“The kind who wanted his daughter to get used to death. I guess you could say I turned out according to his plan.”
“Yeah. He teach you to talk a lot of shit, too?”
“Nope. Picked it up from you.”
We sat in silence.
“My dad hated killing,” Jim said. “Couldn’t do it, even when he had to.”
“Not everybody grows up to be a monster.”
Another thump. The noise of the spectators died down to a hum. I got out my throwing knives and began polishing them with a cloth.
“He was human,” Jim said.
“The Pack never turned him?”
“No.”
Jim was half. Could’ve fooled me by the way he treated outsiders. Usually mates of shapeshifters became shapeshifters themselves.
“How did it go over with the cat clan?”
Jim gave a barely perceptible shrug. “We’re cats. We mind our own business. He was welcome, because he was a doctor. Not many physicians in the Pack. Doolittle and he were friends. Graduated together.”
I remembered Saiman’s words. He said Jim killed the man who had murdered his father while they were both incarcerated. “How did he end up in prison?”
“One of the lynx children went loup. A little girl. She was ten. The alpha was out and the parents brought her to him to be put down. Humane death and all that shit.”
Once a shapeshifter went loup, there was no return.
“He couldn’t do it,” Jim said. “He gave her an injection and she went to sleep. He told the family he wanted the body to see if he could autopsy it and find out what caused loupism. They believed him. He hid her in a cage in the basement. Took tissue samples to try and find the cure. She broke out and killed two people before we caught her and put her down. One of them was a pregnant woman. There was a trial. He got twenty-five to life.”
Jim still wasn’t looking at me. “His second day in prison a lowlife called David Stiles stabbed him in the liver. Later I found David, and I asked him why. He wasn’t in the position to lie. You know what he said?” Jim turned to me. “He said he felt like it. No reason.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“My father helped people. He treated a loup kid like she was normal. I treated a normal kid like he was loup and six years later sent him to have his face beaten off his head. Doolittle tells me he’s fading. He doesn’t have long. If my dad was alive, he’d spit in my face.”
It was an old wound and he’d ripped the scab off and left it raw for me to see. I had no salve to put on it, but I could show him my own scar. “If my father knew that I deliberately put myself here, in this situation, for the sake of another person, he would consider himself a failure.”
Jim looked at me. “Why?”
“Because ever since I could walk, he taught me to rely only on myself. To never build a relationship or to attach myself to a human being, even to him. He used to send me out to the woods for several days with nothing except a knife. When I was twelve, he dumped me in the Warren. I ran with the Breakers for a month. Was beaten several times, almost raped twice.” I braided my fingers into the Breaker gang sign. “Still remember how.”
Jim just stared at me.
“Friends are a dangerous thing,” I told him. “You feel responsibility for them. You want to keep them safe. You want to help and they throw you off balance, and the next thing you know you’re sitting there crying, because you didn’t make it in time. They make you feel helpless. That’s why my father wanted to make me into a sociopath. A sociopath has no empathy. She just focuses on her purpose.”
“Didn’t quite work out that way,” Jim said quietly.
“No. His training had a fatal flaw: he cared. He asked me what I wanted to eat for dinner. He knew I liked green, and if he had a choice between a blue sweater and a green one, he’d buy the green one for me even if it cost more. I like swimming, and when we traveled, he made it a point to lay our route so it would go past a lake or a river. He let me speak my mind. My opinion mattered. I was a person to him and I was important. I saw him treat others as if they were important. For all of his supposed indifference, there is a town in Oklahoma that worships him and a little village in Guatemala that put a wooden statue of him at the gates to protect them from evil spirits. He helped people, when he thought it was right.”
I shook my head. “I have this picture of what my dad wanted me to be, and I can never measure up. And I don’t want to. I have my rules. I stick to them. That’s hard enough as it is. If that means my dad would spit in my face, so be it.”
ALMOST TWO HOURS HAD PASSED BEFORE SAIMAN made it to the room. He strode briskly inside, his face flushed.
“The bug?”
Jim held out a small, flesh-colored disk the size of a quarter. “A transmitter,” he said. “The deeper into the body you shove it, the better. Make him swallow it. We don’t want it found.”
