Venomous

by Christopher Krovatin

  Renée decides that her place “isn’t safe,” as though Casey is a team of highly trained mercenaries. We walk to my place, a couple of New York City vampires—black coats, dark shades, skin with an obvious lack of sunlight. There’s a tension between us that gets worse and worse as the walk continues. We barely speak, our mouths occupied with cigarettes, our minds taut with anxiety. By the time we get to my apartment, I’m almost wishing she would go away and leave me alone with the venom, let me ride its course, but I know her presence is the only thing keeping me from going utterly batshit. The venom’s not abating in the least.

  Thank the maker, my mom and brother are nowhere to be found. We get to my room and immediately curl up on my bed, still silent. It seems like the only option available at this point—to clutch each other for dear life.

  After about twenty minutes of silent cuddling, when the noise in my head has quieted just enough for me to form a coherent sentence, I ask, “So, do you hate me now?”

  “Cut that shit out,” she mumbles into my chest. “It’s as if you want me to hate you at this point. I’m sick of it.”

  “Why would I want you to hate me?”

  “Because it would justify your poisonousness,” she says in an academic monotone. “You would feel justified in thinking of yourself as a blight on my life.”

  “You agree with Randall then,” I snap. Suddenly her touch feels repulsive. “I’m just a melodramatic victim.”

  “No,” she says. “I think Randall was over the line in talking to you like that. You’re his friend, and he owes you more than that. But this is a big deal, and I am pissed at you, and he has a point.”

  “Is it really, though?” I spit out, speaking before thinking. “So Casey has a crush on him? Does that warrant all the crying and the breaking shit?”

  “Look who’s talking, Mr. Takes Me Two Minutes to Cripple Someone,” she says. “This isn’t just a crush, hon. This is years of friendship and embarrassment on Casey’s part. You dealt with the venom your own way, but part of Casey is wanting what he can’t have, and you just yanked the support out from under years of propped-up baggage. What if that happened to you? What if a portion of this crazy-ass life you’ve built around yourself just got smashed?” She shakes her head against me. “There’s no right answer here, it’s everyone’s fault, but it’s not the end of the world. There.”

  You don’t know a thing about me, lady.

  “I’m sorry. I love you.”

  “I know,” she says, and then as an afterthought, “and I think your mom’s home.”

  The door clicks and opens to the sounds of my mom and Lon carrying groceries into the kitchen. My eyelids clamp together, and I take a deep breath. The siesta was nice, but we have to get out of here. Considering the state I’m in, I can’t deal with my family, especially if they’re meeting my girlfriend for the first time.

  “Locke?” calls my mom. “You here, honey? We got chocolate milk.”

  There’s no way of exiting without running into them. Make this quick. “In my room. Be out in a second.”

  We straighten ourselves up and get our coats back on. Before I open the door, Renée grabs my face and kisses me, hard, as if we’re on our way to a quick demise. I open the door, and we shuffle into the kitchen.

  My mom looks up from a paper bag and smiles. “Hey, babe, chocolate milk’s in the fridge—Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you had someone over.”

  “It’s cool. Mom, this is Renée. Renée, Mom.”

  “Renée? The Renée?” My mom squeals in delight and, in traditional Mom response, sidles over to us and gives Renée a huge bear hug, pulling my girlfriend into her maternal bosom. Renée’s eyes are just visible between my mom’s grasping arms, a look of panic lining her face. It’d be cute if I didn’t want to leave this place as soon as possible.

  The person who gave birth to me pulls Renée back at arm’s length and beams into her face, but her smile suddenly wanes a bit, and then she decides to mortify the crap out of me.

  “Honey,” she says, inspecting my girlfriend, “do you really need all that mess on your face? You’re so pretty!”

  “Jesus, Mom,” I say a little too loudly. “Come on, don’t do this.”

  My mom suddenly looks hurt and embarrassed, and I hate myself for it. “I’m sorry, kidlet, I don’t mean to be…It’s just, she’s got this beautiful figure, and this lovely hair, and then BAM! Captain Howdy!” For the first time in my life, I contemplate matricide. Like lightning, I pour myself a glass of chocolate milk and throw it down my throat. It helps. A little. Mostly I just feel nauseated.

