Page 77 of Ghost’s Awakening

I didn't care who the darkness killed next.

As long as Gravedigger was one of them.

18

VOID

GHOST

The bullet went over our heads.

I heard it before I heard the gun. A flat snap through the air a foot above my hair, then the crack of the gun a beat behind it from somewhere out in the fog, and behind us the corner post of the ring rang with the hit and kept ringing. Whoever had fired knew where a standing man's chest would be. One second earlier I'd been standing. So had Caleb.

"We need to move!" It came out of me loud, and it came out firm, and I didn't know the voice. Wanting Caleb out from under that gun had put something in it I'd only ever heard come out of Hawk. "We're a target up here, we're lit, we're the highest thing in the room, and the others need us!"

"Where's it coming from?!" Cuervo, flat on the mat beside me, his one good eye on the fog.

"Doesn't matter." I kept my head down. "It's coming."

I looked at Caleb. He wasn't looking at me.

He was looking out through the ropes at the floor, and the floor was hell. The dust was still coming down. It fell out of the beams in slow gray sheets through the sodium lamps. One lamp had come half off its clamp and swung on its cable, so the light moved and the shadows moved with it. Pieces of the ceiling kept letting go and hitting the concrete out in the gray. Through all of it, the fighting. Men in black going backward into folding tables. A chair coming apart over somebody's head. Anima's inked arm flashing under a lamp as she drove her elbow into a face. A body coming out of the fog sideways, all the way off the ground, thrown clear by a spinning kick, and landing on its shoulders and not getting up. Smoke and dust in my nose, and under it the copper this building never washed out. Men roaring, and under the roaring, fists landing on meat.

"Let's move." Caleb's voice came out with a rasp under it, torn up from the arm that had crushed his throat, and his head turned on me. Fast. I'd thought he was reading the floor, the way he read everything. He wasn't reading anything. The look in his eyes was dark all the way down, and it wanted skulls.

I'd seen him from the ropes on my way in, a flat-out run through the fog, then off the mat and turning, and a man going down without putting his hands out. That man lay across the ring right now. He hadn't moved once.

If Caleb was cracking, I was going to bring back every piece. I made myself that promise with the bullet's echo still in the corner post. For now, though, the crack might be what got us out of here, and I let it be.

Somewhere past the ropes a man screamed, high, and it didn't sound like one of ours.

Three more shots ripped the air, close together, and Caleb moved. Low and fast along the ropes on our side, and my Glock came out of my jacket and into both hands. The long-haired man lay in his path. Flat on his back in a spread of broken glass, blood down both sides of his face, pieces of somebody's beer glass shining in it. Caleb went past him without a look.

Then the body moved.

A groan came out of it, barely there under the noise. His upper half came up off the mat slow, an inch, then more, and his eyes found Caleb, and they were wide open.

Caleb went back a step, still low, right foot behind him, hands opening. His left hand came out toward me and the others, flat, and stayed there. Stay back. That hand told me everything about what had happened to his throat.

"You… fucking…" It came out of the man wet, through blood and broken teeth, and he was getting a hand under himself to push up. "I'm going to kill you… and your coward frien⁠—"

I shot him in the face.

The Glock jumped in my hands and the bullet went in under his left eye. His head whipped back on his neck and the back of it came apart, red and gray spraying across the mat behind him. His body dropped flat onto the glass again and stayed there.

Smoke drifted up off the muzzle into the falling dust. From the corner of my eye I could tell Caleb was looking at me. I didn't turn my head. The sights were still on that man's ruined face, and he wasn't getting up, and I aimed anyway.

Him. Your answer. Caleb had given me that two minutes ago in pieces, with his throat gone purple. This was the man who'd sat on him and squeezed the air out of him until his eyes rolled. I'd killed one man before tonight, and I'd walked around for two weeks with the weight of it. This one weighed nothing. This one was never going to cost me an hour of sleep.

"Should've hit him harder." Norte, from behind Mateo, slow and low. I lowered the Glock.

"Let's move!" I gave it to Caleb, straight at him, and he nodded once. Then I turned to Norte, and past him to Cuervo. "Mateo and Trenza are down. You two stay on them. I'm sorry—" my eyes went from Mateo's broken face to Trenza's closed eye and back "—but that's the truth, you can't fight like that, and it's getting worse out there every second. Drop out of the ring and get low behind the platform. He's carrying." I tipped my chin at the dead man. Coming over the ropes I'd seen the pistol for one second, the grip of it showing inside his open jacket. "Take what he's got. Anybody comes close who isn't a Phoenix, use it. The rest is ours."

Trenza looked at me out of her one good eye, and the look said two things at once. I know. And fuck you. "Ya vete, cabrón." Thick, through the split lip.

"Get lost already, asshole."

Mateo couldn't look at me at all. His head hung, and every time his dead arm brushed Norte's side, even a little, his whole face winced with it. Norte nodded once. Cuervo nodded once, already crouched over the body, and his hand came off the man's waistband with a pistol in it.