King Maker: The Knights of Breton Court, Volume 1 (15 page)

  "Look at this motherfucker here."

  "He always had a problem dealing with people," Miss Jane said.

  "He's obviously not ready to handle all of this." She passed her hand down her body to show off her voluptuous figure. "Tell you what, though. I'll suck him off real good."

  Her hands encircled the outline of his penis. His eyes fixed on her mouth. Brown lipstick smoldered on lips traced with black liner. A mole dotted her chin on the left. She might as well have drawn a bull'seye on her face. She took him into her mouth and seemed to hold him there for eternity.

 
 

Lott Carey woke from strange dreams every hour. That was when fatigue got to him so much as to allow him to drift off into the fitful thing he called sleep. He dreamt of blood and battles, of swords and death, of love and pain. It was his calling, his destiny, and his gift. He knew he'd never know peace. So he flipped through the motel cable channels as if on this third time through there might be something on worth watching. Better the perils of late-night television than the visions that tormented him whenever he closed his eyes lately. A baleful glare over a reptilian spread of teeth, no more than a glimpse, but the familiar sensation sent terror spreading through his soul like embalming fluid poured into a corpse.

  On the outskirts of Speedway, the Speedway Lodge, formerly a Howard Johnson's, cost just over a hundred a week to stay. Just off the Crawfordsville Road thoroughfare that led to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the stretch was tourist-friendly year-round; but if there wasn't a race going on, the motel was largely deserted. And worse, it offered few amenities to alleviate boredom. Lott couldn't even distract himself with his cell phone as it had been cut off earlier that day. He had let his cousin talk him into sharing a plan with him because his cousin couldn't get a plan on his own. Ignoring the voice warning him not to do business with family, Lott agreed. The first bill arrived and his cousin had run up over three hundred dollars in texting charges alone and offered to pay him fifty bucks on it out of his next check. Lott never even received the fifty. Another in the long list of reasons for him to stay away from family.

  His mother was a fiend. Always working an angle, she named him for a missionary in hopes of impressing some deacons at the church. It worked until they caught her breaking into the office to steal the petty cash. They moved into Section 8 housing, his moms little more than an industrious junkie who knew how to work the system. Even now, Lott suspected that her head bobbed up and down in the lap of a neighbor so that she could score enough to get back to sucking on a glass dick. Of his two brothers, one was barely functional and the other in the ground. He was staying with his sister, but she abruptly kicked him out. He couldn't tell if she was bipolar or simply back on drugs.

  Turning off the television, Lott decided to indulge his one vice and went out for a smoke. It was needless, too, because he wasn't addicted. There was no physical urge, his brain didn't get the rush others did. He smoked… just cause. It was something to do and gave him time to think. The outside view didn't offer much by way of distraction. His neighbors mostly paid for their rooms by the hour. One glance of his concrete dour expression and they let him be, though he took no joy in appearing hard. At the thought of having to adopt that affectation, he spat on the sidewalk. However, the role of being hard was a community expectation, a fixed mask, though he had no heart for death, his or anyone else's. Occasionally, he forced a smile for one of the regular pros whose faces he'd come to recognize, otherwise he continued the pantomime of armor needed for survival. Thus he rose up quickly on the streets with a reputation for being a loner until he hooked up with King. They had been boys for a minute, though, truth be told, while Lott was tougher and a better fighter, King had greater heart and will. He'd told King to stop through, but the parking lot remained empty and bleak.

  His evening's boredom sufficiently broken up, Lott flopped on his bed and opened one of the six books he picked up from the library. Tom Wolfe's
A Man in Full.
Walter Mosley's
Futureland
. Machiavelli's
The Prince
. Sun Tzu's
The Art of War.
Gary Braunbeck's
Destinations Unknown
. And the book which caught his attention this evening, Joseph Campbell's
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
. He remembered his fifthgrade teacher who rarely spoke to him and never called on him in class. She had already written him off as another street tough and had no expectations of him beyond, hopefully, him not disrupting class so that the other students could learn. Public school became a death by discouragement with him, the memory of which often had him wondering how many boys she'd derailed by not believing in them, by teaching them that they had already been written off. College was a dream he clung to as he struggled to pull together ends. Once he passed his GED. After he got his license. After he paid off the tickets from driving his sister's car without a license. There was always some roadblock in his map of plans.

