God's War (43 page)

“He’ll work old-fashioned,” Jaks
said. “No magic, but he can keep you from bleeding in your face. Maybe get me a
little longer with you.”

“You never could accept your death,”
Yah Tayyib said.

Nyx turned on him. “You’re right.
That’s why I came to you. I
trusted
you.”

“A bel dame can trust no one.”

“I’m not a bel dame anymore.”

It was the first time she’d ever
said it out loud.

Dahab pushed Rhys up into the ring.
Under the lights, he looked bigger, his shoulders broader. In the ring, for a
brief moment, Nyx could have mistaken him for a fighter.

Nyx stepped toward him, grabbed his
wrist with her bad hand. “You can do this?” she said softly.

“I’ve spent much of my life in one
ring or another,” he said. He looked her in the eye. She held the look for a
long time.

God, why didn’t I find you sooner?
she thought.

Jaks tossed a pair of gloves across
the ring. “Come now, bel dame,” she said.

Nyx handed the gloves to Rhys. “You
lace them on,” she said, and bent forward so their foreheads touched. He did
not draw away. So close, he smelled of blood and sweat and something even more
intimate. Perhaps it was fear she smelled, or the biting chemical odor of a
magician. But it was something uniquely Rhys. I’ll miss you, she thought.

“Keep the laces on the left loose,”
she said. “I want to be able to get them off with my teeth. You know.”

“I know,” he said.

Rhys slipped on her gloves and took
his time lacing them up. He was good with the knots on the right, but he tied a
simple bow on the left and tucked the ends into the seam of her left glove.

“Good?” he said.

“Good.”

Nyx was in no shape for a fight. She
was worse off now than she had been back at Husayn’s gym. She wanted to believe
that Jaks hadn’t had much time to box either, but as she looked across the ring
and saw Yah Tayyib take off Jaks’s coat, that hope went right out of her head.

Jaks was lean and muscled, and under
the lights the contours of her body were that much more dramatic. She was also
young, six or seven years younger than Nyx, and though she had lived a hard
life, there was no way she’d been rebuilt as many times, in as many ways, as
Nyx had.

Nyx didn’t look out at Rhys or
Anneke. And she would deal with Yah Tayyib later.

She looked at Jaks.

Yah Tayyib was rubbing Jaks’s arms
and shoulders. Nyx had no illusions that this would be a proper fight with
proper rules. She saw no one at the buzzer. It was going to be one long round,
with a moment or two for Rhys to patch her back up if she got too bloody.
Maybe.

Nyx stood with her hands down and
her left toe forward. She waited.

Jaks didn’t put in a mouthpiece, and
she didn’t offer one to Nyx.

“Don’t get hit,” Rhys said.

“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” Nyx
said.

Yah Tayyib took his hands off Jaks
and waved at the buzzer. A thousand hard-backed beetles exploded into movement,
sounding the bell.

Jaks leapt forward.

Nyx left her hands down until Jaks
was within hitting distance. Then she ducked and blocked Jaks’s wide, wild left
hook. As Nyx ducked, she pivoted behind Jaks and caught her with a left jab to
the back of the head.

The dull edge of the blade she held
in her fist jarred her palm. She sucked in a breath, stepped back into a
fighting stance.

Jaks stumbled and turned and moved
away, reassessed.

They circled, hands up.

Nyx watched Jaks gnaw on strategy.
She had opened too eager, just like she did eight years ago, hungry for a quick
fight, for first blood.

Most people who watch a fight think
it’s all about the muscle: hitting harder, moving faster. And, yeah, sometimes
it looked that way. But telling somebody that you won a fight by hitting the
other person harder and more often was like telling somebody that the way you
kept from drowning was by moving your arms and legs.

Once two fighters knew how to fight,
they stood pretty even. What made one win and the other fall wasn’t about blood
or sinew or sweat. It was about will.

Jaks was old enough to know that.

So was Nyx.

Nyx dropped her hands again.

Jaks made as if to hesitate, then
stepped in and fired.

Nyx ducked and blocked. The blow
glanced off her forearm. She had only enough strength to take a couple of good
hits. She needed most of these to bounce off, but she needed them to bounce off
in a way that made Jaks think she was winning. Nyx was tired. Not all of the
hunched posture was feigned. Her body ached. It didn’t feel like her body
anymore. Hadn’t for a long time. She sometimes wondered who she belonged to:
the queen, the magicians, the front; Raine had thought she belonged to him,
thought he had some responsibility.

