Like Them
The building looked completely innocuous from the outside, just some place that had been remodeled in the last few months to make it fit for business. Even the cars outside looked perfectly normal, the people exiting them to go inside people who could have been from anywhere. Connor sat astride his motorcycle watching them as they passed by, mentally debating whether or not he was going to move. The night was cold, his breath visible on the breeze. He supposed he shouldn't go in there.

Then again...

It was hard to admit it to himself, but he kind of liked it. The competition of it, striving to win, to prove himself. To be found as worthy, no matter how fleetingly. And at least he was taking his frustrations out on someone who could fight back fairly. The Destroyer chuffed softly, unfastened the strap of his helmet. Fuck it, he was going, since he'd already come all this way. Might as well take those last few steps.

The interior of the former factory was warm, and Connor quickly removed his jacket as he passed a few soon-to-be spectators who were already gathered at the betting kiosk. He recognized a couple of them vaguely, didn't acknowledge them as he moved to where the ring stood. He could go look for Phillip in a minute. Would his opponent tonight be demon or human? 'Don't fight demons, Connor, not unless you have to'.

Well, maybe he did have to.

"You've been quite the surprise." Easing into position beside Connor, the owner of the fighting ring cut a distinctive profile, his posture straight, his jaw horizontal to the ground, his eyes sharp. He kept his hands in his pockets. The Dealmaker always wore a suit, this time gray with the faintest hint of pinstripes. He strove for visual separation from everyone else, but didn't sequester himself in the wings, like the owner of a similar venue in Las Vegas had done. That man, a retired Russian boxer, had feared retaliation, perhaps rightly, and kept his identity hidden. Perhaps that was why it was easy to kill him and take his place. Without a face or a name, no one in the audience had been the wiser.

Darian scratched the side of his face. For a while, he had taken to wearing a small amount of facial hair, but had shaved it off again. "I thought the Chanwa demon would've given you more trouble. You took care of it in under four minutes. People are beginning to remember you, Mr. Reilly."

Connor looked around, and then up into the clean-shaven face, his expression a little watchful, a little guarded. "Chanwas are stupid," he said after a second. "Tough but dumb. Once you out-think them, it's easy to beat them."

The man wasn't familiar to him, but the suit and the straightness of his bearing set him apart from the more casually-clad men behind them. The Destroyer resisted the urge to pull out of his slouch in response to the taller man's carriage. "You're Darian." The blue stare narrowed behind a fringe of unruly brown hair, and Connor nodded thoughtfully. He didn't look psychotic, but that didn't mean Rhiannon was wrong. "I guess they expected it to wipe the floor with me. I think I pissed Phillip off. How much did he lose?"

"Not enough to matter." He dismissed the subject of his assistant. The decision to hire Phillip on in Chicago was made because he had leverage on the man and knew he could trust him, not out of an interest in his welfare or personal finances. Darian watched his staff make final preparations in the cage. "If you decide to stay competitive, you might want to consider making it look hard. No one wants a knock-out in round one of the heavyweight championship."

Connor shrugged, touched the chain-link fence surrounding the ring for a second. They seemed to hum with all the pent-up energy of the fighters that usually battled it out within the enclosure. "I never competed before," he said, pulling his hand back. He didn't think that muddy blotch on the metal was rust. "Never thought about holding back on purpose."

He sniffed discreetly at the air, but Darian didn't smell that much different than anyone else. Then again, his cologne might be masking it. "Gonna be a full house tonight," he surmised, because more people were streaming in from the cold to stand around in little knots muttering back and forth before either looking for seats or taking money over to where the bets were made. Some of them gave him questioning looks as they passed by, but he just looked back at them blandly. "Have you run this place for a long time?"

"You should live to see it in the summer. It's standing room only. Heat makes people behave strangely, want different sorts of things." Darian looked up. A simple system of catwalks crisscrossed between the floor and ceiling. Over the noise of people arriving and milling about, he heard hollow footsteps up there, and looked up to see what his employee was working on. It turned out to be the lights. "I bought the property late last spring. Since then, we've been making improvements." He pointed at a far wall, bare up to this point. "We're having cameras installed. We'll put a digital screen there for close-range shots, and mic the ring so we can pipe the noise through the sound system. After that, who knows?" He lifted his shoulders. "They'll always grow bored and want more."

The Destroyer also looked up, neck craning. Cameras. Closed-circuit viewing. Television? Jessica liked television. If she saw him in one of these matches, would that convince her that he really was different from the things she was afraid of? Or would it just make her more certain that he was Other, that his Otherness was something she could never bring herself to accept? He stifled the thought, shunted it into the furthest corner of his brain that he could reach.

