Chapter 8
Damon
I train Spite for twenty-one days.
The first day I bring him into the workshop and I sit him down and I look at him across the bench and I say, "Spite. Do you know why you have not been put in a sanctioned fight in three years."
"Because I'm a fuckup."
"No. Because nobody has been willing to do the work it would take to make you a champion.
You are not a fuckup. You are a wolf who has been undirected for a long time.
I am going to direct you. You are going to listen.
You are going to do everything I say without questioning it for three weeks.
At the end of three weeks you are going to walk into the Hollow Pit and you are going to beat Garrett Hollis. Do you have any questions."
He looks at me.
He is six-three and two-forty and his arms are crossed and his face is the face of a young alpha who has been called a fuckup so many times that he has accepted the label as part of his identity.
I have seen this kid in the pit at every gas station in three states.
The compound is full of him. The eastern corridor is full of him.
He is a category. Most of the time, the category dies in his thirties from a fight he should not have been in.
The good ones get patched, and the patched ones stay alive, but they do not become champions, because nobody bothers.
"Why now," he says.
"Because I need a fighter. And because I have been watching you for three years and I think you are wasted, and I am tired of watching you get wasted."
"What if I lose."
"You will not lose. But if you do lose, you lose to one of the top alphas on the eastern corridor in a fight you were never asked to be in, and nobody will think less of you. The only way you can fail this is if you do not commit. Commit. Then we will see what we have."
He thinks for a long time.
He says, "Yes, sir."
I have not been called sir in three years.
I have been called Vice and coordinator and boss, and Conrad and Reaper call me Damon, and the prospects call me whatever they think I want to be called that day.
I have not been called sir. I am thirty-two years old and I am being called sir by a kid four years younger than me, and I do not correct him.
I train him.
I train him every day for twenty-one days, twice a day, in the workshop and the woodshed and the river bottom along the eastern boundary where there is a flat patch of grass that we use for footwork drills.
I do not let him shift more than three times a week because I do not want his wolf to know the routine — I want his wolf hungry for the bout, not satisfied by it — and I teach him in human form, with pads, with focus mitts, with the thousand small adjustments to footwork and balance and weight transfer that are the difference between a brawler and a fighter.
Spite is a sponge.
He absorbs everything I show him. He asks questions.
He repeats drills until I tell him to stop.
He shows up at six in the morning and he stays past dark.
He eats what I tell him to eat. He sleeps when I tell him to sleep.
He does not drink. He does not see his girlfriend, who I find out about on day four because she comes by the workshop to bring him lunch, and I tell her, politely, that he is in fight camp for the next three weeks and that she will see him on the other side, and she nods like she has heard this before and she leaves.
Petra watches.
She watches from the medical wing during the morning sessions.
She watches from the porch of the lodge during the evening drills.
She is not coaching. She is observing. She is taking notes — she is, I find out on day nine, building a baseline of Spite's biomarkers to feed into Hex's analysis pipeline, because if we are going to send a fighter into a dominance bout, she wants to know everything about how his body responds to the training so that on the day, she can predict the inflection points.
She is the best medic I have ever worked with.
She is also a partner I did not know I needed.
She comes to the cabin most nights. She makes me eat.
She makes me sleep. She rubs my shoulders out on the porch when they have seized up from holding pads for six hours, and she watches the films with me at night — I am cutting tape on Garrett Hollis going back five years, watching every bout he has ever had, breaking down his patterns, his tells, the tactical errors he has not stopped making despite his record — and she does not pretend to understand the films, but she asks the questions that make me see things I have missed.
On day fourteen, she says, "He drops his right shoulder before the kill bite."
I rewind the film.
I rewind it again.
She is right.
Garrett Hollis, with forty-one wins on his record, has a tell that I have not seen because I have been watching his footwork.
He drops his right shoulder approximately one second before he commits to the kill bite.
Always. It is consistent across five years of film.
Petra, watching with the eyes of a medic who has watched a thousand wolves go for the kill bite, has spotted it.
