Page 5 of Ghosted

The moment violence drains out of me and leaves everything clean.

Tonight, it doesn’t fucking come.

My eyes cut through the crowd instead. Raised phones. Drunk faces though the smoke. Moving bodies. Too much fucking noise. Too many people.

I tell myself I’m not looking for anything.

Bullshit.

The camera flash shouldn’t matter.

The person holding it shouldn’t matter either.

But my gaze keeps searching until another burst of light flares near one of the steel columns.

This time, I see her.

Not all of her, but enough.

Long dark hair. Black clothes, and the lens is still pointed right at me.

Like she wants to see what happens when I notice.

Another flash hits before I’m ready for it.

White cuts across my vision, sharp enough to make the whole warehouse disappear for half a second.

I blink once.

Twice.

When the world comes back, the steel column is empty. The crowd is still screaming, smoke still crawling under the lights, but the girl with the camera has slipped back into the dark like she was never there at all.

My mouth curves before I can stop it.

Cute little trick.

Dangerous as fuck during a fight, but cute.

A flash like that could cost a man his timing, his teeth, maybe the whole damn match.

Lucky for her, Wraith doesn’t lose.

I drag my tongue over the blood at the corner of my mouth, eyes still locked on the empty space where she stood.

Alright, ghost girl.

Run your pretty little ass back into the dark.

I’ll still find you.

The hallway behind the cage is narrow, concrete, and lit by buzzing fluorescent lights that make everyone look half-dead.

It smells worse back here than it does on the fight floor. Out there, smoke and beer cover some of the rot. Back here, there’s nothing pretty enough to lie for it. Blood, disinfectant, sweat, old vomit near the emergency exit, and the cheap menthol cigarettes one of the med students keeps smoking while stitching fighters up for cash.

I peel off my gloves and toss them onto a metal folding chair.

My knuckles are split in two places. Nothing serious. There’s a cut above my eyebrow from the first hit, and my jaw aches enough that tomorrow chewing is going to piss me off.