  Renée stays charming, picking up my slack. “Locke makes me wear it. He doesn’t want any competition, and it scares the other boys away.”

  “Well, good. At least he knows a worthy investment when he sees one.”

  “Yeah, he’s a pretty perfect kid.”

  My mom glances sidelong at me and stage-whispers, “I like this girl,” which sends her and Renée into fits of well-choreographed laughter. I try to force a chuckle, but it dies in my throat. “So can you kids stay for dinner? I was thinking spaghetti, but if we have company, I could do something a little bigger, maybe make some chicken parmigiana—”

  “Actually, we have to get going,” Renée interrupts before I can act like an even bigger dick to my mother. “We’re meeting Casey and Randall for dinner in a little bit, and we’ve already ditched ’em a couple of times in the past. You know how it is.”

  “Sure, sure, no problem, have a good time,” she says, waving us away. I can hear it in her voice—I don’t mean to cramp your style, you kids go ahead. I feel terrible, like I’m hurting her, but I’m also enraged. Sorry I have my own fucking life to deal with now. If she had any idea what I’m going to have to deal with today—

  “Honey? Come on, we have to run.” Renée’s hand is on my shoulder, pulling me away. I wave good-bye to my mom, and we move toward the door, thinking only about the fresh air, the sun, all things outside my fucking apartment.

  Suddenly a blond blur darts in front of us, and Renée and I are confronted with ten years of overachieving young man smiling up at us.

  “Are you Renée?” asks Lon peppily.

  “I so am,” she says with a smile. “Lon, right? How’re those comics treating you?”

  “They’re great,” he says, elated to be in front of my comics-savvy girlfriend. “I really liked ’em. Too bad you guys can’t stay for dinner. Locke, we’re having spaghetti tonight. And you can see some of the drawings I did at school today! Here, stay for dinner, I can show you, I did this one of Iron Man. And his armor’s really hard to draw. But I think I got it down. It’s just the chest plate, it’s a real pain, so I don’t think he looks perfect—”

  “Lon. We’ve got to go. Back off.”

  Lon’s mile-a-minute speech stops dead with a frightened wheeze. Renée looks over her shoulder at me, equally taken aback—the voice that just spoke was commanding, cold, and impatient, exactly not how I should be talking to the best little brother ever.

  I clear my throat. “Sorry, man. Rough day, okay? We’ll talk about it later. We need to go.”

  “Yeah,” he says, looking down at his feet, ashamed to be shut down in front of company. “Sorry. I understand. Nice meeting you, Renée.”

  As we tromp down the stairs of my building, Renée shakes her head. “That wasn’t cool, Locke. You don’t do that to a little kid in front of company. All he wanted to do was impress me, you realize.”

  I don’t. Fucking. Care.

  The cool New York air hits me, lowering my insane body temperature a few degrees. Every remedy for the venom—chocolate milk, cooling down, Renée—is frighteningly temporary. Every movement of my body is charged with fire. Every thought is murderous, persistent. This day could not get any worse.

  And, as if on cue, Renée’s phone rings.

  “Hello? Brent, hey, yeah—What…Oh, fuck. Yeah. Locke told him. No, no, we should get to him first…Right, exactly. Where is
he? Okay. Yeah, sure, it’s cool. Yeah, I know where that is. Thanks a bunch, man. Bye.” She clicks her phone shut. “He’s at a bar on Seventy-third. Apparently, he’s called all the Major Arcana to try and put out some sort of hit on us or something. They were less than receptive, so Brent called me.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “We meet him at the fucking bar.” She sighs. “What else do friends do?”

  The P&G Café is apparently a dive in the truest sense—it is neither large nor well-lit nor clean nor in any way cool. There’s a bar, some bottles, and a couple of tiny booths surrounding a broken-down jukebox. While its outside is lined with flashing neon depicting martinis and signs for steaks, it’s really only good for holing up and drinking yourself to death. It looks, honestly, like the kind of place I’d normally love to go and drink, probably with Casey. Today it’s the house of Dracula.

