Page 68 of Ghost’s Awakening

It should have settled me. It didn't. By this hour last Thursday, that wire had already given him a ten-count and half a card of fights. Tonight the green meter sat flat at nothing, the lot outside was the fullest I'd ever seen it, and not one fight had been announced.

Gravedigger knew my face. He'd pulled it out of a crowd of two hundred once, between one sweep and the next, and that was why the best set of quiet feet in this club stood at a painted window two blocks off instead of inside, where I could do something. The one job I was built for, and mine was the one face that couldn't go through that door.

The kid we'd taken in that parking structure had sworn the boss would be there tonight. The whole crew, he's there, everybody goes one more time. But the kid had also climbed into a van with four other men and never come home, and a man like Gravedigger recounts his tools. Five gone without a sound. If it were my building, my night, I'd either stay away entirely…

Or I'd change the locks and stand at the rail to watch what walked in.

An arch at the entrance. A mic that hadn't said one word.

Then the roar came.

It rolled out of the pit and across two blocks of night air, through brick and painted-out glass, arriving low and enormous, and the old paint on the window ticked against it.

My knee stopped.

Every head along the windows turned at once. Valkyrie came off her crate with the knife open in her hand, and I hadn't heard her do either. Reaper's chin lifted, the first move he'd made in an hour. A room full of people stopped breathing to listen to a building none of us could see into.

A fight roar spiked and died. This one climbed and kept rolling, one long sound out of a whole crowd's worth of voices, like the whole building had been promised something. Nothing about a first fight sounds like that.

I looked at Nolan. Nolan was already looking at me, one cup still on his ear, and the easy answer was gone off his face. The green meter sat flat. The line was silent. The mic hanging over that ring was still off, and a building full of people had just come up off its floor screaming over something nobody had announced through it. Why would a crowd come apart like that when nothing had gone into the hanging mic? Was the mic we'd rigged even being used tonight?

The roar came again, bigger, and the glass in front of me buzzed against its old paint.

"I don't like this."

This time, nobody told me I was wrong.

16

IGNITE

CALEB

Iwent left.

There was no thinking in it. My feet moved before the rest of me had finished seeing the knee, one fast slide with my weight low, and Renzo's kneecap came through the air where my mouth had been. Close enough that the wind off it stirred the sweat on my cheek, and I smelled him going by, tape and the cheap deodorant every fighter in that back hall used.

Then he was past me, and the crowd came up off its feet.

The sound hit the back of my neck like a hand before my ears caught up with it. The roar that had come down with the bell hadn't died yet, and this one climbed over the top of it and kept climbing, three hundred people learning in the same second that the first fight of seven wasn't going to be short. The plywood hummed with it through the soles of my feet.

Out past these walls, Ghost was standing in the dark, vibrating, waiting on one word from me. If a roar like that didn't carry the two blocks to him, nothing would. I hoped he heard it and knew I was still on my feet. Then I put him where I put Liam on fight nights. Behind my eyes, where I could feel him without looking.

Renzo's jump had carried him most of the way across the ring. He came down near the far ropes, already turning. The hemp took him across the back, and he let it throw him at me like a slingshot. Four strides to cross the ring, where I'd have needed six.

"Renzo, it doesn't have to be this way!" I threw it at him over the noise, and it went nowhere with him.

He came out of the sprint with a jab, straight down the middle, his whole run behind it. I slipped it outside and the rest of him arrived. A low kick, right shin at my lead thigh, and I turned my knee into it to check it, shin on shin, and the bones clacked. A short elbow toward my temple that I caught on the forearm. Then a knee coming up for my body while his hands went hunting for the back of my neck.

"Save your breath, Cal." Into my ear, through his teeth, his forearms grinding on my collarbones, working for the neck clinch that lets a Thai fighter put knees into you until you fold. "You'll want it later."

I broke his hands off my neck at the wrists and shoved him away, and he came straight back.

Four months taping up across from this man, and I'd never once watched him work. I'd seen him go over that top rope a dozen times on my way out the back, and never stayed for a round. Now I knew what had kept the Saint standing through nine months of Thursdays. The shin instead of the foot. A grip that hunted the neck so the knees could go to work. Muay Thai, out of a real gym, and something else under it that I couldn't name yet.

He stepped in again, and his right leg came up. Higher than a kick had any business going. Past my ribs, past my shoulder, a hook kick, and it was the heel that came around, whipping in at my chin from the outside with his whole hip behind it, and I saw it the way you see a pan slide off a shelf, clear as day and too late to catch.

Except I knew what to do with it. Chin up. Eyes to the beams. I threw my head back and my shoulders followed, the whole top half of me bending away from him, and the heel went through the air an inch under my jaw. I felt the skin on my throat move with the wind of it.