Riot in His Veins - Part 1

A high-octane urban fantasy novel in progress

Fourteen flights of stairs behind him already, and each step further shaved away more and more of Kavel's patience. Gods help the fool he'd come to see if none remained when he reached the "penthouse", a far too generous term for what it was: a filthy, little sweat box whose only luxuries were a long-broken elevator and a position slightly further than usual from the piss-tinged stink of the city streets. Real penthouses belonged to the upscale kind of dealers that Kavel never had to visit.

His pay grade was full of losers; often losers with ambitions to exceed their station needing to be humbled. The same necessity brought him to summit the staircase, to an uppity punk taken to calling himself the "King of West Kiegland" like a child playing at how he imagines a powerful person to be. Kavel didn't know—didn't care to know, really—the guy's actual name, but no doubt it was something embarrassing. Something outdated and soft and buried deep inside an armor of undeserved confidence. Something like Pad.

Pad, his excitable sidekick for the day. A nineteen-year-old kid who had done a good job of some small-time work for the coven and begged for a bigger opportunity. Apparently, that made him Kavel’s problem, and it was a problem. Pad was loud and chatty. He used expletives like punctuation, all with a streetwise dialect that simply must have been a put-on. He had the fifty extra pounds of a much lazier man hanging from his gut, perfectly coiffed hair frozen in place by product, and a fashion sense best described as an eyesore.

In contrast, Kavel was aloof and practical. Never one to talk without something important to say. Never one to talk like someone he wasn’t. To be honest, never one to talk. He looked as if Pad had stolen those fifty pounds from him, had a mangy mane barely held back by a rubber band, and wore wrinkled black like a second skin. He wasn’t above ornament, but only in the form of understated silver jewelry and an aged pair of round-lensed sunglasses. Simple tattoos peeked out from behind clothing, suggesting a more unbridled youth, and yet he radiated an aura of too-old-for-this-shit that had existed for the entirety of his thirty-three years.

They were an odd couple, made odder still by the circumstances. What was Casia thinking, making him babysit the kid on this job? She knew how these things went. If it got rowdy—and it always did—young bloods like Pad were less than useless. They were too eager to make their name; too obsessed with seeming hard and projecting authority. They turned picnics into problems because they don't think. They don't even think that they should think. He's gotta learn sometime, Casia had said, despite his protest.

Sure, but did he have to learn on my time? Kavel lamented as he rounded the landing of the last set of stairs.

"We gotta give this guy an extra beatin’ for making us walk all this damn way, amirite? Shit."

An attempt at puffed-chest bravado made pathetic by Pad's incessant panting and wheezing. Kavel wheeled on him, planting a stern finger into his chest.

"We are not doing anything. I am going to handle this, and you are going to watch like it's an EV show you're sitting too close to."

“C’mon, bro,” Pad whined. “I can be helpful. The boss put me on this job for a reason.”

“Right here, right now? I’m the boss. And the boss says you’re not to lift a finger in there.”

“But— “

“But nothing. Boss says—are you seriously pouting your lip at me right now?”

Pad pulled his bottom lip back quickly, “No, I was— “

“Enough. Boss says keep your mouth shut too. Just watch. And learn.”

Pad nodded, shrinking behind his contrition. Kavel expected more of an argument, but the kid just folded. Maybe he’d been too harsh?

Better than letting him do something stupid.

At the door just outside the King’s throne room, Kavel pulled a nebulizer from his jacket and poised it to his lips. He caught Pad shifting about in the corner of his eye, and the kid’s face had traded shame for envy.

“Yo, now we’re talking! Lemme get a hit of that.”

After a scowl and a shush that shrank the kid right back down, Kavel rolled his eyes towards the door and returned the nebulizer to his lips. A deep breath shot a surge of aerosolized Etherite straight to his lungs. A feeling like being splashed with ice water at the atomic level sent a cold electricity arcing between his every molecule.

The promise of infinite possibilities hidden in the tension of reality’s invisible strings. The shiver in the tendrils of his psyche as they stretched across those strings, aching to pluck them. The harmonic embrace of their vibrations uniting his soul with the cosmos. No matter how many times he did it, the thrill of connecting to The Ether never went away.

His personal harbinger signaled his transition to the trance state: a vision of an endlessly stretching shoreline lapped by gentle ocean waves underscored by the dense thrum of cellos resolving a G to a C. It filled his senses for but a moment and then faded away, pulling his consciousness back to the apartment door and the task at hand.

