Suicide Kings, page 7
“He could kill you.”
“And? We all die. Some of us get to do it more than once. Dying is not the worst thing that can happen to me.”
This is something I’ve been thinking about since I was brought back. If I die, my soul isn’t going to merge back with Mictlantecuhtli. I don’t get to go back to who I was. I know this.
But I also know there’s a hell of a lot more than alive or dead. When I die again, I have no idea where my soul will go. I’ve been told my existence is so jacked that death doesn’t know what to do with me. If anything, things are a lot more complicated now, not less.
My soul has to go somewhere, but I’m not sure any afterlife will have me. Fine by me, gods are assholes. Take it from one who knows.
Or it could go the other way. With a case of double deicide on my record, I’m on a whole lotta divine shit lists. They might fight over who gets to eat me.
But do I belong here? Do I belong on Earth with thousands of years of death god memories bouncing around in my skull, half of which are so obscured I can barely see them?
I’m an Eric-Carter-shaped piece of soul that was peeled off of a Mictlantecuhtli stand-in and shoved into my grandfather’s dug-up corpse. There is nothing in me that’s original. Nothing that’s actually mine. I am a man made of bits and pieces and I’m not sure who, hell, what I am.
So no, dying is not the worst thing that can happen to me.
“You want to die?” Amanda says.
“Not really,” I say. “But if it happens, it happens.” It takes her a second to process this.
“Okay. So where do we go from here?”
“Fight’s at midnight. Your dad’s handling the logistics with Alice. I’ll be there around ten. You might want to get some sleep. Bound to be a long night no matter who wins.”
* * *
—
I’m sorry Freddy’s dead, but there’s no way he would have survived a fight against Otto. From what I hear, Freddy knew how to fight in a ring, not murder somebody in cold blood. If Otto’s half as powerful as his kid was, Freddy would have been dead before he could so much as think about a spell.
He was planning on using a regular old boxing ring, with the standard magic. I’m not. That’s going to even things out a little. A wizard fight that uses a boxing ring is a reputable fight. The wards on the ring keep the audience safe from stray magic, but they’re designed so that if a mage has to pull in additional power to keep from getting killed, they can. It’ll just count against them in points.
At Quick Change Alice’s you can’t do that. The Pit’s an octagon about ten feet in diameter. A chain-link cage is shaped into a sphere, sunk underneath the Pit and ensorcelled to keep everything out, and everything in.
The only power Otto and I are going to have is what we take in with us. There will be a one-minute warning for us to top off before the fight. I can pull in more magic faster than most mages can. But Reinhold and I were pretty evenly matched. No reason Otto won’t be just as powerful, if not more so. There’s really no concept of cheating in a fight like this. If you can do it, it’s legal.
Quick Change Alice’s has been a staple on the mage fight scene for almost a hundred years now. Ever since the airport opened. People walk by it all the time and completely miss it. Even the security guards don’t know it’s there, and they let people into the place. Soon as a car goes in, they forget about it, and security footage shows nothing.
I arrive a couple hours beforehand and it takes me a second to realize something’s different. The hangar’s there, the parking lot’s there. Only they’re both much bigger than they should be, but at the same time somehow completely unchanged. Old Man Werther is good with transdimensional spaces, and I can see his handiwork all over. He’s taken the spells already in place and beefed them up by a factor of ten.
Good thing, too. Because the lot is full and growing in capacity for more cars. It took me almost half an hour just to get off the freeway. A radio traffic reporter is talking about delays off the 405 and 710 Freeways for construction. There’s no construction, it’s just Quick Change Alice’s customers.
I find a parking spot way in the back. Parking might be a nightmare, but the second I set foot on the pavement, I’m at the hangar entrance.
It occurs to me that if Otto is even close to as powerful as his uncle, I might actually be in trouble.
I pull out a HI, MY NAME IS sticker and write JUST SOME GUY on it with a Sharpie, slap it on my chest, and pump some magic into it. Everybody in this place is a mage, or at least enough of a mage to know how to get here and into the hangar. That probably means a lot more people who know about magic than people who can really do much with it. The sticker should let me get through the crowd easily without most of them getting in my way.
More powerful mages will see right through it, but I’m not worried about them. If Amanda’s right about my reputation among the elite out here, it’s probably better if they do see me. Goddammit, I hate this shit.
“Sir,” one of the bouncers says as I come up to them. They’re in uniform and easy to spot. Red polo shirts, white pants, bulging muscles.
They’re talents themselves, so they see right through the Sharpie magic. “I’ll have to ask you to leave any guns, knives, fetishes, talismans, or artifacts with us. We’ll give you a ticket to retrieve them later.” Awfully optimistic to think I’ll be alive to get them back.
I hand them my Sharpie and the three or four blank stickers I had in my pocket. It’s all I have. I don’t even have a cell phone or car keys on me. It’s not like it was my car I drove here.
Still, they have to check. I get it. Rules are rules. They do a quick pat down and I feel a small flare of magic from one of them as he gives me a once-over for anything I might be hiding. “Thank you, sir. Go right in. Alice has requested to speak with you when you arrive. You can find them in their office.”
