Just in case the tech failed, two additional teams of Guardsmen bided their time in the opposite corners: one with an arrow thrower and the other with an assortment of weapons.

  “I see you don’t want a repeat of the Andorf accident.”

  If Saiman was surprised at my knowledge of Games-related trivia, he didn’t show it.

  “We don’t. But I assure you, we still get plenty of shapeshifter participation.”

  “How? Didn’t the Beast Lord veto it?”

  “We import shapeshifters from outside the Pack’s boundaries. They fight and we pull them out before the requisite three days are up.”

  All visiting shapeshifters had three days to approach the Pack for permission to stay within its territory, or it would approach them and they wouldn’t like it. “Sounds expensive.”

  Saiman smiled. “It’s well worth it. The price of tickets alone covers most fighter-related expenses. The real money comes from betting. On a good fight the House takes in anywhere from half to three quarters of a million. The highest intake on a championship fight was over two million.”

  With hazard pay, I made just above thirty grand a year.

  I stared at the sand of the Pit. In my head, the building vanished. The fence, the concrete, the guns, Saiman, all dissolved into the blazing sun, blindingly bright and merciless. I heard the noise of the crowd in the wooden stands, the quick staccato of Spanish, the high-pitched laughter of women, and the hoarse cries of the bookies calling out numbers. I felt my father’s presence behind me, calm and steady. The reassuring weight of the sword tugged on my hand. I smelled my skin, scorched by the sun, and blood fumes rising from the sand.

  “Shall we sit down?” Saiman’s voice intruded upon my reverie. Just as well.

  We took our seats. Huge rust curtains slid aside on the far left and right of the chamber, revealing two entrances: the one on the right painted garish gold and its twin on the left in a cheery shade of solid black.

  Saiman leaned to me. “The fighters enter through the Gold Gate. Corpses leave through the Midnight one. If you ‘walk out gold,’ you’ve won the match.”

  A long, deep bellow of a huge gong tolled through the Arena, calling the spectators to silence. A slim woman in a silver dress stepped out of the Gold Gate.

  “Welcome! Welcome to the house of combat where death and life dance on the edge of the blade.” Her voice was deep for a female and it carried through the Arena. “Let the Games begin!”

  “Sophia,” Saiman said. “The producer.”

  The woman disappeared back into the Gold Gate.

  A huge scoreboard suspended on chains slid down from the ceiling and stopped just above the Midnight Gate. Two names written on white paper in beautiful calligraphy sat in twin wooden frames: RODRIGUEZ VS. CALLISTO. The odds beneath it said -175+200. Rodriguez was a slight favorite to win. If you bet on him as the winner, you would have to put in $175 to get back an extra $100. If you bet on Callisto and she won, for every $100, you’d get your money and $200 back.

  “Both human. Mildly interesting.” Saiman dismissed the scoreboard with a wave of his hand. “The Reapers, Kate? I’m eager to hear your assessment.”

  “Both Mart and Cesare are fighters?”

  Saiman nodded.

  “Have you ever seen them bleed?”

  “Cesare. During a bout with a werejaguar, he suffered several deep gashes across the chest and back. Mart so far has been untouched.”

  I nodded. “Have you noticed how perfect Mart’s skin is?”

  Saiman frowned. “Its tone is quite even, but I don’t see your point.”

  Not surprising. Someone who treated skin like clay he could mold and mash at will wouldn’t realize the significance of a perfect complexion. “Pimple” was simply not in Saiman’s vocabulary.

  “Ordinary people have blemishes. Acne, bruises, blackheads, clogged pores, small scars. Mart has none. His skin is completely uniform and unnaturally perfect.”

  “Perhaps he has accelerated healing.”

  “I’ve seen shapeshifters with scars, and they regenerate broken limbs in a couple of weeks. A normal human’s history is written in their skin, Saiman. We have training scars from before we got good enough. But he has none. How long since you first met him?”

  “Two months.”

  “So he has been in Georgia since late summer. Have you ever seen him sunburned?”

  “No.”

  “A man with skin that shade should develop a nice crispy crust after half an hour under Atlanta’s sun. Why is he paler than a flowering dogwood? And have you ever seen him with a different hairstyle?”