He focused his thoughts on his ears, willing primal forces to amplify their ability, until silence gave way to the sound of whispers from the other side of the door.

Is someone out there?

I don’t know.

What are they doing?

I don’t know, man.

Will you go fuckin’ check already?

Yeah, sorry boss.

Excuse me?

Yes, your majesty. Pardon me.

Pardon you? You’re lucky I don’t flay your dumb ass alive.

Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.

Then the muffled thump of footsteps drew closer to the door.

I guess it’s showtime, Kavel thought.

“You ready?” he asked.

Pad nodded, but the furtive flitting of his eyes told the real story.

No time for a warm blankie and a bottle of milk, he’ll have to find some nerve as we go.

Kavel held out a hand that surged with imperceptible energy and grasped the various mechanisms of the door with his mind. A twist of his palm unlocked the deadbolts, and another turned the doorknob. A gentle push forward through the air swung the door inward to reveal a surprised lackey backing away towards the living room.

Kavel entered the apartment but did not make his way to its occupants at first. Instead, he took his time perusing the first room just past the entryway, a cramped and poorly maintained kitchen. He picked through cabinets and drawers, even searched the fridge for anything appetizing. Eventually, he grabbed a bag of chips and pawed around inside it.

A nonplussed Pad whispered, “What are you doing? Shouldn’t you be bustin’ those guys up?”

Kavel replied nonverbally, projecting his voice into Pad’s mind, “Letting them sweat. Throwing them off balance.”

Pad’s smile went wide, and he mouthed, “Very cool.”

“Hey! Whoever’s in there needs to come out right now, or else!” shouted a lackey in the living room, mustering all the vocal timbre of a chattering rodent.

Happy to oblige, Kavel sauntered out carrying his snack, with Pad shadowing close behind, staring intently at him in giddy anticipation.

There, in the living room, lounged a man in his mid-twenties on a ratty recliner draped with relatively ornate fabric. He was unclothed except for a pair of gym shorts, his hairy body bulged with decorative muscle, and his face was a lumpy wad of clay that even a master couldn’t work with. Despite this, he at least possessed charisma powerful enough to conquer weaker minds, evidenced by his crew of nobodies so lacking in presence they may as well have been furniture.

Kavel presumed this was the self-styled King of West Kiegland he had come looking for. He casually munched a fistful of chips and watched, with some amusement, the recognition of who he was creeping across the king’s face. The king then bolted upright, his whole body clenched and taut. He signaled a flunky to cut the music playing from busted speakers.

“The fuck do you want?” sputtered the king.

“You tell me,” Kavel mumbled through his mouthful, spitting out moist crumbs that nearly struck the king’s face.

Pad barely held back a chuckle at the sight of it.

Head hung low, the king answered, “I ain’t gotta tell you noth— “

"Look me in the eyes when you're talking to me."

"Oh, damn!" Pad blurted. “Get ‘em.”

A pulse of pain shot through Pad’s skull, threatening to bring him to his knees, if not for a supernatural force that held him upright. This same force compelled him to turn his head towards Kavel’s back. Though Kavel didn’t turn to face him, Pad felt his fiery glare chastising him all the same. The edges of his vision blurred, vibrated, and then faded to black. A screech rose to a crescendo until it drowned out all other sounds. A fear consumed him. The fear of prey trapped within the claw of the predator—no, the fear of a sinner condemned by a god. Then, as suddenly as it had seized him, the paralysis lifted. His vision cleared, the screech faded away, and a voice rumbled like thunder through his mind.

I told you to shut it.

The king rose to his feet with a lithe ferocity, getting all but nose-to-nose with Kavel.

"Nah nah nah, I ain't about to let some tubby toddler disrespect me in my own castle." the king declared. “You better watch your boy.”

The kid's outburst seemed to remind the king he had a spine, but truthfully Kavel was glad for it. These shakedowns were so tedious without a bit of action. All the years spent in the underworld—perched on the razor’s edge, the pressure of a life lived at the extremes pressing him harder and harder into the blade—had calloused his soul. Now, living was an endless chase for the next boundary line between this existence and the next. Casia assumed he didn’t want to take the kid because he was a misanthrope. Really, it was for the kid’s own good.

Whenever the fun started, any responsibility he might have felt for Pad could vanish, and that time had come.

“My boy isn’t your problem. Do you know what your problem is?”

“Tell me. Tell me my problems, peasant.”

“Besides all that matting in your fur?”

“The man’s got jokes.”

