16. Ignite
IGNITE
CALEB
Iwent left.
There was no thinking in it. My feet moved before the rest of me had finished seeing the knee, one fast slide with my weight low, and Renzo's kneecap came through the air where my mouth had been.
Close enough that the wind off it stirred the sweat on my cheek, and I smelled him going by, tape and the cheap deodorant every fighter in that back hall used.
Then he was past me, and the crowd came up off its feet.
The sound hit the back of my neck like a hand before my ears caught up with it.
The roar that had come down with the bell hadn't died yet, and this one climbed over the top of it and kept climbing, three hundred people learning in the same second that the first fight of seven wasn't going to be short.
The plywood hummed with it through the soles of my feet.
Out past these walls, Ghost was standing in the dark, vibrating, waiting on one word from me.
If a roar like that didn't carry the two blocks to him, nothing would.
I hoped he heard it and knew I was still on my feet.
Then I put him where I put Liam on fight nights.
Behind my eyes, where I could feel him without looking.
Renzo's jump had carried him most of the way across the ring. He came down near the far ropes, already turning. The hemp took him across the back, and he let it throw him at me like a slingshot. Four strides to cross the ring, where I'd have needed six.
"Renzo, it doesn't have to be this way!" I threw it at him over the noise, and it went nowhere with him.
He came out of the sprint with a jab, straight down the middle, his whole run behind it.
I slipped it outside and the rest of him arrived.
A low kick, right shin at my lead thigh, and I turned my knee into it to check it, shin on shin, and the bones clacked.
A short elbow toward my temple that I caught on the forearm.
Then a knee coming up for my body while his hands went hunting for the back of my neck.
"Save your breath, Cal." Into my ear, through his teeth, his forearms grinding on my collarbones, working for the neck clinch that lets a Thai fighter put knees into you until you fold. "You'll want it later."
I broke his hands off my neck at the wrists and shoved him away, and he came straight back.
Four months taping up across from this man, and I'd never once watched him work.
I'd seen him go over that top rope a dozen times on my way out the back, and never stayed for a round.
Now I knew what had kept the Saint standing through nine months of Thursdays.
The shin instead of the foot. A grip that hunted the neck so the knees could go to work.
Muay Thai, out of a real gym, and something else under it that I couldn't name yet.
He stepped in again, and his right leg came up.
Higher than a kick had any business going.
Past my ribs, past my shoulder, a hook kick, and it was the heel that came around, whipping in at my chin from the outside with his whole hip behind it, and I saw it the way you see a pan slide off a shelf, clear as day and too late to catch.
Except I knew what to do with it. Chin up. Eyes to the beams. I threw my head back and my shoulders followed, the whole top half of me bending away from him, and the heel went through the air an inch under my jaw. I felt the skin on my throat move with the wind of it.
I staggered. The lean had put my weight back behind my heels, and it took two steps to get it under me again, and three hundred chests let go of the same sound at once, a long WOOAAH that rolled up out of the seats and took a full second to die.
Under it, close, a beer bottle hit the concrete and broke.
"OH!" The announcer's handheld crackled awake, and the horns split on the shout. "The Saint nearly took Monk's head home with him, folks! Odds are moving! Get your money down!"
Close. Close enough that the sweat at my hairline had gone cold. That heel lands, and my jaw comes off its hinges, and the night is over before it starts. Liam's night with it.
"Told you!" Renzo kept circling, weight riding light on the balls of his feet, blood still up. "Big words, Cal. Fight me or go down. Pick one!"
He gave me the same flat, far-off look he'd given me before the bell. He'd thrown a kick that would have taken my head off, at the man whose tape he'd redone for four months running, for a number on a bill. I'd asked him three times to stop.
Twenty years of martial arts and their discipline had taught the darkness in me to sit. It had never once gotten into the ring with me.
I felt it stand up.
Renzo hopped in to close the last of the space, and I watched his feet set.
Left foot down. Hips loading. Right leg.
Body kick. I'd read it before it left the mat.
His shin came around at my left side, at the ribs, with his hips turned over on it, and I let it come, because I wanted the leg.
