“I already tried to help him, Ballard,” a familiar voice called out from another part of the house. “He’s too far gone, brah, too close to the dark.”
As if in response to the stimulus of the voice, one of the men in the pile of bodies moaned; a bubble of blood popped from his open mouth. His one remaining eye opened and moved about lazily. He said something in Spanish I couldn’t make out, but it was the human equivalent of the sound the dog had made, a last feeble groan for help, for life.
I wasn’t thinking, I wasn’t casting a spell, I was pulling up all the wires and conduits that the universe had seen fit to give me access to; this wasn’t magic, it was rage. And to be honest, the two, at their core, had always felt very pure and similar to me. I clutched my hand, clawlike, on the wounded man’s face and kept my other hand gently against the dying pit’s side. The man’s energy was still vital, was still strong; he could live with immediate medical care. I reached down into this anonymous man’s soul, his life force, the well of all he was, and I tore it out in big, ugly hunks. There was no care for the fragility of it, no concern for the fact I was taking every single thing this person had ever been from the time his soul gelled in his body, until this instant—good, bad, saintly, evil—every scrap of his contribution to the human condition. I pulped it, stealing it from the great wheel of karma, from his final judgment with his creator, from the Godhead, take your pick of whatever flavor you subscribe to. I was God in this bloody arena of doors, and I had judged.
The man’s soul shattered and fragmented like a snowflake made of spun sugar and light. I took the raw, undefined life force, the ineffable spark that changes a living, animate, aware being into a pile of rotting meat, and I pumped every iota of it into the dying dog. I felt the fading flame in the pit jump and sputter at the infusion of raw life. The dog’s life force struggled, fought, and finally fortified.
The pit lay on his side. His breathing was strong, his eyes closed, and he slept. I patted his flank gently and stood up, trembling from the anger and the effort, a little high and feeling indestructible after the stolen life energy had channeled through me. I noticed a wedding ring on the finger of the soulless man. For a second, I thought of going through his pockets, taking a look at the life of the person I had just erased. The cherry coals of my anger hissed fuck him, and I did none of it. I climbed out of the arena and headed toward the voice, headed toward Dwayne.
I found him in one of the two bedrooms on the ground floor. The walls were covered in dripping spray paint gang tags, and the air was thick with the smell of dog shit and death. There were steel wire pet crates, about half a dozen in this room, stacked on top of each other. Half the dogs in them were dead. The others, four fierce, muscular, scarred veterans of the arena, were quiet; they didn’t bark at my entrance. They didn’t growl or flinch in fear. They were surrounding a man sitting cross-legged on the filthy floor. He was rubbing and loving on the dogs, and they were eating up the first genuine affection most of them had ever received in their lives, licking and nuzzling the man.
“Hey, Ballard,” Dwayne said. Dwayne Perez-Walker Li was beautiful. I’ve yet to meet anyone living who disagreed with that statement. He was the best parts of several different ethnicities: African-American, Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, and Pacific Islander. His long, thick, black hair was clumped in dreadlocks, and he wore a fringe of a black beard and mustache. He was a shade over six feet and built as solid and muscular as these fighting dogs. His eyes were hazel, and he wore a frayed gray hoodie, baggy black shorts that fell to his knees, and leather sandals. Resting next to him was his badge of office, a length of steel rebar, wrapped in strips of colorful but weathered duct tape. A Barbie doll head was mounted on the top of the staff, colored in various hues of ancient, faded Sharpie and covered in glitter. The hair on the doll’s head was half shaved off. Radiating from the base of the doll head were small chains, like those used in toilet tanks. They hung with various charms on them: seashells, bottle caps, pigeon feathers, and old bus tokens.
“Hey, Dwayne,” I said. “You busy?”
“Not anymore, brah,” he said. There was no malice, no harsh edge to his voice. He sounded for all the world like a stoner surfer, innocent, at peace, even though he had just single-handedly slaughtered close to fifty people in this house without anyone getting off a shot. A large black dog with white paws, a German shepherd–pit bull mix, stood behind Dwayne. The dog was uninjured, clean, and not half-starving. She had been with Dwayne as long I could recall.
“Hi, Gretchen,” I said to the dog. Gretchen narrowed her eyes and growled lowly at me.
“She still fucking hates me,” I said. “Even after all these years, your dog hates me, Dwayne.”
“Hate’s harsh, man,” Dwayne said. “She just knows when you show up, we tend to get put into some ugly predicaments, Ballard.” Gretchen made a sound like “glomph” in agreement.