I pass through the doors of the hangar and Quick Change Alice’s turns into something I don’t recognize. It’s the same layout, only not. Stadium seating that reaches up near the ceiling looking down at the Pit in the middle. Concession stands selling beer and hot dogs and whatever else you’re looking for.
Only the place is bigger, a lot bigger, than I remember, and I was here just last night. It’s hard to focus on some parts of the bleachers, like they’re bending away and twisting at impossible angles. Looking at multi-dimensional architecture can you give you a headache, but this is quality craftsmanship. I doubt most of the people in here even notice it.
I’ve seen enough at this point that I can tell that it’s Werther’s work. He’s twisted the space inside to accommodate the ever-growing crowd. There is enough space for everyone. There’s no over-crowding. And wherever I go I can see the Pit perfectly, with nothing blocking my view. Nice touch.
That said, it’s already packed. Christ, how many people are in here? The landscape shifts too much for me to get a good count, but hundreds? Thousands? Fuck. Are they all here to see me get my ass kicked? I never realized I was such a draw.
Making things even more interesting, the crowd is completely sauced. Drunk mages are like football hooligans, but when they throw the seats in protest it’s usually with gale-force winds. Here it’s kept under more control. The bouncers all carry powerful paralysis talismans. You step out of line, be prepared to spend the next eight hours frozen in a heap in a back room Alice had specially made for it. And then she’ll ban you, which is an even bigger threat.
I head down a walkway splitting one level of seating from the other and stop to watch the action below. There’s a match already in progress. Two women in sports bras and wrestling tights, one black, one Asian, are trying to kick the shit out of each other. At least I think so. They’re a little blurry.
It’s a speed match. Same as any other pit fight, only they’re both using magic to increase their reflexes to insane levels. Moving so fast they’re hard to track. These fights usually end with just one punch. When you’re going as fast as they are, one punch is all it takes. Like getting hit with an elephant.
The trick is landing that punch. They’re each dodging every swing, kick, jab, knee, or elbow the other throws. Speed matches have no rounds and last three minutes. If somebody isn’t unconscious or dead by then, it’s a draw. At that point both fighters would be so exhausted they’d have to be taken out on stretchers anyway. I hear it’s great for weight loss and cardio, provided your heart doesn’t explode.
The black woman finally tags the Asian, slamming a fist into her jaw so hard I can hear it crack over the noise of the crowd. She bounces off the chain-link and hits the mat unconscious or dead. There’s something about the winner that looks familiar.
“Quite the match, isn’t it?” Gabriela says behind me.
“I know that fighter,” I say, hopefully covering up the fact that I just froze for a second. I was wondering if Gabriela was going to show up, not that I had any real reason to. I’ve been avoiding her, but I’m pretty sure she’s been avoiding me, too.
“You should,” she says. “You’re the one who told her to talk to me.”
“That’s Indigo? Holy shit.” I met Indigo a couple days before I died. She’s got a twin sister and a cousin who were all shaping up to be pretty powerful mages. I suggested she connect with Gabriela, see if they could work out some kind of training deal. Her knack was that she could move really fucking fast. She seems to have gotten better.
“My protégé,” she says. “She’s a lot more versatile these days. So, you’re really doing this? Fighting for a young lady’s honor?”
“Right, because that sounds so like me,” I say.
“It really doesn’t,” she says. “You doing all right? You look like you could use some sleep.”
“I’m fine,” I say, a little too quickly. “I have to go see Alice and get ready.”
“Talk after,” she says.
“Sure.” That is so not gonna happen.
“Good luck. And—just don’t die, okay?”
“I’ll take it under advisement. Say hi to Indigo for me.”
Jesus, that felt awkward. I make my way toward the betting booths. I can’t tell if it’s my imagination, but it feels like Gabriela’s burning a hole through my back with her eyes. I haven’t talked to her in a couple of weeks and the last conversation we had was kind of strained.
I have mixed feelings about her. She pulled me out of Mictlan. I can’t fault her reasons. She needed to take care of Darius, an eight-thousand-year-old djinn who was about to break free of the prison where he’d been locked up by Mictlantecuhtli. The seals were failing and the only one who could do anything about them was Mictlantecuhtli himself.
She couldn’t get all of him, so she settled for me. She ripped me from the only place that ever really felt like home, away from too many things to forgive her for.
But she’s my friend. And she risked a lot to bring me back. And she kissed me. That spun me a hell of a lot more than it should have. But now’s not the time to think about it.
The seating in front of the betting booths has been rearranged to create a box seat that looks down over the Pit. Werther and Amanda will be sitting there. It looks like there are a few more seats in the box, though. Not sure who else is showing up from the family.
I go to one of the bouncers, some guy I’ve never seen before. “I’m here to see Alice,” I say.
It’s clear he recognizes me instantly. “Yes, sir. They’re expecting you in their office. Please follow me.” He takes me past the betting booths and into a short corridor. Last night there was only one betting booth. Not six, or maybe sixty, I can’t tell. Each booth has a line of twenty people, easy. A few take notice of me, mages strong enough to see past my thin disguise.
“You’ve made some changes,” I say.
