“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.
“Are you listening to me?” Fin demanded, as even Olga ended up hugging brick.
“No,” I breathed, and doubted he heard it. But he must have seen it, because the wrinkled forehead acquired another one.
“Dory! I’m trying to tell you that you’re in danger!”
“No shit,” I said, as the trolls started scaling the burnt brick, pulling themselves up ruined floor after ruined floor, until the blue and red teams were facing each other, not on the ground, but on the walls.
And, finally, I understood. The fight—a free-for-all between a dozen massive guys on each side—was to take place in the demolished open space in the center of the building, up and down fifteen stories as combatants leapt and dove and swung through open air, getting assists from a few dangling ropes the showrunners had provided while dodging the pots and pans, broken bottles, and burnt, ragged-edged table legs many of the fans were wielding. Which they clearly planned to use to help their favorite team by clobbering the hell out of the other guys.
“Interesting,” Louis-Cesare said, his eyes shining.
Because he was insane.
Like Fin, apparently, who had leaned over to grab me and yell something in my ear.
“What?”
“. . . warn you . . . word on the streets . . . seat.”
“I can’t hear you!”
“Heard . . . want . . . seat!”
“What seat? It’s standing-room only!”
Fin was starting to look frustrated, but not nearly as much as I was, because how were we supposed to find anybody in this? We’d be lucky to avoid getting pancaked by a falling troll. Like, really lucky, I thought, staring upward at thousands of pounds of muscle hanging off barely-holding-together walls as a sound like a thousand trumpets pealed through the air, loud enough to make me actually nauseous. And to drown out whatever the hell Fin was yelling.
“I don’t want a damned chair!” I told him, ears ringing, as I tried to pry him off. Which should have been easy, because forest trolls are a lot less butch than their mountain counterparts, only this one was determined.
And now he was shaking me. And screaming in my already-wounded ear. “Not a chair! A seat! They want your Senate seat!”
I frowned at him. “What? Who does?”
“Hello.” It was the girl with the purple hair and the catsuit, appearing out of nowhere and giving me a little wave.
And the next thing I knew, I was flying.
Chapter Four
For a moment, everything was darkness and disorientation and the disturbing feeling of no longer being properly attached to earth. And thunderous noise, because the crowd was on all sides now, since I’d just been thrown something like three stories straight up. And flipped head over heels in the process, to the point that I only knew where I was by the torches burning in the lobby below, a ring of fire slinging around me as I tumbled through space, getting farther away by the second.
Gravity being a thing, I fully expected to be reacquainted with them shortly, when I hit the floor in a puddle of used-to-be-dhampir. And maybe I would have—except that I hit the side of a moving mountain first. To whom I clung like a limpet, because literally all I could see were thrashing bodies and flailing fists, all of which were bigger than my head.
Way bigger.
And aimed at us, I realized. Team Immovable Object and Team Irresistible Force were meeting with a crash like two freight trains coming together, with me in the middle. Because I’d happened to catch hold of the big boy, whom everybody seemed to agree had an unfair advantage.