  At the moment he was trapped in that cycle: needed money for a car, needed a car for a job, and needed a job for money. He accomplished the first goal and he got a job. The blue FedEx uniform was like a second skin at this point. He used to work down by the airport, trying to save up enough money to get a car and full get on his feet, but his kin were bleeding him dry for ride money, charging twenty-five bucks for a ten-minute trip. Another reason to add to that list. Life would be easier if he could walk to work or if he worked along a bus line, so he had hopes of transferring to a closer branch. Soon he'd be able to apply to school, maybe IUPUI or Ivy Tech, something to get started.

  The room lights flickered, interrupting his reading. Briefly he wondered if rats chewed on the wiring, as such was the natural order of things. Finding his place in his book again, he found comfort in the slightly chilly room by curling up and covering himself with a blanket. Fully dressed and it being the waning days of summer, Lott found himself pulling the comforter further around him. A creeping numbness settled into his feet so slowly he didn't realize the deep ache of cold in his bones at first. Movement skittered on the edge of his vision. Against the contrast of the dark blanket he realized he could see his breath. He was ready to adjust the thermostat or call the super when he noticed something else. Smoke billowed in from under the door.

  Lott rolled out of his bed. The heavy fog had a measured creep to it, its movement contrary to the laws governing mists. Cloudy torrents seeped under the door and through the slits of the window with nary a smoke detector going off. Rushing to the bathroom, he scooped up several towels, returning to find that the wisps had formed a hand with a raised finger, wagging at him for having any thoughts of stemming it.

  With that, the mist dispersed in a puff then coalesced into a screen of sorts. The picture of a woman formed, one unfamiliar to Lott though her beauty – despite the smoky portrait – was quite evident. Tall and proud, hair pulled back into a ponytail, she had a fragility and strength all at the same time. His heart filled with an ecstatic longing. Soon, another shape entered the scene. Clearly it was Lott, the two recognizing each other. They moved like guilty people not wanting to be caught, yet desiring the other all the more. They embraced, cloudy fingers fumbling over each other, probing, undressing. Lott stepped nearer, his hand raised in front of him as if to touch the entwined pair.

  Suddenly, the tendrils of mist took hold of him, whip-like cords wrapping around his hands, squeezing him with such force he winced despite his surprise. The fog rope lifted him from the ground, his arms pulled over his head. Lott kicked at the fallen cloud, each kick dispersing it briefly only to have it re-form. It formed a teeth-filled maw, opening and closing, with dark indentations giving it the appearance of eyes as it drew Lott toward it. A tongue lolled out, snaking its way to him, its serpentine undulations writhing up his body until it arrived at his face. It licked about him, its ephemeral touch both cold and light. Lott pulled away from it, straining from its touch as much as its tight embrace allowed. The coil reared up, a cloud cobra, then it rammed itself into his mouth. The coldness seeped into Lott. Its essence pushed down his throat. He gagged as it forced itself into him, filling him. Growing light-headed, unable to breathe, his eyes fluttered as they sank back into his head.

  The door buckled as something with a lot of force behind it slammed into it. The crash roused Lott back to near lucidity. He turned his head to see what manner of beast would follow next. Interminable seconds passed as the mist both drained and filled him. With the next blow, the door flew off its hinges followed by King and Merle tumbling in.

  King came to a stuttering halt as it took him a moment to get his head around the sight of his longtime friend suspended on tendrils of smoke. Gathering himself, he swung madly to break the beast's grip. Merle stood, near motionless, as if a patron at an art exhibit taking in the beauty and scale of the machinations as only a true connoisseur such as he could appreciate.

  "What is this thing?" King cried out as he punched in vain. "Merle?"

