«He's a teddy bear,» I said.
Teddy bear looked like he was suffering from murder withdrawal. Rene grinned. «He certainly
is. First room on the right, get yourself logged in.» Rene glanced at the doors, where Saiman was
making his grand entrance. «Hurry now. Your ex is coming through. We don't want him getting
hysterical again.»
THE FIGHTER LEVEL WAS BASICALLY A LONG hallway forming a ring. Red Guards
were thick in the hallway like flies on a dead horse. Big deadly flies, armed with Tasers, chains, and
nets. No fights would break out there. Inside the ring lay a large exercise room located directly
under the Pit. Outside the ring branched off fighter quarters: sets of rooms where the fighters waited
for their bouts.
Jim leaned against the doorframe of our room, like some dark sentinel. The patrolmen gave him
a wide berth.
I sat at a bench. I had inspected our quarters: the front room where we waited now was long and
narrow, a bottleneck. No door separated us from the hallway. In case of trouble, a couple of Guards
could easily contain a dozen people or more within the room.
On the left a door led to a narrow locker room with a bench and three showers and off it was a
small bathroom with three toilets, separated by partitions. Behind me another door led to a large
bedroom housing eight double bunks. The Order's files said the teams were sequestered once the
tournament began and for three days they lived in their fighting quarters.
Above us the crowd roared, enthused by someone's death.
Guilt gnawed on me. It haunted and stalked me, just waiting to pounce when I had a dull
moment. I should have kept Derek from being hurt. As they had beat him, in the parking lot, he had
been utterly alone. He knew no help would be coming. That was his last memory: the molten silver
being poured on his face.
My heart clenched. I tried to make some words come out, anything to keep thoughts out of my
head. «My father would've approved of this place. Of all the arenas he took me to, this is the best
equipped and best secured.»
Jim's gaze was still firmly fixed on the hallway and the patrols. «What kind of father would take
a kid to the slaughter?»
«The kind who wanted his daughter to get used to death. I guess you could say I turned out
according to his plan.»
«Yeah. He teach you to talk a lot of shit, too?»
«Nope. Picked it up from you.»
We sat in silence.
«My dad hated killing,» Jim said. «Couldn't do it, even when he had to.»
«Not everybody grows up to be a monster.»
Another thump. The noise of the spectators died down to a hum. I got out my throwing knives
and began polishing them with a cloth.
«He was human,» Jim said.
«The Pack never turned him?»
«No.»
Jim was half. Could've fooled me by the way he treated outsiders. Usually mates of shapeshifters
became shapeshifters themselves.
«How did it go over with the cat clan?»
Jim gave a barely perceptible shrug. «We're cats. We mind our own business. He was welcome,
because he was a doctor. Not many physicians in the Pack. Doolittle and he were friends. Graduated
together.»
I remembered Saiman's words. He said Jim killed the man who had murdered his father while
they were both incarcerated. «How did he end up in prison?»
«One of the lynx children went loup. A little girl. She was ten. The alpha was out and the parents
brought her to him to be put down. Humane death and all that shit.»
Once a shapeshifter went loup, there was no return.
«He couldn't do it,» Jim said. «He gave her an injection and she went to sleep. He told the family
he wanted the body to see if he could autopsy it and find out what caused loupism. They believed
him. He hid her in a cage in the basement. Took tissue samples to try and find the cure. She broke
out and killed two people before we caught her and put her down. One of them was a pregnant
woman. There was a trial. He got twenty-five to life.»
Jim still wasn't looking at me. «His second day in prison a lowlife called David Stiles stabbed
him in the liver. Later I found David, and I asked him why. He wasn't in the position to lie. You
know what he said?» Jim turned to me. «He said he felt like it. No reason.»
I didn't know what to say.
«My father helped people. He treated a loup kid like she was normal. I treated a normal kid like
he was loup and six years later sent him to have his face beaten off his head. Doolittle tells me he's
fading. He doesn't have long. If my dad was alive, he'd spit in my face.»
It was an old wound and he'd ripped the scab off and left it raw for me to see. I had no salve to