"What does the rest of the competition look like tonight?" he asked Darian, looking through the fence towards the other side of the ring. "More of the tough-but-stupid crowd?"

"Not exactly," Darian said, nudging his own chin with a thumb. "Be mindful, it's dangerous to make assumptions about the kind that fight here, intelligence or otherwise. After all, it's more likely that you're one of them than a stand-out." Inside the ring, the employees shut the doors to the hallways from which opponents emerged. In the stands, people continued to hold conversations, some of them about gambling and some not. The median age in the facility had always been mid-life; the Dealmaker liked that it wasn't a younger crowd. They didn't have the disposable income.

"To answer your question, though, quite good. Are you going to throw your hat in the ring?"

He was still looking across the expanse of the closed-in ring, the corners of his mouth tightening a notch. He was not one of them, he was...he was something different, even if he wasn't always sure of what that was. Fear, a thing he had been forced to almost outgrow when he was very young, was not a factor when he stepped out to fight, no matter the circumstances. He could feel the adrenaline start to crowd into his bloodstream, his shoulders going taut inside the soft cotton of his T shirt. When he turned his head, he was on eye level with the shoulder of Darian's well-tailored suit.

"Yeah. Yeah, I am." His voice was distant, his expression a little removed. He was going away again. "Can I bet on myself?"

"If you didn't, I'd be concerned for your welfare," Darian said, becoming more human with a tight-lipped smile, even as Connor pulled inward. But that wasn't a worrying thing, where the younger man was concerned. The colder he got, the more intensity he seemed to put into his fists. "No one that walks in unsure if they'll win ever does." He turned on his heel, surveying the people behind them. Grit had tracked in on shoes and it scraped under his foot. "Believe it or not, I'd like to see you do well. There's something to be said for a crowd favorite. It keeps them coming back."

The Destroyer stopped looking at the cloth the demon's suit was made of, looked up into his face instead. His mouth lifted into a smile, just as taut as the Dealmaker's. "Win and live, lose and die." The philosophy of his youth, the way he'd been raised. He inclined his head in the taller man's direction before he started towards the betting station. "Enjoy the matches, Darian."

He had fifty-six dollars in his wallet, and he wagered it all on himself at seven-to-one odds. He spotted Phillip talking to another of the competitors, arranged to get in the ring once he finished dealing with the bookie. Circling around, he waited for the cage door to be opened, stripping out of his shirt to tuck it into one of his jacket pockets. The inside of the building was getting hot, the press of bodies combining with the anticipation of the bloodsport to come. He began to sweat even as his emotional temperature dropped.

Becoming that other thing.

Usually when a match started, Darian went upstairs to watch it from the top floor, where he could see everything that went on. Tonight he stayed on the ground floor near the fence, where you were likely to get a face full of sweat or splattered blood. He wanted to get a feel for how the crowd experienced it. Admittedly, he was also fascinated by Connor, or more accurately, by the audience's reaction to him. Like Bethany and even Darian himself, the man who thought of himself as the Destroyer -- Darian picked that up by sleight of hand -- was by appearances a regular human, yet he consistently out-performed his competitors. Darian didn't publish bios of the fighters; no explanations were given. The audience gambled on appearances and reputation. Rumors flew around the place. Was the kid a vampire? A demon? On drugs?

He watched the first gate roll up. The building heat was off, but it was oppressive in there. He shed his coat and dropped it on an empty seat. He folded his arms and glanced at the clock.

Connor could hear the wheels of the gate as it rolled up even over the loud mutters of the crowd, and he worked a small knot of tension out of his shoulders as he waited for his opponent to appear. He could see Darian standing close to the cage, and he turned his attention away from the demon's face to focus briefly on the crowd. Suits and ties, expensive-casual, some designer labels even if he couldn't read the fine print from here. Banker types, executives. It was just like everything else, people loved a circus.

The scrape of feet on canvas had him looking back towards the other entryway, and he watched a thick, leathery tail drag across the floor. Yellow reptilian eyes studied him; he stared back stonily. He didn't know the species of this one, but it hardly mattered. He watched the narrow pupils get even smaller, the triangular head moving back and forth. Somewhere, a bell rang hollowly, and Connor padded to the center of the enclosure. He had already started calling the other combatant Swamp Thing in his head.

He wondered if he could make this look hard.

Outside the circle, Phillip joined his supervisor. He was a blonde-haired native of California, a former concierge of the Bellagio in Las Vegas, and a long-time client of Darian's. He was smarmy and good-looking, at least if you didn't look at the mutilated flesh beneath his clothes (courtesy of his boss). Not even his dislike for the Dealmaker kept him from relocating to take this job. "I lost eight-hundred bucks on this kid last week." He pulled on his ear and checked for eavesdroppers. "What's his deal?"

