Magic Strikes kd-3 Page 24

  He paused to let it sink in. Apparently he’d been busy acquiring the information: he actually had a clipboard with notes written on a legal pad, as if he were coaching a baseball team.

  “Despite this rule, most teams field four. Fielding three is risky.” He looked down the steps at Curran.

  Curran shrugged. “It’s your game.”

  So Jim retained Stratego. That was big of His Majesty.

  “We break into two teams,” Jim said. “Three and four.”

  So far, so good.

  “This will minimize our risk of being eliminated and will permit us to rest between the fights.”

  Made total sense.

  “Raphael, Andrea, Derek, and I will be in group one, and Curran, Kate, and Dali in group two.”

  Full break. “You want me to fight with him? On the same team?”

  “Yes.”

  Suddenly I had an urgent need to run away screaming. “Why?”

  “Derek, Raphael, and I have similar fighting styles. We move across the field. Andrea is a mobile range fighter. She can shoot and move at the same time. Dali can’t,” Jim said.

  “I do shodo magic,” Dali said. “I curse through calligraphy. I have to write the curse out on a piece of paper and I can’t move while I do it. One smudge, and I might kill the lot of us.”

  Oh good.

  “But don’t worry.” Dali waved her arms. “It’s so precise, it usually doesn’t work at all.”

  Better and better.

  “Raphael and I aren’t good defensive fighters,” Jim said. “And Derek isn’t up to speed yet. I have to put Dali behind Curran, because he’s the strongest defense we have. He’ll need a strong offense and you’re the best offensive fighter I have.”

  Somehow that didn’t sound like a compliment.

  “Also the three of us have undergone similar training,” Jim said. “We know what to expect from each other and we work well as a team.”

  He didn’t think I could function in a team. Fair enough.

  “Group two will take the qualifying bout and the third tier. The qualifying bout should give you little trouble and third-tier fighters shouldn’t be that fresh. Group one will take the second-tier bout. We will come out together for the championship fight.”

  Jim flipped a page on his legal pad. “You’re going up against the Red Demons this afternoon. From what I’ve heard, they will be fielding a werebison, a swordsman, and some type of odd creature as their mage. You will have magic for the fight. They try to schedule the bouts during the magic waves, because magic makes for a better show. Try to appear sloppy and incompetent. The weaker you look, the more our opponents will underestimate the team, and the easier time we will all have. My lord, no claws. Kate, no magic. You’ll need to win, but just barely.”

  He looked at his notes again and said, “About the murder law. Doesn’t apply in the Pit.”

  Curran said nothing. Jim had just given the shapeshifters permission to kill without accountability with Curran’s silence to reinforce it. Just as well. Gladiators died. That was the reality. We had to be there. The rest had volunteered. And given a chance, every member of the opposing team would murder any one of us without a second thought.

  THE SAND CRUNCHED UNDER MY FOOT. I COULD already taste it on my tongue. The memories conjured heat and sunshine. I shook them off and looked across the Pit.

  In the far end, three people waited for us. The swordsman, tall and carrying a hand-and-a-half sword. The werebison, shaggy with dark brown fur, towering, angry. His breadth was enormous, the shoulders packed with hard, heavy muscle, the chest like a barrel. He wore a chain mail hauberk but no pants. His legs terminated in black hooves. A dense mane of coarse hair crowned the back of his neck. His features were a meld of bull and human, but where the minotaur’s face had been a cohesive whole, the shapeshifter’s skull was a jumble of mismatched parts.

  Behind them reared a nightmarish creature. Its lower body was python, dark brown with creamy swirls of scales. Near the abdomen, the scales became so fine, they glittered, stretching tight over a human upper body, complete with a pair of tiny breasts and a female face that looked like it belonged to a fifteen-year-old. She looked at us with emerald-green eyes. Her skull was bald and a hood of flesh spread from her head, resembling that of a king cobra.

  A lamia. Great.

  The lamia swayed gently, as if listening to music only she could hear. Old magic emanated from her, ancient and ice-cold. It picked up the sand and rolled it in feathery curves to caress her scales before sliding back to the Pit.

  Behind me, Dali shivered. She stood in the sand with a clipboard, an ink pen, and a piece of thin rice paper cut into inch-wide strips.

