Page 1 of Harmless
1
DEVIN
Iflipped one knife in my left hand, catching the handle on every second turn in the air. With my right hand, I moved a smaller blade across my knuckles like my old man had taught me to do with a quarter when I was a kid.
The wooden target, with its faded circles of paint and hundred of tiny nicks on the surface, sat fifty yards away from me, but I wasn’t looking at it. I wasn’t looking at anything in particular, but I sure as hell was listening.
All of the gladiators noticed Santos’ absence. The Butcher was famous in and out of the pit, not that he’d ever wanted the fame. Everyone also noticed that Tezcatlipoca, his jaguar, seemed to hover around me like a shadowy four-legged bodyguard.
I didn’t particularly know or care what conclusions the others drew from this, not even if it made me a target. Even if I didn’t have a two hundred and fifty pound black jaguar prowling around me protectively like I was his cub, I was the Ghost. No one could touch me.
On top of that, I was annoyed. On edge. If I let one thing get under my skin, I was liable to let one of my knives fly until—oopsie—it landed in someone’s eye socket.
Everyone sparring in the pit was talking, except for the one person I wanted to hear from. Aside from my missing roommate, that was none other than the very jaguar currently sitting on his haunches, panting in the sun as he stared out across the sands.
“You know where Santos is. You’re just not telling me.” I caught the knife I’d been flipping and let it fly. The blade hit the wooden target with a thunk just to the left of center-mass. Not bad for throwing with my non-dominant hand, but had I been cool and not so twitchy, it would have hit dead-center. My emotions were getting to me, and that made me sloppy.
I never let anything get to me. My survival depended on my aim, and if my aim was fucked, I was just another corpse in the pit. For four years, the carnage of this place had always passed through me, never sticking with me. Guys disappeared all the time, whether their last act was fucking a guest or bleeding out on the sands.
But never Santos.
We were each others’ anchors here, a friendship made through being forced to endure the unthinkable. First, in that hellhole before the gladiator pit, and then afterward.
It had been three days since he went for a personal appointment with that woman and never came back. Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen her or her supposed husband either.
“Not a peep, huh?” I muttered out of the side of my mouth, the question aimed at the jaguar who was, in fact, not a jaguar.
Tezcatlipoca was some kind of deity, divine consciousness, what-have-you, that was currently occupying the body of a jaguar. He had a connection with Santos, but I had also heard the jaguar speak directly into my mind. What I’d heard sounded like riddled nonsense, but I would have taken anything, even a clue in pig-Latin, to know where Santos was.
Or if he was even alive.
But after three days and counting, Tezca didn’t seem interested in revealing any of that to me.
“Not that it’s important or anything,” I said, approaching the target to retrieve my knife. “But I care about Santos. I’m pretty sure you do too. So, anything you can offer would be great.”
The jaguar moved to the shade next to the row of targets and plopped his belly down in the sand with grunt.
“You’re making it awfully tempting to stab you.”
Tezca rolled over, twisting his spine as he brought his paws up and his belly to the sky.
“Really? You thinknowyou deserve belly rubs? Or are you just taunting me?”
He stretched his neck out, offering his chin up for scratches.
“Only if this is an even exchange, cat. I give you scratches, you tell me where the Butcher is. That’s the deal.”
I got nothing. No words, in any case. The closest thing to a response I got was a feeling of frustration, separate from my own. The sensation stroked along my brain, similar to when I heard the jaguar god speak to me. Tezca was annoyed with me, like we were playing charades and the answer was completely obvious to him, but I kept making the wrong guesses.
“I dunno, Tez.” I turned around, stalking several paces away to set myself up for target practice again. “I don’t get it.”
“You’re not the only one.”
I whipped around, knives ready, letting my instincts and keen hearing guide me to my new target—the source of the voice that had somehow managed to sneak this close to me.
The Hunter lifted his chin to give space to my blade that found itself nuzzled snugly against his skin. A red bead of blood welled at my knife’s edge, growing round and dark before it ran a crimson trail down his throat.
“What don’t you get?” I asked him. “That you missed a spot shaving down here?”
