Page 12 of Reaper (Quincy Harker Demon Hunter #10)

W ell, I didn’t wake up soaked in my own piss, so I guess that’s a win.

More coherent than a lot of my first thoughts upon waking after being knocked out, which usually consist of some variation on “where the fuck am I and what the fuck hit me?” I still didn’t have any idea the answer to those questions, but since the last thought before falling unconscious had been worry about falling into my own urine, it made sense that I woke up thinking about pee.

And having to pee. Lots of piss on the brain, apparently.

I opened my eyes to take stock of my surroundings and found myself in a small cell.

Not the first time, and not the worst cell I’d ever been locked up in.

That distinction goes to a bamboo cage in the jungles of Cambodia.

Long story, and not a pretty one. But we can sum up a lot of it with the maxim “don’t lock the guy with superhuman strength up in a cell made of wood. ”

I wasn’t locked in a wooden cell this time.

No, it was more like a typical room in a stereotypical dungeon, which would make this a first for me.

I’ve been locked in a lot of jails, and more than one have been underground, but I’ve never been trapped in an actual dungeon before, with stone walls, steel doors, and maybe a torture chamber somewhere nearby.

I didn’t hear screaming, so torture chamber seemed unlikely.

But we definitely checked the “stone walls” and “steel door” boxes.

There was a hole in the floor from which a truly rancid stench floated up, coating the whole room with a miasma that would have made Vincent Price and his funk of a thousand years run screaming for the hills.

I straddled the hole and received myself, sighing with the relief of a man who was interrupted while taking a piss, then knocked unconscious.

Yes, I know how that feels from more than one unfortunate experience.

I’ve angered a lot of people in my life, and a fair number of them have taken it upon themselves to seek their retribution whilst I was taking a leak.

Once I zipped up, I took a quick inventory.

I still had my clothes, but my phone, knife, and both guns were gone.

My wallet was likewise missing, but since I didn’t carry any real identification, I figured there was a slight chance I hadn’t been recognized by my captors.

Scratch that. I was fairly certain I hadn’t been recognized, because if anyone realized the captured one of the most violent wizards on the Eastern seaboard and they had me unconscious in their dungeon, they probably would have killed me in my sleep.

So the fact that I woke up and wasn’t running around like a whiny-assed ghost trying to figure out who killed me was a strong indicator that I was still alive.

That and the whole pissing thing. Pretty sure ghosts don’t need to pee.

I still had my boots, but the small knife I kept hidden in the sole of my right one was gone, as was the lock pick set I had built into my belt buckle.

Whoever searched me did a bang-up job at it.

Next, I reached out to Becks through our mental link, but got nothing.

I could sense her, but I couldn’t contact her.

We’d been through this before when we were separated by great distances, or when there was something blocking our connection but not strong enough to actually sever it.

I reached out to call power from the earth around me and found myself cut off from magic, too.

I only had the power I usually stored within me and the juice stored in my magical tattoos.

I thanked Past Quincy for getting them redone the last time I was in Atlanta.

My tattoo artist, James, was a faerie mage who poured magic into the ultraviolet inks when he tattooed me, turning them into mystical batteries and rendering them mostly invisible under normal circumstances.

It took about twice as long as regular tattooing, and hurt about three times as much, so I had gotten pretty lax about having them redone when I drained them.

But after needing every ounce of magic I could lay my hands on for a big fight in D.C.

last year, and then going to Hell again when I was supposed to be on vacation in the Outer Banks, Becks had insisted I keep the tank topped off.

I was glad I listened to her for once. I had a sneaking suspicion that I’d need every fireball I could summon up to get out of this place.

With no phone, no books, and no furniture other than a thin pallet with an even thinner blanket, I sat on the “bed” with my back to the wall and waited for someone to come monologue at me, threaten me, or try to murder me.

I’d wanted to infiltrate this fight club, and it seemed like the fight club approved my infiltration.

Now I had to figure out how to exfiltrate myself without any backup. Best laid plans and all that.

I might have drifted off because when I heard a key scrape in the lock, I jerked my attention to the door.

The drool on my chin was another hint that I might have been snoozing.

The door opened and a guy in his late teens or early twenties came in carrying a styrofoam takeout container and a bottle of water.

He put the food on the floor by the door and looked over at me. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Any blurry vision, headaches, or ill effects from the drugs or the knock on the head?”

“Are you my doctor, or my waiter? And I specifically ordered the escargot,” I quipped.

He chuckled. “I’m Pete. The guards told me to ask you that stuff. And you got sesame chicken. Everybody got sesame chicken. With fried rice and an egg roll.”

“I don’t like egg rolls,” I said.

“I’m pretty sure the Boss doesn’t care,” Pete replied, but he chuckled again.

“There’s a plastic fork in there. If you try to hurt me with it, they won’t give you utensils anymore.

If you try to do anything with the food or water other than eat and drink it, they’ll just starve you.

So please behave. I don’t like scrubbing brains off the floor.

” The matter of fact way he said it was pretty chilling.

Like he’d had to scrub brains off the floor enough times to have an opinion about it.

“I’ll behave,” I said. “Where am I?”

“The Colosseum,” Pete replied. “You’re a gladiator now. After you eat, you’ll have your first fight. You win, you get to keep fighting. You win enough fights, you get to go free.”

“And if I lose?”

Pete just looked at me, and his eyes were sad. “Try not to lose.” Then he turned and left, locking the door behind him.

