But the wolves came, and other men to fight did not. The ringmaster took up his blade, but stayed behind her, earning the laughter and jeers of the crowd for his cowardice. Livia turned toward him, baffled, as the wolves separated and prowled toward them, their hunger greater than their fear. "I’m not going to slaughter them for you!"

  He smiled, cool and calculating. "Then you’ll die."

  Livia, who had spent her entire life judging a worthy death, thought that one might well be, if it took him with her. But she had no particular desire to die for the ringmaster, and there was, perhaps, another choice. He would never be accepted by the goddess, never be given the bond he craved. Livia herself hadn’t sought the shifter power in any battle she’d fought, but reaching it for now might help her survive. If she was worthy. If the goddess of beasts, and the pacing wolves, looked into her heart and found it true, hungering not for power but a kind of justice, then perhaps she could bond with a wolf, and become like Joash, a wild shifter, untamed by the ringmaster.

  The first wolf leapt for them, and Livia cast away her sword.

  She had never fought a wolf before. Not unarmed, not at all. The beast was huge, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, less dog-like than she imagined: rawer. It smelled of fear and desperation, like anything taken from its wild place and forced to fight for the entertainment of screaming people. Its teeth closed a scant breath from her throat, powerful snap that would have easily ended her life, and in a peculiar moment of calm, Livia understood what Joash had felt, facing the tiger.

  There was no death to be had, here. No fight to be won. They were only two animals, both caught in a battle that had nothing to do with them, not as they were. She surged, straight-arming the beast with her shield, and it somersaulted over her head, yelping with dismay as the sand scattered beneath it. More wolves came as she rolled to her feet, and more than one, throwing itself at her, bounced off the shield and staggered in confusion. Livia put her back to the ringmaster, his presence a form of unreliable protection, and turned to find the big male who’d come at her first. He was on his feet again, shaking himself. A warning growl set a number of his pack back, as if they understood that the fight was now between Livia and himself. Dogs didn’t fight that way, one on one, and she supposed wolves didn’t usually either, but perhaps this was the goddess beginning to touch them both, finding another way.

  The crowd was so loud she almost couldn’t hear it anymore, an endless roar of excitement that hardly varied in pitch or volume. It wracked the air, making it thick as the wolf came at her again, more a test, this time. She knew the dance. It was as familiar with a beast as a man, finding weaknesses, reaching an understanding of strength, judging when and what to risk. There was no animosity, not even any fear as the air shimmered between them, more than just the heat rolling off the sand. Livia whispered, "I don’t want to hurt you," and for a moment, it seemed as if understanding glimmered in the wolf’s golden eyes.

  They went at each other full force this last time, Livia casting her shield away as if the screams of the crowd were armor enough. Just as they were about to meet, pain sliced through her, so sharp and clean it made no sense. A blade protruded from her chest, red with blood. The strength was gone from her legs and she was falling, falling, while the wolf rushed onward, unable to stop his headlong charge. Livia was gone, though, fallen, not there to meet the exchange of power she had seen with Joash, with so many others, time and again over these past months.

  But the ringmaster was there. He had been only a step behind her, at her back, where she’d put him for some sense of protection against the pack, but it had never been the pack she needed protection from.

  The last thing she knew was the dawning astonishment and the burgeoning anger that the ringmaster had stolen her bond.

  CHAPTER 11

  Elissa’s chest hurt, an emptiness that felt like death inside it. Like death, like the loss of an impossible bond, like the cut of a sharpened blade. She couldn’t breathe around the pain, around the emptiness, around the loss. If she cried, she thought it must be without sound. She didn’t want this, this intimate knowledge of a tragedy millennia past. She didn’t want to feel who she had been, or what had happened to her. There was no escaping it, though, whether it was her all too vivid imagination or some connection with the woman she had been so long ago. She couldn’t break free, and thought she would die of it.