"Petra."
"Yeah."
"You are very good at this."
"I read bodies."
"You are very good at this."
I tell Spite the next morning. I make Spite watch the films. He sees the tell.
He spends the next week drilling counters to the right-shoulder drop until the counters are reflexive.
The drill: I cue him with the shoulder drop, he ducks and shifts to the inside, and he takes the throat in the controlled bite that ends a dominance fight without killing.
By day eighteen, Spite is hitting the counter eight out of ten times.
By day twenty, ten out of ten.
The bout is on day twenty-one.
— —
The night of the bout, the chamber is full.
Three hundred people, plus the Asheville Iron contingent who have come up from North Carolina to watch their alpha defend his record.
The Sinners are in their cuts in the bleachers.
The Iron are in their colors on the upper terrace.
The viewing galleries are sold out — every seat priced at eight hundred dollars because dominance bouts are rare and this one is the most anticipated in eighteen months.
I am in the corner.
I have not been in a corner in three years.
The corner is on the eastern side of the pit, opposite the booth that I have spent three years inside.
The corner is a folding chair, a water bucket, a towel, and a small cart with Petra's emergency kit at arm's length.
Petra is at the pit-side station, twenty feet from me, where the medical lead always sits.
We have eye contact across the chamber. We have set up a signal system that is the medic-coordinator signal system from the tournament with three additions — codes for if Spite is fading, codes for if Garrett is fading, codes for if either of them is about to feral.
The bell goes.
Spite enters.
He is in human form for the walk-in, in his Sinners cut over a black tee, and he is not bouncing or showboating.
He is walking the way I have taught him to walk — heel-ball, balanced, eyes ahead.
He gets to his corner. He strips. He shifts.
The shift is clean. His wolf is enormous, dark red, and the chamber inhales when he comes into the light.
Garrett Hollis enters.
He is a leaner wolf, gray, with the long lupine build of a fighter who has been in the pit for fifteen years. He moves with the ease of an alpha who has won forty-one bouts. He is not afraid. He should not be afraid. He has every reason to think he is going to win.
The bell goes.
Round one.
They circle. They feel each other out. Garrett opens with his standard set — a feint right, a left attack, a clinch attempt — and Spite handles it the way I have taught him, the way we have drilled for three weeks.
He does not engage on the feint. He shifts weight.
He absorbs the attack at the shoulder, not the chest. He breaks the clinch with a hip-throw that gets him distance.
I call from the corner. Two short words. Reset. Inside.
Spite hears me.
He resets. He moves inside.
Garrett reads the move and adjusts. The bout is a fight now.
Real, technical, two alphas at full output.
The crowd has not stopped roaring since the bell.
The chamber is louder than I have ever heard it, even from the booth, and from the corner the sound is a wall, a physical thing, the kind of pressure that has a weight.
Round one goes the distance. Even.
Round two.
Garrett tries his right-hook to the body, his signature setup.
Spite slips it. Spite goes for the inside.
The two of them lock up in the center of the pit and the lock-up becomes the kind of grapple that drains both fighters because there is no clean way out of it without giving something up, and they break apart at the four-minute mark of round two with Spite bleeding from a shoulder gash and Garrett breathing hard.
I call from the corner. Hands up. Body shots. Wait for the shoulder.
Spite raises his guard.
Garrett presses.
Garrett presses too hard.
Garrett's right shoulder drops.
Spite ducks.
Spite goes inside.
Spite takes the throat.
The chamber explodes.
I am on my feet — I do not remember standing — and Spite has Garrett on the sand with his jaws around Garrett's throat in the submission grip and Garrett is locked.
The cornerman from the Iron is already throwing the towel.
The pit officials are calling the bout. Spite holds the bite for the required four seconds — submission protocol, never longer, the brutal courtesy of a fighter who has been taught discipline — and then he releases and steps back and Garrett rolls onto his side and shifts back to human form, bleeding but alive, and the Iron's medic is in the pit.
Petra is in the pit too.