Page 76 of Ghost’s Awakening

He never got the chance.

His feet left the mat backward. Both of them, ripped out from under him at the ankles, so fast his arms flew up and his face met the mat with all his weight behind it, and I knew the move before I saw the man. Both hands hooked behind the ankles. I'd heard what that move did to a skull on concrete. The mat gave him what concrete wouldn't, and he came up off it roaring through a broken mouth, pushing to his hands, and the shadow that had done it was already in the air above him.

It dropped out of the fog with both knees aimed down.

The weight landed square between his shoulder blades, and the roar cut off in the middle, all at once. All the air in the man left through one open mouth. His head jerked up, his legs lifted off the mat behind him, shaking, everything in him pulled tight for one long second, and then all of him let go at once and settled flat, and that corner of the ring went quiet under the dust.

Chills ran down my spine, one bone at a time. I'd slept beside the man who could do that.

Out past the ropes, the fog had new sounds in it. The crowd was gone, and the sounds that had replaced it were deeper. Men roaring, the thud of bodies meeting concrete, boots, breaking wood, and once, close, something that whistled and landed wet. The Phoenixes were inside, and Gravedigger's people were finding out what that meant.

Ghost came up off the body already scanning, head sweeping the ring twice on his way to his feet, and then his eyes found me and he was crossing the mat at double speed with his mouth already going.

"I'm here. Caleb. Trenza, Cuervo, we're here, all of us—" His hands landed on my shoulders and his eyes went everywhere on me, checking me over piece by piece. "You okay?! The crowd took forever getting out, there were so many, we had to hold at the doors, I counted every second of it—" He stopped dead. His gaze had reached my neck, and the speed fell out of him between one word and the next. What was left came out low and careful. "Caleb. Your throat is purple. Who the fuck did that to y⁠—"

I kissed him.

Threw myself the last foot forward and took his mouth with mine, hard, once, the choke and the name I'd apologized to crashing through me at the same time, pure relief, nothing held back. One kiss. Then his arms wrapped me and crushed, and I hung on inside them with my face in his neck, smoke and sweat, and under it just him. For one second the building didn't exist.

The gunshot ended the moment.

It cracked through the fog from somewhere deep in the building, flat and enormous, and Ghost's grip closed on my arm before the sound finished. He dragged us both down together, one foot planted, the other knee on the mat, my heart slamming, and my body caught up with what his already knew. The shooting had started, so we got low.

Cuervo dropped the same way beside us, folded small, eyes on the fog. Another shot answered the first, farther off, and it went through me in a way fists never had. Knowing it would come to this and hearing it arrive were two different things, and I'd spent my whole life in fights that ended when somebody tapped.

"That's ours." Ghost's head was tilted, listening hard. "Or it's answering ours. Either way, we're moving soon."

"You asked who." It came out of my crushed throat in pieces, more air than voice, and I lifted my chin at the man flat on his back in the broken glass. "Your… answer. Him." Ghost looked at Deadlock for one long second, and nothing moved on his face at all. That scared me more than rage would have.

He moved to Trenza in a crouch-walk, fast and low, Cuervo a half step behind him, and they got an arm each under her and brought her up off the mat and into the same crouch, no higher.

She came up swearing, which loosened something in my chest, because dead women don't swear.

"Estoy bien. Quita. Pinche cabrón ese… gracias, Caleb."

"I'm fine. Let go. Fucking bastard, that one… thanks, Caleb."

Her right eye had closed and blood painted that side of her face. The words came out thick through a split lip, and the good eye dared either of them to argue. "Just stand me up and point me at the next one." Nobody stood her up. Cuervo's hand stayed flat on her shoulder and kept her folded low with the rest of us, and she allowed it. That told me how hurt she really was.

On the far side, Norte came across the open mat with Mateo hanging off his shoulder, both their heads pulled down low, the kid's good arm slung across the older man's neck and the other one swinging dead at his side. They folded in beside us near the ropes, close to the edge of the ring. Mateo's face was cut and swelling everywhere I looked, and he'd caught me looking at it.

"Still haven't decided if I like you." The words whistled out through the swelling, and the corner of his split mouth climbed around them. A joke. The kid was hanging off Norte's neck with one arm dead and half his face broken open, gunshots and roars in the background, and he was making a joke at me, because a joke meant he was still in there. The smile cost him. He paid it anyway, and it was the best thing I'd heard all night.

The warehouse was one big fight now. It came out of the fog on every side, men bellowing, the smack of fists landing, a body crashing into the ring platform hard enough that the boards jumped under my knee, somebody shouting orders and somebody else just screaming. Glass shattered off to the left. Another gun went off, deeper in, and none of it slowed down.

I looked up, past all of them, through the thinning dust to the mezzanine.

The center panel stood open in darkness. The rail was empty. The small dark eyes that had watched me hang under that microphone were gone, and the box behind the glass sat black and silent over a warehouse his people were losing.

The heat was in my legs again. It had been there since the oak table at Church, and I'd held it down through two fights, because twenty years had taught me the difference between letting it stand up and letting it drive.

I ran the breathing technique anyway. In through the nose, four. It didn't catch. Out through the mouth. Nothing. The count I'd trusted since I was fifteen was gone.

The darkness in me was driving now.

Across the ring lay the man I'd killed. My shin had cracked his skull and I'd felt it go, and I didn't give a fuck. Maybe tomorrow I would.

Right now I wanted the rest of them dead too. All of them. Every man Gravedigger had fed into this place and every one still swinging out there in the smoke. Dead on this mat or dead in the fog, either way worked.