Chapter 28
Savannah
There’s a word for a sound that makes you want to crawl out of your own skin.
A word for the howl that’s half birth-cry, half execution order.
There’s not a word for how it felt to hear Menace’s wolf split the world open in front of me, but if there was, it would be something guttural, something wet and bladed.
I stood at the edge of the pit and let my nails gouge the railing.
Blood welled under each thumb, a prayer for luck offered to a goddess who’d already weighed us and found us insufficient.
The air stank of blood, old and new, the audience’s anticipation sharpening it into something bright enough to slice cartilage.
The blue fire in the torches painted everything in morgue-colors, even Menace’s white wolf, who gleamed like a cauterized nerve.
Dominic’s wolf was larger than I remembered.
It wasn’t just the mass, though he was easily seventy pounds heavier than Menace, his shoulders corded with obscene new muscle.
It was the way he moved, a sinuousness that looked borrowed, as if the body wasn’t entirely his to command.
When he lunged at the opening horn, the movement was wrong, too fast for the bones underneath.
I smelled magic instantly—a tang of rot, sickly and high-pitched—and the crowd did too.
They shrank back from the rail, supernaturals who’d seen enough sorcery to recognize a ticking bomb when it flexed its claws.
Menace met the charge head-on, no hesitation, no calculation.
His body was a coiled spring, every muscle cabled to snap at the first feint.
But Dominic’s leap was pure physics, not strategy, and Menace barely evaded the snapping jaws, his white pelt losing a ghost-patch to the black wolf’s teeth.
The crowd roared. Menace circled, head low, and his lips peeled back in a grimace of calculated rage.
The first exchange was brutal, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever seen.
Not yet. They clashed, then separated, then clashed again, both landing blows, but Dominic was cheating—healing, even as Menace opened fresh wounds.
Every time Menace scored a bite or a rake, the skin sealed itself with a rippling shiver, closing up the way a mouth does when you clamp your jaw tight against a scream.
Menace switched tactics, going low, aiming for the underbelly.
He feinted left, darted right, and went for the femoral.
It worked—Dominic’s wolf shrieked as Menace’s jaws closed around his thigh, twisting, worrying the bone.
But Dominic just reared up impossibly, and slammed his full weight down, crushing Menace to the dirt.
The thud reverberated through my spine. I thought I felt a rib crack.
I doubled over the rail, bile burning my throat. For a moment, the world narrowed to the two of them: white and black, hope and extinction, a metaphor so on-the-nose I would have laughed if I wasn’t swallowing the taste of my own fear.
Dominic’s magic-enhanced wolf pressed the advantage, pummeling Menace into the arena floor.
I saw white fur turn pink, then red. I saw the way his tail curled protectively over his flank, the way his eyes never left the enemy’s.
Even as he bled, he calculated. He waited for the moment the black wolf’s teeth reached too far, and then—like the world’s most beautiful trap—he snapped his head up and caught Dominic by the lower jaw.
Menace held on with everything, legs scrambling for purchase. He twisted, hard, and Dominic yelped. But the sound didn’t last. Dominic’s claws raked Menace’s face, blinding him on one side, leaving a flap of skin dangling over his left eye. I screamed, and so did someone in the crowd.
The fight went on. It had been minutes, but it felt like hours.
The arena was a centrifuge of violence, every turn escalating the damage.
Menace was on defense now, staying low, dodging the worst of it, but the black wolf’s stamina was obscene.
Every time I thought Menace would get a breather, Dominic was on him, a storm without end.
At the twenty-minute mark, they were both streaked with gore.
Menace’s coat was mostly pink now, and there were tufts of fur littering the sand.
Dominic’s right eye hung half-closed, oozing something blue-black, and one ear was missing entirely.
Menace was panting, tongue lolling, every breath a gamble.
I could feel the pain through the bond, each new laceration sending aftershocks through my chest. I clenched the rail until my fingers went numb, then dug my teeth into my arm to keep from screaming.
There were times when Menace looked to be out. Twice, he went down and stayed down, just long enough for the crowd to start murmuring in defeat. But each time, he got up. Not because he was stronger—he wasn’t—but because something in him refused to give the bastards the satisfaction.