“Your bill’s past due.”

“You my accountant now?”

“Nah, I work in collections.”

“Collect this,” the king said, gripping his genitals.

He strolled to the nearby window with haughty steps. There, his domain lay before him. Blocks upon blocks of city conquered by his magnificence. Soon to be conquered, anyway.

“The deal has changed,” he said, gaze still affixed to his realm. “I want twice the product, for the same price.”

“Is that it?” Kavel muttered, engrossed by the dirt under his fingernails. I trudged all the way up here for that?

“Me and my crew basically run this neighborhood, see?” the king explained. “Refuse, and any other pushers you set up here are getting toe tagged. Trust me on that.”

Kavel whistled.

“Sure sounds like you’ve got us over a barrel,” he cooed. “Tell you what. You go grab me the money you owe us for the first batch, and I’ll make sure the coven honors your new terms. How’s that?”

“You mock me. You mock the king.”

The atmosphere of the room intensified. Pad could feel it, like static before a lightning strike. Dense and icy, it filled his lungs and froze his breath.

Kavel laughed—mirthlessly; he grew bored of this exchange.

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

“So, we are at an impasse,” the king mused, retreating to his throne and the authority it conveyed.

“Love that flex of your word-a-day calendar, but no. We are not,” Kavel corrected.

He sauntered over to a small dining room table covered by a tablecloth of porno mags and snack wrappers. At the edge of the table he spied the dregs of some kind of blue powder. He traced a finger through it and brushed the finger across his gums. A familiar frigid shock tore through him.

They’re dusted up too.

He dragged a chair to have a seat before the king and flopped into it with a lazy grace, lounging back with his legs outstretched and crossed, still clutching the half-eaten bag of chips.

“I will be leaving this charming trash pile with payment for product rendered—one way or another,” Kavel continued. “Now, you can settle up in cash…or in blood, but you are not going to like the exchange rate on that.”

His implicit threat hung in the air like a cloud of smoke, a presage of fire to come.

This shit's about to pop off, Pad thought. Gnashing teeth ground his earlier zeal into worry. Beads of sweat formed glistening pools on his forehead. When did it get so hot in here?

The king threw his head back in performative laughter. A howling, hollow cackle used as a vehicle for intimidation.

"You must be the dumbest motherfucker I've ever seen," sneered the king.

He lifted his hands to present his bargain bin band of knights scattered about the room. Each of the five minions shook out their tension and drew a little closer to Kavel and Pad.

“All my crew against you and the calf? That's no contest."

Kavel examined each flunky, scrutinizing their dispositions. It was only then that he took enough stock of these unremarkables to make any distinction between them. He gave each of them a name. A common practice for him at times like this because he'd never once learned the actual name of any lap dog. Does a tornado learn the names of the towns that it levels? Any name would do; it was all about situational awareness, categorizing threats, mapping out the conflict.

Flanking the king on either side were the only two that seemed competent: Muscles, a woman with the same bodybuilder's physique as the king. And Crazy-Eyes, a hunching scarecrow of a man with an unhinged demeanor.

The other three, he gathered, would love to be anywhere but here. There was Doodles, a reserved androgyne covered in bad ink that no doubt came from a sloppily cobbled gun in a friend's basement. Scratchy, the man he saw in the entryway, had started pawing at himself nonstop since Kavel opened the door, plagued by an irritating allergy to danger. And Sniffle, a young woman probably the same age as Pad whose almost-crying had been an ambient score for the whole encounter.

He pointed his finger at her, prompting a gasp.

"You," he said. "You know who I am?"

She nodded, every muscle in her face twitching and shaking.

"You know what I do?"

She nodded again.

"Do you want to leave?"

A tear formed in her eye as she nodded once more.

"You may go."

She wasted no time dashing towards the front door, not even sparing a single look back at her former master. The king rose in fury at this desertion and shouted at her:

"I'll kill you and your whole family, you worthless fuck!"

Doodles and Scratchy watched her go and then shared an anguished look with one another that Kavel was quick to catch. When they turned to look at him, eyes pleading, he shook his head.

"Sorry, folks. That offer was first come, first served."

The king bellowed out a primal scream.

"Kill these fools right now, or I'll break every bone in your fuckin' bodies!”

