Suicide Kings, page 8
I wink at her. “Only one way you’ll find out.”
“Pass,” she says. “I’m taken. But seriously, you don’t look to me like a guy who goes for jewel tones.”
“I’m not,” I say. “It’s kind of a going-away present from somebody I used to know. It’s a long story.” An airhorn blows outside. “And that’s my cue.”
“Good luck. Don’t die,” she says. “But if you do, make it entertaining. I missed it the last time.”
* * *
—
Noise and light and the stink of sweat and spilled beer. Fifteen thousand people, maybe more, are staring at me as I walk half-naked out of the locker room. There are at least five thousand in the bleachers and another ten to twenty scattered across the world. I make my way up the chain-link covered walk from the lockers to the fighter’s entrance. Otto and I each have our own. The crowd’s screaming but I can’t tell if they’re cheering or cursing. Nobody’s throwing beer bottles at me, so that’s a good sign.
Why do I even care? I’m here to do one thing, and whether people are watching hoping I get murdered or not is irrelevant. And if they are, that’s certainly not new. Even before the fires I had mages gunning for me, when they thought I was some kind of serial killer murdering other mages. Even Werther got in on that action.
The walkway opens up into a larger chain-link-covered space with a stool, a bucket of ice water, and a first aid kit. Like I’m going to get a chance to use it.
An airhorn blows and a scoreboard above the Pit starts to countdown from sixty seconds. I reach out and seize the magic from the local pool, drawing in as much as I can as fast as I can. Though I can’t see him, I can feel Otto doing the same. We’re like two kids shoving each other out of the way to get to the drinking fountain.
How much a mage pulls isn’t actually a good indication of how much they can pull. You don’t know how much they started with. Maybe they’ve got more capacity. Maybe less. And just because you can fill up the gas tank doesn’t mean you can use it all. But people will bet on anything.
The timer ends and the airhorn blows again. The gate to the Pit slides open and I step inside. It’s showtime.
Stepping into the Pit is a little like walking into one of those sound-proofed rooms covered in baffles where all you can hear is your own heartbeat—only for magic. It disappears around you and the only power you can feel is your own and your opponent’s.
I scan the audience and find the box that Werther is in, grim-faced, looking like he’s about to officiate at a funeral. Jonathan, Otto’s lawyer, sits to his left, looking jittery and nervous. Next to him are two men who are almost the spitting image of Otto. One’s clearly older than the other, looking more like Attila. I’m betting that’s Amanda’s uncle Liam and Otto’s brother Hans.
Amanda sits to her father’s right in a black dress. Her face is blank, and I can’t even imagine what she’s thinking.
It takes me a second to realize who the woman sitting to her right is. Gabriela’s changed out of her punk princess attire and exchanged it for a simple black dress similar to Amanda’s. They’re holding hands. Huh.
Otto steps into the Pit wearing wrestling tights. The guy’s ripped, I’ll give him that. But from the way some of his muscles bulge in weird spots I’d say they’ve been enhanced a bit for tonight’s performance. He’s got his way of getting an edge, I have mine.
He pauses for a second, surprise flashing across his face. I’m betting he’s never been in a shielded space, though maybe he just doesn’t like it. Most mages don’t. It’s unnerving if you’re not used to it. He recovers quickly and gives me that now-familiar sneer of superiority.
“We can end this without you having to die. All you have to do is concede.” He has to yell above the crowd to be heard. The wards keep out magic, but do fuck-all for sound.
“You seriously think I’m going to believe that after I tossed your dead kid’s finger at you this afternoon?”
“Reinhold went against my wishes. He knew not to meddle. A son who disobeys his father is less than useless. You did me a favor.”
“You people are really fucked up. Let’s get this started. The sooner I kill you, the sooner I don’t have to see your ugly face.”
Otto throws his hands into the air theatrically and I feel a flash of magic. The air above him starts to shimmer and fill with gray clouds, lightning sparking through them. Confronted with the majesty of his control of the weather, I do the only thing I can think of.