At the thirty-minute mark, Dominic tried to end it.
He went for the jugular, literally. Menace sidestepped, let the jaws close over nothing, and then leaped for Dominic’s exposed throat.
He barely missed. Dominic caught him mid-air and flung him into the pit wall, hard enough to leave a bloody streak.
Menace slid to the ground and lay still, sides heaving, one leg at a sick angle.
The arena went silent. I wanted to die. I wanted to charge the pit myself, tear at Dominic with my nails, my teeth, my useless, fragile body. But my knees buckled, and I hung there, draped over the rail, watching the end approach.
Dominic prowled the length of the pit, savoring it. He barked once, a sound of pure triumph. He padded to where Menace lay and nudged him with a paw. Menace didn’t move. Not even a flinch.
Dominic circled, jaw open in a wolf’s grin, waiting for applause. He turned his back to the body and raised his head to the gallery, inviting them all to see the victor.
That was his mistake.
Menace didn’t get up. He lunged straight from the ground, legs splaying out behind him as he rocketed forward and up, catching Dominic’s back leg in his jaws and yanking with everything left in his ruined body.
The crowd erupted. Dominic went down hard, Menace following, jaws locked on the hock.
He twisted. I heard the snap from fifty feet away.
The black wolf howled, and Menace didn’t let go. He climbed up the body with his teeth, inch by inch, working through muscle and tendon, until he was at Dominic’s throat. This time, he didn’t miss.
He bit down. The bite was obscene, an arterial spray that painted both of them red. Dominic thrashed once, then twice, but Menace hung on. I screamed, everyone screamed, and the blue flames in the torches went wild, shooting high into the air.
When it was done, Menace let go and staggered backward. He limped, dragging the dead leg, and the whole left side of his face was an unrecognizable mask. Dominic’s wolf twitched, then went limp. Blood puddled beneath him, soaking into the sand.
The crowd was dead silent, except for the sound of Menace’s breathing, which was ragged and shallow and desperate.
I screamed again, this time wordless, the sound echoing off the pit walls. Menace swayed, then collapsed, his body stretched out next to Dominic’s corpse. He didn’t move.
I stood there, not breathing, not moving, waiting for him to get up.
He didn’t.
It took eight seconds after the final kill for anyone to move.
In that time, I counted every place Menace had bled, every place the sand was stippled with something vital and unrecoverable.
I counted my heartbeats too, but they didn’t line up right, skipping and doubling in a pattern that felt more like malfunction than rhythm.
Menace’s wolf lay stretched out in the dirt, a white pelt ruined to pink, the left eye swollen shut, and the right still faintly open.
I watched for the breath, the twitch, the twitch that meant he hadn’t died at the finish line.
It came eventually—a convulsive jerk, as if the spirit inside him had to be cajoled back by the world’s most belligerent paramedic.
He shifted slowly, agonizingly, as if every cell had to be dragged one by one from the animal to the man.
There was no drama to it, no shuddering glamour, just a blur of pain and an anti-climax of bone and skin.
He came out raw and naked, his body mapped in bruises and bites, a fresh set of claw tracks scored down his chest. He made it to all fours, then one knee, and then finally to his feet.
The crowd was still silent, but the white noise of horror was starting to leak in around the edges.
Bronc was the first to break protocol, jumping from the box seat to the edge of the pit.
He vaulted the rail and was at Menace’s side in seconds, draping a Council-branded robe over his bare shoulders and half-carrying him toward the stairs.
Juliet was there too, her arms outstretched, her face a mask of incredulity and bone-deep relief.
They flanked him, bracing him, the three of them a battered tangle limping toward the arena’s exit.
I found my legs then, and I ran. The moment I hit the stairs.
I got to Menace as they reached the top, and for a second I didn’t know what to do.
Hug him? Collapse at his feet? Just stare?
In the end, I did all three. I wrapped my arms around his ribs, felt the wet heat of his blood soak the front of my clothes, and then slid boneless to the ground, clutching him and sobbing into the meat of his thighs as we stood at the edge of the arena.
He grunted, the sound closer to a laugh than a scream, and ran a hand through my hair. “Red,” he rasped, “you’re getting me all sentimental in front of the fucking Council.”