  "Elissa." Joash’s voice, soft and sorrowful, gave her almost enough room to breathe. He reached across the cafe table, taking her hand, and the warmth of his fingers spilled through her, taking away some of the cold touch of death that filled her. "Elissa, I’m sorry. I didn’t know it would hurt you, to hear it. Look at me. Can you look at me?" He touched her again, raising her chin so her gaze lifted to his, and the emptiness inside her burst in a shock of pain so sharp she cried out.

  But she could breathe in again after that, could remember what breathing was, and the moment of her death—of Livia’s death—lost its hold on her. Lost the worst of its hold, at least, which would do for now. Her hand was icy in Joash’s, and even the light touch against her chin felt heated. "I’m sorry," he said again. "Breathe, if you can. Breathe. I’m sorry."

  "It’s not your fault," she whispered when she could speak. "It just felt so real. Like I was there. But what—what happened? When she died, what happened next?"

  "Lupus forced bonds on the rest of the pack," Joash said softly. "On every wolf that was brought to the arena, for years and years. He made so many wolf shifters, and controlled them with his every word. Controlled all of them," he corrected himself, unhappily. "Not the few who were left like me, who found their way to the bond naturally, but all of the ones he had chosen to fight in hope of making them shifters became his…thralls. He held power over them and could force them to do his will. All the way down through the generations, gladiator shifters have been subject to the whim of the ringmaster family."

  "The…the ones who run All-Arena Entertainment? Is that what you said?"

  Joash nodded. "I told you we have some peculiarities, as a species. One of them is that when we reach adulthood, we spend several years with an undeniable urge, an instinct, to fight. Even my own children suffered from it, and were drawn to battle. For centuries, Lupus made sure those battles were fought in the coliseums, and when those fell out of favor…" Joash shrugged helplessly. "They went underground, or found other ways to earn their tribute."

  "Lupus made sure? Not his family?"

  "I thought he died." Tension filled Joash’s voice and body, giving him the air of a tiger coiled for a strike. "God knows I tried to kill him, after Livia’s death, but I was a slave, and he the ringmaster. It wasn’t easy to get to him, even after I finally won my freedom. He died—I believed he died—at his own son’s hands. Ambition runs strong and bitter in that family."

  "He lived, though." Elissa’s question was scarcely a sound, even to her own ears. "Is he still alive?"

  "He is." The controlled anger in Joash’s voice could have powered the city for a month. "I only just learned it days ago, and now I finally think I understand why I’ve lived all this time. I thought I was the only one, Elissa. The only immortal among us. I thought perhaps it was because I was first. Now I know it’s because I have unfinished business with a man I’ve believed dead for two thousand years."

  Panic clenched Elissa's heart. "What will you do?"

  "Find him," Joash said. "Kill him."

  "What if you can't? What if he—" She couldn't even say it. The thought of losing this man she'd only just met overwhelmed her with horror.

  "He won't," Joash said flatly. "I haven't waited this long to lose to him now."

  "Do you think he has?" Elissa's voice shot up. "He's been running fights for thousands of years. You think he's going to be content to just roll over and lose now?"

  "I think he must know, must have known all along, that I'm alive, Elissa. If he has, then for two thousand years, he's chosen to hide from me. I don't think a man confident of his victory would do that."

  Elissa sat back, arms wrapped around herself as she stared across the cafe table at him. He had a point. Even in the midst of the heart-pounding fear of losing him, she had to admit he had a point. After what felt like forever, long enough for her coffee to get cold, long enough to be impressed that Joash could just sit there and take her staring at him just as a cat would, she closed her eyes and turned her face away. "You'd better tell me the rest."

