Drop Night—when the new card set was released by the gods—was the single biggest holiday for everyone around the world. The one time every decade that people might receive a god-gifted deck and instantly become a deckbearer.

Everyone desperately hoped that they would be chosen, and everyone did something to prepare for or celebrate the night. Perhaps sit in the dark, hands clasped, hoping fate would change their lives. Perhaps performing last-minute deeds that they thought would convince one faction of the gods to reward them with a deck.

But most people threw a party. Alcohol and drugs worked equally well for celebrating good luck and drowning sorrows, after all.

Wolfe slowly walked through the massive rave he had been required to attend, across a fog-laced dance floor filled with red strobe lights and statues of demons and giant flies, his bones reverberating from the loud club music. He did his best to weave his way among the drunk and high partiers as he made his way to the VIP section.

He couldn’t help but think that while the gods had never talked to anyone, it was still painfully obvious they had favorites. This whole party was a celebration for one family, Wolfe’s employer, the Grimms. Clearly favored of Beelzebub, a dark god of the Infernal faction and Master of Gluttony. There were five crime organizations in Noimore, although two groups—the ultra-violent Cobras and the weirdos who called themselves the ‘Weeds’—weren’t run by an actual family. Each was favored by a different Lord of the Infernal, it seemed.

Wolfe scratched at his chest he walked. The scar tissue from an encounter with a deckbearer itched, and Wolfe didn’t feel like getting drunk or high enough to ignore it.

A tiny girl in a black miniskirt and bra, young and moderately pretty with medium-length blonde hair shaved on one side, bumped into Wolfe and bounced off six-foot-two, two hundred and thirty pounds of nothing but rock-solid muscle frame. Her drink spilled onto Wolfe’s gray Armani suit—gift from Big Man Grimm himself.

“Why’d you shill—spill—my drink?” the girl slurred at him, slapping his arm. “I’m gonna ge’ a deck tonight!”

Wolfe stared at her for a moment, then glanced up at the man who was dancing with her: Richard ‘Rich’ Cordova, one of the other enforcers who worked for Big Man Grimm, same as Wolfe. He met the other man’s brown eyes with his own hazel gaze, a stare he knew others found disconcerting. Especially those who knew Wolfe’s reputation.

Rich went white and grabbed the girl, pulling her away. “I’m so sorry, Wolfe. Um, Tiffany just had an accident. I’ll pay for the—”

“Don’t bother. Just get her out of here,” Wolfe growled out.

Tiffany pouted. “But I still want to—”

Rich put his hand over her mouth and hissed, “Shut up!” and then glanced at Wolfe. “We were just heading out.”

Wolfe turned away, irritated at himself for being irritable. But he was—and he knew why. He had hoped so hard to get a deck three times already, only to be disappointed. The gods didn’t care about people like Wolfe. He had been to these parties twice, once when he’d been eighteen and newly in the family, and once when he’d been twenty-eight and full of adrenaline.

But this Drop Night, he didn’t want to be at the club—he wanted to be at home, even though it was empty now that his only real friend—his dog, Pierce—had died.

But Big Man Grimm wanted all the important members of the family’s business here, and that included his number one enforcer. He was probably hoping for a god-gifted deck for one of his kids, or perhaps one of his cousins. You could put the ten cards necessary to make a deck together by buying them—like Big Man Grimm had for his three kids already—or possibly even by acquiring them from another deckbearer or the weird monsters or dungeons that were also generated on Drop Night. But a lot of the god-gifted decks would have a single special card, new to the drop, and were usually themed well for early play.

Plus, the cards were expensive. The absolute weakest ones tended to go for around fifty thousand, since you could always combine cards to make higher-tier versions.

Wolfe made his way past other drunk-ass girls and men who thought they were dangerous to reach the clubs most important table, the one with the people who mattered: Big Man Grimm, his inner circle, and his family. As Wolfe did, he passed another girl but this one caught his attention—she was barely five feet tall, with strawberry-blond hair, green eyes, and freckles, all set in an innocent and very young-looking face. She had a white t-shirt that covered everything but her face and arms and a pair of modest jeans. She wasn’t sloshed, high, or dressed at all provocatively, and stood out like a nun in a boxing ring.

What’s a girl like that doing in a place like this? She clearly doesn’t belong.

