Ghost's Awakening (Steel Phoenixes MC: #5)

1. The Pit

THE PIT

CALEB

Some nights I heard the ventilator before I heard the crowd.

Hiss-click. Hiss-click. The machine that breathed for my brother, looping over everything while my hands worked the tape.

Around the left wrist. Across the knuckles.

Pull it tight with my teeth. The same pattern I'd learned at eight years old in a martial arts gym in Vegas that stank of old sweat and rubber mats that nobody ever replaced.

Nineteen years later, I taped up in the back hall of a warehouse that smelled like bleach laid over blood, two hundred strangers packed on the other side of a cinder-block wall, waiting to watch somebody get hurt.

"That tape's a crime against humanity."

Renzo. Leaning on the wall across from me, arms folded, already wrapped and loose.

A middleweight fighter out of North Las Vegas.

A massive scar hooked from his ear down to the corner of his mouth and tugged his face into a half-grin that never meant anything good.

He had spent nine months on this fighting circuit.

Around here, that made him practically a veteran.

"You say that every week."

"Because every week they hand you the same garbage tape, and every week you wrap it like it's gonna hold." He shoved off the wall, crouched, and pulled at the edge near my wrist. "Look, a gap, right here. If your hand swells mid-fight, the whole thing slides and you're throwing bare knuckles."

I looked down. He was right. Sloppy work. The hiss-click sound that haunted me had dragged me off somewhere.

"Thanks."

"Don't thank me, I got money on you." He smiled, and the scar stretched from the motion. "I'm kidding. Mostly. They don't let fighters bet, supposedly."

"You follow that rule?"

"I follow the rules that don't cost me. The rest I work out." He dropped onto the bench across from mine and bounced his wrapped fists against his knees, that pre-fight buzz some guys never burn off. "You hear what happened to Cortez?"

"No."

"He had been undefeated… what, five months?

Then they put him in with some Sambo guy nobody had ever seen, and the Sambo dude popped both his shoulders out of socket in under a minute.

First minute, Cal." His hands went still.

"Cortez doesn't fight anymore. Doesn't walk too good either, from what I heard. "

My hands stilled over the tape. "Why are you telling me this?"

The grin disappeared from his face. "Because they're matching you up harder. You clocked that, right? The first couple months it was drunks off a barstool. Lately they're sending guys who've actually trained."

I'd clocked it. Cleaner footwork. Combinations that came in sequence instead of one wild swing at a time. Men who had stood in a real fighting gym at some point in their lives.

"They're feeling for your ceiling," he went on. "And the night they find it, they put you through it. An undefeated guy's worth more to the room when he finally drops. More money riding on it."

I let a slow breath out through my nose. "I'm not dropping."

"Nobody plans to." His voice came down lower, rough at the edges, closer to recognition than pity.

One fighter catching another's blind spot.

"Who you doing this for? Because it sure isn't you.

Nobody fights the way you fight for fun.

You do it clean, in and out like you're trying to clock off a shift. "

I looked at my phone, lying face-up on the bench. Dark screen. Nothing from University Medical Center since the last billing alert that came three hours ago.

I kept my eyes on the black screen. "I do this for my brother."

He nodded once and left it there. You learned fast not to dig into why another man was bleeding in this place.

"Then keep your eyes open tonight." Renzo stood. "They don't hand out winning streaks for free."

He went off down the corridor. The door swung and the crowd's wild noise rushed in for a second, raw and starving, then the closing door tamed it back down.

I opened and closed my fists. The tape held this time, no gaps.

Two hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars.

That was the number on Liam's bill, the one I carried everywhere now.

Into the shower. Into my shifts at the restaurant.

Into the fights in this horrid place. Into the three hours of sleep I scraped together in between.

Two-forty-seven and climbing, because every day my brother lay in that bed with a tube down his windpipe, the figure ticked up.

Liam was twenty-one. Six years behind me.

Brown curls, a grin that ate up half his face.

He'd moved in with me after Mom passed, landed a job at a climbing gym, spent his weekends bouldering out at Red Rock Canyon.

Called me every Sunday whether I picked up or not.

The last call before everything went sideways, he was all lit up about some climbing route near Red Rock.

