The Arena fell silent.
The shapeshifters backed up. Andrea reloaded and sent a bolt into the creature’s maw. It vanished and emerged from the aberration’s back. The oni danced behind it, stomping the sand.
The creature reared slightly, its sallow chest expanded, and it belched a glittering, silvery cloud.
Fine metal needles rained into the sand. One grazed Jim and he snarled. Silver.
The shapeshifters retreated. The monster kept a steady stream of metal vomit, and began crawling forward, slowly, ponderously, chasing them back to the fence.
The cloud caught Derek, slicing through his torso. He jerked as if burned, and leapt away.
“Take out the sleeper,” I murmured.
Jim barked a short order, barely audible behind the hiss of needles slicing the sand. Derek ducked left, while Raphael darted right, trying to flank the creature. A second mouth bloomed in the side of the creature’s chest and the new flood of needles cut Raphael short.
I clenched my sword. Curran watched with no expression, like a rock.
Another command. Raphael and Jim fell back, while Derek backed away slowly, just out of the monster’s reach. The two shapeshifters grasped Andrea’s legs and heaved. She flew straight up, squeezing off a single shot.
The bolt punched through the sleeper’s chest, emerging through his back. He awoke with a startled scream and clawed at the shaft. The threads of translucent magic ribbons ripped and he crashed into the sand. The ribbons shrank, breaking from the monster’s skin, leaving deep black gaps as they tore. The gaps grew, and the creature began to melt. It whipped about and backhanded the oni out of the way. The blue brute crashed into the fence. The silver aberration crawled to the sleeper, dragging itself faster and faster across the sand. Its back and hips were gone, melted into nothing, and yet it continued to crawl. In a moment it loomed above the flailing human, bent down, and gulped him in a single swallow. The mage’s screeches died and the beast vanished.
The crowd exploded. A hundred mouths screamed at once. To the left some hoarse male voice yelled, “Gooooooal!” at the top of his lungs.
The oni stumbled to his feet and met three shapeshifters. It was short and brutal.
I opened the door and took off down to the gate. Curran and Dali caught up with me.
A few moments later the four trotted to us, covered in blood and caked with sand. Andrea ran through the gates and hugged me. “Did you see that?”
“That was a hell of a shot.”
“Into the infirmary,” Doolittle ordered briskly. “Quickly, before the silver sets in.”
They passed us. Jim glanced at Curran. The Beast Lord nodded very slightly.
Derek and Raphael were the last through the door. The boy wonder limped badly. He looked up at Curran, stiff.
“Good,” Curran said.
Derek drew himself straight. A small, proud light played in his eyes. He limped past us, trying not to lean on Raphael.
FIVE FEET FROM THE DOORS, ANDREA FELL. ONE moment she was smiling and the next she dropped like a log. Raphael released Derek and I caught him just as Raphael scooped Andrea off the floor.
“Silver poisoning,” Doolittle snapped. “Bring her in.”
Andrea gasped. “It burns.”
I had dealt with shapeshifters damaged by silver before. It was an ugly, terrible thing. And I had gotten Andrea into it.
Raphael carried Andrea to the side room, where Doolittle had set up shop, and slid her onto a metal table.
Andrea shuddered. Spots appeared on her skin like a developing photograph. Her fingers elongated, growing claws.
“Hold on.” Raphael reached for her leather vest.
“No.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he snarled.
She clamped his hands. “No!” Her eyes went wild.
“Now young lady . . .” Doolittle said soothingly.
“No!”
Her back arched. She convulsed and yelped, her voice vibrating with pain. She was changing and she didn’t want anyone to see.
“We need privacy,” I said. “Please.”
“Let’s go.” Suddenly Derek’s weight was gone from me. Curran picked him up and strode to the back room. Dali and Jim followed. Raphael remained, pale as a sheet, holding Andrea in his arms.
She snarled in a hoarse voice.
“It’s all right,” I told her. “Just me, the doctor, and Raphael. They are gone.”
“I want him to go,” she gasped. “Please.”
“You’re convulsing. I can’t hold you still because you’re too strong, and the doctor will be too busy.”
“Cut her clothes,” Doolittle ordered briskly.
“No. No, no . . .” Andrea began to cry.