  I could almost feel wheels turning in Saiman’s head. “No,” he said slowly.

  “Hair always at the same length?”

  “Yes.”

  I nodded. “Let’s talk about his buddy Cesare. Tattooed from head to toe?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you notice that all of his ink looks perfectly fresh? First, most people get tattooed over a period of years. A complicated design takes time. The process is ritualistic for many people and as important as the result. Ink fades over time, faster if exposed to the sun. All of his tattoos—at least everything I could see—were the same color, bright black. As if he never goes outside.”

  “Perhaps he simply planned his tattooing ahead of time and used sunblock.”

  “I doubt very much that a man could walk into the tattoo parlor and unroll a full body plan of tribal designs. In any case, you said he bled. Deep wounds would cause distortions in his designs, especially considering how intricate his are. A thickening here and there, smudged, broken lines. I saw none.”

  A troubled expression disturbed the handsome symmetry of Saiman’s face.

  Once blood, fluid, or any other tissue was removed from the body, the owner could no longer mask its magic. An m-scanner picked up traces of that magic and registered it in different colors: purple for vampire, green for shapeshifter, blue or gray for human. I didn’t see the problem: take a blood sample, run an m-scan, anything not blue or silver meant nonhuman. An m-scan was foolproof.

  “Have you m-scanned them?”

  “Several times. Both register blue. Pure human.”

  Odd. “The m-scanner is a hell of a thing to rebut,” I said. “But the fact remains: you have two China dolls, one almost albino and the other painted with pretty black swirls. And they really don’t like you. I’d get a bodyguard, Saiman. And I would warn him to expect unusual things from your attackers.”

  Two humans walked out onto the field. Rodriguez was in his forties. Short and wiry, he had chosen a short, curved kukri blade. Front heavy, it was designed to sink into flesh almost on its own. Callisto topped him by a foot and outweighed him by about thirty pounds. Her olive-skinned limbs were disproportionately long. She carried an axe. A silver chain wound about her right arm.

  The gong tolled. Callisto swung her axe. Had she caught Rodriguez, the blow would’ve cleaved the smaller fighter open, but Rodriguez danced away, nimble like a cat. Callisto struck again, a diagonal blow that exposed her left side. Rodriguez refused to commit and dodged instead. The crowd jeered.

  I leaned on the railing, tracking Rodriguez across the field. He had both experience and skill. But a dangerous ferocity tinted the sneer on Callisto’s face.

  “Who will win, Rodriguez or Callisto?” Saiman asked.

  “Callisto.”

  “Why?”

  “A hunch. She wants it more.”

  Rodriguez lunged. His blade hacked Callisto’s thigh. Vermillion drenched her leg. I smelled blood.

  Callisto snapped her arm. The chain swung in a pale metal arch and wound itself about Rodriguez’s neck with unnatural precision. The end of the chain reared above the fighter’s shoulder and at its end I saw a small, triangular head. Metal jaws came unhinged. Small metal fangs bit the air. Callisto pulled. The links of the chain melded into a serpentine body in a shimmer of steel.

  The metal snake clenched its coils. Rodriguez chopped at it in a desperate frenzy, but his kukri slid off the steel body. He was done. The crowd roared in delight.

  Rodriguez’s face turned purple. He went down to his knees. The sword slid from his fingers and plunged into the sand. He clawed at the metal noose constricting his throat.

  She just watched him. She could’ve stopped it at any point. She could’ve killed him with her axe. But instead Callisto simply stood there and watched him suffocate.

  It took fully four minutes for Rodriguez to die. Finally when his legs stopped drumming the ground, Callisto retrieved her chain, its links once again mere metal, and shook it at the crowd. The spectators howled.

  I unclenched my fists. It had taken every ounce of my will not to jump into the Pit and pull that thing off Rodriguez’s neck.

  I hadn’t believed I could think less of Saiman. He proved me wrong.

  Four men in gray scrubs emerged from the Midnight Gate, loaded the corpse onto a stretcher, and took it away.

  Saiman leaned back in his seat. “As I said, mildly interesting.”

  “I find it horrific.”