"Cal, you gotta see this wall. Picture a face, okay, but turned sideways, all red sandstone, and there's this one crack running straight up the middle that's basically a staircase if you trust your fingers."

"I don't trust my fingers that much."

"That's 'cause you punch things with yours. I make art."

"You hang off rocks, Liam."

"Exactly. Art!"

I could still hear him laughing. Easy, rolling, the laugh of a kid whose worst-case scenario was a bad hold on a sandstone face.

Four months ago somebody beat him unconscious in a parking garage. Ruptured his spleen. Cracked three vertebrae. Put his head into something hard enough that his brain swelled, and the surgeons had to cut a piece of his skull away to give it room.

The cops wrote it up as a mugging. Random. The detective phoned me once and went quiet after that. I'd sat in the hospital lot with my forehead on the steering wheel, trying to make the math come out based on what a cook makes down at an Italian place off Charleston in Las Vegas.

The math didn't come out. Was never going to. But four grand for winning a fight in this warehouse on a Thursday night, a disgusting amount of money made in a few minutes… that came out. Ugly and stupid and just enough to keep the number from drowning the both of us.

Sixteen fights. Sixteen wins. Two decades of martial arts training, up against men who'd learned to brawl in alleys and cell blocks. It wasn't a fair edge. But Liam's bill wasn't fair either, and I'd quit caring about fair somewhere back around the third fight.

The door opened, and Harlan filled it. The man was as wide as a fridge, with a shaved head and forearms as thick as fence posts.

"Monk. It's time." The announcement came out flat, almost bored, as if he wasn't telling fighters to get on a ring where they might lose the ability to walk.

"Who've you got me on?" I flexed the taped hand, checking the wrap held.

"Calls himself the Jackal. Eleven wins, six losses. Loud." He propped a shoulder against the frame. "The crowd loves him."

"Loud how?"

"Talks the whole way through. Taunts, plays to the seats. Showman." Harlan crossed his arms and stared me down, slow and unhurried, letting the quiet do the scolding for him. "You're not. They'll be on his side."

"They're always on the other side."

"Yeah." A pause. The corner of his mouth twitched and nearly went somewhere before he locked it back down. "Try not to bore 'em."

I checked the dark screen of my phone. A new habit, one that I despised because of where and why it started. I saw my reflection and fixed my gaze on the scar through my left eyebrow that came from a tournament in Portland at sixteen, a headbutt the ref never caught.

The guy looking back in the phone's reflection didn't feel like me anymore.

Four months ago I'd had a clean fight record, a gym membership and a Sunday phone call to look forward to.

Now I had split knuckles under the tape, a few bruises on my arms and torso from blocking or catching blows, tape that wouldn't stay stuck, and a number that grew in the dark.

Liam… If I ever catch the fuckers who did this to you…

My fists clenched before I finished the thought.

The tape bit into my knuckles and I held the pressure.

I let the ache ground me. The months spent fighting in this warehouse had done something to me that went past bruised knuckles.

The thoughts came faster now. Rushed. And darker.

I tried my best to catch them and put them down before they grew teeth.

I could only hope Liam would wake and save me from going under.

But that wasn't Liam's problem to fix. This was on the people who put him in that bed. And until I found them, all I could do was hold it together for both of us.

I set the phone down and walked toward the noise.

The hall opened onto the main floor and the sound rolled over me with real weight, shoving at my eardrums. Two hundred voices crammed into a space built for forklifts.

Shouting and laughing folded together into one long animal roar, a crowd that had been drinking for hours and feeding on violence until the two ran into a single appetite.

Somebody near the platform slapped the plywood with a flat palm, again and again, the wet crack of it cutting through the low end.

Then the heat arrived. The corridor had been cool, the block holding the desert night. The floor was a different building. All those bodies pumped out warmth which the steel rafters caught and the vents couldn't move. It settled on my skin like a film.

The smell came riding in on it. Sweat, spilled beer, cheap smoke hanging in a gray haze at head height.

Under all that, fainter and never gone, the copper of old blood worked down into the mats and the concrete below, until it was just part of the air.

I'd quit smelling it after five minutes, same as I'd quit hearing a fan. But it always stayed.