Raphael pulled her to him, his arms around her, her back to his chest. “It’s all right,” he whispered. “It’s all right. It will be fine.”
In less than a minute I had her nude. Ugly spots of gray peppered her torso. She must’ve gotten a head-on blast of the needles. Andrea shuddered again, tremors spreading from her chest to her legs. She yelped in pain.
“Don’t fight the change,” Doolittle said softly, opening a leather case with gleaming instruments. “Let it take you.”
“I can’t.”
“Of course you can,” I told her.
“No!” she snarled through clenched teeth.
“You aren’t going to die because you’re too embarrassed by your hyena freckles. I’ve already seen you in your natural form and Doolittle doesn’t care. He’s seen it all before. Right, Doctor?”
“Oh, the stories I could tell.” Doolittle chuckled. “This is nothing. A minor thing.” His face said otherwise, but Andrea couldn’t see it. “We’ll have you up and running in no time.”
“And Raphael thinks you’re sexy in your true form. He’s a pervert, remember? Come on, Andrea. You can do it.”
Raphael cradled her. “Change, sweetheart. You can do it. Just let the body take over.”
The gray spots widened. She clenched my hand in hers, nearly crushing my fingers.
“Change, Andrea. You still owe me lunch, you know.”
“No, I don’t,” she ground out.
“Yes, you do. You and Raphael ran out on me and I had to pick up the tab. If you die on me, it will be hard to collect and I’m too cheap to get stuck with the bill. Let’s go.”
Andrea’s head jerked back, slamming into Raphael’s chest. She cried out. Flesh flowed along her frame, reshaping, molding into a new body, a lean, long-legged creature covered in short fur. Her face flowed into a mix of human and hyena. Unlike the bouda shapeshifters, whose form too often was a horrific mishmash of mismatched parts, Andrea was a proportional, beautiful, elegant being. Too bad she didn’t see herself that way.
Doolittle probed her abdomen with the fingers of his left hand, a scalpel in his right. “Now when I cut, you push. Nice and easy, just like you trained.”
“Trained?” Andrea choked.
“The silver-extraction training,” Doolittle told her.
“I haven’t trained!”
Of course she hadn’t trained. She pretended she wasn’t a shapeshifter. “She doesn’t know how,” I told him.
Andrea convulsed. Raphael clamped her still. His face had gone bloodless.
“The silver burns. Your flesh tries to shrink from it and it burrows deeper and deeper into your body. You must fight it,” Doolittle said. “It goes against all your instincts, but when I cut, you must strain and push against it to force it out of your body.”
“I can’t,” Andrea gasped.
“You can,” Raphael told her. “Everyone learns how to do it. Children are trained to do it. You’re a knight of the Order. You can push a fucking needle out of your body. Stop crying and feeling sorry for yourself.”
“I hate you,” she snarled.
Doolittle positioned the scalpel above the largest gray spot. “Ready?”
He sliced without waiting for an answer. Black blood gushed fro
m the wound. Andrea crushed my hand, screamed, straining, and a silver needle slid onto her stomach.
Doolittle swiped the silver-fouled blood from her skin with gauze. “Good girl. Very good. Now we do it again.”
WHEN IT WAS DONE, RAPHAEL CARRIED ANDREA to the shower, murmuring soothing endearments into her ear. My part in it was finished. I went to the bedroom to find Dali slicing Derek’s back to get out the needles. Unlike Andrea, Derek had training and his progress was much faster. He joked while Dali cut him, mangling the words with his monstrous jaws, snarled with a pretended rage, and dramatically promised to “kirrrl youraaalll for this!” Curran chuckled. Dali was giggling. Even Jim smiled, for once lingering in the room instead of watching the fights.
I couldn’t stay. I wanted to be alone, by myself. I should go and watch the fights instead. Some other people dying for the sake of the greedy crowd. That would fix me right up. There was nowhere else I could go.
It wasn’t until I was out in the hallway that the after-shock of the fight hit me. Little painful sparks danced along my skin and melted first into relief, then into electric anxiety.
At the far end of the hallway a woman in a flowing sari was heading toward me between two Red Guards. She carried an ornate metal box.
I retreated to our quarters and blocked the doorway.
The woman and the guards stopped before me. She smiled at me. “A gift. For the man with the shattered face.”