I tackle him. He hits the mat hard and I hammer at his face a good five or six times before he gets his shit together and throws me off with a push spell that sends me crashing into the chain-link on the other side of the Pit. I hit the mat, roll back to standing. He’s still trying to catch his breath and get to his feet.
His face is a mess. Busted nose, already-swelling left eye. Blood pouring from a gash in his cheek where a tooth has punched through. His eyes are so full of hate it’s almost comical.
I’m back on him before he can get all the way up. I don’t think it’s going to work, Otto’s too powerful to let something like this through, but I slap the flat of my hand against his cheek and look for a hook into his soul. Either he doesn’t have one or he’s got a good lock on it, because I can’t even find it.
So instead I catch him with a punch followed by an elbow strike. Not enough to knock him out by a long shot. Neither one of us is going down that easy, but I’ve definitely thrown him for a loop.
I block a half-hearted jab and follow it up with my own, realizing too late that it’s a trap. His left hand and forearm have morphed into a wide, flat blade with a hooked barb like a fat harpoon.
I spin out of the way, but he scores a long slice along my ribcage. My tattoos help with the pain and in minimizing the damage, but I can still see bright red meat and bone through the wound. Blood splashes onto the mat.
My balance is already fucked. He hits me with a quick jab. I trip over my own feet, land hard on my back. He moves in like lightning and leaps at me, his full weight on his left arm. I manage to roll out of the way just in time. The Pit shakes with the impact.
Miraculously, he doesn’t follow up, and when I get to my feet I can see why. He’s punched into the mat so hard that half his forearm is sunk into it and the barb is sticking. He can’t pull it out.
Far be it for me to see a prize-winning opportunity and not take it. I aim a kick at his elbow, snapping it sideways with a satisfying crack. His weight takes care of the rest as he falls the wrong way over his forearm, ripping bone, meat, and sinew out through a tear just below the bicep.
Otto screams, clutching at what’s left of the ruin of his arm. That has got to be agonizing. I wouldn’t blame him for calling the fight, but I really don’t think he will. Still, I give him the chance.
“We can end this without you having to die,” I say. “All you have to do is concede.”
In answer his right arm morphs into a sword blade, and with one quick slash he severs his shattered arm just above the break. Blood sprays across the floor as he raises the stump of his left arm and calls fire to dance across it, cauterizing it.
“That’s a no?”
Otto screams and runs for me, slashing with the blade. He tags my left forearm as I twist away from him, but I get my fist up into his right armpit and, with some extra power from a push spell, slam it into his brachial plexus.
His right arm goes dead and he howls. I cut that off with a follow-up elbow strike to his throat. He staggers back, gagging.
It’s not going to keep him out of the fight for long, but I need the break. I pull back, breath coming in rapid gasps. Even if he doesn’t kick my ass, this fight sure as hell will.
“You think,” he says, coughing between words, “that you’re hurting me? You think you can win?”
“To be honest, yeah, I kinda do.”
“No, I don’t think so.” He disappears.
Fuck. Invisibility. I hate invisibility. I can’t hear anything over the crowd. I try to track him from the indentations his feet leave in the mat, but I lose him fast. I push myself into one of the corners of the octagon and go low. There’s no way he’s going to come after me head-on and this at least covers my back.
I feel something move to my left, so I roll to my right. There’s a momentary shimmer where I see him as the blade slams into the chain link, and then he’s gone again. I have to do something about this fast.
Then it hits me. There’s an awful lot of blood all over the floor. I reach out with my magic and pull it all into a wet ball floating in front of me. Then I throw it up into the air.
The ball of blood explodes, filling the space with red rain. It coats everything. Me, the mat, the chain-link, and most importantly, Otto.
He doesn’t seem to realize that I can see him perfectly fine now, so when he comes at me with his sword-hand I’m ready for it. At least I think I am. He slashes. I sidestep. He recovers and twists around to stab me in the side, missing by a hair’s width. He sweeps his leg, taking my feet out from under me, and I hit the ground.
