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 shaves away more and more of Kavel's patience. Gods help the fool he's come to see if none remained when he reaches the "penthouse", a far too generous term for what it is: a filthy, little sweat box, its only luxuries a long-broken elevator and a position slightly further than usual from the piss-tinged stink of the city streets. Real penthouses belong to the upscale kind of dealers Kavel never had to visit.
His pay grade is full of losers; often losers with ambitions to exceed their station needing to be humbled. Which 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 doesn’t know—doesn’t care to know, really—the guy's actual name, but no doubt it is 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 Something outdated and soft and buried deep inside an armor of undeserved confidence.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 is a problem. Pad is loud and chatty. He uses expletives like punctuation, all with a streetwise dialect that simply must be a put-on. He has 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 is aloof and practical. Never one to talk without something important to say. Never one to talk like someone he isn’t. To be honest, never one to talk. He looks as if Pad had stolen those fifty pounds from him, has a mangy mane barely held back by a rubber band, and wears wrinkled black like a second skin. He isn’t above ornament, but only in the form of understated silver jewelry and an aged pair of round-lensed sunglasses. Simple tattoos peek out from behind clothing, suggesting a more unbridled youth, and yet he radiates an aura of too-old-for-this-shit that has existed for the entirety of his thirty-three years.
They are an odd couple, made odder still by the circumstances. What is Casia thinking, making him babysit the kid on this job? She knew how these things went. If it gets rowdy—and it always does—young bloods like Pad are less than useless. They are too eager to make their name; too obsessed with seeming hard and projecting authority. They turn picnics into problems because they don't think. They don't even think they should think. He's gotta learn sometime, Casia had said, despite his protest.
Sure, but does he have to learn on my time? Kavel laments as he rounds 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 wheels 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 whines. “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 pulls his bottom lip back quickly, “No, I was— “
“Enough. Boss says keep your mouth shut too. Just watch. And learn.”
Pad nods, 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 pulls a nebulizer from his jacket and poises it to his lips. He catches Pad shifting about in the corner of his eye, and the kid’s face has traded shame for envy.
“Yo, now we’re talking! Lemme get a hit of that.”
After a scowl and a shush that shrinks the kid right back down, Kavel rolls his eyes towards the door and returns the nebulizer to his lips. A deep breath shoots a surge of aerosolized Etherite straight to his lungs. A feeling like being splashed with ice water at the atomic level sends 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 does it, the thrill of connecting to The Ether never goes away.
His personal harbinger signals 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 fills his senses for but a moment and then fades away, pulling his consciousness back to the apartment door and the task at hand.
He focuses his thoughts on his ears, willing primal forces to amplify their ability, until silence gives 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 draws closer to the door.
I guess it’s showtime, Kavel thinks.
“You ready?”
Pad nods, but the furtive flitting of his eyes tells 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 holds out a hand that surges with imperceptible energy and grasps the various mechanisms of the door with his mind. A twist of his palm unlocks the deadbolts, and another turns the doorknob. A gentle push forward through the air swings the door inward to reveal a surprised lackey backing away towards the living room.
Kavel enters the apartment but doesn’t make his way to its occupants at first. Instead, he takes his time perusing the first room just past the entryway, a cramped and poorly maintained kitchen. He picks through cabinets and drawers, even searchs the fridge for anything appetizing. Eventually, he grabs a bag of chips and paws around inside it.
A nonplussed Pad whispers, “What are you doing? Shouldn’t you be bustin’ those guys up?”
Kavel replies, projecting his voice into Pad’s mind, “Letting them sweat. Throwing them off balance.”
Pad’s smile goes wide, and he mouthed, “Very cool.”
“Hey! Whoever’s in there needs to come out right now, or else!” shouts a lackey in the living room, mustering all the vocal timbre of a chattering rodent.
Happy to oblige, Kavel saunters out carrying his snack, with Pad shadowing close behind, staring intently at him in giddy anticipation.