“Really?” the bouncer says. “I hadn’t noticed.” We stop at a red door and for a second I flash to a different red door, with the world’s worst nightmare behind it. But Darius is dead. Destroyed when I collapsed an entire universe on him. And a few thousand people he thought he could use against me as human shields.
Yeah, I know. Have the butcher add it to my tab.
“Right through there, sir. Have a good fight, and for what it’s worth, I hope you win.”
“Appreciate it,” I say. “But you didn’t bet on me, did you?”
“No, sir.” He turns and heads back out.
I knock on the door and go in without waiting for a response. Alice is sitting behind their desk, still wearing the Persian woman’s skin.
“You wanted to see me?”
They wave at a bar cart in the corner. “Pour me a gin and tonic and have a seat.”
“This sounds serious,” I say, once I’ve given them their drink. I considered pouring one for me, but alcohol and fights to the death are not as great a combination as you might think.
“You should know what the betting looks like. Four-to-one on the Kraut,” they say.
“And me?”
“Ten-to-one.”
“Jesus, seriously? The hell is that based on?”
“You know what they say, ‘The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong—’ ”
“ ‘But that’s the way to bet.’ Yeah, I know that one,” I say. “But the odds are that stacked?”
“You hear some of the shit that guy’s done? He made some big river in Germany flow backward for a week. I saw footage of him taking on three other combat mages and all he left were smeary puddles. He made an entire town disappear and none of the normals have noticed. Not even the ones with relatives who lived there. It’s not even on maps anymore.”
“I killed two gods,” I say. “That’s not nothing, you know.”
“Yeah, but I’ve never seen footage of it,” they say. “Ten-to-one. Not a lot of people are betting on you.”
“That’s not surprising,” I say. “What’s the audience like tonight? Hard to tell with all the non-Euclidian shit you got going on out there.”
“Last I checked, about five thousand out there and another ten thousand on pay-per-view.”
“You’re streaming this?”
“Hell yeah. I mean, not just anybody can access it. By the time we get going, we’ll have another ten thousand watching, easy, probably more. We got people from all over the world out there in the stands or tuning in.”
“No idea I was such a draw.”
“Nah, it’s the story that’s the draw. Knight in shining armor comes to rescue a young lady’s virtue from her evil whatever-the-fuck-he-is? People eat that shit up.”
“For fuck sake. She can handle her own virtue. I’m just helping her get out of a bullshit loophole.”
“Uh huh. Sure. Hey, it true you’re bangin’ her?”
“The fuck? No. I hardly know her.”
“Damn. I had twenty bucks riding on that.”
Chapter 7
I change into a pair of blue gi pants in the locker room, a barely furnished space made of cheap drywall with a couple of lockers and a shower with disintegrating grout.
I don’t like pre-planning fights. It’s too easy to second guess yourself trying to prepare for everything. There’s only so much you can remember to do when somebody’s trying to rip your head off.
According to Amanda, everyone in the family tries to keep their knack quiet. So she doesn’t know what he’s good with or what he’s likely to use. He could channel his power into the physical and move faster, hit harder. He could use it to push or pull, set shit on fire. There’s no point in putting too much planning into a strategy for this.
I lie down on the bench and stare at the ceiling. I feel like crap. I need sleep. But if I sleep—well, nothing I can do about that right now. I get up, dig into my messenger bag for a bottle of Adderall. I shake out a couple pills. Fuck it. I shake out another two and dry swallow all four.
A knock on the locker room door. “Come in,” I say.
“Hey,” Indigo says, peeking her head around the door, like she’s afraid I’m going to blow it off, which, let’s be honest, I would have had she been someone else. “Got a second?”
Her left eye is swollen half-shut and a nicely stitched slice on the left side of her face goes from her scalp down to the edge of her ear. She’s got the kind of proud smile that only someone who’s beat the living shit out of their opponent has.
“Yeah, come on in,” I say. “Saw your fight out there. Nicely done.”
“Thanks. Gabriela’s been training me up. I’m better at the physical stuff so she’s been having me focus on that.”
“Glad it’s working out.”
“Me too. But that’s not what I came here for. I saw your man Otto sparring this afternoon. I don’t know if this is going to help, but he really tried to avoid anything physical. Everything he did today was all magic. Big, flashy spells.”
“Anything in particular?”
“He did this lightning storm thing like three times. You know, clouds gathering, bolts shooting out of them. I could tell he’d toned it down for the guys he was working with, but it still fucked ’em up pretty bad. But it also took him a while to get it going. A good two seconds easy. They got some licks in before he set it off. Seemed to fuck his concentration a lot.”
“Good to know,” I say. I have a couple ideas how I might be able to use that information. She’s looking me over and I know what she’s going to say before she says it.
“Goddamn, you look like a horny peacock. I’d heard about your tats, but goddamn those are bright. Is there any piece of skin you don’t have covered in ink?”
When I came back from the dead I still had all my tattoos, which was a little weird considering it wasn’t my body. Weirder still was that they had all gone from black or dull green to bright reds and blues, vibrant greens and yellows. I’m not sure if I look more like a Yakuza boss or the scene of a tropical bird massacre.
