bleached-blue sky.
It was cage fight night, and these biker gangs were late. They usually came in days before to spread their seed and pump their veins full of heroin. I wondered what they had been doing to make them late, but only briefly—it was probably best if I didn’t know.
There were three major gangs that always came to Lobo Norte: The White Wings, South Side Furies, and Hag’s Boys. Some of those assholes were even human. But when their motorcycles came down our hill, they brought the night with them. Didn’t matter if they arrived at high noon or dawn. Darkness followed them. Darkness, pain, and money.
Only one of those mattered to me.
I shielded my eyes to watch them descend. The clarity of the desert air made it easy to see them coming from miles away, ghosting over the shimmering mirage of heat on the pavement. They’d be here in ten minutes, maybe fifteen. Gloria would want me to have the booze ready.
The wind slammed into me hard enough that I staggered. Metal banged against rock as the trash cans tipped over. Garbage blew against my ankles, between my legs, whipped away into the sky.
One thing stuck to my heel. I looked down. The Devil grinned back at me.
My heart accelerated. Trying to dislodge it from my foot with a kick didn’t work. I had to peel it off by hand, then tip the trash can upright again and trap him inside once more.
I glared at the trash can and The Devil within.
“Stay,” I hissed.
We didn’t have trash collection in Lobo Norte. Not exactly. When you live in a nowhere-place that doesn’t exist on any map, nothing functions the way you expect. Mail shows up without ever being delivered. Our trash disappears without ever touching a garbage truck. Where it goes, I don’t know or care—as far as I can tell, it just vanishes.
Hopefully that card would vanish with the rest of it.
The roaring of engines grew louder. I retreated into my trailer, slamming the door behind me, and shut out the incoming gangs. When I first arrived in Lobo Norte, I used to gawk at the new arrivals, awed by the array of tattoos, leather, and scars. The White Wings, for instance, were into ritual scarification; their skin had been plucked into rows of raised, bumpy ridges all over their shining scalps and cheeks and chests. I’d seen one without a shirt once and knew that they cut wings into their backs, too.
They had willingly done to themselves what had been forced upon me. It should have been horrifying. Instead, I found it entrancing, the way that they took charge of their bodies. They hurt themselves before anyone else could.
Once you’d seen a hundred mangled men that reeked of weed and engine oil, though, the allure wore off. It took a lot to impress me these days.
I’d see them all tonight when they were beating the shit out of each other within my cage.
Tugging my shirt off over my head, I kicked my shorts into the corner as I headed for the shower. Something shining on the bed caught my attention from the corner of my eye and I stopped.
There was a card on my pillow.
I almost didn’t touch it. I knew what it was instantly, and I didn’t need to look to confirm my fears. Even so, I reached out and turned it over carefully, as though it might explode if I moved it too fast.
The Devil had come back.
“You asshole,” I whispered.
He wasn’t bothered by my insult. He kept grinning.
Pops hadn’t raised me to give up easy. I flung my closet doors open and shoved my costumes out of the way with a clatter of buckles and chains. Behind them, there was a second, smaller door set into the wall. It creaked when I opened it. Dust showered onto the carpet.
A low table was hidden in the very back of my closet. It was covered in a purple tasseled cloth, upon which stood two wax figures that I had carved myself. I wasn’t much of an artist. One was male, one was female. The male had horns coming out of his wavy, shoulder-length hair. The female had heavy breasts and wide hips.
Tearing a match out of the dusty matchbook on the corner, I flicked it against my thumb. Orange light washed over the other trinkets on my altar.
A quartz crystal. A tiny ruby centered atop sand in a glass bowl. A pine cone. A vial of ocean water I’d collected from Long Beach. A photo of me with my brothers, Cèsar and Domingo, down at the boardwalk. Little pieces of the life I’d had before Lobo Norte.
Pieces of magic.
My grandma, who we called Abuelita, had taught me everything she knew in secret. Pops hadn’t wanted me to know magic. He said it was too dangerous for a Hawke girl. But I’d never let shoulds and should-nots dictate my life, and nor had Abuelita; with her guidance, I had become comfortable drawing on the strength of the earth and sky under the watchful eye of the goddess Hecate.
There was no time for worship in Lobo Norte, though. Not while scrabbling to survive, not when Gloria had made it clear that my priority would be the bar or else I wouldn’t have a job. I wasn’t sure gods could even reach me here.
“Forgive me,” I murmured to the wax figures. “I need help.”
It had been so long since I’d cast a circle of power that I wasn’t certain I could do it anymore. I didn’t attempt it. I just lit one of the tapers and blew out the match.
“Blessed Hecate, work thy will,” I whispered hurriedly, keeping an eye on the door, praying Gloria wouldn’t choose this moment to butt into my trailer. “Let the unclean thing burn. Purify it with fire.”
Dipping the edge of The Devil’s card into the flame, I waited for it to catch fire.
And waited.
The candle flickered along the side, licking toward my fingers. It danced over the mechanical art deco design on the back. I rotated the card so that I could see the fire touch the lovers.
