Page 14 of Reaper (Quincy Harker Demon Hunter #10)

P ete led me down the hall, but this time instead of turning left to go back to my cell, he led me to the right for about fifty yards then stopped before a slightly cleaner, but still reinforced metal door. “Winners get upgrades, so you get a better room now.”

“What do the losers get?” I asked, wondering if the answer was a slit throat and dumped on a golf course.

I had no idea if either of the men I’d beaten were shifters, and in the heat of battle, I hadn’t cared.

But I knew I left them alive, and there hadn’t been nearly enough bodies showing up for these assholes to be killing everyone who’d lost a fight, so I really didn’t know what they did with the losers.

“Every fighter has a bad day, or a bad fight. If you’re in a higher tier and you lose, you get dropped down a level,” Pete said.

“So the guy who used to be in this room…”

“This room used to belong to one of the fighters in the next round. Whoever wins, moves up; whoever loses, moves down. So this room is empty no matter what, and the one next door will go to whoever wins the second prelim fight, but I kinda feel bad for that guy, whoever it is.”

“Why?”

“Because you put on a hell of a show, and now he’s gotta follow that.

Otherwise the crowd is gonna hate him. It won’t make a difference in the fight, really, but the fans will be in your corner next week unless he does something amazing, and the crowd support really seems to make you guys fight harder. ”

“You don’t fight, Pete?”

He ducked his head and blushed a little.

“Nah, man. I’m totally human, so even with your collars on, you guys would rip my head off and crap down my neck.

Which has happened. Literally, in one of the main events a month or so ago.

This one huge Torment Demon just grabbed a vampire ninja dude by his shoulders and his head, and pulled his melon clean off!

Then he, I swear to God, held the vampire under him and took a steaming crap right down the guy’s neck.

It was the nastiest thing I’ve ever seen. ”

“Sounds like it,” I agreed. “So what happens to the guys I just beat?”

“Oh, one of them, I think his name was Terrell, he’ll get one more fight.

The other guy, the guy with the tattoos?

He’s done. He’ll wake up on a park bench with the mother of all hangovers and no idea where he’s been for the last month.

Our docs will put his nose back on first, though.

That was pretty mean, dude.” Now the prison guard at the cryptid fight club was judging me. Great.

“So you get more than one chance to win at the bottom tier?” I was trying to figure out how this all worked, but it wasn’t clear yet.

There were rankings, and tiers of fighters, but how did they keep all this hidden?

And how did they keep everybody prisoner for that long?

Paras aren’t known for being patient, or docile.

“Yeah, you get three strikes. If you lose three fights in a row, you’re done. Unless the first fight you lose is a main event. Then you’re really done.”

I stepped through the door Pete opened and into my new quarters.

This was a slightly larger cell, almost big enough to be considered a room.

Maybe eight-by-ten instead of the barely six-by-eight room I’d been in.

There was a small partition hiding an actual toilet, and a TV mounted high up on the wall.

A twin bed faced the television, and a nightstand held the remote. “Do I get cable now?”

“Dude, you get all the streaming services. The only ones we keep in the real nasty cells are level one conscripts. Everybody else is a volunteer. This is the worst of the volunteer rooms. You win next week and you get some nice shit.”

“And if I lose next week? Back to the cell?”

“You got it.”

“So everybody but me figured out how to sign up for this shit? How did they make contact?”

Pete shook his head. “No idea. And I probably wouldn’t tell you if I did. The Boss handles recruitment, and he doesn’t like anybody talking about the bouts to outsiders. He quotes some old movie all the time.”

“It was a book first,” I said, assuming he meant Fight Club .

Great book, great movie, killer author. Less useful in this scenario than you would expect, since that fight club only existed in the narrator’s completely fucked brain.

This one was real, and it looked like I had just volunteered to spend at least a week undercover.

I needed to find some way to get a message out to Becks, or she and Luke were going to start tearing parts of Charlotte down to the foundations looking for me.

“Do I get to lose the collar now?” I asked Pete as he turned to leave.

“No, sorry. Collar stays on. The Boss says it’s easier to leave it on you the whole time you’re here than to try and put it back on you later.”

Even with the collar still on, I felt a stronger connection to my magic than before, and Flynn’s presence in my mind was better, although still not clear. “This feels different,” I said.

“Yeah, these rooms aren’t shielded as much. The Boss figures you might need magic to heal. It’s warded against offensive magic, teleportation, and a bunch of other stuff that might make you a pain in the ass, but you should be able to heal. And shift, if that’s your thing.”

“It’s not,” I said, conjuring a ball of purple light and sending it to float in the corner of the room. “This is more my thing.”

