Illegal King

by Mason Dakota

  Nebula’s motive, unclear and unannounced, came on the heels of work by their harbinger Ziavir Yiros, a man who not only collapsed Chicago, but also destroyed my family years ago. I failed to stop him and now stood holding the pieces of a city that continued to disintegrate.

  Ziavir escaped, leaving nothing behind except his claim to innocence and a clue to the mastermind behind Nebula, my old mentor and friend…Gabriel. Gabriel’s absence and a letter by his own hand marked him guilty, but the truth of his betrayal never left my lips. I couldn’t save my friends from what happened, but I could save them from the pain of Gabriel’s betrayal.

  “I wondered if any of you still returned to this place,” said Gabriel.

  Gabriel looked fit and strong despite his growing years. His hair had grown longer since I last saw him and was complimented by an untrimmed beard. His attire, a hoodie beneath a light coat, jeans and muddy sneakers, were of conspicuously neutral tones. It was an off assortment compared to his usual sports coat, loafers, and well-trimmed hair. He wore a ball cap and had traded his fancy watch for a broken replica. Flakes of mud covered his clothing and his hands were a bit more calloused than before. He carried no visible weapon, but a man like Gabriel didn’t need one. He was a weapon.

  What was odd was that his green eyes were now blue and he seemed to have a neck tattoo of some ancient naval battleship bursting free from a spider web. This was Gabriel, but not the Gabriel I knew.

  Hard to imagine this man taught me everything I knew about being Shaman.

  “Just me. Nobody comes here anymore,” I whispered.

  “Shame.”

  Gabriel didn’t say anything more than that. No excuses or words of exaggerated contempt would come from him. Gabriel didn’t waste words. Instead he stood there, his look both the warm welcome of a father and the calculating expression of a killer, demanding that I must both address his presence and deny it at the same time. Only Gabriel could communicate both simultaneously.

  He waited patiently, reading me as I did him. His silence left me to decide the future of our conversation. I didn’t miss the fact that he stood close to the weapons rack on the back wall.

  Rage burned in me. Gabriel had answers to questions that haunted me for months. I trusted him—counted on him for guidance and survival and he lied to me every day. I wanted to strangle him! Six months with no word except admittance to betrayal had lapsed, and now he stood in the same room without an apology or excuse. He wasn’t welcome anymore, and despite knowing it, he stood like the contrary was the true reality.

  Be smart, Griffon. Play his game first. Then you take what you want.

  Gabriel liked puzzles. He liked games of chess. He was a finer criminal, using his intelligence more like a scalpel compared to how I used mine like a hammer. Men like Rigs would break down doors with shotguns, but men like Gabriel would rather dig a pit knowing you would eventually fall into it.

  “You’re on the run, aren’t you?” I challenged.

  He smirked—a approval to my deduction. “Your clues?”

  “Neutral colored clothing to blend in easier. Hair untrimmed, beard mangy, a strong stench on your clothes. You hate wearing hoodies. The dried mud on your pants and shoes tells me two things: first that it hasn’t rained in a few days, so you’ve been here a while and second you have been taking routes that avoid the main streets. You’ve changed out your glasses, with colored lenses to turn your naturally green eyes a shade of blue. And it would seem like you’ve recently gotten a tattoo, something which you always advised me against as it would make for an easy way to identify you. By all appearances you would seem to be another one of the homeless in Chicago, a perfect disguise for someone on the run hoping to go unnoticed.”

  “Good eye. You were always clever, though I guess the evidence is a bit clear.”

  “And the tattoo?”

  “A fake. Should be gone in a day or two at most—maybe sooner with a good bath. Been fading for several days now.”

  “So you really are on the run from someone? Who is it?”

  “Not running from anyone.”

  “Then who would the director of Nebula be hiding from?” I asked with ice in my tone. He did not respond to my spiteful comment. I questioned if he even heard me by the lack of response.

  “Too many spies in Chicago,” He said. He didn’t explain more than that. I could probably guess whose spies he feared.

  The Emperor’s.

  I said nothing, trying to match his stoicism, but I failed. My hands trembled but I remained silent, biting my tongue to prevent me from saying what I desired.

  Gabriel, able to maintain his comfort in the silence, permitted me grace by waving his hand and asking, “Shall we speak of the elephant in the room?”