Wolfe put it from his mind as he approached the table.

Two rough appearing, large thugs who looked almost like brothers—Harry and Pete—were guarding the table. Each man was in his late twenties, with brown eyes and black hair, and bodies muscular but subtly awkward to Wolfe’s experienced eye. Harry was a bit broader in the shoulders, and Pete was about an inch, maybe two, taller, but they were hard to tell apart if you hadn’t worked with them for years.

Neither batted an eye as Wolfe slid into the last place on the outside edge of the VIP table. “Sorry I’m late, boss.”

A young Southeast Asian woman in a slinky black dress walked up from just past Pete and Harry and poured expensive brandy into a glass in front of Wolfe. But as Wolfe glanced at her, he saw she was staring at Big Man Grimm, not him. She smiled extra wide at Wolfe’s boss, then backed away. Big Man Grimm watched her go for a second before turning his attention to Wolfe.

Big Man Grimm —Thaddeus Grimm, Senior—looked and sounded like his name. He was big… and grim. Sixty years old, but still two inches taller even than Wolfe, and he had stayed healthy in an old-man way, with a lean body and large muscles that still couldn’t hide his nearly white hair and wrinkled skin. He almost never smiled, and when he did, it wasn’t a good thing. But the scariest thing about him was his voice.

“We were just talking about my children,” Big Man Grimm said in a voice heavy, deep, dark, and menace-filled. “Do you think they’ll get a god-gifted deck?”

The boss swept his arm to take in his three children among the eight other people at the table.

Thaddeus Grimm, Junior was almost as tall as his old man, although he had far less muscle mass. He was just shy of thirty and extremely good-looking. But he was so drunk right now, he could barely sit straight. He was also watching the girls on the dance floor instead of paying attention to what was happening at the table.

Damian Grimm, the middle child, was considerably younger at twenty-one. He was a hobbit by comparison, only five feet tall, with fat rolls under his chin he tried to hide with a scraggly beard and eyes that didn’t sit right on his face—the left one looked like it was trying to escape around the back of his head. He was watching his father with an expression that bordered on the lust he usually reserved for the girls he paid to abuse.

Wolfe frowned, reflecting on the fact that Damian was the most likely successor to Big Man Grimm, given his older brothers room-temperature I.Q.

The last child, Miriam, was a beauty like most of the family. She had inherited height from her father, but had her mother’s green eyes and long, thick, black hair. She was dressed in a slick, black cocktail dress and enough emerald jewelry to pay for a car. Her demeanor was casually superior as she leaned back in the booth, staring at everyone around the table with an expression of amused condescension. Miriam was in her first year of college as a pre-law and criminal justice double major and had never been considered as a successor to Big Man Grimm. Nor had she ever expressed the desire to be part of the family business.

“Might be someone’s lucky night,” Wolfe said, sipping at the expensive brandy. It left a genteel trail of heat all the way to his belly, smooth as caramel. “As long as you haven’t yet received a god-gifted deck, the gods might send you one—even if you’ve already put together a deck through other means. Odds aren’t great, though. One in five hundred is nothing to write home about.”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Wolfe wondered where Big Man Grimm’s wife, Guinevere, was. The shrill but beautiful harpy usually attended these functions.

Heinrick Grimm, Big Man Grimm’s accountant, piped in, “I’m sure they will, cousin. You’ve given much to advance the causes of Beelzebub, after all, and he has favored the family greatly.”

Wolfe scowled at Heinrich. What a cocksucker. The man, a few years older than Wolfe, stared at him, raised an eyebrow over his intelligent, brown eye, and quirked a smile full of perfect white teeth. Jackass.

Plus, Heinrich’s statement was questionable at best. Beelzebub seemed to favor Big Man Grimm, certainly. The boss had gotten a deck that had a lot of Beelzebub’s named cards in it when he’d been young—and, from what Wolfe had heard, made the deck very powerful and full of rare cards since—but the others all had decks that had been bought for them. No other cards had been divinely gifted to the family since the patriarch had received his.

No one else said anything for a bit, the conversation stalling. None of the lesser members of the hierarchy at the table—Jed the enforcer, Heinrich’s son Ian, or Peter “Piper” Risoni, the current man in charge of running the distribution of their product, bothered to answer.