Darian stood with his feet shoulder-width apart. "I haven't bothered to ask." In the top of the bleachers, someone whistled through their fingers. A ridge of hackles lifted away from the yellow demon's back in response to the noise. Darian briefly craned his neck, trying to figure out who the whistle came from and if it'd been some kind of signal.

"Come on." Phillip was annoyed. "You don't have to."

"Just because I read you like an open book doesn't mean it's always easy. Besides," Darian said, "I've a feeling this one's a tougher mark. Right now, he doesn't need anything from me, other than to sweat on my floor."

Connor found himself counting the creature's hackles while waiting for the match to actually start, and when the bell sounded again he made a point of watching for the tail before he closed with his opponent. If it was prehensile, it could be just as dangerous as being hit with a fist. The lizard made a soft hissing noise, then a louder one, the stubby digits of one hand closing. It planted its feet and swung.

The blow caught the Destroyer on the cheekbone, and he rolled with it, letting it drive him against the fence so that the chain-link rattled. His fingers latched onto some of the metal, and he used it to visibly steady his balance. The punch had been hard but a little un-targeted, and he pulled himself back into a standing position, then started circling to the right. The crowd was already making enough noise to rouse the dead.

Connor spent several minutes really sizing up his opponent, deliberately holding back while he gauged the thing's strengths and weaknesses, feeling the time tick by in the center of his chest. Darian had said his last fight had only lasted four minutes. He had never thought about making a career of this, but he supposed people wanted their money's worth. He and the lizard-creature began to trade blows in earnest, the contest picking up in intensity as a blunt claw opened up a gash on the side of his head near his hairline. He slung blood out of his right eye, splattering it on the canvas, started to use his feet to deal punishing kicks to the thing's legs and midsection, driving it against the mesh. That triangular head darted forward, teeth snapping at his arm. His left fist knocked some of them out. Sweating, his breathing controlled.

Making it look good.

"Why's he so strong?" Phillip folded his arms, unconsciously mimicking the stance of his boss. Someday, when Darian grew bored of this gambling venture, Phillip hoped he could buy him out. The Dealmaker had been spending time at a downtown lunch and supper club, where the wealthiest men and women in Chicago networked. Phillip didn't accompany the demon, but he knew he was looking into real estate. Maybe it would be so much work, he'd need his second-in-command to manage the ring.

But looking at Darian now -- the only time, besides when his blonde girlfriend was around, when he had rapt fascination on his face -- Phillip doubted he'd let go anytime soon.

Darian pressed his thumb to his mouth. "There's demon in him," he said, "But human as well." Switching subjects then, he narrowed his eyes and got closer to the ring. The blood on the floor was bright red. Unlike Phillip, he cared less about what Connor was and more about why he was there. "He's not proving a point to us. He's exorcising something. A feeling, perhaps. Look at his face. That's contempt." Darian looked at the clock. 3:06 and counting upwards.

Connor slammed backwards against the fence, the cold metal a sharp contrast to his overheated skin. His knees sagged as the base of his spine absorbed the shock, and his fingers found a handhold to keep himself halfway upright, tendons in his arm standing out as he pulled on the chain-link. There was more blood in the ring now, his and his opponent's, a bite on his shoulder welling red fluid and streaking it down his chest. The waistband of his jeans was getting damp with it. He was going to have to hide them from Francess before they went into the wash. The crowd was screaming encouragement, and the fence rattled as he pushed off from it.

He was Connor. He was Steven. Demon and human at once, forever in conflict, forever at war. The clock said five minutes and ten seconds had gone by. He could barely breathe from the adrenaline pounding through his bloodstream. The lights were a beacon, and he followed them back into the fray.

It got more and more brutal, and at the eight-minute mark he buried both feet in the lizard's stomach while hanging onto the enclosing fence, sending the creature flying across the ring to crash-land in a messy heap. The men and women in the audience roared, and he could pick out more money changing hands as he latched both hands through the link to shake it dramatically. He closed the distance fast, started to kick his opponent again; calculated, strategic blows meant to cripple and maim. Blood dripped into his eye, ran down the side of his head into his mouth. He spat it onto the floor. The lizard couldn't gain its feet, lashed out with that heavy tail, caught him behind his right knee. The two of them rolled across the bloody canvas, a snarling, punching dervish.

Eleven minutes.

Darian's eyes went to the clock. A smile lifted the corners of his mouth. Someone had been listening. He began to circle around the ring, keeping his attention on the match. Phillip had returned to his work, leaving him alone to observe it. A pounding of feet had originated in the top of the stands, near where the person whistled at the start of the match. That pounding took root, urging the fighters to a conclusion. In the ring, the winner got to choose whether its opponent made it out alive or not. The Dealmaker could count on a hand how many times life had been awarded. Much like ancient Rome, the crowd often hungered for a kill at the end of a match, and in a brawl like this, anything else would be an anticlimax.

