Fade to Black (36 page)
Authors: Francis Knight
Tags: #Fiction / Urban Life, #Fiction / Mystery & Detective - Hard Boiled, #Fiction / Fantasy - Epic, #Fiction / Gothic, #Science Fiction, #Fantasy, #Adult, #Fiction / Fantasy - Paranormal
See, now this is why I don’t like responsibility. Not only does my magic hurt like fuck, now it seemed I was going to have to risk a stabbing and I really liked that shirt. It would certainly look better without my blood on it. I could have left the boy, I could have turned away. It certainly would have been better for my health. But, despite what my exes will tell you, at length and in gruesome detail, I am not completely heartless. Only mostly. Besides, we needed this boy if what Dendal suspected was true.
Muttering under my breath about fucking Dendal and his fancy fucking notions of fucking charity, I clenched my fist tighter. The black sidled up behind me like a thief, waiting its chance to drag me into its madness, its joy.
Come on, Rojan, you know you want me, you need me.
“I’m not afraid of you,” I lied. “So fuck off.”
Pain was everything, magic was everything, every part of me. Universes were born, span across my vision, and died. I knew I was going to regret this but I shut my eyes, let the
where
of the boy seep in. The rend-nut stench grew stronger, surrounded me, and made me gag. The air grew danker, colder. One final squeeze of my hand that made me groan, and I opened my eyes and tried not to throw up.
A ring of very surprised faces in the flickering dark. Not very happy faces. I had, of course, announced that I was a mage about as subtly as having a big flashing arrow pointing at my
throat saying, “Please rip here,” which, all things considered, could be said to be a Very Bad Idea. Way to go, Rojan, always leaping before you look.
The man with the knife recovered from his surprise the quickest and loomed over me with a menace that seemed to come naturally.
I always come prepared.
I didn’t fancy any more pain, so I pulled my gun, pressed the end of the barrel against his nose, and made a show of cocking it. Everyone stopped. Guns were still new enough, still expensive and rare enough, that I was pretty confident I had the only one for half a mile in any direction. “Hello. Anyone want to tell me what the fuck they think they’re doing?”
Knife-man took two slow, careful steps backwards, but he didn’t lower the knife. A quick glance around, and I realised why. In my rush toward responsibility, I had failed to see the other men outside the circle. The crowd of them behind me. Looking big and mean and very ugly. I’d heard of this in quiet whispers, of Upsiders going around mob-handed into the refugee areas when it was quiet, finding some poor Downsider on his own and stomping them before getting the hell out. Of them boasting about it afterwards in Upsider bars. Is it any wonder I’m such a cynic?
Three of the men stepped forward. I’m a fairly big guy, broad enough with it, and I can look threatening when I need to but these guys had it down to an art. A mean look to them, like they probably kicked their way out of their mother’s wombs, head butted the midwife, and then got stuck into terrorising anyone in their way. They were doing a good job of terrorising me, anyway.
I was beginning to wish I hadn’t bothered getting out of bed
that morning, or that I’d never met Dendal, or even that I’d stayed dead when I’d had the chance.
The boy crouched by my feet, dripping sweat and fear.
“In my pocket,” I said. “Left-hand side.”
He didn’t hesitate, but delved into the pocket and pulled out my pulse pistol. A very specialised, and until recently, ever-so-slightly illegal piece of kit. The kid stared at it as though it were a live snake for a moment before he seemed to get a grip on himself, and the pistol.
The Upsiders were moving in, wary, careful, but closer every second. I risked a glance behind. A shabby door that looked half-eaten by synth and damp. I backed toward it and the boy came with me. He was shaking fit to bust, and what happened next was probably inevitable.
He pulled the trigger. Now, a pulse pistol is, as I said, a specialised piece of kit. It doesn’t fire bullets, it fires magic, at least provided that it’s a mage pulling the trigger.
Dendal had been right about the boy. He fired, the razor flipped out and sliced his thumb, and the whirring mechanism took the pain, the magic, magnified it, and blasted it out of the end.
I expect the Upsiders were ever so grateful that it was non-lethal. Eventually grateful at least. The pulse leapt out and jumped from one to another, far more power there than anything I’ve ever been able to coax out of it. The zapping pulse dropped everyone it touched, shorting out their brains and sending them slumping to the dilapidated floor to wallow in shallow synth-tainted pools.
The boy had let out a yelp when the razor cut his thumb, but now he stood as though his own brain was shorted out, staring dumbly at the pile of limp bodies.
We didn’t have time for that. The pistol knocks them out but they soon wake up again, and I had only one set of cuffs on me.
I made a mental note to congratulate Dwarf on the improvements he’d made to the pulse pistol, grabbed the boy, and made a run for it. Courageous to the end, that’s me.
Fade to Black
Before the Fall
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Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2013 by Francis Knight
Excerpt from
Before the Fall
copyright © 2013 by Francis Knight
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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ISBN 978-0-316-21769-9
