Page 80

Tomás was waiting there with the boat, as usual, hunched in the stern in his oilskins with a roll-up burning between his lips. He did not say hello. He never did. He belonged to Vey, and people who belonged to Vey generally understood that friendship was not part of the arrangement.

Ironmoor's wards protected the harbor and the gates, but they ended at the cliff edge. Whoever had designed them had apparently decided that two hundred feet of rain-slick rock and freezing seawater provided enough additional security. Most of the time, they were right. Ironmoor housed adults, not children, so nobody came around after dark to make sure we were tucked into our beds.

Unauthorized departure still meant expulsion and a Council review if anyone caught you. Ironmoor simply trusted the cliffs to discourage anyone from trying.

It had not planned for a desperate jaguar with a debt collector's boat waiting below.

We pushed away from the shore, and the engine sputtered before settling into a rough growl. Ironmoor receded behind us until it was only a dark mass beneath a sky crowded with stars. I sat in the bow with cold spray hitting my face and made a serious effort not to think about Wren.

That effort lasted about a minute.

I thought about the taste of chocolate and salt on her skin and the weight of her in my lap. I thought about the sound she had made when I put my mouth against her hip, and about the way she had managed to say don't stop and then, ten minutes later, stop. Both had cost her something, and she had said them anyway.

Then I thought about the silver lines across her stomach, the ones three rich putas with a phone had thought were funny.

I had kissed every one I could find, and I could easily have spent another hour doing it. I had not been lying when I called them tiger stripes. I had wanted to keep moving lower until her thighs were around my head and that broken sound she had made became something that had nothing to do with crying.

When I saw those marks in the lamplight, my cat had gone suddenly alert inside me and started purring hard enough that I could feel the vibration in my jaw.

Mine, it had said.

It said that about sunlight warming stone, the full moon, fresh bread, and almost nothing else. It had certainly never said it about another person.

My cock had reached roughly the same conclusion several minutes earlier, although with considerably less poetry.

I had no idea what to do with any of that, so I handled it the way I handled most things I did not understand. I made a joke to myself, pushed the whole mess somewhere deep, and stared out at the water.

Five years earlier, a man in a silk shirt had knocked on the door of our apartment.

Mateo had been fourteen and coughing blood into a dish towel. Mamá had already sold the good chairs, the television, and her wedding ring, and the doctors had just told us about a treatment that might help. It cost more money than everyone in our building could have put together.

The man in the silk shirt had been sympathetic.

He told me he had heard I was good with my fists. Then he said he would be happy to pay for Mateo's treatment as a loan between friends. I could pay him back gradually, he explained. One fight a month.

I was eighteen years old, and I signed before Mamá got home.

The treatment worked. It stopped the bleeding and bought Mateo years he would not otherwise have had, but it could not undo the damage already done to his lungs. He was still alive, and for five years I had been paying Vey one fight every month without reducing the original debt by a single coin.

I paid the interest. Nothing more.

If I missed a fight, the interest doubled. If I defaulted, the entire balance became due, and Vey would collect it from our apartment, Mamá's wages, and whatever value he decided Mateo himself represented.

He had explained that part after I signed.

That was how loans between friends worked, apparently.

We reached the mainland about an hour later.

The Pit of Obsidian lay beneath the abandoned salt mines, two miles up a dead road from a harbor that did not appear on any official map. Tomás drove us there in a van that smelled of old fish, wet coats, and something sour I had never been able to identify. From there, we descended through an old elevator shaft in an iron cage that shrieked against the rails the entire way down.

At the bottom, we followed a tunnel whose walls were thick with white salt crust. Eventually the passage widened, and the noise of the Pit rolled toward us.

There had to be three hundred people down there, probably more. Every kind of Kindred filled the ledges carved into the rock around a sunken ring of black sand. They shouted over one another, placed bets, shoved money into waiting hands, and passed around bottles of liquor strong enough to burn my nose from several feet away.

Beneath the sweat, blood, alcohol, and damp stone was another smell, one I had never grown used to despite five years of coming here. It was sweet and chemical, with the sterile edge of a hospital corridor.

I had asked Tomás about it once during my first year.