He had forgotten about his suit jacket. Stopping by the fence, he was close enough to catch a spray of blood that erupted from a punch. Little flecks of red dotted his shirt, but he didn't care. Watching this kind of a knock-down-drag-out fight made him want to get back in the ring himself. He hadn't done that since he fought Bethany in Las Vegas. Maybe it was time he relearned how it felt to wrestle for survival. It might give him fresh perspective, and Darian was always looking for a business edge.

Connor saw Darian under the glare of the overheads, the tall demon pacing on the edges of the crowd, and he swiped blood-matted hair out of his face before lacing his fingers together and bringing them down on the back of the lizard's neck in a hammerblow. The thing staggered, reeled backwards in an attempt to get away, and the Destroyer followed suit, fists pummeling everything they could reach. He could hear the stomping, the bleachers rattling, and the faraway sound of his heart seemed to keep time with it as he drove his opponent into a corner. His last contact with the rough canvas had widened the wound on his shoulder, and he was bleeding more freely now, his jeans soaking it up.

"Killshot!" It was a scream, one he heard even over the rising din, and like the foot-stomping it got taken up by the crowd, which had become a beast itself. The clock told him sixteen minutes had passed since the bell first sounded. He kicked the lizard under the jaw, and teeth hit the floor as the creature lay on its side, tail flopping weakly as it struggled to get up. Connor was breathing hard, blood and sweat mixing to form a pinkish brew on his flesh.

"Killshot! Killshot! Killshot!"

One foot came to rest on the unfortunate lizard's neck, the sole pressing down, gradually taking on more of the Destroyer's weight as he stared down into those yellow eyes. Couldn't even feel pity for the thing, although he reached for it, tried to find the emotion and couldn't. Maybe it was just as well. This was...this was what he needed if he was to keep going, and there was no room for pity in that.

Darian loosened his collar and folded his arms. It was getting hotter in the arena and his shirt was starting to cling to his shoulders. He watched the debate the Destroyer seemed to be having. "Well?" He shouted it. Even so, it would've been hard for regular ears to pick up the noise, with hundreds of raucous voices overshadowing him. "Who are you tonight, Connor?" The fevered chorus indicated who the crowd wanted him to be: a killer. The Dealmaker watched the disregard on the younger man's face. How he didn't seem inflicted with the weakness of empathy. You are like them, he thought, but no more than the rest of us watching.

People didn't come here for sport. They came for savagery. No one who stepped in that ring to fight mistook the situation for a game. Connor was the clear victor; the bets would be settled easily. Whatever he did to the demon now was icing on the cake. This was the part of Darian's ring that separated it, made it something worse than the norm. The winner almost always continued to kick their opponent when they were down for the count, and it did nothing to dissuade the crowd from cheering things on to the bloody end.

Jessica. He hadn't wanted anything like this in a while, not since the terrible days in Los Angeles with Cordelia, and Connor let Steven's coldness take over as he added more pressure to the lizard's throat. As if a blood offering would appease her, would cleanse him of the taint. He watched the creature's tongue loll out of its mouth. It was bright red, blood drooling onto the canvas. He pressed harder, the sole of his boot guaranteed to leave indentations.

The tail struck him in the calf, but there was no strength to it, the cutting off of the air supply weakening it further. He grabbed hold of the fence, used that as leverage. Nineteen minutes had elapsed since the cage door had rolled up to let him in. The crowd was screaming.

When the lizard's neck broke, the tail gave one final lash before the body went rigid, spasming on the blood-stained bottom of the ring. Connor stepped back, spat a mouthful of blood on the corpse, watched it glisten under the fluorescent lights. Kicked it once more before putting distance between himself and what he'd just done. Didn't feel one way or the other about it, and that was okay.

Over the cheering, a voice boomed in the sound system. It was Phillip with a cordless microphone, going out in the ring to pick up Connor's arm and officially call the match.

Dimly satisfied, Darian smiled and stepped back. He wiped a cheekbone against his shoulder, sensing something wet there. A smear of yellow blood stained his expensive shirt. Going in search of his suit jacket, he only looked back at the competitors once. Whether or not Mr. Reilly had gotten what he needed or would be back, he couldn't tell. The metaphysical gifts he possessed allowed him to pluck thoughts from people's heads, at times, but he couldn't see the future. What he did know, from wisdom, was that moments like the one just had by the Destroyer could define humans. If unchecked by remorse, or left to fester, they could take bites out of people's souls.

He dearly hoped that was the case, this time.