  “Put on your game face,” says Renée, staring at the bar with the same dread. “You’ve seen Casey bad before, but nothing like this. Fuck, this might even be a learning experience for me.”

  “How do we want to do this?”

  “I’m gonna go in there and sit down with him and try to talk him down. After that, I’m going to tell him that you’re outside, and if he’s down, we should go somewhere and work this through. I figure we give him the choice, that way he doesn’t feel cornered.” She gives me a wary eye. “The most important thing is that everyone keeps their temper. You need to basically throw your pride away and apologize fully. Remember, in a situation like this, anger never solves any—”

  The door to the bar flies open and there he is, standing in the doorway, hunched over and panting. Each time he breathes, a throaty, grating noise comes ripping through his mouth. His hair is mussed, in his face, and even though I know he’s only known about what happened since this afternoon, his clothes look like they’ve been slept in for a week. A line of spittle hangs lazily from the corner of his massive smile, and twitches every time he lets out a breath. His eyes are as big as dinner plates, but for a moment I almost think I can’t see any white in them, that they’ve glazed over with the deepest, darkest black.

  “Holy shit,” he says, advancing on me. “I’m going to kill the shit out of you.”

  “Casey, wait.”

  UP TOmy elbows, then my shoulders, in this monster’s mouth. Its huge, shiny eyes were only inches from my face, and the whirling tentacles at its maw seemed to be gibbering at me in hideous, hellish laughter. There was no doubt in this creature’s mind: I was lunch, a hatred-fueled snack.

  Fine. If it was going to pull, then I was going to push.

  I closed my eyes and felt the dark energies of the city, the fuel for our fires. Like a ham radio, my mind found the core frequency, the seething black heart of the city’s hate-flow, and tuned into it. Be a conduit, Locke. Use it. Your powers are the same as his, just a different form. Attach one to the other.

  There. The pain, the evil. Every drop of innocent blood, every life shattered.

  Focus it. Move it through your heart and into his.

  My costume flared, grew, twisted. With one great push, I used every ounce of darkness I had and fired it into this beast’s obsidian heart with one concentrated blast.

  And then, fireworks.

  My hands exploded in shadows, sending crackling energy and burnt sludgelike tentacle flesh firing into the sky. The bolts of obsidian light rippled through the future-Blacklight’s system, burning away and absorbing every ounce of power he was deriving from the city’s black core. There was the sound of a thousand people screaming in anguish, and then the monster flew away, its flesh cracking and blowing away with the river breeze as ash, nothing more. I reeled back, taking a deep breath—I’d never released such a concentrated amount of energy before, and I’d never absorbed so much at one time.

  My costume rippled and shook. So much darkness. So much avarice and guilt and hatred, pulsing throughout me. I was a god—no, God, the one, the only. I was power and strength, pure and unfiltered. It was incredible.

  I stood, watching his slumped form, and remembered the three words he had spoken. The ones that mattered the most.

  “I killed her.”

  The costume twitched. I knew what I had to do.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THERE’S THE SATISFYING tension of my knuckles hitting meat and bone, followed by the stiffening pain down my arm of the pressure from the punch, and then it’s dynamite, explosive, out of sight and into the stands.

  Casey reels and falls to the sidewalk, but rolls on his back and scrambles to his feet just as I begin to shake off the pain in my arm. I feel my throat already begin to bruise at the points where his fingers gripped it, and the back of my head throbs from being slammed into a wall. My balance feels fucked-up. I’m pretty sure my face is bleeding. Wooo. Party.

  “Stop it!” shrieks Renée, looking angrily between the two of us. “Stop it right now!”

  Doesn’t matter what she says. The words enter my ears, but they’re indistinguishable and meaningless, like a bird or a rodent. From the moment that first swing was thrown, this was no longer about talking or having a good cry. This was about pain and anguish, violence and tears and hatred. Casey is completely absorbed by the black, and as hard as I’ve tried to contain it, the venom has taken over completely. We aren’t two friends arguing—we’re Frankenstein and the Wolf Man, two monsters ready to tear each other apart for the simple reason that the one doesn’t deserve to be alive in the presence of the other.

