Chapter 2
Damon
The first night of the tournament always feels like the first round of a fight.
You step in. Your body is hot, your blood is up, you have prepared for months but none of that matters now because in the next sixty seconds your opponent is going to do something you didn't predict and you're going to have to adapt or you're going to lose.
The first night is the same. Twenty fighters, eight bouts, a crowd of three hundred packed into the bleachers and terraces, the air already thick with sweat and smoke and the rolling murmur of bettors comparing notes on the card.
The pit lights come up. The first two fighters enter. The crowd noise rises. The bout starts.
This is the part I built.
This is the part I am good at.
This is also the part where my wolf, every time the bell goes, surges so hard against my ribs I have to grip the edge of the coordinator's booth to keep my hands still.
The booth is on the south terrace, elevated above the pit floor, glass-fronted, four chairs and a console with the bout timer, the audio rig, the comms to the floor team.
I sit in the center chair. Reaper sits to my right; he handles the book — the betting ledger, who's in for what, who's owed.
To my left, Hex on comms. Behind us, two prospects ready to run anything that needs running.
The booth is the bridge. I am the captain.
I am also a man who used to be down there, on the sand, with the lights in his eyes and his wolf in his blood, and I have not stopped being that man, and the booth is the closest I will ever get to it again, and most nights that is enough.
Most nights.
The first bout is a Tennessee beta against a Virginia beta.
Both young. Both fast. The Tennessee wolf is technical — he's been trained in some kind of formal pit school, you can see it in the footwork, and he uses a lot of feints.
The Virginia wolf is rougher but bigger.
The fight goes three rounds, ends with the Tennessee beta on his back and the Virginia beta's jaws around his throat in submission posture, and the Tennessee corner throws in the towel before the Virginia kid has to make a decision he isn't old enough to make.
No injuries. Clean bout. Crowd is happy.
I call the next pair. Hex feeds the music. The bout starts.
I am watching the bout. I am also watching Petra.
She's at her pit-side station, east edge of the floor, ten feet from where the action will go if it spills.
Her runner, Nell, is beside her — Nell is a patched member who used to be a corpsman in the Navy, and Petra and Nell have apparently figured each other out in the four hours since they met because they're moving in sync now, one of them watching the bout, the other watching the rest of the pit.
Petra's hands are folded across her clipboard.
Her face is unreadable. She's not flinching at the violence.
She's not looking away when blood spatters.
She is doing the thing she does, which is watch.
I watch her watching the fight.
There's a way medics learn to watch combat.
You're not seeing the bout the way the crowd sees it.
You're seeing the bodies. The way a fighter's footwork goes a half-step wrong because his shoulder isn't tracking right.
The way a wolf's pupils dilate before he goes feral.
The way a particular kind of hit looks innocent but lands in the kidney and you'd better have an IV ready in five minutes.
Petra is watching like that. Her eyes never leave the fight.
Her clipboard is open on her crossed arm and she is making notes I cannot see, and the notes are probably worth more than half the conversations I've ever had with my own corner about strategy.
The second bout ends without injury.
The third bout doesn't.
It's the Virginia pack's second wolf, a young beta named Cade Whitlow who, Hex tells me through comms, was almost killed in Roanoke last week and was probably patched up by our own medic.
Small world. Cade is in over his head against an alpha from a Kentucky pack — Petra protested the matchup at weigh-in but the brackets are set, and Cade insisted on fighting because his pack is short on talent and somebody has to.
He goes down hard in round two. Compound fracture of the radius, ulna intact, no arterial bleed but a lot of soft tissue damage.
Petra is in the pit before the bell finishes ringing.
I have seen a lot of medics work pit-side. I have not seen one move like that.
She doesn't run, exactly — running through clay sand is stupid, you can fall — but she crosses the distance to Cade in five long strides and is down on her knees next to him before his cornerman has even cleared the rail.
The Kentucky alpha is still in fight mode, ten feet away, breathing hard, his wolf still up in him.