  I eyed the swordsman. Weak and sloppy. Okay, I could do that.

  The crowd waited above us. The hum of conversation, the clearing of throats, and the sound of a thousand simultaneous breaths blended into a low hum. I scanned the seats and saw Saiman on his balcony. Aunt B, Raphael’s mother, sat on his left, and Mahon, the Bear of Atlanta and the Pack’s executioner, occupied the chair to his right. Sitting between the alphas of Clan Bouda and Clan Heavy. No wonder Saiman had been persuaded to give up his spot to Curran.

  Behind Aunt B, I saw a familiar pale head. Couldn’t be. The blond head moved and I saw Julie’s face. Oh yes, it could.

  “You bribed my kid!”

  “We reached a business arrangement,” he said. “She wanted to see you fight and I wanted to know when, where, and how you were getting into the Games.”

  Julie gave me a big, nervous smile and a little wave.

  Just wait until I get out of here, I mouthed. We were going to have a little talk about following orders.

  “I know what the problem is.” Curran pulled his shoulders back and flexed, warming up a little. I stole a glance. He had decided to fight in jeans and an old black T-shirt, from which he’d torn the sleeves. Probably his workout shirt.

  His biceps were carved, the muscle defined and built by countless exertions, neither too bulky nor too lean. Perfect. Kissing him might make me guilty of catastrophically bad judgment, but at least nobody could fault my taste. The trick was not to kiss him again. Once could be an accident; twice was trouble.

  “You said something?” I arched an eyebrow at him. Nonchalance—best camouflage for drooling. Both the werebison and the swordsman looked ready to charge: the muscles of their legs tense, leaning forward slightly on their toes. They seemed to be terribly sure that we would stay in one place and wait for them.

  Curran was looking at their legs, too. They must be expecting a distraction from the lamia. She sat cocooned in magic, holding on with both hands as it strained on its leash.

  “I said, I know why you’re afraid to fight with me.”

  “And why is that?” If he flexed again, I’d have to implement emergency measures. Maybe I could kick some sand at him or something. Hard to look hot brushing sand out of your eyes.

  “You want me.”

  Oh boy.

  “You can’t resist my subtle charm, so you’re afraid you’re going to make a spectacle out of yourself.”

  “You know what? Don’t talk to me.”

  The gong boomed.

  Memories smashed into me: heat, sand, fear.

  The lamia’s magic snapped like a striking cobra. I jumped up and to the left, just in time to avoid the pit in the sand that yawned open beneath my feet.

  The Swordmaster was on me like white on rice. He charged in and struck in a textbook thrust of wrath, a powerful diagonal thrust delivered from the right and angled down. I jerked back. His blade whistled past me, and I grabbed his leather and smashed my forehead into his face. There you go. Sloppy.

  Red drenched my face. The swordsman’s eyes rolled back in his head and he fell.

  Not good.

  I turned in time to see the werebison arrive. It took him a moment to build up his speed, but as he ran now, massive, huge, blowing air from his misshapen nose, he seemed unstoppable.

>   Curran watched him come with a slightly bored expression. At the last moment, he stepped aside and stuck his foot out. The shapeshifter tripped and Curran helped him down by pushing none too gently on the back of his neck. The werebison flipped onto the sand, hitting the ground like a fallen skyscraper. He shuddered once and lay still, his neck bent in an unnatural angle.

  He must’ve broken his neck in the fall. His chest was still moving. At least he didn’t die.

  Curran stared at him, perplexed.

  Dali barked a sharp command in a language I didn’t understand and tossed a piece of rice paper into the air. There was a quiet plop and the paper vanished.

  We looked at the lamia expectantly. Nothing. She waved her arms, gathering magic for something nasty.

  I guess the spell was a bust.

  A spark of bright magenta shone above the lamia’s head. It flared into glowing red jaws with demonic needle-teeth. The jaws chomped the lamia—neck, elbows, waist—and vanished. There was a loud crunch and the lamia twisted: her head turned backward, snapping her neck, her elbows protruded from the front of her arms, and she bent to the side like a flower with a broken stem.

  I turned slowly and stared at Dali. She shrugged. “I guess it worked. What?”