Then Thad Junior piped in. “Hey, has anyone seen Johnny, by the way? I thought he’d be here tonight.”

Big Man Grimm didn’t answer his son, just frowning at him with a brow so furrowed, it threatened to split his face in two. Damian shook his head in theatrical disgust at his older brother, and most of the others around the table frowned. Johnny, a long-time supporter of Big Man Grimm and one of his best drug couriers, had been wiped out in an ambush last week. The Cobras had brazenly left their calling card and the drugs he had been moving for the Grimm family had all been stolen. No one knew how the Cobras had found out he’d been moving product into town, or where he would be. Millions of dollars in product had gone missing.

From the claw marks, and the fire and death magic marks, everyone was pretty sure it had been a deckbearer. Most likely Nico, the number one enforcer for the Cobras. The closest thing to a nemesis that Wolfe had.

Big Man Grimm turned to Wolfe. “I didn’t want to spoil Drop Night, but I’m going to need you to do what you do best again. The Cobras have been cutting us to pieces. It’s time for you to hit back.”

Wolfe’s scowl deepened. I’ve killed two deckbearers, without a deck of my own, in twenty years. Now I have to do it again? Big Man Grimm used the cards from the deckbearers I killed to make his own deck, and his children’s, stronger, but I’m still not a deckbearer. Even though it’s obvious the big man trusts me, just a two-bit thug without a deck, to handle fucking up his enemies more than he trusts his own deckbearer kids to do the same. Plus, every time I’ve gone up against Nico and his deck, I’ve been chased off. I need my own deck to take him out.

His eyes flicked to Big Man Grimm. He owed the man everything. But Wolfe still wished Big Man Grimm had allowed Wolfe to keep the cards he had killed, so to speak.

Wolfe’s boss must have sensed his mood, because he took a package from the seat next to him and passed it across the table to Wolfe. “Here. I was gonna give this to you after midnight, when the new deckbearers had been picked, but have it now. We don’t need both of us scowling and ready to kill everyone.”

“What is it?” Wolfe asked, picking the package up. It was the size of a shoebox, and weighed a bit. But when Wolfe surreptitiously shook it, nothing seemed to move inside.

Big Man Grimm shifted in his seat, glowering out at the floor, where the bodies of the dancers were visible as silhouettes through the smoke and lights. “Bonus and a promise, for my best and most loyal packmate.”

Both Thad Junior and Heinrich scowled at that statement.

Big Man Grimm ignored them. “Take it and open it alone. In fact, use Suite Two on the upper floor. Also, I give you my word—you can have the cards of the next deckbearer you end. I know you’ve balanced the sheets between us.”

It was Damian’s turn to scowl, and he picked a shot glass off the table and threw it back.

Wolfe felt himself warming a bit. Big Man Grimm wasn’t a good man. But he was an honorable man who took care of his people nonetheless.

Wolfe picked up the package from the table and stood. “I’ll be back.”

He got a respectful nod from Big Man Grimm and Damian, but no one else at the table acknowledged him as he left.

He walked around the outside of the dance floor—hoping to avoid any more ‘Tiffanys’—and reached the elevator. He took it to the second floor and exited. It was the big man’s private set of suites. Suite Two was his best guest suite in the entire Ekron Eternal, the big man’s club.

Wolfe entered the suite and shut the door. It was a huge, penthouse-style room. There was a bar, circular couches around a central table with a statuette in the middle, even a goddamn indoor jacuzzi. That was just the front room—it also had a bedroom and bathroom. Most of the suite was done in garish red and black, thick curtains and velvet, with art—a sort of baroque-style depiction of the Infernal in both painting and statuary—liberally spread around. A iron clock with its gears showing hung on one wall, its style out of place.

Wolfe imagined he could almost smell blood and incense from the overly themed room, although there wasn’t any. He wished the Grimm family didn’t advertise their associations so openly. He knew that even though there was no sure proof that the various gods paid attention to man, most fancied that the beings mentioned in the cards would help them if they worshipped the supposed gods.

The sounds of Drop Night celebration and a few early fireworks outside the window really mute the evil vibe, though, Wolfe thought with a sardonic grin.

Wolfe put his package down on the marble bar top and then sat on one of the barstools. He grabbed an ashtray, pulled a half-full cigarette pack from his pocket, removed a cigarette, tapped it, then pulled his lighter and lit it up.