There, in the living room, lounges a man in his mid-twenties on a ratty recliner draped with relatively ornate fabric. He is unclothed except for a pair of gym shorts, his hairy body bulged with decorative muscle, and his face is a lumpy wad of clay that even a master couldn’t work with. Despite this, he at least possesss charisma powerful enough to conquer weaker minds, evidenced by his crew of nobodies so lacking in presence they may as well be furniture.
Kavel presumes this is the self-styled King of West Kiegland he has come looking for. He casually munches a fistful of chips and watches, with some amusement, the recognition of who he is creeping across the king’s face. The king then bolts upright, his whole body clenched and taut. He signals a flunky to cut the music playing from busted speakers.
“The fuck do you want?” sputters the king.
“You tell me,” Kavel mumbles through his mouthful, spitting out moist crumbs that nearly struck the king’s face.
Pad barely holds back a chuckle at the sight of it.
Head hung low, the king answers, “I ain’t gotta tell you noth— “
"Look me in the eyes when you're talking to me."
"Oh, damn!" Pad blurts. “Get ‘em.”
A pulse of pain shoots through Pad’s skull, threatening to bring him to his knees, if not for a supernatural force holding him upright. This same force compels him to turn his head towards Kavel’s back. Though Kavel doen’t turn to face him, Pad feels his fiery glare chastising him all the same. The edges of his vision blur, vibrate, and then fade to black. A screech rises to a crescendo until it drowns out all other sounds. A fear consumes 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 lifts. His vision clears, the screech fades away, and a voice rumbles like thunder through his mind.
I told you to shut it.
The king rises 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," he declares, “You better watch your boy.”
The kid's outburst seemed to remind the king he had a spine, and truthfully Kavel is 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 is 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 is 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 has 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 says, gripping his genitals.
He strolls to the nearby window with haughty steps. There, his domain lays before him. Blocks upon blocks of city conquered by his magnificence. Soon to be conquered, anyway.
“The deal has changed,” he says, gaze still affixed to his realm. “I want twice the product, for the same price.”
“Is that it?” Kavel mutters, 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 explains. “Refuse, and any other pushers you set up here are getting toe tagged. Trust me on that.”
Kavel whistles.
“Sure sounds like you’ve got us over a barrel,” he coos. “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 intensifies. Pad feels it, like static before a lightning strike. Dense and icy, it fills his lungs and freezes his breath.
Kavel laughs—mirthlessly; he is bored of this exchange.
“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
“So, we are at an impasse,” the king muss, retreating to his throne and the authority it conveys.
“Love that flex of your word-a-day calendar, but no. We are not,” Kavel corrects.
He wanders over to a small dining room table covered by a tablecloth of porno mags and snack wrappers. At the edge of the table he spies the dregs of some kind of blue powder. He traces a finger through it and brushs the finger across his gums. A familiar frigid shock tears through him.
They’re dusted up too.
He drags a chair before the king and flops 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. 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 hangs 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 grind his earlier zeal into worry. Beads of sweat form glistening pools on his forehead. When did it get so hot in here?
The king throws 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," sneers the king.
He lifts his hands to present his bargain bin band of knights scattered about the room. Each of the five minions shake out their tension and draw a little closer to Kavel and Pad.
“All my crew against you and the calf? That's no contest."
Kavel examinea each flunky, scrutinizing their dispositions. It is only then that he takes enough stock of these unremarkables to make any distinction between them. He gives 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 is all about situational awareness, categorizing threats, mapping out the conflict.
Flanking the king on either side are the only two that seem 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 gathers, would love to be anywhere but here. There is 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 so far.
He points his finger at her, prompting a gasp.
"You. You know who I am?"
She nods, every muscle in her face twitching and shaking.
"You know what I do?"
She nods again.
"Do you want to leave?"
A tear forms in her eye as she nods once more.
"You may go."
She wastes no time dashing towards the front door, not even sparing a single look back at her former master. The king rises in fury at this desertion and shouts at her:
"I'll kill you and your whole family, you worthless fuck!"