Well, mission accomplished. I was in the shit now.

* * *

I don’t know if it was an hour later or a day later, but I hadn’t needed to pee in a hole in the floor again, so probably closer to an hour.

The door opened and Pete came back in and held out his hand.

“I’ll take your trash now. If you need to relieve yourself, please go ahead and take care of business.

I’ll be back in a few minutes to take you out for the show tonight.

If you need weapons, we can stop by the armory. ”

“I suppose a fifty-cal is off the table?” I asked, getting to my feet and handing him the empty takeout container.

I downed the rest of the water and gave him the bottle.

I’d kept a couple tines off the fork, thinking I might be able to fashion some kind of lockpick out of them, but I’m neither a MacGyver nor a Houdini, so I didn’t hold out much hope for that.

“Yeah, we’re going melee for this fight, so knives, swords, or blunt weapons only. If you progress, you might get to use a pistol, but I’ve never seen the Boss actually give anybody a gun. He tells all of you that it’s possible, and I wouldn’t call him a liar, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

“You wouldn’t call him a liar because you believe him, or because you know he’d cut you from your nipples to your nuts if you did?

” I asked, stepping over to the hole and unzipping.

I didn’t have to pee much, but if I was going to fight, I might as well empty my bladder first. There are very few things worse than getting hit really hard in the gut and pissing yourself.

And I bet you can think of what at least one of those things is.

“A little of both, actually.”

“You seem like a decent kid, Pete,” I said. “How’d you end up as a prison guard? And where the hell am I, anyway? I haven’t been charged, or gotten to call my lawyer, or anything.”

“Don’t be obtuse,” came a deep voice with an Irish lilt from the doorway. “You know why you’re here. What I don’t yet know is who you are or why you tried so hard to join our little club. If you wanted to get in the ring, you could have simply asked.”

I turned around to see who was speaking, but he stood with his head shrouded in shadow, just outside the door. I could tell he was humanoid, and of medium build, and I could see the pale pink skin of his forearms. But that’s about it. “You’re the Boss, I presume?”

“I speak for him in all things; so as far as you are concerned, yes,” he replied.

That was interesting. Somebody was running things remotely, and this guy was just the onsite supervisor.

That added a layer of assholes for me to pummel, not counting everyone I’d need to thrash to get out of here with my skin intact.

“Okay, so I knew there was a fight club. And I wanted to get in on the action. But I didn’t want to be kidnapped.

I want to get paid, man. So where do I sign the contract? And how much do I get paid to fight?”

The man laughed, a short, harsh expulsion that was devoid of real amusement.

“Paid? Not for the opening bouts, pal. You get room and board, and you’re lucky we fed your ass.

You make it through tonight, and we can talk about some more perks.

We don’t make money off you undercard assholes.

You’re just here to get the crowd revved up for the real fights after intermission. ”

Okay, so this was set up like a real fighting promotion, with undercard, midcard, and headline fights. “What do I gotta do?” I asked.

“You fight. You’re the first fight of the night, and it’s a three-way with you and two other humans.

Or at least, mostly human. What are you, anyway?

You ain’t a were, and you ain’t vamp or faerie, so what does that leave?

Possessed human? Ninth Circle demon in a borrowed meat suit?

Some kind of Euro-trash cryptid I don’t recognize? ”

This was when I realized that I probably should have put a little thought into a cover story.

Becks or Luke are both way better at this shit than me, and I’d gotten way too comfortable having Flynn in my head to talk me through a false identity.

I couldn’t exactly explain that I was Quincy Harker—that was sure to get me promoted to the top of the bill, if it didn’t get me decapitated right off the bat.

And almost everything else I could lay claim to was either too recognizable or too scary.

So I went with the truth. Or a version of it, anyway.

“Cambion,” I said, claiming the heritage of a half-demon, half-human hybrid.

I did have a sliver of demon in me, inherited from Luke’s demon pal Skyffrax, so that should be enough to fool most people who could see my aura.

It would also explain my strength, speed, and ability to wield magic.

“Cambion, huh?” Pete said with a whistle. “We ain’t had one of those before, Boss. Have we?”

“Not here, no,” the Boss replied. “Mighta been one back in Denver, but that was before you were with us. Okay, a Cambion. I can work with that. You types are strong and fast, right? And can cast a little?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Okay, there’s no magic in the opening bouts, so we’ll have to collar you.”

“The fuck you say,” I said, reaching for magic. I was still blocked, but I could tell from his shoulders shaking that Bossman was amused.

“These cells are all lined with sheets of cold iron and silver. You can’t touch magic here any more than you can touch the moon.

But you’ll wear the collar, or we’ll take your head.

We got guys who’ve killed things a lot tougher than some candy-ass half demon, so if you want to keep your neck intact, you’ll let Pete wrap this around it.

” He held a hand out past my line of sight into the hallway, and when he brought it back into view, there was a silver collar in it.

He tossed it to Pete, who motioned for me to kneel.

“I can’t really get it fastened good if you’re standing, sorry.”

I knelt and suppressed the urge to rip Pete’s arm off and shove it up his ass as he fastened the collar around my throat.

I still felt Becks in the back of my mind, but it was even more muted than before.

But I could still sense her, so I knew she was out there.

And if she was out there, I wasn’t alone.

So I let Pete collar me, and then I let him lead me out into the hallway and toward my first fight.

I almost felt bad for the poor bastards who were about to be in the ring with me. Almost.