I took the box. “I’ll be sure that he gets it.”
She smiled wider.
“That’s a beautiful skin you’re wearing,” I told her. “I’m sure its owner screamed very loud before you killed her for it.”
The Guards reached for their weapons.
“You will scream too, when I take yours,” she said.
I smiled back at her. “I’ll cut your heart out and make you eat it. Or you can save me the trouble and swallow your tongue like your scaled friend.”
Her smile got sharper. She inclined her head and took off. The Guards escorting her followed, relieved.
I brought the box into the bedroom and explained where it came from.
Derek reached over and opened it without a word. Inside lay a wealth of human hair. He scooped it with his claws and lifted it out. No blood. Just dark hair, gathered into a horse tail and chopped off. His upper lip rose, revealing his fangs. Livie’s hair.
“Was this done to disfigure her?” I asked.
Dali shook her head. “Widows cut their hair. They’re taunting him. If she’s his bride, then he’s as good as dead.”
CHAPTER 27
I AWOKE AROUND FIVE. GYM, STRETCH, LIGHT workout, shower, breakfast. Routine. Except for all us monsters gathered around the table. The shapeshifters loved to eat. It was a wonder the table didn’t break under all the food they had requested.
“These grits are terrible.” Doolittle grimaced and dropped another dollop of butter into his bowl.
Dali licked her spoon. “The cook must be a blind man with two left hands.”
“How can you ruin grits—that’s what I want to know?” Raphael shrugged. “They’re barely edible when fixed properly.”
“I’ll tell your mother you said that,” Doolittle told him.
“The corn bread is a brick.” Jim took the yellow square and knocked on the table with it. “The sausage is like paper.”
“Maybe they’re hoping to starve us,” Andrea quipped.
“More like they’re fixing to give us a hell of a stomach-ache.” Curran loaded more bacon on his plate.
For people who frequently turned into animals and ate their prey raw, they sure were a choosy lot.
“Kate makes good sausage,” Jim said.
Six pairs of eyes stared at me. Thank you, Mr. Wonderful. Just what I needed.
“Oh yeah.” Andrea snapped her fingers. “The links? The ones we had the beginning of the month? I didn’t know you made those. I thought they were bought. They were so good.” Her smile was positively cherubic. Of all the times not to be able to shoot laser beams out of my eyes . . .
“What do you put into your sausage, Kate?” Raphael wanted to know, giving me a perfectly innocent look.
Werejaguars with big mouths with a pinch of werehyena thrown in. “Venison and rabbit.”
“That sounds like some fine sausage,” Doolittle said. “Will you share the recipe?”
“Sure.”
“I had no idea you were a sausage expert,” Curran said with a completely straight face.
Die, die, die, die. . . .
Even Derek cracked a smile. Raphael put his head down on the table and jerked a little.
“Is he choking?” Dali asked, wrinkling her forehead.
“No, he just needs a moment,” Curran said. “Young bouda males. Easily excitable.”
“Who are we fighting today?” I asked, wishing I could brain him with something heavy.
“Rouge Rogues,” Jim said.
“That’s a joke, right?” Andrea’s eyebrows crept up.
Jim shook his head. “No. Led by a Frenchman. He calls himself Cyclone. A bad bunch.”
“The Frenchman knows me,” I said.
Jim’s gaze fixed on me. “How well?”
“Well enough,” Curran said. “He’s scared of her.”
“Did he ever see you fighting?” Andrea asked.
“Yes. A long time ago.”
“How long?” Jim asked. “How well does he know how you fight?”
If he tried to take me out of this fight, I’d rip him to shreds. “It was twelve years ago in Peru. I seriously doubt he remembers the finer points of my swordwork.”
“What were you doing in Peru?” Raphael asked.
“Fighting in Hoyo de Sangre.” I watched it sink in. Yes, I was thirteen. No, I didn’t want to talk about it. “As I said, it’s irrelevant. He’s a professional gladiator. He tours from arena to arena, drawn by prizes. He’s a strong air mage and he favors basic powerful spells. He’ll likely try an air lock or a hold. What else does he have on his team?”
Jim looked as if he’d bitten a lemon. “Assuming they will bring their best, he’s got a troll as their Stone, a golem Swordmaster, and a vampire Shiv. A very old vampire.”