Doodles and Scratchy watch her go and then share an anguished look with one another that Kavel is quick to catch. When they turn to look at him, eyes pleading, he shakes his head.
"Sorry, folks. That offer was first come, first served."
The king bellows 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, drop to their knees. Their bodies contort wildly as bones morph beneath skin. Patches of wiry fur appear along gnarling limbs and down to hands and feet sprouting small claws. Horrific screams soon turn to unearthly screeches erupting from mouths housing freshly grown incisors sharpened like knives. Soon, there stands two profane fusions of man and rodent locked onto Kavel with their beady eyes. Driven to frenzy by a craving for his flesh, they pounce.
Kavel—unstirred from his languid sprawl on the chair—lobs the chip bag into the air between he and his foes. He shuts his eyes tight and mimics an explosion with his hand, as his lips mime a silent Pow! The bag splits open and splays, sending its greasy contents plunging to the floor. The various lights about the room flicker and dim, while the shiny inner surface of the bag seems to start shimmering. Then an intense flash of light blasts out from it, blinding all in the room but Kavel.
In one fluid movement, Kavel rises from his chair and telekinetically launches it like a shot from a cannon. It bursts into hundreds of splinters against the body of Muscles. The kitchen table follows right after, whizzing past Pad closely enough to send him into a panic. The table crashs into Muscles so hard that she careens backwards into the window overlooking the street. The impact spreads hairline cracks throughout the glass. The smallest of shards rain down on the unconscious abomination slumped beneath.
Over his left shoulder, Kavel glimpses Scratchy holding an arm over his eyes and waving the other frantically. A swirl of frost motes trails the waving hand, tracing rough sigils, until coalescing into the tip of a growing icicle that points right at Kavel. He twirls to face it, gliding, a dancer consumed by a song. Then that lance, forged from winter’s breath, flies with a force that could cleave stone. Kavel’s practiced hands guide conjured winds into twisting ribbons, catching the icicle in their currents, weaving it harmlessly away. He allows its momentum to pull at his aura like a fish on a line, pull his body along with it. He spins 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 alters his magic to sculpt the icicle into a crescent blade, and when the trajectory is perfect, his air currents whip the ice back at its caster. Scratchy's eyesight recovers just soon enough to watch the blade bury itself deep into his torso. Blood mixes with rapidly melting ice, leaving a grisly puddle on the floor that splashes wildly when his corpse collapses in a heap.
Pad screams for peace as he scrambles away from Doodles, who chases him with hands alight with crackling sparks. Kavel moves to intervene but hesitats, struck by the absurdity of the scene—a deadly serious parody of a playground game. A costly hesitation. Crazy-Eyes is upon him, tackling him to the ground in a flurry of tooth and claw. Slobber-slicked jaws furiously clap, aiming to tear the flesh from Kavel’s face as he twists evasively. Taking control, he coats his arm with a layer of rock-hard scales and shoves it into the rat's savage maw to hold the beast at bay.
Despite his present struggle, Kavel spares a glance to check on the kid. The high-stakes game of tag is still in full swing. To his credit, Pad defies expectations by dexterously avoiding becoming “it”, though it helps that Doodles has a poor grasp of etherforming. One well-aimed bolt could fry Pad in an instant, put an end to the game, but it seems Doodles is scraping together the entirety of their talent just to galvanize the skin on their hands.
Kavel reaches out with his free hand, diffusing his aura throughout the room to find arcane purchase somewhere useful. Crazy-Eyes proves too distracting. The creature manages to snag a claw on the base of Kavel’s neck, gouging a groove in the skin. On reflex, Kavel unleashes a barbaric onslaught of analog violence into its face. A garbled yelp ekes out from the narrow gaps around his scaled arm.
Kavel clutches at the back of Crazy-Eyes’s head, seizing a clump of his fur. A surge of unnatural strength courses through his muscles. He pulls down hard to wrench open the rat’s mouth. His scaled arm escapes its fanged confines and clenches the lower jaw without delay. Both of his arms jerk in opposite directions. A sickening snap punctuates the jawbone dislocating from the skull. Crazy-Eyes heaves backward, howling and flailing.
