“The first rule of Night Club,” Leah says, dragging the back of her hand across her throbbing lip, smearing blood, “is you do not talk about Night Club. The second rule of Night Club, is you DO NOT talk about Night Club!”
They are gathered around her, pixies and ogres and ropey, gangling bogeys; minotaurs with their wet steaming nostrils and sharp-toothed mermaids thrashing in murderous silver streaks on the cold concrete floor, all under the yellow halogen lights of her mother’s Cellarworld (Book Five). Leah stands an inch over four feet and the knuckles on her right hand are split open and a tooth near the back of her mouth is loose when she wiggles it with her tongue and there are six more rules to go, but everyone knows them all already, and if they don’t it doesn’t matter.
No weapons. Hair-pulling, biting, gouging with nails: all of that’s allowed.
The pixie’s dress crumples like taffeta, like the princess-pink skirt of Leah’s bed, and Leah wrestles over it, kicks like she’s trying to tear out the seams, twists her head backwards to dodge the nail-points slashing at her face. Her hand closes onto a wing, brittle, and she twists hard, feeling slivers of it under her nails, clinging to her like glitter, indelible. She’ll be picking the shiny fragments of it off her skin for hours. The pixie screams, and Leah rolls the monster onto its back and brings her fist down against the bird-light hollow of skull, again, again, until the body goes limp under her and big meaty hands pull her off, patting her back, shoulders, monsters cheering their admiration, and the pixie shudders and drags itself up to a crawling position and looks up at her, a satisfied smile smashed into its insectoid face.
Leah nurses on her sore knuckles. First win of the night.
Dragonbreath searing ogre-flesh. Minotaurs twisting their massive veiny necks, goring horns upwards into the bulging belly of the beast with the sickening snap of ribs or keratin. Harpies slashing downwards; mermaids arcing their spines in the reckless desperation of the drowning. Monsters, monsters, monsters.
The whole world is warm with blood and sweat.
“You buy Books One to Four,” Leah says, stalking the sidelines, grimy. “You buy the merchandise. The backpacks. The patterned bedsheets. The Halloween costumes. You buy the tickets for all the movies! You log on to nightarena.com and play the flash games, take the quizzes, figure out which patron you’d be fighting for! You are not the merch you own! You are not your fandom! A generation without anything left to believe in but corporate fantasy, good and evil reduced to the girl protagonist of an endless iterative book series and all its subsidiary IPs, all to make a billionaire and her corporate partners even richer!
“You!” she says, and stabs her finger at a shaggy hulking beast of a minotaur, easily twice her height, great yellowed curving horns that end in blunted points spaced a handsbreadth part. “Battle me!”
It stares at her, and then lurches forward, eyes black and unforgiving.
“Girl power,” sneers Leah. “The future is female, finally, right in time for the future to be a corporate-owned dystopia of global warming and fascist upheavals. And all the dumb whiny boys failing in class, flunking out of college, having coasted for so long and finally realizing that the society they’ve built is crumbling around them, and lashing out in their petty shrieking toxic rage and burning down the rainforests, destroying everything beautiful they’ll never have, fleeing back to the same bigotries they’ve held all their lives and thinking it’s rebellion, never realizing that it’s all of us going down together!”
The minotaur lowers its head, panting steam like a great black engine, muscles tensing and surging like iron, and charges.
“We are the inheritors of the world,” Leah says, and leaps.
She clears the horns, hand closing on a fistful of hair and clinging tight as the minotaur thrusts its head upwards to stab at her. Leah’s wrapped around its sweating neck, legs locked around the pistoning bulge of its throat, and she claws forwards and drives her thumbs into its eyes and they slip boiling hot into the jelly, the minotaur bellowing beneath her, roaring as it tries to fling her off, slamming into a wall as she feels the impact shudder through her bones, her fingers hooked into the eye sockets now, dull bone cutting into her fingers as the world beneath her upheaves, topples, falls a terribly long way down to come crashing against concrete.
In the awed silence before recognition, the door creaks open, impossibly loud, casting a burning rectangle of light into the room, and all eyes abruptly turn to it.
Leah stumbles to her feet, her legs boneless with exertion, disentangling her fingers from the hair and muscle fibers, lines cut into her skin, her hands dark and wet and dripping. The minotaur still breathes beneath her, an oily warmth radiating off its dying form, blood and grease evaporating from its matted fur, from the gaping holes gouged into its face. Leah’s jaw aches, as if she has held it clamped it so tightly as to contuse the muscle, and touches her face with a limp wrist to feel tender bruises blooming across her cheek. And there, in the rectangle of the doorway, stands five-time bestselling author Leonora Pierce.
Leah smiles, and all of her aches. “Hey mom,” she says, and collapses onto the mat of fur into sleep.
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