“How old?” I asked.
“Olathe old,” Jim said.
Inwardly I cringed. Olathe, Roland’s former concubine, had used ancient vampires so old, they had to have become undead before the Shift, the first magic wave, when technically they weren’t supposed to have existed. A vampire was an abomination in progress. The older a vampire grew, the more pronounced were the changes the Immortuus pathogen inflicted onto its once-human body and the more dangerous it became.
“The golem is silver,” Jim said. “Sprouts blades in weird places. Preternaturally fast. Can’t be cut; can’t be pierced. The troll’s hide is also nearly impossible to penetrate. I saw a spear bounce off. It worries me.”
It would worry anybody. The vampire alone, even if the other three were paper cutouts, would give me a pause. As it was, the lineup was nearly impossible to beat. The vamp was deadly and wickedly fast. With two extra fighters and a mage, keeping the vamp from Dali would be nearly impossible.
Olathe had gotten her vampires from Roland’s stable when she had fled him. Where did Cyclone get an ancient vampire, especially with the People’s Warlord sitting right there in the stands?
I could crush the vamp’s mind, but not without giving myself away.
“I can take the bloodsucker,” Dali said. “If the magic is up.”
Jim grimaced. “This isn’t a regular vampire. You’ve never seen one like that. It’s old.”
She shook her head. “The older, the better. But it will take everything I got. I can do it once and that’s it. Then I’ll need a nap.”
I looked at Dali. If she took out the vamp, they would lock on her. Four to three, lousy odds, especially with an air mage in the mix. There was a way I could make her safe. It would be a foolish and reckless move under normal circum
stances. But with d’Ambray watching, it qualified as mind-numbingly stupid.
If she failed, she had no protection against the vampire. It would tear into her and I would hear her scream.
“If you can take out the bloodsucker, I’ll make you safe for the rest of the fight, provided the magic holds.”
“How?”
“Blood ward. It locks all magic out, including your own. You cast the curse and jump into the ward. Once you step into it, it will keep you locked in. You won’t be able to exit without my help. But nobody else will be able to enter.”
Dali bit her lip. “What if it doesn’t work?”
“You just have to trust me.”
She considered it for a long moment. “Okay.”
Jim shook his head. “Consider taking a fourth.”
“No,” Curran and I said at the same time. I didn’t want any more friends on my conscience.
Doolittle sighed.
I rose. “This will take a bit of practice.”
THE VAMPIRE CROUCHED BY CYCLONE, OOZING necromantic magic. Jim was right. This one was old. No sign of it ever walking upright remained. It waited on all fours, like a dog that had somehow sprouted humanoid limbs tipped with stiletto claws. The last lingering echoes of its humanity had faded long ago. It had become a thing, so revoltingly alien and frightening it sent shivers down my spine.
Not an ounce of fat remained on its frame. Its thick skin clung so tightly to its steel-cable muscles that it resembled wax poured over an anatomy model made by a demented sculptor. Sharp bone protuberations broke the skin along its spine, creating a jagged ridge. Its nose was missing, and not even a slit remained. Massive, lipless jaws jutted from its sickening face, revealing a forest of fangs embedded in crimson gums. A thick horn protruded from the back of its deformed skull. Its eyes glowed dark hungry red, like rubies thrust into the skull of a demon.
I found the sharp, painful light of its mind and waited in the shadows. If Dali failed, I would crush it, whether it gave me away or not.
Next to it rose a troll. A hulking creature, he stood almost nine feet tall. His skin was dark brown, uneven, and gnarled, interrupted by patches of rougher brown. A single adjective came to mind: thick. Thick tree-trunk legs, ending in flat, round stumps of elephantine feet. Thick midsection with a round stomach that looked too hard to be termed “gut.” Thick chest. Massively broad shoulders slabbed with thick muscle. Thick neck, bigger than my thigh. Thick, round head resembling a stump with a flat face. Eyes sunken deep into dark sockets, a stunted Persian cat nose, and a narrow slash of a mouth. Two tusks protruded from his lower jaw, stretching his mouth into a smirk. He looked as though he’d been carved out of a gargantuan tree trunk and allowed to petrify. Screw the spear; he’d break a chain saw.
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