  “Why? I’ve seen you kill before, Kate. Granted, you do it with considerably greater skill.”

  “I kill because I have to. I kill to protect myself or others. I won’t take a life to titillate a crowd. Nor would I torture a man for the pleasure of it.”

  Saiman shrugged. “You kill to survive and to appease your own misguided conscience. Those in the Pit kill for money and the gratification of knowing they are better than the corpse at their feet. At the core, our motives are always self-serving, Kate. Altruism is a fog created by sly minds seeking to benefit from the energy and skill of others. Nothing more.”

  “You’re like a god from a Greek myth, Saiman. You have no empathy. You have no concept of the world beyond your ego. Wanting something gives you an automatic right to obtain it by whatever means necessary with no regard to the damage it may do. I would be careful if I were you. Friends and objects of deities’ desires dropped like flies. In the end the gods always ended up miserable and alone.”

  Saiman gave me a stunned look and fell silent.

  CHAPTER 10

  FIGHTS CAME ONE AFTER ANOTHER, ENDING IN death far more often than necessary. Too much blood, too much gore, too much show. Too much amateur enthusiasm cut short by icy experience. Once in a while Saiman asked me who would win. I answered, keeping it short. I was ready to go home.

  The gong tolled once again. The scoreboard descended carrying two names: ARSEN VS. MART. -1200+900. Arsen was a heavy favorite to win.

  “I would like to offer you a job,” Saiman said.

  I was too sickened to muster any disbelief. “No.”

  “It’s not of a sexual nature.”

  “No.”

  “Out of six fights, you have picked a winner every time. I want to employ you as a consultant. Members of the House evaluate the fighters prior to the event to determine the odds the House will give for each fight . . .”

  “No.”

  Mart walked out onto the sand. He had lost the trench coat, and his black suit clung to his slender frame. He moved quietly, a dark, lean shadow, his blond hair the only spot of color. He carried two swords like two sunbeams trapped in steel, one long, one short, a classic katana and a wakizashi.

  “Three grand per evaluation.”

  I turned to Saiman and looked at him. “No.”

  A deep bellow rolled through the Arena. It started low, a long, heavy roar produced by an inhuman throat, grew to a thunder, and broke into a cacophony of snorts and rapid, sharp cries. The crowd went completely silent. My hand went above my shoulder, but my saber wasn’t there.

  “What is that?”

  Saiman’s face shone with smug delight. “That’s Arsen.”

  A huge shape appeared in the dim depth of the Gold Gate. Slowly, ponderously, it moved just to the edge of the light. Shadows clung to the contours of vast shoulders and a thick, muscled torso, obscuring a large helmet.

  The Red Guard holding open the wire fence door to the Pit looked as though he wanted to be anywhere but there.

  Arsen bellowed again and burst into the light, galloping into the Pit. The Red Guard slammed the door closed and took off.

  Arsen charged to the center of the Arena, put on the brakes, raising a spray of sand in the air, and roared. The silent audience stared in shock.

  He was seven feet tall and layered with slabs of hard, carved muscle that stretched his coal-black hide. His short fur flared into a shaggy mess on his chest and ran down his stomach in a narrow line to widen at his crotch, striving but not quite succeeding in masking his generous endowment. A fringe of hair climbed his thighs and the backs of his arms to droop in a long mane off his massive neck. Two pale horns protruded from his skull. His face was a meld of human and bull: a bovine nose and a bovine mouth, but human eyes peered out under the coarse ridges of his eyebrows. A braided beard dangled from his bottom jaw. His legs terminated in hooves. His arms ended in hands that could enclose my face with their thick, blunt fingers, only two per hand and a thumb. The spear in his right hand was the size of a two-by-two.

  I remembered to close my mouth. “A werebull?”

  “No. Something much more exotic,” Saiman said. “He was born this way and he doesn’t shapeshift into a human. He’s a minotaur.”

  Arsen dug the sand with his left hoof, kicking it up, and shook his head. Gold loops of earrings glittered in his left ear. He was power, strength, and rage, bound in flesh and straining to be unleashed.

  Mart didn’t move. He stood, the two swords in his hands pointing down and apart.