He slashes and punches at me with lightning speed. I raise a shield to ward off his attacks, but he’s pushing a lot of power into his strikes. I’m not going to be able to keep this up much longer.
Time for Plan B. My shield finally breaks. He pulls back and stabs, but I’m not there anymore.
Though Quick Change Alice has been around for a long time, the Pit’s relatively new. She had it built in the nineties and hired people from all over to ward the fuck out of it against every type of magic she could think of. Fire, lightning, scrying, curses, hexes, whatever it was, she thought of it.
Except for one. See, necromancers are rare. In the last hundred years there have been five of us at most in Southern California. And so it never occurred to her to ward it against ghosts. More importantly, she didn’t ward it against anything crossing the veil.
There’s a rush of noise and everything turns to shades of grey and blue as I shift to the other side. I get to my feet, dizzy, bruised, and bleeding. Which means I’ve already gotten the attention of all the Wanderers in a ten-mile radius. I don’t have a lot of time.
I can’t see the cage around me. It hasn’t been in place long enough for its psychic footprint to solidify over here. Which is one of the reasons I picked this place for the fight.
I can see everyone in the seats, though, and Otto is right where I left him, glowing like a bonfire. I was here last night, dropping off a package in the middle of the Pit in case I needed some backup.
The straight razor is one I’ve never used before. Honestly, I’ve been afraid to touch the damn thing since I found it in a storage building with a bunch of other magical tchotchkes that ranged from the dangerous to the stupid, heavy on the stupid. I inherited the building and its contents from my parents but didn’t know about it for decades. Not until I came back to Los Angeles. There’s a ledger for all the crap in there with an entry for every item. And for all that, I still can’t figure out what half the shit does. Most of the entries are along the lines of, “Winter Coat—Do not wear for more than two hours at a time,” or “Hat—Randomly changes overnight between fedora, trilby, derby, boater, and tricorn.”
When I’m summoning and talking with ghosts it helps to offer a little something to entice them. A few drops of blood are perfect. So I carry around a straight razor and cut a little into a bare patch on my left forearm without any tattoos. I had years of scarring, but this body hasn’t been cut up enough yet.
Since I almost always have a straight razor on me, I’ve learned how to fight with one. I don’t recommend it if you don’t like cutting the shit out of yourself while you learn.
So I’d been really interested in an item entered in the ledger as “Straight Razor,” then crossed out with the words “Vorpal Razor” handwritten above it. There wasn’t much detail in the entry itself, but plenty of notes in the margins to suggest that’s as good a name as any for it. Most of the notes were variations of “Don’t fucking touch this thing,” or “Frank took his hand clean off yesterday when he wasn’t paying attention.” At least three mentioned decapitation.
I’m a little nervous, but nobody ever said I was smart. I’ve got one chance at this, and if I fuck it up, Otto’s gonna be pissing inside my ribcage.
He’s moving around the Pit looking for me, swinging wildly from side to side. I open the razor, stay behind him, wait until he stops moving, then slide back across the veil.
I grab his hair and yank to the side to hold his head in place, then slash across the back of his neck. If this thing works nearly as well as I’m expecting I should be able to sever his spine without a problem.
The blade bites through his skin, goes through tendon and muscle and bone like tissue paper. And before I realize what’s happened, I’m standing there with Otto’s severed head in my hand.
Blood fountains out of the stump of his neck as his body sways, falling to its knees and then the rest of the way, landing with a wet plop in a growing puddle of gore. My little blood shower was nothing compared to this. I swear he must have had high blood pressure, because this shit is coming out like a firehose.
The audience is dead silent. I cast around until I see Werther sitting stoic in his box, Otto’s lawyer next to him looking like he’s about to throw up. Liam is, like his brother, unreadable, but Hans’s face is pure rage.