Once he had smoked for a few seconds, he glanced at the clock on the wall.

11:58 p.m.

He was tempted to wait for the very moment of Drop Night but then cursed himself for a fool. He tore open the package and stared at it.

The majority was a thick stack of thousand-dollar bills… and the top was a stylized card that appeared to be a blank creature card.

Wolfe was pretty sure it was a promissory note—promising him that he would receive at least some kind of deck and become a deckbearer. Big Man Grimm could do it if he wanted—and he’d been there for Wolfe when—

A fiery pain in his chest caused him to yank his shirt open. He saw the huge, raised-off-the-skin scar where he had been cut by Nico’s summoned creature almost a decade ago. There was a brief flash of flame, a pentagram, and then chains seemed to briefly appear above his chest. After a second, they sank into his scarred flesh and disappeared.

His own eyes wide in shock, Wolfe slowly touched his chest with a trembling hand splayed open in the gesture everyone knew from watching hundreds of TV shows about deckbearers. A sense of fire and eternal hunger, as well as a controlled rage and purpose, filled Wolfe, all of it tempered by a feeling of limitless possibility.

His heart beat so fast, he thought it might burst. Wolfe held his hand out, still splayed open.

A red, fiery light pushed out from his hands and manifested as three cards, each the size of a normal playing card, hovering in front of Wolfe, just like it would have for every newbie deckbearer ever. A fourth card also manifested, hovering in the air off to the side—which wasn’t normal. A new deckbearer always had ten cards, and pulled three random ones at a time. The fourth card was very unusual.

Wolfe had two copies of an ‘escaped damned’ card, as well as the ‘tormentor imp’ card. All three cost one Infernal power and were tier-one—the weakest cards you could get.

But still cards!

“Holy shit,” Wolfe muttered. A piece of him was concerned he had received an Infernal god-gifted deck, but in that moment, most of him was just overjoyed to have received a deck at all.

Wolfe’s eyes strayed to the last card, the fourth one. He knew instantly it was different… it had no power cost, it was labeled as a companion card, and it was unique. Cards had both rarity and tier. Rarity tended to reflect starting strength compared to its power cost, and each tier was just a slightly stronger version of the same card.

Unique cards could be nearly any effective rarity in quality, and since they couldn’t be raised in tier, were assigned an ‘effective tier’ to explain their total strength. Tier-seven was… ridiculously high.

Cereboo (Unique, effective Power 2, effective Tier-7)

0 power

A pup of Cerberus.

Infernal, Beast[Dog]

Companion

Attack

5 x 3

Magical Attack

7

Defense

7

Magical Defense

4

Health

12

Special: Companion. While in play, Beast and Infernal power may be spent as if they were the other.

Special: Guardian of the Gate: +100% attack and magic attack against other Infernal cards.

Special: Preferred Typing: Gains all the better type matchups of both Infernal and Beast.

Special: One of the ‘Gate to the Underworld’ cards. If all 6 are possessed in the same deck, the bearer will gain 7 Legendary Infernal or Beast card pulls. Additionally, the deckbearer may either gain the Mythic ‘Gate to the Underworld’ Building Card or evolve Cereboo.

Wolf was intrigued by the part where it claimed it belonged to a set that would unlock other, even more powerful cards… If Wolfe could acquire the other five.

He looked at the Cerberus puppy card but didn’t summon it. The picture of the pup reminded Wolfe of his late dog, Pierce, but with three heads and red skin.

Was this the gods sending him a sign?

“Pierce better not be in some hell,” Wolfe quipped. Then he gave a dark chuckle—he knew damn well his dog hadn’t gone to any bad place in the cosmos. He was the only purely good being Wolfe had ever known, even if he had been a bit of a doofus.

He thought about the promised reward as well. Legendary cards were so rare that only the most famous card users had more than one or two, and Mythics were almost unheard of. The gods might have power crept this season. Wolfe’s mind raced with the possibilities.

Wolfe was about to pull up his status sheet when his phone went off. What the fuck? It’s been like four minutes since the drop! How the hells can someone already need me?

He pulled it out to see who was calling, then answered immediately.

“What’s up, boss?”

Big Man Grimm’s voice came through the phone. “Get down here. We have a situation.”