Page 17 of Reaper (Quincy Harker Demon Hunter #10)

M y new room was a little closer to the arena and about twice the size of my last one.

This time I actually had a bathroom, with a door that closed.

Sort of. It was one of those sliding pocket doors, with anything resembling a locking mechanism removed, but it afforded the illusion of privacy, at any rate.

And there was a bathtub. A big-ass bathtub with jets.

And after getting pummeled by a fucking Reaver demon and getting sliced almost in half by poisonous claws, I needed some hot tub time.

I wouldn’t have minded an ice bath, but since I wasn’t a first-round draft pick, I figured the trainer’s room would be off-limits to me.

At least until I beat some other asshole’s face in.

“The crowd really liked you tonight,” Pete said, walking into the room ahead of me.

He pulled a remote out of his pocket and pointed it at the ceiling.

“Cameras and mics are off now. Nobody can see or hear us but me. Who the hell are you, man? There’s no way you’re some random drifter, not taking out Abraxar like that.

He’s shredded Alpha weres with those claws, but you didn’t even slow down when he tagged you. How did you do that?”

I wanted to trust Pete, I really did. He looked so goddamned earnest, like an Eagle Scout beaming with pride at his latest merit badge project.

Or whatever Eagle Scouts get proud about.

I wasn’t born in America, remember? And when I was growing up, it was a little more…

Dickensian than running around in short pants collecting patches for our sashes.

But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I don’t trust many people, and I don’t let many people get close.

It’s probably a character defect, but it’s a character defect that has kept me, and Luke, alive for a long time, so I think I’ll keep it.

“I fought a Reaver once about five years ago. I think I was in Texas. Maybe Oklahoma. I wasn’t exactly following a GPS at the time.

But the last one really messed me up, and I learned a spell to give me a bit of a shield against its poison then.

Abraxar counted on one drop of his venom to completely incapacitate me, and when that didn’t work, it made him easy pickings. Relatively speaking.”

I could tell by the look on his face that Pete didn’t buy it, at least not completely.

But that’s the thing about magic—it’s ninety-five percent art and maybe five percent science.

So unless someone knows the exact spell you’re crafting, and knows how to watch what magic does in the invisible ends of the spectrum, they can’t tell for sure if you’re full of shit or not.

So Pete couldn’t call me on my bullshit, he just knew he smelled it.

“That’s cool, man. Turning your defense into offense is slick. But how are you so strong and fast? You didn’t test for any fae genetics when we ran your blood, but you’re way faster than a human should be.”

Ran my blood? Fuck. If there were samples of my DNA somewhere, I had to make sure I got those back before I brought this whole place down around their ears.

I’d left plenty of blood splattered around plenty of crime scenes over the years, but to my knowledge I’d never had anything run where it could be labeled and tied directly to me.

That could be dangerous. If some shadowy branch of some shadowy government somehow found out that I had a sliver of demon soul inside me, they’d want to put a lot of very large needles in very uncomfortable places and run very invasive tests on me to figure out how to create demon-infused human weapons.

Shit, I didn’t trust the non-shadowy agency of the government I worked for with that information.

Becks knew, of course, and her boss, Paranormal Division Director Keya Pravesh, but I trusted Becks with my life and soul, and Pravesh had her own secrets to hide from the higher-ups, so we had a little mutually assured destruction working for us there.

I snapped my attention back to Pete, who was waiting for an answer from me.

“I don’t know, Pete,” I said. “I don’t know about all that DNA stuff.

I just know that when I started out, I had to cast spells on myself to enhance strength, speed, and endurance.

Over time, I had to refresh the spells less and less often, so maybe pouring the same magic into my body over and over again changed me somehow.

You know magic, dude, it’s all about intent and willpower.

I poured enough of myself into those spells over the years that I guess they just kinda… stuck?”

“Shit, makes as much sense as anything, I guess,” Pete said, with a broad grin that didn’t quite make it to his eyes.

He was holding something back, and I couldn’t tell if it was his decision, or if he had orders.

Either way, I was probably right not to trust him completely.