A hoarse scream for help from Pad swiftly brings Kavel’s attention back to dealing with the kid’s pursuer. He climbs to his feet and notices a spigot on the ceiling that could get the job done. His hand shoots his aura out 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 rains down.
Doodles is too focused on Pad to recognize the danger in suddenly soaking in water. The moisture on their hands and in the air causes the sparks that emit from their palms to arc and course throughout their whole body. It had taken all the concentration they had to form electricity from the Ether and magically protect their hands enough from the voltage. The rest of them is woefully unguarded. The pain is unimaginable, overwhelming every synapse in their brain until the thing just shuts off, dropping the goon to the ground.
Hearing a crunching sound, Kavel swings back toward Crazy-Eyes. The rat-man had stumbled his way into the pile of chips Kavel left earlier. In an instant, the chips melt into a puddle of vegetable oil. Just as Crazy-Eyes regains composure, a blast of air strikes like a battering ram. The force of the wind catapults him backwards, a feat made all the easier by the slick oil. Before he knows what hit him, Kavel’s spells send Crazy-Eyes through the window in an explosion of glass, and the rat-man’s body tumbles fourteen floors down to die a bloody splatter on the street.
The shards of glass, however, hang in the air, frozen there by otherworldly forces. Slowly, with a certain menace, they shift angles and hover inside to orbit Kavel’s body. Dismantling every threat and keeping the kid safe put a spring in his step. Tense muscles relax, and he feels the adrenaline coming down. He meanders 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 stares at the razored mouth of transparent teeth that ache to tear him to pieces. He thinks 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 arrives to show him just how deep the abyss can get. What a real monster can be.
Kavel kneels before the king in faux deference. The glass blades do not.
“Got anything else for me, Your Highness, or can we wrap this up?”
The king paws 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 doesn’t stir, but the glass shards inch closer to the near-blubbering king.
“Please! I’m sorry, okay?! Don’t kill me, man. Don’t kill— “
A few of the shards take off faster than any eye could see.
The skewered body of Muscles drops into the king’s lap. He can make out his reflection in the blood-soaked glass sticking out from the mangy body. He looks like he is screaming. Is 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 snaps his fingers at the king, but the man is simply unreachable.
“Hey. Shut it.”
The shrieking continues.
“Shut up already!”
Kavel’s voice rings out from the elaborate speaker system in the room, booming like the heavy metal that was playing before. The king ceases his wailing and gawps at Kavel; his mind is long gone, pondering the next life.
“What’s your name?” Kavel asks.
The king can hardly shake himself from his haze, struggling to remember if he spoke any languages at all. Kavel slaps him hard.
“Your name, dummy.”
“The King of W— “
“No, your real— “
A tinge of pain grows behind Kavel’s left eye, the headache that always signals he had suffered fools enough today, and he turns 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 asks 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 slumps into a crying fit. As if the name was the keystone of a dam built to hold back his former weakness, and now the whole thing had burst. Kavel pats him gingerly on the cheek, 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 pleads through snotty tears.
Kavel backs away from him, willing the remaining glass around him to appear juggled by his hands.
“Well, I’m only here to send a message.”
Quennis dares himself to believe in mercy, imploring, “Message received loud and clear! Astelum, I won’t pull shit like this ever again.”
Kavel’s brow wrinkles, and then so does his.
“Oh, I think you’re misunderstanding me,” Kavel purrs, the temperature of the room drops a dozen degrees at the iciness.
Quennis mutters to himself a few panicked no-no-nos, I-don’t-want-to-dies, and even a mommy or two. His eyes lock onto Kavel’s to find any hope there, and instead he finds himself looking into that abyss. Looking at the solitary truth that from birth until now, it was all a mistake.
If you enjoyed this, Chapter Two is available for you to read right now.