Sunday December 28th 2014

Deep in meditation, Cesare floated around the Kundalini. It had shown more life during the fights than he’d seen in hundreds of hours of meditation. Last night it had felt hot and ready, burning with golden light, wantonly violent.

Only this week had meditation and the combat trance merged. Seeing the Kundalini move while he fought had been equally frightening and exhilarating. Did the serpent only respond when blood was on the line? Was Cesare’s life slipping along the razor between maiming and malignant pleasure what pulled at its dreaming mind?

He was fucked if even one of those was true. Uncontrolled power was a weapon he didn’t need, he’d rather it stayed asleep than answer to arcane rules beyond his mastery. Like a fair-weather friend that only showed when your house was burning, it was worth less than salt in the ocean. He liked fighting, but he wanted more than that.

Hours passed as he contemplated the Kundalini. Anger, hatred, bloody minded thoughts, and mock combat washed over the serpent like rain. Nothing affected it, Cesare couldn’t replicate what had set it off last night. Power that refused the leash of will was useless to him.

Knocking resounded from the door, sending ripples of frustration radiating across the bubble of his consciousness. Spiraling up from his mind, his body came to him in fits and starts as he turned his focus outward. Gripping the bed and the wall, he levered himself to his feet, stiff and clumsy from sitting for hours. Stretching out the aches, Cesare glared at the door as the insistent knocking came again.

The wolf grinned from the bed as it watched Cesare stumble to the door. Yanking it open, he caught Ramona in mid-knock. “Do you always sleep this late?” she said, a frown creasing her face. Her day wear was jeans and a tight blue shirt that flattered her figure.

“I wasn’t sleeping. I was meditating,” Cesare said, meeting her frown with one of his own.

“Sure you were. Well … I have breakfast ready, and we need to go over your training schedule.”

The wolf was already off the bed and coming up behind him. Stepping out of the doorway, Cesare made way for the wolf to slip past him and into the hallway. The woman quick stepped back as it flowed into the space she’d claimed. “I thought you might leave … the wolf in your room.”

A dangerous, black rage surged up through the bond, the cutting edge of hatred and killing need. Washing into Cesare, it ran through his body like acid, muscles tightening on the cusp of violence. Joining his own anger in incestuous lust, it mixed into a volatile need demanding an offering of pain.

How dare this woman think the wolf was a pet, easily caged while humans lived free. She was nothing but a rotting mass of flesh, decaying in the air as seconds ticked past. With her probing fingers and mercenary schemes, rat sharp eyes looking for advantage in every angle. Ramona was just the latest in a long line of people pimping his ass for money.

Facing her, a vicious smile etched itself on Cesare’s face. Flinching back from him, she tried and failed to pull her eyes away from his face. “It goes where I go.” The finality of the statement was the promise of death, immutable, carved into the fabric of reality. Dark satisfaction thick with happiness filled the etheric thing binding him to the beast. Cesare didn’t control the wolf, it went where it willed, but joy pulsed through the bond at his words.

Ripping away from his hellish eyes, she turned and opened the door across from his. Without waiting to see if he was following, she quick footed it into the room. Cesare caught the door, holding it open as the wolf brushed against him on its way into the room.

Different from Cesare’s, it had its own living room complete with sofa and chairs set around a small table. Ensconced in a cushy chair he'd pulled up; Chris busily stuffed his face with pancake. The man looked like three miles of bad road, piggy eyes peeking out from blood engorged tissue, purple Band-Aids with pink hearts covering incisions around his eyes.

Ramona gave him a smile as she sat in the chair next to Chris. Cesare noted the bathroom and the doors that lead to her bedroom and Chris’s room. White drapes were pulled back from expansive windows, buildings of steel and glass pushing into the room, the city scape hungry for eyes. Winter light burned the room with antiseptic rays.

“Take a seat and help yourself,” she said, gesturing at the table. She’d taken up a chair next to Chris, hand coming down comfortably on the fighter’s thigh. United, the two faced Cesare. Numbers matter, a psychological pressure felt along the lobes of the brain, distorting self-worth. Cesare took a seat on the sofa with the wolf laying across his feet, its stygian fur gleaming in the light with an almost iridescence, an unbreakable and inviolable border.

Taking the plate of bacon off the table, Cesare set it on the sofa next to him, feeding a piece to the wolf while he filled his own plate with odds and ends. Leaving the wolf behind had been nothing more than a tactic to isolate him. To make him pliable, easier to push and pull into the shape she wanted. The easiest thing in the world was to tell a person they had no one and make them believe it. Secretly, we all know we're not worth loving.

The wolf put that idea down without a whimper. His own pleasure ran through the bond as he handed another piece of bacon to the wolf, its butter soft lips brushing against his calloused fingers. It was them against the world. There was no one else he’d rather have beside him.

Guilt flashed through him. It wasn't that he didn’t miss the others, he did. But he was an asset to them, not a person but a tool. They used him for what he could do, but didn't like who he was. It was a never ending race of value, a constant seeking need to fill, buying minutes with blood forged skill, just like the deal he’d made with Ramona.

The wolf had no agenda, no schemes ruled its heart. It was free of the complications that bound his other relationships, it was unlike any friendship he’d ever had. Only animals love freely, man and monster always have an angle, a price you’ll pay by hook or crook. Transactional, a trade in needs with nothing off the table, twisting promises and contracts forged in Faustian words.