“Oh, cool!” Pete said. “Wizards always make a good show when y’all fight. Real flashy. But don’t try to get out. The walls and doors are all lined with silver. Just not solid like the last level. So you can cast, but you can’t blast, get it?”

He looked so goofy standing there grinning at his dad joke that I had to give him a chuckle. “I get it, Pete. Thanks.”

“No problem, Murray. I’ll be back in the morning with breakfast. You get a little bit of choice in the menu now. Win next week and you’ll get even more. Your exercise time is at eight. Sorry, new guy gets the first time slot, as long as he isn’t a vamp.”

I walked over to the bed and sat down, slipping off my Docs and leaning back, remote in hand. “See you in the morning, Pete.”

As soon as the door closed, I reached out to Becks. You there, babe? I asked, feeling resistance from the crap lining the room.

Her mental voice came back thin and thready. Harker, are you okay? What the fuck happened? Where have you been? Luke and I have been worried sick!

I got into the fight. Not exactly the way I wanted, but I’m in.

I got kidnapped and held in a warded room until I fought tonight.

I won, so now I’m in a room with less security.

But I won’t be allowed to leave, so you’re going to have to investigate outside while I try to find out who’s in charge from the inside.

How long are you going to be stuck there? Can you blast your way out?

Not from here, I replied. The walls are lined with silver and cold iron, so they’d just absorb anything I threw at them. Makes it hard to talk to you, too.

Yeah, this is giving me a headache.

Same. But I’m okay, relatively speaking. At least I don’t have to piss in a hole in the floor anymore. To the victors really do go the spoils, at least in here. I’m gonna try to talk to some of the other fighters in the morning, and I’ll ping you if I find out anything.

You better fucking ping me regardless, Harker. I’ve gotten used to having you in my head all the time, don’t go vanishing on me again.

I won’t, babe. I promise. I let the direct connection lapse, and stretched out, closing my eyes and not thinking about how much I really don’t like being locked up.

* * *

I woke up a few hours later, about three in the morning according to the clock on the TV, which I trusted about as much as the average campaign promise.

I heard someone moving around on the other side of the wall from my bed, but it was too indistinct to make out anything.

I tried tapping on the wall in some kind of half-assed Morse Code, but all I know is SOS, and that kinda goes without saying if you’re locked in a cell in some kind of secret underground sports complex, or whatever the hell this building was.

I got up and moved around a little, stretching to try and loosen up the sore muscles from my fight.

I felt pretty good overall—the bonk on the head to get me here had done more damage than the match, but it still felt good to go through a few katas and limber up.

I examined my cell closely, but there wasn’t much to look at.

A twin bed on a basic metal frame, with clean sheets and a thick blanket.

Flat screen TV hanging from the ceiling, high enough that it would be a pain in the ass to pull down for a weapon, but low enough that it was possible.

All the cables were hardwired, so there was no electrical outlet to try and MacGyver a bomb out of, not that I had any idea how to do that without getting myself fried in the process.

The “bathroom” was as basic as it could be: a toilet, a small shower with a drain in the floor and a fabric curtain on a piece of curved conduit suspended from the ceiling, and a cubby in the wall holding a bar of soap and a hotel-sized bottle of shampoo.

I guess conditioner and a nice lavender body wash would have to wait until I won another fight or two.

There was a set of shelves built into the wall across from my bed holding a towel, a washcloth, and a pair of loose pajama pants in roughly my size.

There was a set of scrubs and a pair of boxers as well.

A sink beside the shelf with a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a cup for water completed the furnishings, which were barebones but far from the worst I’d endured.

Hell, given the fact that I’d been pissing into a hole in the floor twelve hours earlier, it was downright palatial by comparison.

Still, I would have liked a window, or something to let me keep track of time on my own.

I didn’t trust my captors any farther than I could throw a Buick, and screwing with your prisoners’ sense of time is a tried and true interrogation tactic.

Not that anyone had asked me any questions beyond my name.

Well, at least being left alone would give me time to work on my cover story, in case someone decided to care.

I felt Becks across our mental connection and could tell she was sleeping.

She was probably exhausted from searching for me, so I let her sleep.

I could touch magic, at least on a limited basis, so I sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor and worked on some new defensive tricks I’d been wanting to try out.

If the next fight was going to be against tougher opponents who had access to more of their abilities, it would be good if I had a new trick or two up my sleeve.

Spellcraft always relaxes me, as long as I’m practicing when no one is trying to kill me, so it didn’t take long for me to decide that my magic wouldn’t be harmed even a little bit if I leaned back against my bunk to think things through, and I was asleep in minutes.