I dropped my left elbow to take the shin on the arm and clamped the leg against my body.
It landed anyway. I couldn't stop a kick like that, only choose where it landed. The shin hit the meat of my forearm and the ribs behind it, and the shock went through my arm into my shoulder and down my back like a door slammed inside me. My left hand went dead to the wrist and came back tingling.
Renzo's eyes went wide. He knew what I had.
I had his leg. His right, trapped under my left arm, and a man with one foot on the mat is a man you own for exactly one second. I swung the leg across my body to my right side, and his whole body had to turn with it, and there was his standing leg, right in front of me, alone.
"Fucking. Stop. THAT!!" I kicked his standing leg from under him on the last word. Left leg, low and hard, the inside of my foot through the back of his calf, and the calf went sideways like a table leg kicked loose, and I let go of the other leg as he went.
He hit the mat on his back, right side first, and the platform boomed under both of us. "OHHH." Three hundred voices, one sound, and the front rows leaned in over the ropes like they could smell it.
"The Saint is DOWN!" The handheld spat. "Monk with the sweep! Two minutes ago you people had him at three to one!"
Renzo rolled away from me, twice over, and came up with his hands already up. A red print sat on his shoulder blade where the mat had taken him.
"There he is." He was breathing through his mouth, and the half-grin came back with something sour under it.
"Looks like Monk finally showed up to his own fight.
" He spat to the side. "I'm sorry it went this way, Cal.
I am. But look around you. Seven of us, one of you.
We were ending up across from each other one way or the other.
I went first so I wouldn't have to do it to you after four other guys had already been at you.
That's the only kindness I've got tonight.
" His hands came up and set. "So fight me! "
"You could climb out." I knew the answer before it was out of my mouth. "Harlan said it. Concede, same as any night."
"And go home with what?!"
"Have it your way, Saint." He'd left me nothing else, so I let my hands drop. Let them hang open at my sides, fingers loose, and set my feet the way I'd set them across from seventeen men before him, and the crowd screamed at the stance, because the whole room had learned what came after it.
The darkness in me stood all the way up, and I let it.
I didn't let it drive. There was a difference between letting it up and letting it drive, and twenty years was what it had cost to learn it.
I kept my head, with two reasons in it. Liam, in a bed, with this man's boss reaching for him on paper.
Ghost, outside these walls, with a word that was mine to give him.
Renzo came again. A front kick this time, a stomp with the ball of his foot driven straight out, and low. Aimed at my lead knee. A kick that lands there bends the joint the wrong way, and a man with one knee doesn't kick anyone again that year. He'd decided my legs were the fight.
I didn't back up. A stomp kick like that wants you backing straight up, so the next one can follow you down the line. I turned instead. Sideways, the whole of me going thin, shoulder first, the way you slide down a packed line with a hot tray, and his foot went by my hip and found nothing.
My right hand was already moving. Palm out and fingers curled back, the heel of the hand leading, and I put it into the middle of his face.
I felt the cartilage go under my palm, a wet crunch that came up through my wrist, and hot blood hit the inside of my fingers before I'd pulled the hand back.
He went backward on one leg and somehow stayed up. Hopped, twice, got the other foot down, and both his hands went to his face, and when they came away there was red down his mouth and his chin.
"Cheap shot!" Thick, through the blood. "Open hand?! What was that?!"
"Palm heel. It's the first thing they teach eight-year-olds.
" It came out at normal volume, and it carried anyway, because the crowd had gone quiet to hear what Monk sounded like.
"You live on one leg too much, Saint. Every time you do it, half your balance goes out the window. That's your weakness."
Then, for the first time that night, I went at him instead of waiting for him. Three steps, a short sprint, and I left the mat turning, spinning in the air, and my right leg came around at the end of the spin, a tornado kick aimed at the side of his head.
His eyes didn't go wide this time. They went narrow. He dropped under it and turned with the drop, and my foot went through the air over his hair with nothing in it.
I landed on the kicking foot, clean, and turned. He was still down there, crouched, hands flat on the mat, and the blood from his nose dripped off his chin in a line of dark drops.