  I bit onto that like a dog. “The last time I saw you, you kept me handcuffed to a bed and made me believe you did it out of love.”

  He nodded and looked as if the memory pained him. “Not the setting, nor the situation in which I ever wished to say goodbye.”

  “You know, for a while I thought that you honestly left me because you were afraid. You made it sound like you cared about me—about all of us. I kept that thought until the day I returned here and found your letter. I thought Ziavir a liar. But you had to prove that wrong. I never thought I could trust Ziavir over you. You were supposed to be on our side. But you manipulated and betrayed us,” I said.

  He raised his eyebrows. Finally, I struck a nerve.

  “Don’t stop. Let it all out. Say everything that you need to say,” he whispered. He sounded genuine and caring, and I hated it. I sensed pain in him and it motivated me to press the knife further.

  “How was it lying for years to those you loved? You did it so easily. You were our hero, and yet you threw us to the wolves and destroyed our home!”

  “I told you long ago I was not a hero,” Gabriel whispered.

  “Is that supposed to justify what you’ve done? Every death since that day, every drop of blood spilled was spilled by you! You’re right, you aren’t our hero. You’re selfish and wicked and our true enemy.”

  “Then why have you not told anyone about me and what I’ve done?”

  “Because I knew Chamberlain and the others would forgive you if you asked them too. They would have believed your lies and only gotten hurt again,” I said. I moved closer into the room toward the table. Gabriel didn’t move. He stood still on the opposite side.

  “And what about you? Do you have it within yourself to forgive me?”

  As he spoke I reached the table and kept my hands beneath his eye level. Taped beneath the table and within my reach was a pistol.

  “The truth is that I never wanted to see you again. I wanted to forget you existed,” I said.

  Gabriel glanced away, toward the Shaman mask he once passed on to me, just long enough for me to look down and see the gun still taped exactly where I had left it. My eyes shot back up immediately toward Gabriel. He never saw my downward glance.

  “I did the things I did in order to protect you, to protect all of you. You have no idea the sacrifices I have made. There are things of this world that you weren’t ready to know. Things I have had to endure for a better world that I never wanted you to endure.”

  My hand drifted to the pistol under the table.

  “To protect me? That’s your excuse? You were my mentor, my friend! And you betrayed me. I believed in you and all the while you were the enemy! You lied to my face as you planned to destroy Chicago. You left me handcuffed to a bed awaiting death, and you think that was protecting me? You’re a monster!”

  I grabbed the gun and drew it on my old mentor, my old friend. He didn’t flinch. He only stared solemnly at me.

  Fearless to the bone.

  “Griffon, you’re not a killer. You won’t shoot an unarmed man,” he whispered.

  “You know I was never good at following your orders. Goodbye Gabriel,” I growled.

  I squeezed the trigger.

  The gun cli
cked but didn’t fire.

  I stared wide eyed at Gabriel. A deep pain expressed itself on his face as he lifted his hand and opened his palm to show a handful of bullets. My bullets! I realized right then that Gabriel had glanced away on purpose to tempt me. Every single action that Gabriel did was for a reason. Everything came down to a test to him. Even where he stood in the room, on the opposite side of the hidden firearm in a spot that would permit me to casually approach it, he planned.

  “I took precautions,” whispered Gabriel, a deep sadness in his voice.

  I growled in frustration and hurled the gun across the room. The moment it left my hands, a cold emptiness swallowed me as I realized I attempted to kill someone I loved in cold blood. I gasped but the air was thick with my darkness and shame. The feeling in my hands disappeared and my blood turned to ice as loneliness sunk its teeth into my veins.

  I collapsed into a chair and sobbed into my palms. Memories of Agent Murray and Rupert dying by my hands flashed through my mind. I am no stranger to death. I killed before, an act that tore my soul apart, growing horrifyingly easier each time. I killed them in self-defense, but I knew it could have been different. I could have stopped myself each time, or done something differently. They didn’t have to die and I didn’t have to see their blood on my hands or their faces every time I slept.

  And now I had been so quick to try to add a new face to the list.

  But this had been different. Gabriel wasn’t trying to kill me or someone else. He was defenseless and weak. There would have been no justifying it as self-defense. It would have been murder and I would have become the monsters I hunt.

  “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” I sobbed. I kept my face in my hands and refused to look Gabriel in the eyes. His hands rested gently on my shoulders.