The card didn’t catch.
“Ofelia! They’re here!” Gloria was calling me from outside my bedroom window. I was out of time.
“I need to shower!” I shouted back.
I crumpled up a piece of notepaper and stuck it in the candle’s flame. It quickly caught fire. I dropped it in an empty bowl, placed The Devil on top of it, and left him to smolder.
They registered for the cage in droves.
I danced as they scrawled their names on the blackboard in chalk. Some only wrote X’s or scrawled lines or scribbles because they were illiterate, while others signed in beautiful cursive, and others still in block letters. I knew most of them by sight. These biker gangs came back month after month for the release of testosterone. They were our regulars.
Larry Smith, a big guy with gray hair and a belly bigger than a keg. Sweet guy that could barely read and liked to order his alcohol by color rather than brand. He loved blue and gold. A White Wing, with scars plucked into the side of his neck.
Chuck Coyote-Heart, a scrawny man that had gone bald on top and braided his scraggly fringe of hair with feathers, who always smelled like pot and fought like a mountain lion. One of the Hag
’s Boys.
Yankee—no other name, just Yankee—a young guy with no chin and brass knuckles all but embedded into his gnarled fists. A South Side Fury.
They came back every month to kick asses and get their asses kicked and stuff dollar bills in my G-string. But something about those iron bars seduced a man in a way that even my body could not. It got their hearts pounding and the blood flowing. Some of them even got erect over it.
The idea of a place where rules didn’t exist—a place where a guy could unleash every one of man’s dirtiest, most violent urges—drew these gangs from the most distant corners of the continent, and it was sweeter than sex, a better high than drugs.
But there were new faces today. Men who hung back to watch others sign up, like they weren’t quite sure of themselves, or were watching to see who enrolled before they jumped in. Gloria would assign the matches at random. We didn’t do weight classes. Anyone could end up fighting anyone. A huge guy like Larry could end up pitted against a scrawny weed like Chuck, and they wouldn’t come out until one of them was beaten beyond the point where they could say uncle.
The Fang Brothers were there, too, sitting in the back under the TVs. I had already memorized all of their faces and I performed a quick headcount as I gyrated on the bar. Big Papa, Mad Dog, Smoky, Old Yeller, Pit Bull, and even Cooper. All there. None had signed up yet. They were among those waiting. Watching.
But Cooper was only watching me.
He didn’t even glance at the cage beyond the curtains. He didn’t care who was signing up to fight. His golden eyes pierced the gloom of the bar, and even though I had a spotlight on me to make sure that everyone could see my swaying tits, I felt like he was the only one in the room. Definitely the only one that mattered.
The way I danced—it was all for him. Every roll of my hips, every pop of my ribcage, the serpentine undulations of my spine. I was fucking Trouble with my eyes and with my body and we weren’t even on the same side of the room. I wanted him to imagine being between my legs as I slithered down the pole to kneel at its base. I needed him to desire me as badly as I desired him.
I didn’t want him to sign up for the cage match.
The song ended, and I realized that I’d been dancing for a half an hour without a break. I swung off the bar and landed easily on my cowboy boots by Gloria.
She was counting twenties and hundreds, licking her thumb, fanning through the bills.
“Looking good tonight,” I said, pulling a couple singles out of my bra. Tips hadn’t been good for that set. The men were too distracted. The money would come after, when they were so drunk on liquor and adrenaline that they wouldn’t realize they’d emptied their bankrolls on a woman that wasn’t even going to suck them off.
Gloria shot me a look. Her eyelids were painted smoky blue up to her eyebrows. “If I didn’t need your help, you wouldn’t be here,” she said in her musical, fluid Spanish. “Remember that.”
It had been a long time since Gloria threatened to get rid of me. “Did I do something wrong?”
“Not exactly,” she said.
Weird for her to be in such a bad mood when we had such an unusually big crowd. Big crowd meant lots of money. “Quite a few unfamiliar faces here, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” Gloria said curtly. “They want to be Fangs. It’s a big night.” That was news to me. I’d never seen the gangs try to swap members with each other before. They were usually at odds, working out their frustrations and territory battles within my cage. “Where’s Bo Peep?”
I brushed my fingers over the stock of the shotgun. She was under the bar, where I always kept her when I was working.
“Think it’ll get bad?” I asked.
“Yes,” Gloria said. “It’ll get bad.”
A man elbowed up to the bar, planting both hands on it, leaning all his six and a half feet of height over Gloria. “Cancel the fight,” he growled.
She spat a curse at him in Spanish, so colorful that even I wasn’t quite sure what she’d said. Apparently, he understood. He slammed his fist into the bar. “Don’t you fucking talk to me like that, woman. You heard what I said! Cancel the fucking fight!”
I pushed up beside Gloria and caught this guy’s eye. Showed no fear. “That’s not how it works. We fight every two weeks, whether or not anyone’s here. It’s the law in Lobo Norte. It’s how we’ve always done it.”