Although, if you’re the prisoner, it’s always a good idea not to trust the guards.

They have one job, and keeping you happy isn’t it.

“I think I’m gonna clean up and soak in that tub now, if that’s cool,” I said, peeling off my scrub top. It was crusty with a mix of dried blood and sand, and had several rips in it. “Think I can get a new change of clothes? These are hanging on by a thread.”

“Oh yeah,” Pete said, pointing at a small dresser.

There was no mirror, because you don’t give prisoners things that can be turned into a weapon in half a second, but there were some toiletries on the top, along with a belt.

“There’s real clothes in there. We kinda guessed at the sizes, but we went up and down a little in the pants and the shirts.

It’s basic stuff—t-shirts, jeans, sweats—but it’s all clean.

And there’s a six-pack of assorted beer in the fridge.

” He pointed to a dorm fridge beside the dresser.

“I’ll be back at seven tomorrow morning to walk you to the mess hall. Have a good soak, man. Good fight.”

With that, Pete hustled out of the room and I untied my Docs and peeled out of the rest of my disgusting clothes.

They’d been pretty good about providing fresh scrubs every day, but I’d still coated them with a thick layer of sweat, blood, and fine sand tonight.

I stood under the steaming shower for a while, letting the heat soak into my muscles, and reached out to Becks.

You there, babe?

Yeah, I’m here. Glad you’re okay.

A little banged up, but you should see the other guy.

I can. I’m in your memories, remember? I could almost feel her laughing in my head.

Yeah. Listen, it’s gonna take me at least a couple more weeks to get to the bottom of all this. You finding out anything on your end?

No more bodies have appeared, so whoever lost the last Main Event must have been someone that didn’t leave a corpse.

Or they’re getting better at hiding them. No Main Event tonight, so there shouldn’t be any deaths. Next big fight is Saturday, and I’ll move up another bracket.

There’s five brackets, right?

Yeah. I need to win two more before I fight in a Main Event. Any luck on figuring out where the fuck I am?

I’ve got a couple of ideas. There aren’t many places in town big enough for the kind of operation you’ve described, so we’re looking to outlying areas like Pineville, Concord, or Matthews.

That tracks. There’s still some undeveloped land up by the speedway. Not much, though. The chunks of North Charlotte and Concord where the racetrack was had grown up a lot in the past decade.

So we’ve narrowed it down a little, but I can’t get enough of a fix on your signal to narrow it down any. It’s like your thoughts are being bounced off a bunch of different satellites or something.

Weird. Well, I’ll let you get some sleep. Now that I’ve washed most of the blood off, I’m gonna soak in a tub of scalding water and let my muscles recover.

Wish I was there to wash your back.

It’s hard to blush across a telepathic link, but somehow my fiancée managed to bring it out in me, along with some other awkward responses to the thought of her washing my back, among other things. I wish you were here, too. Love you.

I know. She tamped down our connection and I filled the tub, sinking all the way up to my chin. There were a lot of questions still rolling around in my head as the heat soaked into my battered body. Where the hell was this place hidden? Who was running it?

I had a pretty solid suspicion that the shadowy “Boss” I’d met a few days ago might be the day-to-day manager, but I was pretty sure the real power lay elsewhere.

How much could I trust Pete? I liked the kid, but at the end of the day, he worked for the people running an underground fight club for cryptids, not all of whom were here voluntarily. That made him sketchy at best, and a murderer at worst.

What was I going to do when it came time to fight to the death?

I’d killed a lot of people—human and cryptid alike, but could I murder somebody for the entertainment of a bunch of bloodthirsty assholes?

Or would it be self-defense because if I didn’t kill whoever I got matched up against, they would definitely kill me.

Sometimes life was easier when I was just a berserk killing machine ripping Nazis to shreds all across Europe.

At least then I knew the assignment—see a Nazi, kill a Nazi.

This whole “conscience” thing was a real pain in the ass.

Those thoughts were all tumbling through my head like psychotic squirrels when the heat, the fatigue, and the relaxation of the soak all combined to pull me under into a deep, dreamless sleep.