  "There have been changes, lately," Joash said as if their conversation had never paused. "Challenges among our kind. Not just to each other, but to the way things are. Fated mates who have…" A smile played at his mouth when Elissa glanced back toward him. "Who have refused to accept the status quo," he said, as if choosing his words carefully, and as if he admired the people who had stood their ground. "Mates who have gone beyond what our rules and laws and traditions say is allowed. Mates who have fought shifters in an arena, mates who have called their shifter partners back from the far side of death, or broken down fight rings that have been running aeons. All-Arena Entertainment has recently changed hands, and its new leader refuses to use the ringmaster power. He believes he has to end this cycle, the story of ringmaster supremacy over the gladiator shifters. He believes he has to challenge Lupus Aurelius in the arena. Believed," Joash said after a moment. "I claimed that fight as my own. And then I found you, Elissa. I can't help but think it's connected."

  "Humans like patterns," she said, almost sharply. She was angry with him, she thought. Angry at the idea that she could lose him, having only just found him. As if she’d been the one waiting for decades and centuries, instead of being the one who had only just learned that such a thing as fate even existed. "It's one of the dangers of interpreting archaeological sites and remains. We see patterns that aren't there."

  "We do," he conceded. "But I've never found you and Lupus at the same time before. It feels like coming full circle. And—" He hesitated sharply enough that Elissa's eyebrows drew down with curiosity. His hesitation drew out, then faltered into an indrawn breath and a shake of his head. "I keep thinking this is the ninth time I've found you, and that cats have nine lives. I'm not normally superstitious, but in this case, I’m overwhelmed by it. I realize it makes no sense. For one thing, I'm the cat, and have lived one very long life indeed. For another…" He smiled. "I remember, but you don't. I have absolutely no idea if you've lived nine lives or thirty, in the past two millennia. It seems so much more likely that I simply didn't meet you, in the empty years. The world is very large, and its people are many. So imagining this as anyone's ninth life is purely⁠—"

  "A pattern," Elissa murmured, and watched Joash's mouth twist in rueful admission. "See? We like patterns. We like stories that fit a recognizable narrative. Have you lived one life, though? Surely you’ve lived dozens, if not hundreds."

  Joash passed a hand through the air, soft graceful motion. "You could say anyone does, though. I’ve had different jobs, different clothes, different names, but at the core of it I’m still myself, living the one life I have. We don’t leave who we were behind, even if we go somewhere else and do something else. Even if we never tell anyone who we used to be, it’s still part of who we are, part of what made us. We could debate the philosophy of it for years, but to me, it’s just been one life, albeit with many different facets."

  "But to you, I’ve lived nine different lives."

  "Yes." His voice was as soft as the gesture he’d made. "I can try to see it differently, if you’d like. But I remember all your faces, all your voices, all the ways you laughed, all the ways your scent changed."

  "And eight deaths, too," Elissa said softly.

  "Those, too. The soul remains the same, but the experiences are different."

  "I guess that’s fair," she said after a long moment’s consideration. "Well. All right. How do I help?"

  He blinked, a slow golden blink that was perfectly familiar to anyone who had ever owned—or been owned by—a cat. "Help?"

  "Deal with Lupus." Her eyebrows rose sharply as an objection all too clearly formed itself on his lips, although it didn’t get farther than that. "Look, as far as I can tell, I’ve got some beef to settle, too, and you just said fated mates were getting involved in shifter business in ways they never had before."

  Joash blinked again, then exhaled and glanced away with another cat-like air. "I hadn’t thought of that," he said after a moment, then looked back with a brief lift of his own eyebrows. "I have no plan at the moment, Elissa. I only just learned he’d survived, and my instincts haven’t gotten beyond ‘kill him.’"

  "I feel like I should be appalled by that," Elissa admitted, but rubbed her palm over her heart, all too clearly feeling the cut of a blade again. "Somehow I mostly just want to know how to use a sword. Did I ever, again?"

  "Tove used a spear more," Joash said after a brief, stark silence, as if he had to recalibrate his thoughts to answer. "Yekaterina used a rifle. Jabir, though. Jabir was extraordinary with a blade."

  Elissa’s stomach clenched with surprise. "A rifle?"

  "We met during the Russian revolution," Joash murmured. "She fought and died bravely."