Petra doesn't look at the alpha. Her back is to him.
She is, technically, in a position from which she could be killed.
She knows this. She has decided it doesn't matter.
She puts a hand on Cade's bleeding shoulder.
She bends close to his face. She says something I can't hear but can read on her lips — shift back, shift back, you're safe, shift back — and the wolf, still bleeding, still snarling, lowers his head and pushes the shift through.
The shift back is bad — the broken arm rearranges into a human's broken arm with the bone still pushed through the skin, and Cade screams in a way that the crowd actually hushes for — and Petra has the splint on him and the morphine drawn and the stretcher under him before three minutes have passed.
Nell handles the cornerman. The two security wolves handle the Kentucky alpha, who is finally, slowly, allowing himself to be walked back to his corner.
Petra walks Cade off the floor herself, hand on the stretcher rail, talking to him the whole way. She's calm. He's calm. The crowd stops being scared and starts being impressed.
My wolf does something I do not understand.
It goes still.
I've spent three years with a wolf that does not go still.
He paces, he claws, he snaps at the inside of my chest when I sit too long at a desk.
He howls when I sleep. He's been worse since the tournament prep started — twenty fighters down there, all of them tasting like prey to a wolf that hasn't been off the leash in eight months.
He's been a constant low scream in my bones since Monday.
But when Petra is in the pit, on her knees, fingers in another wolf's bleeding shoulder, completely focused, completely unafraid — my wolf goes silent.
Not bored. Not asleep. Attentive.
Like a wolf at a doorway watching the only person it trusts walking back through it.
I have no idea what to do with that.
The fourth bout is clean. The fifth. The sixth has a head-butt that splits a brow open and Petra is in the pit again, this time with butterfly closures, and she's done in ninety seconds.
The seventh ends in a tap-out. The eighth — the final bout of the night — is a slow, careful fight between two technical alphas who clearly do not want to give each other anything to work with, and goes to decision after five rounds.
The crowd boos. I do too, internally. Hex makes a note to not bracket those two together again because they don't make a good show.
The crowd thins. The fighters return to their cabins. The compound goes quiet. The night-shift prospects begin the work of resetting the pit for tomorrow.
I sit in the booth for another twenty minutes, doing the bookkeeping with Reaper.
Cash, IOUs, deposits, payouts. Reaper is good at the books and he doesn't talk during it, which is one of the reasons I work with him.
We finish at one a.m. I send him to bed.
I sit alone in the booth and look down at the empty pit, the lights dimmed to their low setting, the sand raked smooth.
The chamber that ate my fighting career and made me rich.
I should sleep.
I go to the medical suite instead.
The door is open. Petra is at the sink, washing blood off her forearms with the methodical thoroughness of a surgeon. She doesn't turn when I knock on the frame, but she says, "Vice."
"How'd you know it was me."
"You walk like a fighter. Heavy on the heel, balanced on the ball. I've heard you walk three times today. I'll know it from a half mile."
I lean against the doorframe.
"How's Whitlow."
"Stable. Sleeping. The radius will need eight weeks minimum, six if he stays the hell out of training.
He won't, so call it ten before he's fight-ready, but he'll keep the arm.
" She shuts off the water and dries her hands on a paper towel and turns.
"His pack handler wants to know if you'll waive his entry fee since he didn't make it to round two. "
"Tell the handler that's between him and his fighter. The Sinners don't refund."
"I figured. I told him to ask anyway. He needed to hear no from somebody not me."
"You handled the floor well tonight."
"I do this for a living."
"I know."
She tilts her head at me. The mine office's overhead light is fluorescent and not flattering to anyone, but Petra is built in a way that doesn't need flattering — compact, dense muscle, the kind of body that has carried a thirty-pound kit up bleachers and through field tents and across parking lots for over a decade.
Her short dark hair is matted with sweat at the temples.
Her eyes are gray in this light, brown in others, neither one of them softening for me even a little.