Saiman accepted the transmitter and crossed the floor to the door in the opposite wall, swiping the bundle of canvas on the way. He entered and shut the door behind him.
Minutes stretched by. Behind the closed door something thumped.
“Think he can do it?” Jim asked.
“Nope. But we don’t have a choice.”
We sat some more. Above us something howled in the Pit, sending a dull hum of resonance through the ceiling.
“Cold,” Jim said.
A moment later I felt it too, a dry, intense cold emanating from the door that hid Saiman. I rose. “I’ll go check on him.”
I knocked. The wood of the door burned my fingers with ice. “Saiman?”
No answer.
I pushed the door and it swung open, admitting me inside. The room curved to the right and I saw only a small section of it, illuminated by the bluish glow of the feylanterns: a shower stall, its curtain pulled aside. A long icicle dripped from the metal showerhead.
“Anybody home?”
A layer of frost slicked the floor under my feet. I turned to the right, moving slowly. My shoes slid a little. I caught myself on the wall and saw him.
He sat slumped on the bench, his enormous back knotted with hard clumps of muscle beneath skin so white and smooth, it seemed completely bloodless. Coarse hair fell down his back in a long blue-green mane. A fringe of hair trailed the vertebrae of his spine, disappearing into ragged pants of wolf fur. Sitting, he was taller than me, too huge to be a man.
“Saiman?”
The being turned his head. Piercing eyes stared at me, distant, pale blue, yet lit from within with power like two chunks of ice that somehow stole the fire of a diamond. He had the face of a fighter carved with exacting precision by a master sculptor: terrifying, forceful, arrogant, and touched with cruelty. His eyes sat sunken deep into their orbits, guarded by a thick ridge of blue eyebrows. His cheekbones were pronounced, his nose wide, and the line of his jaw so strong he could have bitten through bones with little effort. Gone was the philosopher, the urbane erudite, who pontificated on the meaning of luxury. Only a primitive remained, hard, cold, and ancient as the ice that hugged the bench on which he sat.
I wanted to raise my hands to shield myself from that gaze. Instead, I made myself walk to the bench and sit by him. He made no movement. Next to him, I looked like a toddler.
“This is the original form?” I said softly.
“This is the form of my birth.” His voice was a deep, contained bellow.
“And the golden dancer on the roof?”
“He’s what I could have been. What I should have been. There is enough of him in my blood to let me assume his shape with infinite ease, but I don’t delude myself. This is the true me. One can’t deny blood.”
On that we were in agreement.
Above us something thumped. The noise of the spectators swelled. Saiman raised his monstrous head to the ceiling. “I’m frightened. I find it richly ironic. What a ridiculous notion.”
He raised his massive arm, the forearm sheathed in silver-blue hair. His fingers shook.
“It’s natural,” I said. “Only the insane aren’t scared before the fight. They can’t imagine dying.”
“Do you feel fear, Kate?”
“Always.”
“Why do you do it, then?”
I sighed. “Fear is pain. It hurts. I sink into it and use it like a sharpening stone gliding against a sword. It makes me better, more aware. But I can’t be scared for too long, or it will wear me out.”
“How do you make it stop?”
“I kill.”
The blue eyes regarded me with a strange look, half-terror, half-surprise. “That’s it? No noble purpose?”
“There isn’t always a noble purpose. There is usually a reason. The need to save someone or something. Your friend, your lover, an innocent who doesn’t deserve to be hurt. Sometimes it’s a purely selfish reason. One might fight for their body, their good name, or their sanity. Sometimes it’s just a job. But deciding to fight and doing it are two different things.”
“How can you live like that? It seems unbearable.”
I shrugged. “Like you, I harbor no illusions. I was conceived, born, raised, and trained with one purpose in mind: to become the best killer I could be. It’s what I do.” So eventually I can kill Roland, the most powerful man on Earth.
“It’s time,” Jim’s voice said from beyond the door.
A long, deep sigh issued from Saiman. He rose. His head nearly brushed the ceiling. Eight and a half feet tall. Wow.
“Do you prefer the Aesir?”