  The point is, me and Casey are overdue to mindlessly beat the shit out of each other. It was the way we’d met, and the only thing we knew.

  Casey charges me and throws me to the ground. I throw my arm around his head as we hit the concrete, and start punching him in the back and kidneys, but it’s no use, because he knocks the wind out of me with one strong fist to the stomach. The world swims. I will not pass out. As I try to regain my breath, he lets out a scream and punches me hard in the temple. I stumble headfirst into a wall and then hit the ground again, the concrete cheese-grating my face. White again. Fuzzy.

  GET UP.

  The venom grabs my limbs, twisting them into movements of precise violence. As he’s bent over me, savoring my pain, I lean back on my tailbone and send the toe of my boot arching right across his chin. His head snaps around as blood starts drooling down his lower lip, but that’s time enough for me to get back on my feet.

  My mind is a cacophony of barked orders. Do as much damage as possible. Make him hurt. Make him bleed. Don’t do so until he stops saying “please.” Go for the eyes. The throat. Knees.

  I throw a right hook at Casey’s jaw, and he takes it like a bitch, an arch of blood whipping widely out of his mouth. As he staggers backward, I throw all my weight into my shoulder and send it firing into his solar plexus. I manage to take him off his feet, give him a few seconds of air before he slams loudly into the side of a parked car. The alarm goes off, a high-pitched rhythmic wail. It’s incredibly appropriate.

  I suddenly realize that, disgustingly, I’m yelling, “MOTHERFUCKER! TAKE IT, MOTHERFUCKER! TAKE IT!” which is about the least dignified thing anyone could do in a fight, but whatever, this is the venom talking, not me. I change it to just guttural throat-noises, things that sound like I’m scraping my own windpipe with a violin string. I feel my fist swing out and collide with his mouth, his lips and teeth becoming a squishy mishmash with hard edges; I actually feel blood drip off my knuckles as I pull my hand back. I make a note of it and get ready to swing again—

  Pain. The worst kind of pain.

  Casey’s knee hits my groin and doesn’t move, just keeps pushing harder and harder. I yelp, feeling my testes lunge up into my intestines, and curl over on my side, clutching my aching manhood.

  Heh, aching manhood. It’s like a line out of a romance nov—

  He’s up on his feet and kicks me in the stomach before I can reach out and grab his leg. I feel my gut cave in on two sides now, from between m
y legs and from its front, and something in the back of my mind prepares itself for the loss of my stomach contents. I lean my head back, grit my teeth, put out my hands, and wait for a second kick.

  “STOP IT RIGHT NOW!” screams Renée, launching herself onto Casey’s back. He sways and stumbles like a lush, caught in midkick and now trying to regain his balance while a harpy bites his shoulder, screams into his ear, drags her nails across his scalp. A crowd has gathered around us, watching with something between horror and amusement on their faces. For the first time in a while, clarity explodes into my mind—Jesus, what are we doing?

  Casey reaches around his shoulder, grabs Renée by her shirt, and in a single swift, brutal motion, whips her around his front and tosses her onto the ground. She lands with a thud and a small cry.

  Clarity vanishes. The venom is everything. The pain in my groin and face slowly, piece by piece, flows out of the rest of my body and nestles itself in my heart.

  I’m on my feet. Casey growls obscenities at me. I don’t listen. I send the back of my hand booming right into his cheek, smashing his face to the side with a small shower of blood and spit. He stumbles back a few steps, wipes off his eyes, lets out a bestial war cry, and then charges me.

  And for once, everything slows down. Normally, the venom doesn’t act this way. There’s none of the car-crash-slow-motion fear that one gets when something goes horribly wrong before your eyes. But this time, things change. This time, I watch intently, knowing just what will happen.

  Casey charges me. I sidestep as he pulls back his fist. His knuckles nearly graze my cheek, but just miss it. And with Casey swinging at air, I take one step forward and send my fist arching up into where his stomach and chest meet.