"You should let me examine your neck," she says.
"No."
"I've treated three spinal injuries in fighters before. I've spent eleven years reading post-mortems on careers like yours. I might see something the surgeons missed."
"No."
She shrugs. She turns back to the counter and starts cleaning her instruments.
She does not push. The not-pushing is the thing that gets me — she presents the offer, I decline, and she lets me.
No leverage, no second pass, no let me explain why this is good for you.
The respect of a professional who has decided you are an adult.
I stay in the doorway.
I should leave.
I don't leave.
She finishes the instruments. She racks them.
She wipes down the counter. She moves like someone who's been on her feet for sixteen hours and is still going to do the post-shift walkthrough before she sleeps.
She turns to her logbook and starts writing — her right hand fast and neat, left hand pinning the page.
She writes left-to-right and her tongue tips out very briefly at the corner of her mouth when she's concentrating, and I notice that, and I notice that I noticed, and I should leave.
She looks up.
"Was there something else, Vice."
"No."
"Then go to bed."
"Yes ma'am."
She makes a sound that's almost a laugh. Almost. I get the impression Petra is not a laugher, exactly, but she makes a number of sounds that are almost-laughs at varying frequencies, and they are doing something to me that I am going to think about later when I am not in her presence.
I leave.
I walk back to my cabin through the cold mountain air, breath fogging, the dark above me thick with stars.
My cabin is at the end of the western row, set back into the trees, one of the larger ones because I have rank.
Inside it's clean and spare. A bed I rarely sleep more than four hours in.
A weight rack on the porch I built myself the year after the injury.
A kitchen I use for coffee and not much else.
A bathroom. A closet. A small office with a desk and the books I read when the wolf gets too loud — military history, mostly, and a battered copy of Marcus Aurelius that belonged to my grandfather.
I undress.
I stand in front of the mirror in my bathroom.
I have done this every night for three years, and I do not know why I do it, except that some part of me thinks if I stop looking, the body will change, and I will look up one day and find a stranger.
The body is still mine. Six-two, two-twenty, lean for my weight.
The pectoral scars from the surgery I had at twenty-four when I tore both rotator cuffs in the same season.
The long pale line down my left forearm from a knife I never saw coming when I was twenty-one.
The deep curved scar above my right hip from an alpha who got his teeth in me in a bout in Memphis in my third year on the circuit.
The smaller scars I no longer remember the origins of.
And the surgical scar at the back of my neck, low, where they went in to fuse the C4 and the spinous processes above and below it, and which is the reason the man in the mirror is not in the pit anymore.
My wolf is awake.
He is always awake.
But tonight he is not pacing.
He is watching, through my eyes, the image of the man in the mirror, and he is thinking — I can feel his thinking — about the woman down the hill in the medical suite, who put her hand on a bleeding alpha's shoulder and told him to shift back and was obeyed.
My wolf has not been interested in any woman in three years. He has been too busy raging at the body. I expected him to die slowly, the way wolves do when their human halves stop letting them out, and I had made my peace with that, mostly, in the way you make peace with anything you cannot change.
He is not dying tonight.
He is pointing at something.
I close my eyes.
"No," I tell him.
He does not listen. He has never listened. He is a wolf.
I get into bed. I lie on my back because side-sleeping after the surgery is uncomfortable.
I stare at the ceiling. I think about the way Petra walked across the sand to the bleeding wolf.
I think about the way she said go to bed like she was a sergeant and I was an enlisted man who needed orders.
I think about the way the wolf in me went still, and how long I have wanted my wolf to be still, and how I do not know what to do with what that means.
I sleep.
I dream about the pit. I dream about a fight I never had. I am in the sand and there is a woman at the corner and she is not afraid of the wolf in me, and she is saying something I can almost hear, and when I wake up at four a.m., the wolf in my chest is calm, and I am not.
I lie in the dark and I think:
This is going to be a problem.