But in the end it was just Nyx in a
ring.

Jaks sent out a double right jab, a
left cross. Nyx kept her hands up. Nothing got through, but she let Jaks keep
at it, keep pounding at her forearms and shoulders. Jaks tucked in an uppercut
to Nyx’s midsection.

Nyx huffed air and stepped left,
tried to get herself out of the corner Jaks was trying to push her into.

“Hit me!” Jaks yelled at her. She
batted at Nyx’s raised hands, and Nyx peered between her gloves at Jaks’s
pinched face. “Hit me, you fucking coward!”

“Your brother was the one who
wouldn’t fight,” Nyx said, pushing back at her with her gloves. “Your brother
was the coward.”

Jaks swung, a wide right hook,
double left jab, right uppercut. The combination was too fast for Nyx. The
uppercut caught Nyx hard under the chin. She fell back and caught herself on
one knee.

Jaks brought a gloved fist down. Nyx
rolled out of the way and staggered back up, brought up her hands. Sweat poured
into her eyes. The bell didn’t sound. It had been longer than two or three
minutes. Too long.

That was all right. Nyx didn’t
intend to fight fair either.

“Look at you, broken up over a dead
boy,” Nyx gasped. She sucked more air, tried to concentrate on her breathing.
Remember to breath, remember to breath….

You kept yourself from drowning by breathing
air.

Jaks swung again, a wild swing. Nyx
caught her in the belly with a hard left uppercut, pummeled the side of her
face with a left hook.

Jaks reeled and swung. She caught
Nyx across the ear.

Nyx grabbed her in an embrace,
locked their bodies together.

“You rigged this whole thing for a
dead kid, a coward,” Nyx murmured in Jaks’s ear, “and you’re no better.”

Jaks pushed her away and tried
forcing her backward. Nyx pushed back.

The lights were starting to flicker.
Nyx thought maybe her sight was going. She tried to blink the sweat from her
eyes. Her face was starting to swell up. She needed both eyes. She tried to
protect the bad side, the one with the swelling eye, but Jaks saw what she was
trying to do and swung away at that side with her right.

Nyx stumbled again. She saw darkness
at the edges of her eyes. Jaks pounded at her. Still with the right.

Nyx staggered back, put her hands up
again. Blood leaked from a wound just above her eye. She blinked, rubbed the
side of her face against her shoulder, smeared blood.

“Let me clean her up!” Rhys yelled.
“Let me clean her up!”

The lights
were
flickering.
What
was
that? Nyx tried to look up, but Jaks was on
her again.

Nyx hung back on the ropes and let
Jaks pummel her shoulders and forearms. She let the force of the blows bleed
into the ropes.

“You want to know how he died?” Nyx
said. “He was a bleeder, just like you.”

But of all the things she
remembered, vividly, from her last night as a bel dame, the death of Jaks’s
brother was not one of them.

Just another boy, another body, to
Nyx.

But to Jaks: the world.

What had Nyx done, what had she
given up, for her brothers? Her mother?

Jaks pounded at her again. Sweat
poured down her face. Her body shone.

Nyx’s arms were tired. She waited
out the shaking and the pain, kept taking the hits. She didn’t look directly at
Jaks’s face but kept her eye on the left side of Jaks’s body, just below the
collarbone. She watched the muscles move there from between her gloves. She
didn’t need her peripheral vision so long as she had a good look at the way
Jaks’s muscles and tendons moved under the skin.

She remembered to breathe.

“You can hit me harder than that,”
Nyx said.

Jaks’s assault slowed down. She was
losing momentum.

Nyx used the ropes to push herself
up against Jaks. She forced the younger woman back and yelled at her, “He bled
out like a dog.”

The swing came from the right. Nyx
blocked and saw her move left.

Bel dames didn’t trust anyone.

Lucky she wasn’t a bel dame.

Nyx dropped her guard on her right
and ducked and turned her head. Instead of smashing her in the temple, Jaks’s
left caught Nyx full force on the upper right side of her head. The hardest
part of her head.

Light exploded behind Nyx’s eyes.
She dropped to her knees.

Jaks cried out and fell back,
clutching her bad hand to her chest.

Nyx curled over her hands and pulled
at the knot on her left glove with her teeth. Her head spun. Black juddered
across her vision.

