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Then, like a magician frantically pulling scarves from a top hat, Clara began stripping Bronze of every weapon in sight and some not so in sight. When she came at his thigh holster with her fingers curled and her nails out front and center, he twisted away with a yelp and leaped back, making sure his junk was well out of clawing range.
“What the hell, Clara?”
“Off! Get it all off! Right now!”
“Okay, but tell me why first. Hey, easy.”
“Hide them. Melt them. Do whatever you must do to make sure no one but me sees them. If you’re caught with those weapons, they’ll kill you on sight.”
Once he’d finally managed to grab up her hands to prevent them from taking out more important bits, he urged as much calm as he could muster into his voice, even though a slight buzz of warning was beginning to work its way into his ears. “Let’s talk about this. You’ve seen me with my weapons before and never said anything. It was you, Clara, who chose me as your champion to compete and then refused to speak to me for two days, which we will have a discussion about once today’s competition is over. You’re not getting out of that so easily. But we’ll get to that. For now, why would someone try to kill me simply for being armed?”
“You don’t understand,” she said, shaking her head back and forth.
Damn right he didn’t. “So make me. Talk. I don’t think there’s much time before I’m due out there.”
Clara’s eyes fell shut, and she sucked in a deep, labored breath that did as much to calm her down as it did him. Which was not at all. When she opened her eyes, they were lit with a stern awareness that told him whatever came out of her mouth next was something he most definitely did not want to hear.
“You already observed that there is no electricity here. That is because, as I tried to explain to you once before, certain things in the human lands don’t agree with our lycan makeup. Electricity is one of them. It affects our ability to shift and connect with our wolf, so we cannot live with it.”
Bronze gripped her hands a bit tighter, suddenly finding a great desire for something to anchor himself against. Even as the weight of his daggers and firearms pulled down on his straining muscles, which still struggled to support what only a few days ago had been like a second skin, a part of him knew what Clara was about to reveal.
Knew it and was conversely strangled by the implications of it.
“What else doesn’t agree with your kind?”
Clara’s eyes bore the subtle sheen of a female who was equal parts frightened for her sake and someone else’s. “Metal.”
Chapter 21
Excited cries and energized murmurs rose up throughout the makeshift dirt-caked arena, teasing the treetops with an anticipation the forest and its inhabitants seemed to have not known for some time. Wooden bench seats, erected in haste, lined up in bleacher-like fashion around a cordoned-off enclosure and groaned beneath the bouncing bodies of exuberant lycans. Those unlucky enough to grab a front-and-center seat were apparently unperturbed by that fact and still roared their enthusiasm from the ever-pressing crowd spreading out from the arena in a burgeoning bulge.
Bronze focused on none of it. It was all white noise eclipsed by the pounding truth bombs that Clara had dropped on him right before he’d entered the ring.
There was no metal anywhere in the lycan lands. And wouldn’t you know, his little viper princess had been spot-on about one thing: she had tried to tell him earlier that certain things didn’t agree with their lycan makeup. He had surmised as much about electricity, which seemed relatively harmless if not annoying, but fucking idiot that he was, he’d missed her use of the plural. Things. He’d never bothered to ask what other things.
It had something to do with their blood, she’d informed him hastily as she hid his weapons in his room and all but dragged him by his bicep toward the practice field. To his astonishment, lycan blood contained no metal, which was why consistent exposure to metal didn’t agree with them. It didn’t harm them, per se, but over time, the contact suppressed their lycan natures and prevented them from shifting into their wolf forms.
It all made fucking sense now as Bronze stood at one side of a dirt circle and peered at the crowd of mismatched lycans. There was no metal anywhere, not even on their clothing. No zippers or metal fasteners of any kind. It was why there was such an assortment of old-world linen tunics and leathers mixed with heavily modern drawstring khakis, vinyl, and whatever the latest polyester trends were. There were male lycans in baseball hats and T-shirts sitting next to long-skirted females in animal-hide cloaks. All at once, other pieces he’d filed away as odd began to surface. The strange black blades of the kitchen knives moving across cutting boards. The stone hearth of a stove combined with the notable absence of a proper aluminum ventilation hood.
The knives hadn’t been made from some well-patinated carbon steel. They were ceramic, just like the wristwatches he saw peeking out beneath the chefs’ coat sleeves. Likewise, the few weapons he had seen on the king’s guards were either carved stone, whips, wood, or bone. He’d just never bothered to wonder why.
And then there was the giant blinking light of a newsflash that Bronze was still kicking himself over not realizing. The king’s stronghold. The thing had the look of an impenetrable stone fortress, and Bronze took for granted that, as they all resided in the Fucking Granite State, the materials they’d used were surely granite as well, a stone rich in aluminum and alkali metals.
Wrong. So incredibly wrong.
Limestone. The whole place was built from limestone and cement mixed with the stuff. And limestone, so fucking unfortunately, was a non-metallic mineral.
In short, he was completely cut off from the earth’s metallic elements, which meant he couldn’t regenerate his celestial powers or call on them to manipulate metal in any way.
Which further meant that he was essentially no more powerful than a mortal.
A mortal who was still battered and bruised and now took up a very prestigious spot in a game where he had to best two warrior lycans without his metallic armor, angel fire, wings, or weapons.
Fuck.
King Halpin stood from a raised seat and held his arms up wide, silencing the crowd instantly. Clara sat by his side and kept volleying her gaze from one competitor to the next in worried assessment.
Bronze hadn’t spilled the beans to her directly, because what kind of champion wanted to broadcast their weaknesses to the one they were about to fight for? But it was in her eyes, the way they swept across the playing field and never stayed too long in one place, as if searching for a way out . . .
