“That shit had nothing to do with you,” he whines.
“Rules are, you start a fight, you fight one of us.”
He looks around. Folks are getting antsy—been too long without blood. The floor is slippery, smelling of bleach. It’s hot up here, and disorienting, seeing your own face on a screen twenty feet high.
“Should I let him go?” I call to the crowd, using my firing range voice, meaning,loud.
“NO!” Comes the resounding reply.
I turn back to him. “Come on, Chunks. Chickening out, are you?”
He charges.
I let him.
He gets within a couple feet of me, just outside arm’s reach, and I pivot, dance sideways, and smash a fist behind his left ear.
Hurts my knuckles like a motherfucker, but he goes down in a heap. Flat on his face, groaning.
I shake my hand out, spinning in place. The crowd both hates and loves this. They hate it because it means the fight is over, but they love it because it was brutally quick, and kind of funny—watching the replay is amusing as fuck. Chunks wentdown.
I swagger out of the ring, down the stairs, and make for the exit to Hel. On the way, I happen to glance at the stairs leading back up to Sin, and my gut clenches.
Myka.
On the stairs, hand to her mouth. Fear in her eyes.
Shit.
Well, she saw that, saw what I am.
See if she wants my dick, now.
5Sucked In
Myka
I’m horrified.
My gut lurches, and I see that moment burned into my brain, replayed and replayed.
It seemed like it should have been a lopsided fight—the other guy was gargantuan, not like Chance but outweighing Rev by at least a hundred pounds. But then he charged, and Rev seemed to just…wait,lazily. He moved in slow motion. Languid, almost. One punch, but that punch was like a pile driver. The big guy went down like a sack of bricks, and Rev just swaggered out. Unfazed in the extreme.
One hit, and a four-hundred-pound man hit the floor.
He sees me. Freezes. Stares at me from across the huge room. Turns on a heel and stalks into Hel; I’d seen this room from the other side, from Hel. I’d been so fraught and so drunk that I didn’t even wonder what was going on in here.
Now I know.
Bareknuckle fights.
Even as I watch, another pair of men enter the cage. The door closes, the stairs move away. The screens show them as they pace and swing their arms and stretch; lists of numbers appear beneath the screen—odds on the fight. There’s no ref. No rules. No gloves, no hand wraps, no mouth guards.
Just two men, a cage, and one winner.
Savagery.
I turn and go back up to Sin, sliding through the crowd. I’m here alone, and I’m sober. Well, I’ve had one cup of beer while I tried to find Rev in this chaos. Sober, it’s deafening chaos, debauchery. Well-named is what it is. Nudity abounds. Not everyone is merely dancing, and they’re doing it right there on the dance floor, for anyone to see. It’s a different DJ, different music. This time, it’s less hypnotic and more jarring, wilder. Faster. Almost frenetic.