The word hit me like a bolt of lightning. Pieces fell into place in my head: Saiman, golden and high on magic, dancing on the roof and celebrating “the time of the gods,” his fluid changes of shape, his self-interest, his ego, and him now, an enormous monster, a giant of a man. I gaped at him. He wasn’t supposed to exist.
“My other shape, Kate. Do you like it?”
“Yes,” I said, managing to make my voice even. “So are you all god or did one of your divine relatives get fresh with a human?”
For the first time Saiman smiled, displaying white teeth that would’ve been at home in the mouth of a polar bear. “A quarter. It’s enough. The rest is frost and human.”
He scooped the canvas bundle off the floor. The fabric fluttered down, revealing a four-foot-long club studded with metal spikes thicker than my fingers. Saiman bent and stepped through the doorway. I heard a startled growl from Jim.
Saiman kept going, out of the room, into the hallway, each step like two of mine. Jim’s teeth were bared in a snarl.
“Come on.” I swiped Slayer and chased Saiman into the hallway. The Red Guards hugged the walls as he passed by.
Jim caught up with me. “What the fuck is he?”
“Vikings,” I managed, breaking into an outright run.
“What about Vikings?”
“Vikings called their gods Aesir.”
“That tells me nothing.”
The Gold Gate loomed before us, and through its lit rectangle I saw the Pit and the sea of spectators. Saiman paused in the gloom, his club resting on his shoulder.
“He said he is a quarter Aesir, which probably means his grandmother was a Viking god. But there is only one Norse deity who can change shape the way he does and he wasn’t Aesir. He was Loki, the trickster, a giant who became a god. Saiman is the grandson of two Norse deities, Jim.”
Saiman swung the club off his shoulder with the ease of a child with a toy baseball bat and stepped through the gate into the light. The crowd fell silent. The silence stretched as the audience tried to come to terms with an eight-and-a-half-foot-tall humanoid. Saiman didn’t wait for them. His club in hand, he strode to the Pit.
CHAPTER 17
THE REAPER WAITED AT THE FAR END OF THE sand. Inhumanly tall and packed with thick muscle, he had the build of a champion weight lifter, his body so overdeveloped it resembled an action figure. If I went up against him, I’d have to strike at a joint—if he clenched up, the sword might not penetrate all that muscle.
The Reaper wore black boots, and nothing else. Swirls of henna designs covered every inch of his pale body. He carried two heavy bearded axes, sharpened to razor gleam, each three feet tall. They were meant to be used two-handed.
Saiman entered the ring, his long legs moving slowly. He towered over the Reaper by a foot or so, which made the axe fighter just over seven and a half feet. Despite the height difference, they probably weighed the same. You could see Saiman’s ribs, and the Reaper would have trouble picking up coins from the ground without crouching.
A Red Guard closed the fence door and scurried away to the protection of the wall.
As the gate clanged shut, the resolve drained from Saiman. A light trembling began in his arms. He hunched his shoulders. I could taste his terror from where I stood. The Reaper sensed it too and grinned, baring his teeth. They were filed to points, like the teeth of a shark.
The smell of blood and hot sand invaded my nostrils. I squinted against the bright glow of huge feylanterns and took a step to the Pit . . . and almost bumped into a guard barring my way.
“No further. If you exit the gate, your fighter forfeits the match.”
It wasn’t my fight.
I leaned against the golden arch. Jim halted next to me. It was up to Saiman now.
The Reaper tossed one of his axes in the air. It spun, the bluish blade shining as it captured the torch light, and he caught it with deft quickness. The crowd loved it.
A gong tolled through the chamber. As its deep ring died, Saiman glanced back at us.
“Come.” The Reaper’s voice was a raspy growl, touched with that same accent I couldn’t quite place. He motioned with his axe. “Come! I cut you down to size.”
Saiman hesitated.
“Come!”
Saiman turned halfway, facing me. His eyes brimmed with fear. We should’ve never put him into the damn Pit. He wasn’t a fighter. No matter how big he was, unless he had courage enough to kill for his survival, he would be simply cut down.