“We have a big day planned for you.” Looking up from his food, Cesare met Ramona’s calculating eyes. “I’m going to get you squared away with a mouthpiece and a cup.”

“No thanks,” Cesare said, taking a drink of his water.

Chris stopped eating, leveling a disgusted look at Cesare. “Look, you need to listen to the professionals. We do this for a living, you need a cup and a mouthpiece.”

“Why do you fight?” Cesare asked.

“Because I want to,” Chris said as he shoveled a mound of eggs smothered in ketchup into his mouth. Raising his head, Chris grimaced at Ramona’s glare. “I’m not good at anything else and I like punching people.”

Cesare had broken his bones, ruined his face, and taken his shot at a dream he’d bled to get. You don’t shrug that off with a grin and some tea. People didn’t like Cesare for a host of reasons. It was the fact that formed the foundation of his life, long since smoothed out by needy hands and washed in bitter tears.

Taking the last bite of his breakfast, Cesare set his plate aside. Small piggy eyes glared out of Chris’s swollen and lumpy face. “I didn’t learn to fight, I learned to kill.” Leaning back, Cesare relaxed muscles wound tight with lethal readiness. “I fight for my life, without props. I won’t have a cup or a mouthpiece if I get jumped. I don’t need one for the fights.”

Lips twisting with derision, Chris opened his mouth, shutting it slowly under the heat of Ramona’s glare. Turning to Cesare, her lips twitched in a halfhearted smile. “A lot of fighters get the wrong impression when they come to the fights. The chain link cage, bloody cement, and the crowd, are orchestrated to create an image. But this isn’t life and death.”

“Because if it was, I would’ve destroyed you,” Chris cut in.

Sending a quelling look at the fighter, Ramona continued, “This is theater. Each fighter needs a gimmick, Baby Face’s, Heel’s, Tweener, Wild Savage, Outsider. Like the cage, it’s all for show. Don’t get me wrong, the fights are real, and people get hurt, but that’s why we have a doctor on site. The fighters know it’s not just the win, but how they entertain.”

Shaking his head in disgust, Chris cut in again. “What she’s trying to say, is that it’s stupid to treat this like its life and death, when it’s about benjamin’s. We fight in the cage, but everyone knows this is a money game.” Trying to calm himself, Chris’s voice lowered, but it only compressed the anger into something like hatred. “You went too far. Sure, we hurt each other, but we don’t maim. When we can’t fight, we don’t get paid. You didn’t just hurt them, you took food from their table, shoes off their kids, put a hurting on their family that will cost more than stitches.”

Ramona moved into the pregnant silence, picking her words carefully. “We train fighters to fight, not kill each other.” Hesitating, Ramona looked over at Chris before leaning forward and locking eyes with Cesare. “You got talent, Caine. But you crippled three guys and they won’t be earning for weeks if not months. You don’t have to go that far in the cage.”

They were just fighters. None of them had a grudge against him, they weren’t looking to hurt him for giggles. They hadn’t spent weeks tearing him down with words. They were looking for quick money and a good fight. There were all the reasons in the world to take it easy on them. And one reason not to.

He wasn’t a fighter. He didn’t learn how to fight to make money. He’d learned to survive. To be strong enough to push back the creatures slinking just on the edge of sight. To break the needy fingers that hunted for his violation, and gouge out the vicious eyes of the humans hungering for his degradation. He’d learned to kill, never stopping until the man was crippled, maimed, and destroyed. How you train is how you fight, how you fight is how you survive. It was a mantra burned into his bones, and no matter how much his flesh wept, that savage truth wouldn’t come out.

They wanted him to fight their way. Chris wanted it because it made the cage safer. He was a career fighter, and crippling meant losing the one thing he could make a living at. You couldn’t blame him for not wanting to be pounded into the cement. Ramona was in it for the money, the more fighters out of commission, the more money she lost.

That was their angle, but fighting nice wouldn't cut it against the things that prowled the moon-soaked nights of Primrose. His mind stalled and stilled on the thought. Did he have to go back? He had money in the pocket with more to come and free room and food. He wasn’t the grifter who’d slunk through the Primrose gates with the smell of garbage on his breath. Why would he step back onto the tightrope between death and discovery?

He could do this. Could make a living fighting chumps in the cage, leaving bloody offerings for people who’d never thrown a punch. Splayed out in front of him, gutted by truth's scalpel, the life that could be beat wetly gleaming organs. Traveling from city to city with Ramona, crippling fighters and fucking groupies. Money in his pocket and a life lived outside the chains of society. Skirting the edge of civilization, taking savage delight in bleeding men out onto concrete. It was an option, and he hadn't had that when he started at Primrose.

His eyes fell to the wolf, the unspoken question met by indignant feral eyes. Of course, it would come with him. If he wanted to roam the concrete jungles and fight humans in squalid holes, it would be there with him. It didn’t care where he went; it had chosen to walk beside him, nothing would change that.

Simple and beautiful, whole in a way Umbrae Lunae and humans could never be. People are treacherous, never willing to help without seeing a payday. Every friend has an angle and if you don’t know it, then you are the angle. Animals are better than that. They kill and die on the truth of their hearts, no logic, no lying eyes and poisoned lips.