Muscles and Crazy-Eyes, who had been itching for a scrap from the beginning, dropped to their knees. Their bodies contorted wildly as bones morphed beneath their skin. Patches of wiry fur appeared along their gnarling limbs and down to hands and feet sprouting small claws. Horrific screams that soon turned to unearthly screeches erupted from mouths housing freshly grown incisors sharpened like knives. Soon, there stood two profane fusions of man and rodent locked onto Kavel with their beady eyes. Driven to frenzy by a craving for his flesh, they pounced.

Kavel—unstirred from his languid sprawl on the chair—lobbed the chip bag into the air between he and his foes. He shut his eyes tight and mimicked an explosion with his hand, as his lips mimed a silent Pow! The bag split open and splayed, sending its greasy contents plunging to the floor. The various lights about the room flickered and dimmed, while the shiny inner surface of the bag seemed to start shimmering. Then an intense flash of light blasted out from it, blinding all in the room but Kavel.

In one fluid movement, Kavel rose from his chair and telekinetically launched it like a shot from a cannon. It burst into hundreds of splinters against the body of Muscles. The kitchen table followed right after, whizzing past Pad closely enough to send him into a panic. The table crashed into Muscles so hard that she careened backwards into the window overlooking the street. The impact spread hairline cracks throughout the glass. The smallest of shards rained down on the unconscious abomination slumped beneath.

Over his left shoulder, Kavel glimpsed Scratchy holding an arm over his eyes and waving the other frantically. A swirl of frost motes trailed the waving hand, tracing rough sigils, until coalescing into the tip of a growing icicle that pointed right at Kavel. He twirled to face it, gliding, a dancer consumed by a song. Then that lance, forged from winter’s breath, launched with a force that could cleave stone. Kavel’s practiced hands guided conjured winds into twisting ribbons, catching the icicle in their currents, weaving it harmlessly away. He allowed its momentum to pull at his aura like a fish on a line, pull his body along with it. He spun on the balls of his feet, following the lead of the swirling squall, in a pirouette both nimble and euphoric.

Amidst his pinwheeling, Kavel subtly altered his magic to sculpt the icicle into a crescent blade, and when the trajectory was perfect, his air currents whipped the ice back at its caster. Scratchy's eyesight recovered just soon enough to watch the blade bury itself deep into his torso. Blood mixed with the rapidly melting ice, leaving a grisly puddle on the floor that splashed wildly when his corpse collapsed in a heap.

Pad screamed for peace as he scrambled away from Doodles, who chased him with hands alight with crackling sparks. Kavel moved to intervene but hesitated, struck by the absurdity of the scene—a deadly serious parody of a playground game. A costly hesitation. Crazy-Eyes was upon him, tackling him to the ground in a flurry of tooth and claw. Slobber-slicked jaws furiously clapped, aiming to tear the flesh from Kavel’s face as he twisted evasively. Taking control, he coated his arm with a layer of rock-hard scales and shoved it into the rat's savage maw to hold the beast at bay.

Despite his present struggle, Kavel spared a glance to check on the kid. The high-stakes game of tag was still in full swing. To his credit, Pad defied expectations by dexterously avoiding becoming “it”, though it helped that Doodles had a poor grasp of etherforming. One well-aimed bolt could fry Pad in an instant, put an end to the game, but it seemed Doodles was scraping together the entirety of their talent just to galvanize the skin on their hands.

Kavel reached out with his free hand, diffusing his aura throughout the room to find arcane purchase somewhere useful. Crazy-Eyes proved too distracting. The creature managed to snag a claw on the base of Kavel’s neck, gouging a groove in the skin. On reflex, Kavel unleashed a barbaric onslaught of analog violence into its face. A garbled yelp eked out from the narrow gaps around his scaled arm.

Kavel clutched at the back of Crazy-Eyes’s head, seizing a clump of his fur. A surge of unnatural strength coursed through his muscles. He pulled down hard to wrench open the rat’s mouth. His scaled arm escaped its fanged confines and clasped the lower jaw without delay. Both his arms jerked in opposite directions. A sickening snap punctuated the jawbone dislocating from the skull. Crazy-Eyes launched backward, howling and flailing.

A hoarse scream for help from Pad swiftly brought Kavel’s attention back to dealing with the kid’s pursuer. He climbed to his feet and noticed a spigot on the ceiling that could get the job done. His hand shot forth his aura once more, this time with enough breathing room for his thoughts to grab hold of the material structure of the spigot and heat up the sensor housed within. A torrent of water rained down.

