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ore or less intact.
“Been trying to reach you all day!” Fin yelled, while continuing to accept money and write slips. “You kill another phone or what?”
I held it up. “Got it on me!”
“Well, turn it on once in a while! I got news!”
“A job?” I yelled, because Fin had been known to shoot work my way. And while I didn’t think moonlighting was normal for a senator, neither was starvation. And nobody had bothered to mention before I took my shiny new Senate job that it didn’t come with a salary.
A girl needed to get paid.
“No! A warning!”
He made a disgruntled sound and handed the bookmaking off to his senior associate. And clambered down the mountain, although not all the way. He found a perch that left him approximately chest high on Olga, which seemed to be a view he liked. Because he simpered at her while she gazed around the lofty space above us, probably searching for the albino.
I poked him. “What warning?”
“There’s a rumor going around—some of my competition are already giving odds.”
“On what?”
“On how long you’ll last!”
“What?” It felt like I was saying that a lot tonight.
Fin nodded. “I’m not taking them, of course, us being friends and all, but others—” He broke off, eyeing the gleaming stash I was still clutching. “Of course, if you want to get a bet down on something else, I can—”
“Fin!” I pushed the gold at Louis-Cesare, who indicated with a grin that his hands were full of bear. Bastard. So I shoved it in my pocket for the moment. “What are you talking about?”
“Just that you’re a senator now, and nobody saw that coming!”
“So they think I’m going to get fired?”
“No. They think you’re gonna get dead!” he yelled, because some enthusiastic drumming had started from somewhere behind us, loud enough to tear through the din and my head.
I glanced around to see a bunch of trolls emerging from a room across the lobby. They were threading their way ponderously through the crowd, not that they had to work too hard. Everyone was practically trampling one another to get out of the way.
I didn’t blame them.
They were the biggest damned trolls I’d ever seen.
The nearest was what I called shadow-on-a-rock, a mostly gray skin tone with purplish highlights in the crevasses, and had to be at least twelve feet tall. He had a torso like the Hulk’s and arms thicker around than Olga’s entire body. I’d never thought of her as a dainty, sylphlike creature before, but if these were what full-grown male trolls looked like, I was revising my opinion. And he was one of the smaller ones.
The biggest was fortunate that the ceiling was mostly missing, because the bits that remained were well below chin height, and that was despite the lobby having had a vaulted ceiling. He was a colossus with sun-kissed-mountain-range skin, mostly indigo with a scattering of orange-copper highlights. They gleamed in the torchlight, along with a map of scars, some new and vivid, some old and stretched, scrawling across the massive chest and back and arms. Advertising just how many of these contests he’d already survived.
I licked my lips uneasily. I’d thought the duo living in my basement were big, but I now recognized them for what they were: scrawny adolescents. And understood a little better why Olga had wanted an entire truckload of backup.
Not that we were looking so formidable, all of a sudden.
There seemed to be two groups, distinguished by the red or blue bandannas they wore on bulging biceps. Or, more likely, repurposed tablecloths, because just look at them. Most of the crowd didn’t even come up to their waists, including some of our garden-variety green-brown boys, while some of the smaller beings scuttling around were in danger of being turned into a greasy spot with one misplaced step.
I didn’t see anybody get crushed, but one obviously drunken ogre a few stories above us threw a bottle, and had the good aim or bad luck to have it bounce off the biggest guy’s head. I doubt it hurt—the rock-hard cranium was encased in a helmet it didn’t need—but I guess it made him mad. Because a split second later, maybe fifteen hundred pounds of muscle had jumped up, grabbed the offender, and landed back on the tile, with enough force to shudder it under our feet and to crack it around his giant ones.
And then he casually flicked the guy through a wall.
It looked like that was what the crowd had been waiting for, because they started roaring and stomping even harder than before, giving every impression of enjoying the pregame show.
I barely noticed. I was too busy wondering if maybe I couldn’t see a ring because we were standing in it, and how it might be a good plan to, you know, get out, which was what everybody else appeared to be doing. The groaning stairways were suddenly flooded with people trying to get to higher levels, and crushing us against the wall in the process.