  "Oh." A pang shot through Elissa, so sharp she couldn’t tell if it was sorrow or another stab of body memory. Or over-dramatic imagination, more likely. "I’m sorry."

  Joash nodded, but let it go. Elissa could almost feel how much practice he had at that, at moving through grief because there was no other choice. "Jabir took up the sword like he was born to it, they said. He would only shrug and call it luck, but his mother said that even when he was a tiny child, he would block and strike as if he’d been trained. I wondered, sometimes, whether some trace of Livia’s skill lived on in the soul." His eyebrows quirked and he smiled. "Or maybe he was just exceptional."

  "Would you use a sword or a gun? To fight him? Or do you just use…" Elissa made a claw of one hand. "Tooth and claw?"

  "Mostly the latter. I wouldn’t use a gun. I don’t think I could," Joash said thoughtfully. Bumps lifted on his arms, a chill visibly running over him before he shook his head. "Guns weren’t weapons of our time. I think the arena would refuse them. Swords, spears, bows and arrows, shields…we can use those. But not modern weaponry."

  "What would happen if you tried?" It wasn’t that Elissa didn’t believe him. Curiosity killed the cat, that was all.

  Although she hoped it didn’t, given the circumstances. Joash, who seemed to understand her every thought so well, appeared to miss that one as he shook his head. "In the best case scenario, I think a gun would simply misfire. In the worst, I think there would be…retaliation."

  "From the goddess," Elissa said so easily she almost thought it wasn’t herself speaking.

  Joash’s eyes went bright, pure unmarked gold. "Now you do sound like Livia."

  "Do you have a better explanation for your entire species?"

  "I do not. Do you believe in ancient gods, Elissa?"

  "More than I did yesterday."

  His laughter rolled toward her, warm and comforting. "Fair. Fair enough. Livia did believe it was Diana. Artemis, although despite their fondness for the Greeks, the Romans used their own names for the gods."

  "But she was Livia Amazonia." The latter had to be a nickname, a cognomen, because only citizens had surnames in Rome.

  "She might have been Livia Hippolyta, or any one of a dozen other Amazons as famous to the Roman masses, but no, they gave her the mantle of all Amazons. She carried it well, too. Heir to legends. She should have had longer to enjoy it."

  "If you tell me where to look, maybe I can bring her back from the dead."

  Joash smiled, sudden and brief and bright. "Arguably, you already have."

  "But not really," Elissa said quietly. "I don’t remember her. Only you do. But the world could, if there were any monuments or…" The cafe door had opened while she spoke, and a familiar shape came through the door, pulling Elissa toward silence before she fully recognized him. Then her voice dropped and she said, "Shit," as she recognized her ex.

  CHAPTER 12

  Joash turned in his chair as Elissa’s face fell, looking for what had dismayed her. A shifter had come in the cafe—a jackal, from the way he moved—and although he wasn’t looking Elissa’s direction, she clearly recognized him. Joash moved his chair a few inches, blocking her from view, and turned his attention back to her, voice low and calming. "Elissa?"

  She grated, "My ex who can’t take a hint. He found out I was in Reggio and called me just before I met you. I don’t know how he found me here."

  Surprise filtered through Joash and he glanced back again, making sure he hadn’t imagined the other man’s shifter presence. "I don’t think he’s here for you."

  Elissa looked at him blankly, and Joash lowered his voice further. "He’s a shifter. Probably a jackal, but some kind of canine. This is a cafe for our kind, so he might come here anyway."

  "He’s a shifter?" It clearly took everything Elissa had to stay quiet, although shifter hearing meant the quietest of whispers could be overheard.

  That, however, was not something she needed to know right now, so Joash only nodded, turning his attention to her fully again. "How long were you together? It’s a big secret to keep."

  "Eight months or so. Why would a shifter date somebody who obviously wasn’t his mate?"

  It was such a pragmatic question Joash couldn’t help but laugh, although he kept it quiet. "A variety of reasons."

  "Enlighten me."

 

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