  The crowd went wild.

  Jim waited for us at the Gold Gate. His teeth were bared. “What happened to barely winning?”

  “You said sloppy! Look, I didn’t even use my sword; I hit him with my head, like a moron.”

  “A man with a sword attacked you and you disarmed him and knocked him out cold in under two seconds.” He turned to Curran.

  The Beast Lord shrugged. “It’s not my fault that he didn’t know how to fall.”

  Jim’s gaze slid from Curran to Dali. “What the hell was that?”

  “Crimson Jaws of Death.”

  “And were you planning on letting me know that you can turn people’s elbows backward?”

  “I told you I did curses.”

  “You said they don’t work!”

  “I said they don’t always work. This one worked apparently.” Dali wrinkled her forehead. “It’s not like I ever get to use them against live opponents anyway. It was an accident.”

  Jim looked at us. The clipboard snapped in his hands. He turned around and very deliberately walked away.

  “I think we hurt his feelings.” Dali looked at his retreating back, sighed, and went after him.

  Curran looked at me. “What the hell was I supposed to do, catch the werebison as he was falling?”

  BACK IN THE ROOM I GRABBED A CHANGE OF clothes and showered. When I returned, dinner had been brought in by the Red Guard: beef stew with fresh bread. Raphael had vanished right after dinner, and the shapeshifters invited me to play poker.

  They killed me. Apparently I was made of tells: they could hear my heartbeat and smelled the changes in my sweat, and counted the number of times I blinked, and knew what cards I had before I looked at them. If it had been strip poker, I would’ve had to give them the skin off my back. I finally gave up and went back to my bed to read one of Doolittle’s paperbacks, since he was otherwise occupied. The good doctor turned out to be a card fiend. Once in a while, I glanced at them. The six shapeshifters sat like statues, faces showing nothing, barely lifting their cards to steal supernaturally fast glances. It felt weird to fall asleep with someone else there, but there was something almost hypnotic about their absolute stillness that lulled me into sleep.

  I dreamed that Curran and I killed a dinosaur and then had sex in the dirt.

  AT ABOUT NINE, CURRAN, DALI, AND I MADE OUR way to the Gold Gate to see Andrea, Raphael, Jim, and Derek take on the Killers.

  The magic was up. Andrea grinned as she passed me by. She carried her SIG-Sauers in hip holsters and a crossbow in her hands. With the magic up, the guns wouldn’t fire, but she must’ve wanted to be prepared for the shift.

  Jim and Derek carried nothing and wore identical gray sweatpants. Raphael carried two tactical knives, both with oxide finish that made the blades Teflon-black. The knife in his left was shaped like a tanto. The blade in his right was double-edged and slightly leaf-shaped: narrow at the handle, it widened before coming to a razor-sharp point. Raphael wore black boots, fitted black leather pants that molded to him with heart-shattering results, and nothing else.

  As he passed me, he leaned to Curran and handed him a paper fan folded from some sort of flyer.

  Curran looked at the fan. “What?”

  “An emergency precaution, Your Majesty. In case the lady faints.”

  Curran just stared at him.

  Raphael strode toward the Pit, turned, flexed a bit, and winked at me.

  “Give me that,” I told Curran. “I need to fan myself.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  We took off to the stairs for the better view. When the three of us settled on the staircase, Andrea was drawing her crossbow in a businesslike fashion. The three shapeshifters spread out in front of her.

  Across the expanse of sand, the Killers waited in a two-by-two formation.

  The Killers gave off a distinctly Japanese flair. Their Stone, a huge, towering monstrosity, had to weigh close to four hundred pounds. Dark indigo, he stood eight feet tall, with arms like tree trunks. A big, round gut protruded above his kilt, as though he’d swallowed a cannon ball. Two horns curved from the coarse mane of dark hair dripping from his skull, and two matching sabertooth-like tusks protruded from his lower jaw. His brutish, thick-featured face communicated simple rage, and the huge iron club in his hand signified his willingness to let it loose. An oni, a Japanese ogre.