  Merle arced his hand as if throwing up a mystical gang sign, and an arc of green light struck the room. The tentacles of vapor collapsed, their tethers cut, dispersing like fog under morning rays. Merle's complexion turned suddenly pallid and gray. He reached out to a lampstand for purchase, but missed it, instead falling from sheer exhaustion.

  "Merle, are you all right?" King caught Lott as best he could, propping him up until his legs steadied themselves enough for him to bear his own weight. "What was that?"

  "Each action costs." Merle gulped air between words. "Someone called the dragon's breath."

  "The what? Why attack Lott?"

  "Someone wishes to cut off your support before you can assemble it. Nice."

  "You can marvel at it later. Let's get out of here before it comes back."

 

Loaded with hundreds of songs from his father's childhood, doo-wop mostly, but a mix of tunes through the '70s, the music on King's iPod was the last connection to the father he barely remembered. He had no distant memory of his father, only the idea of him. His mother treasured a few items he'd left with her between visits. Of the few records left at her place, her favourite was Isaac Hayes'
Hot Buttered Soul
. She played it over and over, often saying how the record reminded her of him and how out of his own time he seemed to be. An old soul. Only in these moments, between battles and with his music, did he feel like his father's son.

  Lott slept, exhausted but otherwise none the worse for wear after being attacked. As if around a campfire taking the first watch, King plopped down on his couch. Merle laid on the floor, head propped up in his hands, and stared at the dancing lights of the iPod with childlike fascination.

  "What the hell was that?" King had been waiting to ask but had decided not to open the topic until he had a chance to digest what he'd seen.

  "The dragon's breath," Merle said with a matterof-factness.

  "Oh. Well, now that you've laid it out for me, that explains everything."

  "It's the same for every hero's journey. You're only told as much as you're ready to accept."

  "And what couldn't I accept?" King poured himself a glass of water, tilting the pitcher to Merle who waved off the offer.

  "That magic is real. That mystery has power and truth."

  "Uh huh."

  "This would be you still being not quite ready." Merle rolled over, a mad light in his eyes. Clearing the countertop that doubled as a table, he spread a few coasters along it. "The city, like many places, is swathed by ley lines, what some might call fairy chains. Think of them as lines of force that connect places of power."

  "This better not be some Satanic shit."

  "No, no. This is older than that. Think of the magic that I describe as energy." Merle traced a line from one coaster to the next. "A natural energy that runs along power lines."

  "These ley lines…"

  "Exactly. And they connect places of power."

  "Like power stations."

  "Some people, or elementals, can naturally harness that energy better."

  "Like you?"

  "Me? I'm an old man in a tinfoil hat. Barely capable of a glamour here or there, though I've got a few tricks left in me."

  "I'm having a hard time getting my mind around this."

  "We live in precarious times. No room for magic. Or dragons. For the line of the serpent to continue, it must adapt to the age. For now I have it on good authority that we need to wait."

  "On whose authority?"

  "Sir Rupert's, of course."

  "Great." King stared at his empty glass he didn't remember draining and refilled it. It was going to be a long evening.

 

• • •

 

A couple of nights a week, volunteers from Outreach Inc. did what they called a street night. Patrolling the streets, they searched for teens who might be at risk in order to inform them about Outreach's services. Tonight, Wayne and a female volunteer wore the vests emblazoned with the Outreach logo and toted the flashlights that doubled as batons if they got into a scrape. As her case manager, he wanted an excuse to check up on Lady G. He couldn't shake the feeling that she was in trouble.

  There was a perception that the poor want to live the way they did, victims of their laziness or poor life choices. As was usually the case, the truth was a little more complex, the stark shades of such black and white judgment tempered by the reality of a system that often erected walls against folks when it didn't abandon them outright, and allowed them to fall through the cracks. To fall into that other world of shadow and societal malice, the forgotten places in the shadow of downtown. The survivors – and truly they survived more than lived – made use of any abandoned space to stay warm and carve out the semblance of an existence. It hadn't been so long since Wayne transitioned out of the streets. Other family members pitched in, one, because when they saw someone working so hard to make it they had to help when they could; and two, his charitable spirit put them to shame. Once he graduated from college, he strove to help as many over the wall as he could.