  “Arsen is my personal fighter.” Saiman’s voice vibrated with pride.

  “Where did you find him?”

  “Greece. Where else?”

  “You brought him over from Greece?” By boat. With sea serpents and storms. It must have cost a fortune.

  Saiman nodded. “It was worth it. I have no resources to waste on cheap things. I would sacrifice a considerable sum to have the Reapers humiliated. This was a mere pittance.”

  Arsen bellowed. His eyes locked on Mart. He lowered his head.

  Mart simply stood, unmoving and silent.

  Moist air puffed from the minotaur’s nostrils. Arsen hunched his shoulders and charged.

  He came roaring down, impossible to stop, like a battering ram.

  Mart made no move to evade.

  Twenty feet. Fifteen. Twelve.

  Mart leapt into the air, unnaturally high, like a piece of black silk suddenly jerked out of sight. He sailed over the minotaur and landed on its shoulders. For a moment he actually rode on Arsen’s back, balancing with laughable ease, and hopped off, light as a feather, into the sand.

  Arsen wheeled about and lunged, thrusting his spear in a classic Greek move. Mart dove under the thrust, deflecting the arm with his shorter blade. His katana kissed the inside of Arsen’s right thigh. In a split second, Mart reversed the strike, sliced Arsen’s left thigh, and twisted away from the minotaur’s reach.

  It was blindingly fast. “He’s dead.”

  “What?” Saiman glared at me.

  “Arsen’s dead. Both femoral veins are cut.”

  Thick gushes of red stained the minotaur’s thighs. Mart turned on his toes, faced our box, and bowed with a flourish, bloody swords held wide.

  Rage twisted Saiman’s features into an unrecognizable mask.

  Mart walked away to the Gold Gate.

  Arsen let out a weak moan, more of his lifeblood spilling with every palpitation of his heart. His knees hit the sand. With a shudder he toppled forward and fell facedown.

  The crowd exploded in a rabid crescendo of cheers. Saiman surged to his feet and took off through the balcony door. I waited about thirty seconds to put some distance between us and ran out of there as if my hair were on fire. As far as I was concerned, the night was over. It was time to go and track down the Red Roof Inn.

  CHAPTER 11

  EVEN THE BEST PLANS HAVE A FLAW. MINE HAD two: first, I had no clue where the Red Roof Inn was, and second, I had no transportation. The first problem I resolved with relative ease: I grabbed the first Red Guard I came across and interrogated him. The only Red Roof Inn in the area lay to the west, on the way to the South-West ley line, twenty minutes by horse or a good hour on foot. Forty-five minutes if I jogged. It was close to 2:00 a.m., and with the magic up, the odds of finding a horse to commandeer were nil. Anybody sensible enough to ride a horse wouldn’t be out at this hour, and if they were, they could defend themselves and would take a rather dim view of losing their mount. I should’ve brought my running shoes.

  I emerged into the night. The magic had robbed the entrance to the Arena of its electric illumination. Instead runes and arcane symbols glowed red and yellow along its walls, their intricate patterns weaving the solid wall of a ward. One hell of a ward, too—the whole building shimmered in a translucent cocoon of defensive magic, sealed tighter than a bank vault.

  I inhaled deeply and let the air out, exhaling anxiety with it. The Arena behind me loomed, emanating malice. Greed and bloodlust mixed there into a miasma that tainted all who entered.

  A stone building filled with men and women in evening wear or a sand arena enclosed by crumbling wooden stands filled with people in rags, it made no difference. I had never forgotten fighting on the sand, but I hadn’t realized that my memories lay so close to the surface.

  The sand marked a number of firsts for me. The first time I fought without any guarantee of my father rescuing me. The first time I killed a woman. The first time I killed in public, and the first time I was deified for it by a bloodthirsty crowd.

  My father judged it to be an experience I had to endure and so I had done it. It must’ve left a scar, because I had only to look at the sand and my arms itched, as if dusted with its grit. I brushed off the phantom powder, shedding the memories with it. I wanted to take a shower.

  Right now Derek was probably lying in wait for Livie at the rendezvous point. He was a careful wolf. He’d get there hours in advance. I needed to get my ass to the Red Roof Inn.