Chapter 3
Petra
The second night is worse.
That's how it always goes on a tournament card.
The prelims weed out the wolves who shouldn't be there.
The quarterfinals are where the real fighters meet the other real fighters, and the bouts get longer, dirtier, more inventive.
Tonight I'm going to be busy. I knew that when I packed the suite. I packed extra.
Bout one of the quarterfinals: dislocated hip.
The Tennessee technical wolf I clocked on night one took an exchange wrong against a Pennsylvania alpha and went down on the angle that does it.
I'm in the pit before the round-end bell.
I shift the joint back into the socket while he's still in wolf form — the technique is the same; the geometry just has more fur on it — and his cornerman damn near faints when he hears the audible pop of the relocation.
The wolf shifts back, cursing at me in a voice that's deeper than his speaking voice, and I tell him he's done for the tournament.
He argues. I tell him the next time he weight-bears on that hip in the next ten days he's going to put it out for life. He stops arguing.
Bout three: deep laceration across the chest, sternum to floating rib, eight inches long, all the way through skin and fascia.
The Kentucky alpha who almost killed Cade Whitlow last night took a swipe on the rebound from his own attack.
I close it in two layers, twenty-three stitches on the inside, thirty-one on the outside.
He doesn't flinch. He sits perfectly still on my table while I sew, watching me work, and when I'm done he says, "You're good with a needle, Doc. "
"I'm not a doc."
"What do you want me to call you."
"Petra."
"You're good with a needle, Petra."
"Thanks."
He goes back to his cabin to sleep off the morphine. He'll fight in the semis tomorrow if he wins his next bout, which he will.
Bout six: concussion. A Virginia alpha — the same pack Cade fought for — takes a clean right to the temple in human form on the rebound from a clinch break, and I'm in the pit reading his pupils inside fifteen seconds.
The pupils are uneven. He's not tracking my finger right.
Mild traumatic brain injury, conscious, oriented to person but not place.
I pull him from the bout. His pack screams. He is, in fact, ahead on points and was about to win.
I do not care. I send him to the suite for observation and tell Nell to wake him every two hours through the night and check his pupils each time. She nods. She's done this before.
The fourth, fifth, seventh, and eighth bouts of the night I sit through and do nothing, because the fighters in those bouts are smart enough not to give me work, and that's good.
That's what I want. My ideal night is a night where I sit in my pit-side chair and watch fights and never have to stand up.
By eleven-thirty, the card is done. Quarterfinalists are set. Tomorrow night is semis and finals — four bouts total, four of the best wolves on the eastern circuit, with everything on the line.
I go back to the suite. Nell finishes the concussion handoff and goes to bed. I sit on the examination table in my own pit jacket with my own blood on the cuff — somebody else's blood, technically, but it's on me now — and I open my logbook and start writing my night-two notes.
I get four sentences in when there's a knock on the doorframe.
I don't look up. "Vice."
"Petra."
"That coffee on a tray you got there?"
"It's bourbon. On a tray."
I look up.
He is standing in my doorway holding a wooden serving tray — not a hand towel, not a paper bag, an actual wood-and-brass tray that looks like it was stolen from a country club — with a bottle of bourbon and two glass tumblers on it.
The bourbon is good. I can tell from the label, which is not the kind of label you put on Friday-night bourbon.
It's the kind you buy when you're trying to thank someone for not letting your fighter die.
"Figured you could use it after tonight," he says.
"Come in."
He comes in. He sets the tray down on my supply counter — he moves the IV bag with surprising delicacy to make room for it — and pours two fingers into each tumbler.
He hands me one. He sits on the examination table opposite mine.
There are two tables in this suite, hydraulics, paper rolls and all.
We are now sitting on them like opposing chess pieces, six feet apart, knees not quite at the same height because mine is set lower.
I drink.
The bourbon is excellent. Warm, smoky, with a long finish that softens at the back of the throat. I do not own bourbon this good. I have never drunk bourbon this good. I have drunk a lot of cheap bourbon.
"This is very good bourbon," I say.
"Yeah."
"You drink this regularly?"
"No. This is what I bring out when I want somebody to know I'm taking a conversation seriously."
