a sure thing, so I kept one knee on his remaining shoulder so I’d feel if he tried to move, and then I reached down his arm for the blade he was still gripping.
Somewhere between reaching for it and getting to his hand, that unnatural stretching of reality stopped happening. Maybe it was just shock? I took the knife out of his soft, unresisting hand, and that was when I knew he was dead. I hadn’t meant to kill him, and if the blade I’d just taken from him didn’t have a high silver content, he hadn’t meant to kill me either. God.
19
THE KNIFE I’D taken off the dead man had been silver. He’d meant to kill me; good, that made me feel just a teensy bit better about what I’d just done. If there’d been more fighting to do, I could have rallied and kept going, but strangely, no one wanted to fight me now. Of course, no one wanted to hug or flirt with me now either; since I was drenched in fresh blood, I couldn’t really blame them. Going from a violent, life-and-death fight to nothing meant that all the adrenaline just washed away, which left me feeling weak, faint, nauseous, and really needing a few minutes out of sight of strangers to get my shit together.
I had cleaned my blade on the dead man’s shirt and put it back in its sheath. I didn’t have a sheath for the silver blade I’d taken off him, so it was still naked in my hand. I held it out wordlessly to Claudia.
“You’re entitled to the sheath and any other weapons or equipment that he’s carrying,” she said.
I glanced down at the body lying there in the huge pool of blood. I understood now why the throat wound hadn’t bled much; the hydraulics had lost too much fluid by the time I got to his neck. The blood was still shiny; it’s almost cheerful red when there’s enough blood in the right light. It would start to darken soon.
“Is there some place I can clean up?” I asked in that detached voice that people who don’t understand violence think means you don’t care, but that’s not it at all. It means you care too damn much, so much that your mind is trying to shut down so that you won’t feel all the emotional fallout all at once, because if you do, then you’re going to fall apart right here, right now.
“There’s an area where the fighters get ready and there’s a bathroom,” Claudia said.
“Which gives me the most privacy?”
“Bathroom,” she said.
“That,” I said.
She started guiding me away from the curtain opening that was the way into the main fighting pit. That was fine with me; I’d had enough fighting for the moment. Pierette moved up beside me and took my left hand in hers. I squeezed her hand to let her know I appreciated the gesture, but I took my hand back. If anyone was too nice to me in that moment, I was going to lose my shit, and I couldn’t afford that in front of all the wererats here.
They looked at us as we passed, some not wanting to make eye contact, but others stared, and some even nodded. I didn’t know if I was supposed to nod back or ignore them, so I pretended I didn’t see and did nothing but follow Claudia’s tall figure. She was walking ahead of me like a good bodyguard, clearing the crowd, but we moved in an oval of emptiness; people were staying away from us, from me. They weren’t all horrified, but they were all being careful of the crazy woman who had just torn a man’s arm off.
The numbness was starting to wear off, the nausea was getting worse, and I was having to concentrate on not letting my hands shake. The cut on my leg was stinging. I didn’t have a limp, but it hurt. “Is there a doctor on site?” I asked.
Claudia looked back at me. “Leg hurting?”
“Starting to,” I said.
She stopped and turned to me. “There are doctors in the fighters’ area.”
I sighed and fought a serious urge to rest the top of my head against her as if I were a tired five-year-old, but I fought it off. I’d just torn a man’s arm off; surely I could not break down for a few minutes longer.
“Sure.”
She looked at me for a second, as if she knew I wasn’t sure at all, but she