Page 79 of Ghost’s Awakening

"Ghost! Your right, Valkyrie!" Hawk. The bass in his voice went through the floor and up into my boots. In all my time in this club I'd heard him raise it twice, and both times had been tonight.

Caleb and I looked at once. Valkyrie was pinned against the north wall, the wall under the mezzanine, two men on her, and she had her forearms up blocking a boxing combination that kept coming. Around us the dust was settling, the room coming back into focus a piece at a time, and every piece of it had one of ours in it, locked in a fight of their own.

We ran. I got there first, from the left, and I went in sideways and low, my right shoulder driving up into the man's groin from underneath, and then I stood. Everything my legs had, straight up through him. He went back and over the top of me, screaming the whole way because there was nothing under his feet, and he landed on the concrete headfirst.

I looked right. Caleb's kick took the other one behind the knee, the one throwing hands on Valkyrie, and the leg folded and dropped him onto that knee with a shout. Valkyrie didn't give him time to look up. Her roundhouse came around and her boot met his temple, hard, and I saw him go limp before he'd finished falling.

"Thanks, you two! Now get out of my way." She was already going, off into the thinning fog at a run, toward a man who was giving Irish more work than Irish wanted.

"Yes, ma'am!" She didn't hear me. I was very glad she was ours.

I took the room in.

There were more of us than there were of them. Gravedigger's men in black were going down one after another, and every one of them was trained, and every one of them was fighting alone, because the gyms that had built them had never once put two men on the same side. Whatever number that kid in the parking structure had bragged about, forty, fifty, it wasn't on this floor. Faro had a man's arm bent up behind his back and was walking him into a wall. Three of ours on two of theirs everywhere I looked, or two on one, and ever since Montana, the Phoenixes had the numbers.

Caleb's head jerked left. I followed it, and I knew them, and I watched his shoulders come down an inch as he knew them too. Declan, walking in out of the smoke at the east doors with the rifle across his body and Tyler and Logan behind him. Vega and Santos coming in behind them. The two who'd put the rockets into the corners, and the three who'd come down off a roof two blocks away.

"Street's empty." Declan, in every ear, nothing in his voice. "Nobody came for them."

"Caleb. They've got this." I said it close, under the noise. "They're outnumbered. Declan alone will probably smash half of what's left, and I saw Irish with a bleeding lip, which means Irish is having a great night. What I mean is⁠—"

"You want to stop?! You want them to handle it?!" He was looking straight at me, and it wasn't a question. He didn't mean it as one. He wanted me to explain, fast, because he had no patience left for words.

Something was driving him, and it wasn't the thing he'd told me about one night in the dark, the kid who broke things in his parents' house and didn't know why, the strip-mall gym that had taught him where to put it. That thing had a shape he knew. This didn't.

Then I got it, and I hated that I'd taken this long.

He'd never seen this. Ever. Twenty years of gyms and rings, and every fight had ended when a man tapped or a man couldn't stand. Nobody in a gym had ever fired a gun over his head. Ten minutes of guns and men dying on both sides of him, and it wasn't rage driving him. It was too much. Too much noise and too much blood coming in through his eyes and his ears at once, with nowhere to put it, and it was shoving him over an edge he'd walked for twenty years.

"I meant we go for the head." I pointed straight up. We were under the mezzanine. "Gravedigger. We end it. Now."

His eyes went up. Then back to me, and the look on him said I forgot. He nodded, fast, once.

There was no time for breathing drills. No time for calm down, Caleb. The only thing that was going to bring him back was the end of this, so I looked for Hawk.

Hawk was ten feet off the ring with the shotgun at his shoulder, loaded with buckshot.

And three men were coming at him together.

He fired the shotgun once. All three of them jumped and screamed, and the one in the middle dropped to the concrete and lay there, and the two on either side went down rolling and clutching at themselves, howling.

Scattershot. One pull, and the pellets spreading took all three. Dangerous, because it went everywhere, and it was the first time tonight I'd heard it go off.

Every head in the building turned toward the sound. Hawk turned with them, shotgun in both hands, and his eyes came across the room and landed on me.

"Hawk!!" I pointed straight up. "Let's end this, now!"

I felt the eyes move. Every one of Gravedigger's men still standing had looked at Hawk with terror, and now the same eyes came to me, and something else went through them. They were losing. Each of them had fought alone, and now they looked around and saw how many of us there were, and how few of them. Two hands went up. Then another pair. A man in black went down onto his knees with his fingers laced on top of his head.

Hawk crossed that whole room in strides, and it looked like two. "To the mezzanine." His eyes went from me to Caleb. "Now."

CALEB

I hadn't cared who the darkness killed next.

That was the truth of the last ten minutes, and in the middle of wanting more damage, I'd forgotten the one man I'd come here for. Ghost had put sense back in me with one finger pointed at a ceiling. We end it. Now. Then Hawk gave the order and that sealed it. We were going up for the man who'd put my brother in a hospital bed, and his men were down and outnumbered.

Hawk covered the ground to the stairs in a few long steps. Ghost and I went after him, and he didn't have to ask twice.