I consider that.
"Vice."
"Yeah."
"Are you taking a conversation with me seriously?"
"I am taking the fact that you saved Whitlow's life last night, and the Kentucky kid's career today, and the Virginia alpha's brain seriously. I am taking the fact that you are very good at your job seriously. Whatever else this is, you can decide."
I drink.
He drinks.
We sit there in silence for maybe two full minutes, which on most days would be uncomfortable, but it isn't tonight.
Vice does not need to fill silences. That's a rarer trait than people understand.
Most fighters need to fill silences because silences are where the wolf gets loud and they don't want to hear it.
Vice has learned to live with his wolf being loud.
He's learned not to flinch when it howls.
I say, "Tell me about your fights."
He stops drinking. Looks at me over the rim of the tumbler. "Why."
"Because you'd rather talk about them than not. And because you're the only person on this compound I haven't read a profile on yet, and I'd like the data."
"You want the data."
"Yes."
"For your fighter prediction system."
"Among other things."
He sets the tumbler down on the table beside him. He looks at the ceiling.
"My first fight was when I was nineteen.
Bar in Hartford. Not even a pit, really — somebody set up a fight ring in the basement of a strip club and I was working as the bouncer upstairs and I came down on my break and saw the bout going on and the bouncer who was supposed to be supervising it had walked off, and there was a wolf who'd gone feral and was about to gut the other fighter, and I — I don't know.
I just went in. I shifted in the basement of a strip club in Hartford and I pulled the feral off and I held him by the scruff until he came down and then I shifted back in front of about forty people and somebody in the crowd offered me five hundred dollars to fight on the card the next week. "
"And you said yes."
"I said yes. I won the next week. I won the week after that. Two years later I was on the main circuit. By twenty-five I was fighting twice a month and clearing six figures a year. By twenty-eight I was the champion of the eastern corridor."
"And then."
"And then I was twenty-nine. I was fighting an alpha from Atlanta in a venue in Charleston.
Fourth round. He had me on the ground in a clinch.
He went for a knee and I dodged left and his elbow came down on the back of my neck.
I heard it. The sound. Cartilage, vertebra, something else.
" He flexes his right hand. "I lost my legs immediately.
Couldn't feel them. Couldn't move them. I was on the sand and I was thirty seconds away from him biting through my throat in submission posture, except my corner threw in the towel and the alpha disengaged and somebody — I don't know who — kept me from going into shock.
The medic that night was — I don't even remember his name.
I remember the ambulance ride. I remember the hospital.
I remember the surgeon telling me the fusion would hold but I would never be cleared to compete again. "
He picks the tumbler back up. He doesn't drink.
"That was three years ago. April."
"And you've been the coordinator since."
"I started the coordinator role six months after the surgery. The previous guy retired and Conrad asked me if I wanted it. I said yes. I would have said yes to anything that kept me in the pit chamber. I think Conrad knew that."
I drink. I think about the surgical scar on his neck. I think about a man who started this job because he could not bear to not be in the chamber, and what that does to a wolf over the long term, and how he has lasted three years without fully unraveling.
"Tell me what it was like," I say. "The pit. When you were in it."
He looks at me.
"You really want to know."
"Yes."
He sets the tumbler down again. He looks at the wall. He's quiet for a beat.
"It was the clearest I ever was. About anything.
You step in and you stop being a person who has problems. You become a wolf who is solving a wolf problem in real time.
There is no past in there. There is no future.
There is the other wolf and there is your wolf and there is the sand and the lights and the hot, bright, narrow tunnel of attention that runs from your eyes to your opponent's eyes, and if you let go of that tunnel for even a second you get hit.
There is no room for anything else. I have never been as fully alive as I was in the pit. "
He pauses.
"I've never been as fully alive doing anything else, either. That's the part that — yeah. That's the part."
I drink.
"You know," I say, "what I see when I watch you coordinate?"
He looks at me. He looks tired. He looks like a man who is going to hear me say a man behind a desk and is going to drink the bourbon to wash it down.
"A man behind a desk," he says, beating me to it.
"No," I say.
He stops.
"No?"