Amanda looks stunned and Gabriela—well, Gabriela looks like she’s trying really hard not to laugh. I raise the head, its eyes still blinking, toward them.
“Does this mean I win?”
Chapter 8
I rinse out the cuts with a bottle of Jack Daniels I found in the locker room. I just want it clean enough to see what I’m doing when I start sewing.
With all this blood on me, I’d probably have to stand in the middle of a car wash to get it all off. You think sand is bad? Blood gets into places you didn’t even know you had. And once it dries it might as well be paint. You can feel it pinching your skin every time you move.
Nobody tells you these things. You pretty much have to figure them out on your own. You’d think by now some enterprising mage would have written a basic manual on shit like this. “Chapter 7: Clean-up Tips After Sacrificing a Black Ram at Midnight to Dark Entities Unknown.”
I pull out a suture kit from a first aid kit on the wall. Last time I stitched myself up I had a sewing needle, dental floss, and a gash in my cheek where some asshole decided to go to town with a dental pick, so this is quite an upgrade. My life is a glamorous one.
I have more cuts than I realized. Three on my chest, one of which looks pretty significant. My left leg has a slash in it. Two slices on my ribs haven’t completely stopped bleeding, but I slapped on some gauze from the first aid kit in my corner of the Pit when I walked out, and they’ve slowed enough that I can work on them.
Between the blood and my tattoos it’s hard to see where exactly I’m bruised. I assume “everywhere” and decide to worry about that later.
I’m about to start stitching, the needle just over the skin, when the door bursts open. Without thinking I put my hand out, and the straight razor, which I thought I’d stuck in my bag, flies across the room to slap into my hand.
I go low into a crouch, ready to fire off a spell, jump, or cut the guy who just walked in. He’s young-ish. Late twenties, maybe. Brown hair, green eyes, glasses. Wearing a doctor’s lab coat and carrying a black bag—like I’m gonna fall for that.
“Oh, for god’s sake put that thing down before you hurt yourself,” he says. “What the hell kind of hack job are you trying to do?”
“I don’t know who the fuck you are, but you got five seconds before I start cutting off limbs.”
“It’s all right, Eric. Doctor Hilliard is with me.” Attila Werther steps into the room behind him. “Thought you might want to have a professional look you over.”
“Last one did that told me I had brain damage.”
“They were clearly right,” Hilliard says. “You’re seriously trying to sew yourself up? Do you even have any anesthetic?”
“Your bedside manner sucks.”
“Good thing you’re not in bed, then. Now put that goddamn thing down so I can take a look.” I do what he says, fold the razor and put it down.
Hilliard looks me over, asking me to move for a better view at a couple cuts I missed. “Okay. These are easy,” he says. “If you really want to sew yourself up, knock yourself out.”
“I’ll leave it to the professional.”
“Oh, I’m a professional? Thanks for noticing. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and shut up.” I can feel the flare of magic as he performs a spell.
“Am I gonna live, doc?”
“Only if you fucking shut up like I told you. All right, open your eyes.”
He’s typing notes into a cell phone. Or hell, maybe he’s texting somebody and sending dick pics, I dunno.
“Yes, you’ll live,” he says. “You’ve been knocked around some, but you don’t have a concussion. You’re bruised all to shit inside and out, though. One of your kidneys took a beating. Probably be pissing blood for a few days. Don’t worry about it. Your left vertebrochondral ribs are bruised, so try not to get hit on that side for a couple days or one of them’s going to crack. Take some ibuprofen and ice whatever hurts. Other than that, you’re alarmingly healthy.”
“Alarmingly?”
“How old are you?”
“Depends on how you look at it. Couple thousand years, pushing fifty, or just over a month.”
“Are all your people this much a pain in the ass?” he asks Werther. “I’m gonna go with a month. Your mental capacity certainly fits. You don’t have any of the damage I would expect to see in anyone who looks like you. No arterial plaque, no scarring, no sun damage.” He turns to Werther. “You sure he’s human?”