Jaks dropped next to Nyx and grabbed
her by her butchered hair, jerked at her throbbing head.

Nyx wedged her left glove between
her knees.

Jaks forced Nyx to face their
audience. “You could have cut and run from your team. You could be in Tirhan
now, living on that beach you told me about in that shitty cantina outside
Punjai. But you didn’t run, and this is where it left you.”

Jaks’s left hand was limp at her
side. She spoke through her teeth, whispered into Nyx’s ear, “You think dying
for your team makes you a hero? No, Nyx, heroes
live
for
what they love. It’s what separates the heroes from the cowards. Arran and I
weren’t the cowards. You’re the coward.”

She let go of Nyx.

“What do you think I’ve been doing
my whole life?” Nyx said. “Giving up?”

Nyx jerked her left hand free of her
glove and caught Jaks in the throat with her left elbow.

Jaks choked and clutched at her
throat. She made a clumsy swing with her bad hand, but the knock on Nyx’s head
had broken something deep, and when her bad hand hit Nyx’s head, it felt like a
halfhearted swipe, a slap.

Somebody yelled something. A dog
barked.

Nyx pinned Jaks. She brought the
razor blade across Jaks’s throat. It was a ragged cut, rough and desperate. She
pressed hard, sliced. Blood ran, Jaks thrashed, and Nyx sprang for the edge of
the ring.

Rhys leapt across the ring and
punched Yah Tayyib full in the face. It was a beautiful, unexpected hit, and
the old man toppled off the edge of the ring. Rhys jumped after him. Nyx rolled
under the ropes and came up in a crouch among the startled spectators, drooling
spit and blood.

People were moving, just shadows in
the dark. Nyx was momentarily blind after stepping from the glare of the ring
and into the dim. Nyx moved before her eyes adjusted. She heard Rasheeda
snicker. Nikodem was already standing. Yah Tayyib yelled.

Dahab’s gun went off.

Nikodem drew one of her pistols. Nyx
slammed the palm of her hand into Nikodem’s face. Nikodem fell back onto the
table.

Nyx pulled a poisoned needle from
her hair and jabbed it hard into Nikodem’s arm.

Anneke still lay under the table.
Nyx used the razor blade to saw Anneke’s bonds. She gave Anneke the razor
blade. Anneke crawled to her feet.

A tawny dog darted past them. Khos?
Where had he come from?

Nyx yelled at the dog. “The gun on
the floor! Give Rhys the gun!” She didn’t see Rhys. Where was Rhys? She
squinted and wiped the blood and sweat from her eyes.

The dog retrieved the gun with its
mouth and took off across the dim room.

Nikodem was holding a hand to her
gushing nose while stumbling toward the door.

Nyx heard Rasheeda snickering and
looked up.

Rasheeda carried no weapons. She
merely reached out and clawed at Nyx’s face. Nyx stumbled back and fell.

Anneke scrambled past Rasheeda
toward Nikodem and the other pistol.

“I’m hungry, sister,” Rasheeda said.
She stalked forward like a cat.

Nyx tried to get up, but the floor
was bloody and slick. She grabbed one of the chairs.

Rasheeda leapt at her.

Nyx got to her feet and pulled the
chair between them.

Rasheeda grabbed the chair and held
it up.

Nyx ran.

Dahab stood at the corner of the
ring as Nyx ran past. She shot at her. A chair kicked back and splintered an
arm’s length away.

Nyx covered her head and ran toward
the other side of the boxing ring, where the magicians had gone.

Rasheeda strode after her.

As she ran, Nyx saw Rhys and Yah
Tayyib; a cloud of beetles, flying ants, and wasps circled them. The floor was
covered in roaches. She crunched across them on bare feet. She saw someone run
past the struggling magicians. Beside the figure ran a tawny dog.

Somebody hit her on the back of the
head.

Nyx sprawled on the floor,
scattering roaches. The dog barked. Somebody yelled at her. Why was everyone
yelling?

Rasheeda stood over her, grasping
the broken leg of a chair. She swung it again.

A gun went off.

Nyx looked out into the darkness.

Rasheeda dropped the chair leg, and
clutched at her throat. She started to shiver and morph.

Dahab appeared from the other side
of the ring, trained her gun on Nyx. “You fucking—”

The pistol went off again. Dahab
jerked back. The rifle fell from her hands. A line of blood appeared from a hole
at the center of her head.