“You can’t do the Fang initiation fight until the Needles get here,” he said.
My blood ran cold. “The Needles? What do you mean, the Needles?”
Gloria elbowed me aside. “Get your skinny ass back there,” she barked, aiming a kick at my shins. I leaped out of the way. By the time I was free of her reach, her attention was back on Dickwad across the bar. “She’s right. The fight goes. We don’t wait for anyone.”
“You’ll regret it,” he said. “I’ll make you regret it.”
She was unimpressed. “Sign up or fuck off.”
My hand slipped under the bar, caressing Bo Peep. Give me a reason. Just give me a reason to shoot you, asshole.
But he backed away with a final warning look at Gloria.
At the same time, a hush fell over the bar.
Mad Dog had approached the chalkboard. The other gangs stepped back. Even the Hag’s Boys dipped their heads and looked at their feet.
The display reminded me of submissive dogs. When you’d kicked a mutt enough that it rolled over and pissed itself every time you walked past.
Chuck had the chalk. He offered it to Mad Dog.
The biker’s eyes cut through the crowd and fell on me. The corner of his mouth lifted in a knowing smirk. Then he slashed the chalk over the board four times, writing four different names to fill the final four lines for tonight’s fights.
Old Yeller. Pit Bull. Smoky.
Trouble.
My stomach flipped. Cooper was going to fight. He was still healing from the night before, and he was going into the cage.
Mad Dog was watching me to see if I’d react, but I didn’t let my fear show on my face. I made myself smile and bat my eyelashes. Push my cleavage together with my arms. Make a kissy face at him. Let him think I was some dumb whore, just like any of the Coyote Ranch girls.
He didn’t look fooled. He tipped his head at me and headed back to the table.
Gloria took down the chalkboard. Counted the names.
“We’re on,” she said.
VI
Nobody cares about seeing a pair of tits once the men have taken the cage, so I didn’t bother stripping during the fights. I stayed behind the bar. It gave me a prime view through the doorway to the crowd around the raised platform, the iron bars, the flickering lights overhead.
There was magic in that cage. Not exactly the kind of magic that Abuelita had taught me to cast, but the natural allure of violence and pain.
A current rippled through the crowd as the first pair climbed in.
“Bloody Pete and Ezio!” Gloria had said, selecting two entries off of the chalkboard. She could always read the names, even when the one signing had only left a scribble. She simply knew.
Bloody Pete was a diminutive man missing his left ear. It was a wound he’d always had, as long as I’d been in Lobo Norte, but it still oozed pus and blood down his jaw—hence the name. His face looked like cauliflower. I could still tell he was excited as he hauled himself over the bars.
Ezio wasn’t much bigger than him, and was nearly as ugly. A good match, probably by accident. Gloria liked the mismatched fights better.
When they were both inside, Gloria climbed up to slam the door shut and padlock it.
The watchers hooted. Hollered. A hand slipped up the inside of Gloria’s thigh and she caught the thumb in her hand, twisting it hard enough that I heard the pop from the bar. That only made the shouts louder.
She hopped down, grabbed a mallet, swung it at the bell. It rang with a clear chime that resonated over all the shouting.
The men were silent fighters, circling eac
h other with their fists lifted, watching each other through the guards of their forearms.
The crowd was not so quiet. The gangs roared, shaking the bars, slamming their fists against the cage. They shrieked suggestions. Stomped their feet. Made the whole bar shake with their fervor. It was a frightening sound, not unlike what I thought it might sound like to stand on the brink of Hell.
My hands moved as though with consciousness of their own, pouring beers, sliding them across the bar, flipping fresh steins into place under the taps. Foam dribbled over my wrists. Even as I sucked the moisture off my skin, I couldn’t tear my eyes from Bloody Pete and Ezio.
Pete took the first real swing.
He lunged forward and to the side, bringing a right hook around Ezio’s guard. Knuckles slapped against the meat of his shoulder. Ezio took the chance to make an uppercut.
Bloody Pete’s head snapped backward. He stumbled into the bars.
It was a short fight. Short and bloody. Once they got a measure of each other, they were beating hard, digging into their weaknesses. Ezio boxed Pete’s bleeding ear and made the man howl. The two tumbled to the ground in a writhing mass of limbs, kicking, kneeing, elbowing.
Bloody Pete ended up on top of Ezio, screaming wordlessly as he wailed on the other man. Blood splattered over the floor. The crowd grew feverish, banging against the outside of the cage, sending spittle and sweat flying.
And then Pete stood, and there was nothing under him but the bloody pulp of what had been a man.
Ezio had refused to tap out. Now he would be lucky to wake up ever again.
That was the nature of the cage.
Gloria opened the door. Took Pete’s wrist and shook his fist. “Victory!” she crowed. “Victoria!”
Everyone seemed like they turned to Big Papa all at once. He was sitting in the corner of the room on a stool, no taller than anyone else, yet undeniably kingly. He nodded his approval.