  Next to him crouched a beast bearing a striking resemblance to the stone statues guarding the entrances to Chinese temples. Thick and powerfully muscled, it stared at the crowd with bulging eyes brimming with intelligence. Its flanks were dark red, its mane short and curled in ruby ringlets. It sniffed the air and shook its disproportionately huge head. Its maw gaped open, wide, wider, until its head split nearly in half. Lights glinted from brilliant white fangs. A Fu Lion.

  Behind him a thin-lipped redheaded woman in a white shirt and flaring black pants held a yumi, a two-meter-tall, slender, traditional Japanese bow. By her side stood an Asian man with striking, pale green eyes.

  The archer began drawing her yumi bow. She stood with her feet wide apart, the left side of her body facing the target—Raphael. She raised the bow above her head and lowered it slowly, drawing as it came down, wider and wider, until the straight line of the arrow crossed just under her cheekbone.

  A silver spark ignited at the tip of the arrow and ran down the shaft, flaring into white lightning.

  Across the sand Andrea waited, with her crossbow down at her side. Raphael casually twirled the knife in his right hand, turning it into a metal blur.

  I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, hands braided into a single fist.

  “They aren’t children,” Curran said to me. “They know what they’re doing.”

  It made no difference to me. I would rather walk a hundred times into the Pit than see one of them die in there.

  The gong struck.

  The archer fired.

  Andrea snapped the crossbow up and fired without aiming. In the same blink Raphael slid out of the way of the fiery arrow, as fluidly as if his joints were made of water, and struck it down with his knife. Pieces of the arrow fell to the sand, sizzling with magic.

  The archer’s head snapped. The crossbow bolt sprouted precisely between her eyes. Her mouth gaped open in a black O and she toppled back like a log.

  The man next to her closed his eyes and fell back. His body never touched the sand. Thin strands of magic caught and cloaked him, knitting into a gossamer web, cradling his body like a hammock. His face turned placid. He appeared asleep.

  The Fu Lion roared, sounding more like a pissed-off wolverine than a feline. Plumes of reddish smoke billowed from its mouth. It charged.

  It covered the distance to our line in three great bounds,
each strike of its clawed feet shaking the sand like the blow of a huge sledgehammer. Derek lunged into its path, ripping the sweatpants from his body. Skin split on his back, spilling fur. Muscle and bone boiled and a seven-foot-tall werewolf grasped the Fu Lion’s head. The nightmare and the lion collided, raising a spray of sand into the air. The impact pushed Derek across the sand. Derek dug his lupine feet into the sand, grinding the lion’s charge to a dead halt. Sinewy muscle played along his long back under the patchy fur.

  The Fu Lion jerked his head, trying to shake off the half-beast, half-man. Derek thrust his claws into the creature’s massive neck. To the left Jim became a jaguar in an explosion of flesh and golden fur.

  The Fu Lion reared, trying to claw. The moment it exposed its gut, Raphael and the werejaguar darted to it. Knives and claws flashed and the slippery clumps of the beast’s innards tumbled out in a whoosh of blood. Derek tore his claws free and leapt aside. The Fu Lion swayed and fell.

  The shapeshifters rose from his corpse, silent. Derek’s eyes glowed amber, while Jim’s were pools of green.

  “Jim improved his warrior form,” Curran said. “Interesting.”

  Behind the shapeshifters Andrea loaded the crossbow and fired. The crossbow spat bolts, one after another. Three shafts punctured the oni’s chest, but the ogre just bellowed and brushed them off the massive shield of flesh he called his torso.

  Andrea landed a shot to the forehead. The bolt bounced off the ogre’s skull.

  Magic grew behind the oni, blooming like a flower around the sleeping man. Long, translucent strands snaked past the oni’s legs, like pale ribbons.

  “Bad,” Dali murmured behind me. “Bad, bad, bad . . .”

  The strands knotted together. Light flashed and a creature spilled forth. Ten feet tall, it resembled a human crouching on frog legs. It squatted in the sand, leaning on abnormally long forelimbs, the magic ribbons binding its back and legs to the sleeping mage. A second set of forearms sprouted from its elbows, terminating in long, slender fingers tipped with narrow claws. A huge maw gaped where its face would have been, a black funnel turned inward. Its hide shimmered with a metallic sheen, as if the creature were spun from silver wool.