Doodles was too focused on Pad to recognize the danger in suddenly soaking in water. The moisture on their hands and in the air caused the sparks that emitted from their palms to arc and then course throughout their whole body. It had taken all the concentration they had to form electricity from the Ether while magically protecting their hands enough from the voltage. The rest of them was woefully unguarded. The pain was unimaginable, overwhelming every synapse in their brain until the thing just shut off, dropping the goon to the ground.

Hearing a crunching sound, Kavel swung back toward Crazy-Eyes. The rat-man had stumbled his way into the pile of chips Kavel had left earlier. In an instant, the chips melted into a puddle of vegetable oil. Just as Crazy-Eyes regained composure, a blast of air struck like a battering ram. The force of the wind shot him backwards, a feat made all the easier by the slick oil. Before he knew what hit him, Kavel’s spells had launched Crazy-Eyes through the window in an explosion of glass, and the rat-man’s body tumbled fourteen floors down to die a bloody splatter on the street.

The shards of glass, however, hung in the air, frozen there by otherworldly forces. Slowly, with a certain menace, they shifted angles and hovered inside to orbit Kavel’s body. Dismantling every threat and keeping the kid safe had put a put a spring in his step. Tense muscles relaxed, and he could feel the adrenaline coming down. He meandered his way around the throne to face the king once more, mentally ordering the glass shards about him to scrape against each other at lazy intervals, making a bone-chilling sound.

The king stared at the razored mouth of transparent teeth that ached to tear him to pieces. He thought of the monsters he feared as a child, understanding now just how right he was to be afraid. He had convinced himself that he was the monster, staked everything on it. Then one man arrived to show him just how deep the abyss can get. What a real monster can be.

Kavel knelt before the king in faux deference. The glass blades did not.

“Got anything else for me, Your Highness, or can we wrap this up?”

The king pawed sweaty hands around in his pockets, producing a mangled bundle of bills.

“Here, man. Just take what I owe you and get the fuck out, please?”

Kavel didn’t stir, but the glass shards inched closer to the near-blubbering king.

“Please! I’m sorry, okay?! Don’t kill me, man. Don’t kill— “

A few of the shards shot forward faster than any eye could see.

The skewered body of Muscles dropped into the king’s lap. He could make out his reflection in the blood-soaked glass sticking out from the mangy body. He looked like he was screaming. Was he screaming? What just happened?

She had come out of her stupor and did exactly what minions like her do: She failed to assess how thoroughly a force of nature had just torn through her friends. Failed to understand the foolishness of charging at that force. And crucially, failed to dodge the six nearly foot-long shards barreling towards her body.

Kavel snapped his fingers at the king, but the man was simply unreachable.

“Hey. Shut it.”

The shrieking continued.

“Shut up already!”

Kavel’s voice rang out from the elaborate speaker system in the room, booming like the heavy metal that was playing before. The king ceased his wailing and gawped at Kavel; his mind was long gone, pondering the next life.

“What’s your name?” Kavel asked.

The king could hardly shake himself from his haze, struggling to remember if he spoke any languages. Kavel slapped him hard.

“Your name, dummy.”

“The King of W— “

“No, your real— “

A tinge of pain grew behind Kavel’s left eye, the headache that always signaled he had suffered fools enough today, and he turned to Pad to muse, “These guys are always so fucking stupid.”

Pad, of course, had taken up rocking back and forth in the fetal position.

“Right. Anyway. What’s your real name, stupid?” Kavel asked again.

The king whispered something softly. He felt a shard of glass grazing his ear.

“Didn’t quite catch that.”

“It’s Quennis!”

The king slumped into a crying fit. As if that name was the keystone of a dam built to hold back his former weakness, and now the whole thing had burst. Kavel patted him gingerly on the cheek in a twisted vision of a caring parent.

“Yeah, I thought it was gonna be something like that.”

“What are you going to do to me?” Quennis pleaded through snotty tears.

Kavel backed away from him, willing the remaining glass around him to appear as if it were being juggled by his hands.

“Well, I’m only here to send a message.”

Quennis dared himself to believe in mercy, imploring, “Message received loud and clear! Astelum, I won’t pull shit like this ever again.”

Kavel’s brow wrinkled, and then so did Quennis’s.

“Oh, I think you’re misunderstanding me,” Kavel cooed, the temperature of the room dropping a dozen degrees at the iciness.

Quennis muttered to himself a few panicked no-no-nos, I-don’t-want-to-dies, and even a mommy or two. His eyes locked onto Kavel’s to find any hope there, and instead he found himself looking into that abyss. Looking at the solitary truth that from birth until now, it was all a mistake.