Death's Mistress (Dorina Basarab, #2)(124)

The fact that he had a rifle didn’t mean he wasn’t a vamp, but the weed probably did. Drugs had no effect on the vampire lack of a metabolism and so were uninteresting to them. They had plenty of other vices to compensate.

I stood up, tucked the tube inside my jacket and jumped through the ward. Any lingering doubt I’d had as to the type of doorkeeper I was facing wore off when there was no immediate response to the small tone the ward sent out at my entry. By the time the shadow’s bootheels hit the cracked cement underfoot, I was already at the bottom of the stairs and reaching through the iron cage to grab him by the shirt. A quick slam of his head against the unyielding doors knocked him out and the keys were in his pocket.

Simple.

What wasn’t so simple was what was reverberating off the walls. It sounded like drums or too many hearts beating too fast. I couldn’t pin it down, but it was doing bad things to my blood pressure. I stepped through the door and over the inert guard, taking a second to attach him to the grille with the cuffs he’d thoughtfully had in his back pocket.

A couple of small red dots had stuck to my jeans. I peeled one off with a thumb. It said “forty-two.” I flicked off a few more, and they had numbers, too. They were spilling out of a box with a lot of red, fewer orange and a couple of bright yellow circles. All had numbers, except for the yellow ones.

I took one of each, appropriated the guard’s flashlight and headed down the corridor. It sloped away on a sharp incline, not quite as steep as the stairs but close, and the thrumming sound got worse the farther I went, echoing strangely in the enclosed space. There was something familiar about it, something I’d heard before, I just couldn’t place it.

And then I didn’t have to wonder anymore.

A door slammed open at the end of the corridor, and a guy staggered out, obviously inebriated. A wash of light, noise and strong smells spilled out along with him. I caught the door before it closed and found myself in the back of a large room lined with sloping stadium-style seats and packed with people. I couldn’t see much else, because a couple of hulking shapes blocked my view.

The two vamps looked at me, one bored, the other just plain mean. The bored one said something, but I couldn’t tell what. My hearing is better than good, but the noise level was incredible. The commotion going on behind them had reached a fever pitch, and the crowd was chanting and stomping their feet.

That was the weird sound I’d heard: the collective pounding of hundreds of feet on a dirt floor. The place looked like it had once been a cellar, one of the mass of old structures undergirding Chinatown. They and the tunnels that connect them were once used by the tongs as escape routes in their constant feuds, but these days, they’d mostly been converted to underground shopping malls and storage areas for smuggled Gucci knockoffs.

This one appeared to have been appropriated for another purpose.

Golden graffiti traced along one grimy wall, but unlike Fin’s, it wasn’t scrolling. Instead, a running outline of abstract shapes girdled a list of names, with numbers scrawled alongside them. They were odds, I realized, recognizing the formula.

The bored guard pointed at the yellow dot on my clothes and hiked a thumb to the left. I didn’t know what that meant, but he moved out of the way, letting me pass, so I went in the specified direction.

I stayed near the wall, and edged around the crowd, trying to search for a familiar figure in the crush. It wasn’t easy, as it was standing room only in the back, and my head only came up to the shoulders of a lot of the people. But here and there I caught glimpses of what looked like a live-action version of Olga’s chess set.

A powerfully built male ogre in a leather loincloth was jabbing a long spear at an equally minimally attired troll. The troll had a club, but he wasn’t using it. It lay ignored on the ground, the heavy wood a poor substitute for his own stonelike hands.

He appeared to be trying to crack the ogre’s head between them like a nut. The ogre didn’t seem in favor of this idea and kept jabbing the spear at the troll’s small eyes. Considering how useless troll eyes are anyway, this seemed a bad strategy to me, and it had the double effect of pissing the troll off.

Luckily for the ogre, who was maybe half the troll’s size, mountains of troll flesh do not move quickly. He was just keeping ahead of the massive hands, one of which smashed down into the floor with a bone-shaking thud. The troll was becoming frustrated, and the ogre was growing tired. This wasn’t going to last much longer.

I spied a kind of box seats overhead, in the form of a platform jutting out of the wall. It looked like it had been built over the entrance to another tunnel. A rickety-looking set of wooden stairs went up to it and the back disappeared into darkness.

I headed for it, hoping that the stairs would give me a better vantage point from which to scan the room. There was a vamp at the bottom of the steps, which had a rope stretched across them, but he caught sight of the yellow tag on my shirt and let me through. I was halfway up when the stairs, which had been vibrating slightly to the enthusiastic stomping of the crowd, jittered more violently.

A man staggered out of the darkness at the top, a spill of bright red blood cascading down the front of his white dress shirt. I had a few seconds to recognize Geminus as he teetered on the edge of the platform, along with the gaping wound in his throat, the knife in his back and the disbelief on his features. Then he was falling, hitting the ground in the middle of the two combatants, his blood leeching out to stain the arena sands.