“Move,” I whispered. That first step was the hardest. Once he broke the dread chaining him and struck the first blow, he would be fine. But he had to move.
The Reaper raised his arms wide as if asking the audience for an explanation. Boos and jeers erupted, at first isolated, then gaining strength, until they swelled into a wall of sound.
The Reaper held up his axe. The noise died down. “I cut you now,” he announced.
He advanced, flexing, hefting his axes. Saiman took a step back. The Reaper smirked and kept coming. An ugly grimace skewed his face. He raised the axes and charged.
Saiman dodged, but the edge of the left axe caught his thigh. Blood drenched the frost-white skin. Shock slapped Saiman’s monstrous face. The axe fighter paused to soak in the applause.
Saiman stared at the blood. His lips trembled. His eyebrows came together. A wild light danced in his deep eyes.
Pain, I realized. Pain was his trigger. Saiman was afraid of pain, and once it lashed him, he would do anything to keep it from hurting him again.
With a terrible bellow, Saiman swung his club. The Reaper leapt aside and the club smashed the ground, sending a spray of sand into the air. Without a pause, Saiman swiped the club up and charged. The Reaper jumped back. The club’s steel spikes fanned his face. The Reaper ducked left, right, but Saiman whipped the club at him as if it weighed nothing. The axe fighter ran.
All thought vanished from Saiman’s glassy eyes. He roared and chased the Reaper back and forth through the Pit, his face terrible to behold, his mind lost to fury. I wasn’t sure he knew where he was or what he was doing here, but he knew he had to kill the fleeing Reaper.
“Ice him,” Jim murmured. “Ice him.”
Our stares met and he shook his head. Like the Norse warriors of old odes, Saiman was lost to his berserker rage, too far gone to remember he had magic.
The Reaper stopped. As the club whistled past his chest, a hair short of ripping him open, he pivoted and struck at the club
’s handle with his right axe, trying to knock Saiman off balance. It was a good move. Saiman’s momentum, aided by the Reaper’s strike, would drive the club forward, leaving the Reaper free to cleave at Saiman’s right arm and side.
The axe connected to the club. Ice swallowed the blue axe blade, shot up the handle to the Reaper’s arm, and caught his fist. The Reaper screamed. Desperate, he chopped at Saiman’s elbow, but the giant let go of the club, hurtling it and the Reaper into the wire fence. The Reaper’s back hit the wire right in front of me. He barely had a chance to bounce off. Saiman loomed above him, his face deranged, locked his hands into one enormous fist, and brought them down onto the Reaper’s skull like a hammer.
The Reaper dodged at the last moment and the blow landed on his right shoulder. Bones crunched. The Reaper howled. Saiman reached for the Reaper’s shoulders. His enormous hands gripped his opponent’s flesh, and Saiman jerked him off his feet as if he were a child, and smashed his head into the Reaper’s face. Blood flew, staining Saiman’s features. He threw the Reaper against the fence and pummeled him with his fists, breaking into a rabid frenzy of blows.
The fence shuddered and quaked. With each crushing punch, wire cut into the Reaper’s overmuscled back, leaving bloody, diamond-shaped gouges. His head lolled. Saiman struck and struck, growling, oblivious to the red mess of blood and bone that stained his hands. The wire cut deeper and deeper.
“He’s going to push him through that fence like a sieve,” Jim growled.
The crowd had gone silent, stunned by the ferocity of his onslaught. Only Saiman’s labored breathing, laced with furious grunts, echoed through the Pit.
I turned to the guard. “The Reaper’s dead; pull him off.”
The guard gave me a look reserved for the mentally ill. “Are you out of your mind? Nobody’s going to get into the Pit with him. You step in there, you’re his target.”
A group of patrolmen gathered behind us. “Jesus,” one of them murmured.
There was nothing left to do. We stood and watched Saiman vent his rage and terror on a battered piece of Reaper meat.
Four minutes later, the magic drained from the world in an abrupt gush and Saiman finally stepped away from the corpse. The thing that slid to the floor of the Pit no longer bore any resemblance to a man. Wet, red, soft, it was just a heavy mess of tissue, stuffed into black boots.
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