  “It’s okay,” he whispered over and over again. Minutes passed, but I regained control over myself and forced the memories and emotions back into the dark abyss of my soul to be visited on my next nightmare.

  “Why,” I whispered, “Why did you do it?”

  Gabriel stepped away from me and walked back around the table. He sat back down in his seat and sighed. He slowly rubbed his chin.

  Then he finally spoke the truth.

  Twenty-Two

  “As you are aware, I run a secret organization called Nebula. You believe us to be terrorists because circumstances force us to use unconventional tactics to achieve our goals. We believe we are reformers—liberators. Our values do not differ from yours. We believe in equality between Nobles and Outcasts, not separation like the Empire or the Outcast Legion,” Gabriel said.

  He took a deep breath and continued, “Six months ago, Mayor Kraine reached out to us in a plan to push his political career in opposition to his uncle. We saw it as a perfect opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. We falsified claims of disaster to create mass panic, to disguise our real intentions of crippling this city’s infrastructure. It’s why Ziavir was here. I tried to keep you away from Ziavir, because I knew you thought him responsible for your mother’s death. I tried to protect you. I didn’t want him to kill you if you got in his way. He had a job to do.”

  “Why tell people though your intentions to destroy Chicago? You made most of the population think it was a bomb, but we both know it wasn’t. So why do that?”

  “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and stupidity,” he said.

  “But why? Why do this to Chicago?”

  Gabriel sighed. “Bait.”

  Bait? Bait! Bait for what?

  I stared at him. I tried to put the pieces together. Even though Chicago was cut off from the rest of the world now, I knew it was still the talk of the world. The globe had eyes on us. Gabriel wanted to draw someone or something here. There were only a few possible names that would require so much work.

  “You drew the Emperor here. You’ve set a trap!” I whispered, afraid that even in my hideout others might be listening.

  Gabriel shook his head, “The city is the hook, but the Emperor is only the worm.”

  “You used Chicago as bait to draw the Emperor, who you plan to use as bait for an even bigger fish? Who or what is so important to you that you risk not only the safety of everyone in Chicago but also the Emperor?”

  “A specific warlord of the Northern Territories—the next and most likely candidate to be crowned king. Someone who has spent the past twenty years in secret, living in the shadows, and causing death wherever he goes. Someone who has the intention to kill thousands, if not more, if he is not stopped. Someone who seeks to send this entire empire into a civil war. An Outcast who’s only goal for twenty years has been genocide,” Gabriel said. He stared at me as though waiting for me to guess. Before my mouth could form the words, my soul spoke. I knew. I didn’t want to believe. It meant my entire life had been a lie.

  I knew, but I needed confirmation.

  “My father?” I fearfully asked. Gabriel nodded. My throat went dry. “So he is alive? And everything I’ve ever believed about my parents is a lie?” I whispered.

  Gabriel stared and took a long time to answer. He breathed heavily, as if the confession pained him as much as it did me. “I believe he’s somewhere in the city now. A city with no technology to identify him or track him is just too much for him to resist. Knowing the Emperor heads this way, to such a vulnerable location, would make an assassination attempt easier. If he succeeds, he destroys an empire he despises and ensures a positive election as the Northern Territories’ new king. This city—this empire would fall to civil war, and would be helpless against the Giants of the North who would overrun us. We have risked war in hopes of preventing it. I’m so sorry you ever had to get involved. It was my wish to keep you, Chamberlain, Alison, and Michael separate from this.”

  I felt numb, drowning in a sea of confusion. The world shattered around me, breaking every foundation I built my life upon. I had nothing to stand upon. I lost to a dark well, falling deeper and deeper into a void where even my own heartbeat was doubted.

  My father’s alive? And he’s a warlord?

  “So Ziavir spoke the truth? He never killed my parents? He really tried to save my mother and me that day?”

  “Yes,” said Gabriel, “Your father is relentless, more so than you. He uses social injustice as an excuse for mass murder against the Nobles. He founded the Outcast Legion, the only Northern Territory war clan that operates outside of their borders sparking rebellion across the empire for two decades now. The group publicly and gruesomely kills Nobles and those affiliated with them. And now my spies believe he is here with a weapon more powerful than I anticipated.”

  I shook my head, remaining unconvinced my father could be what everyone claimed…or even alive. I may not recall much about the man, but was he really what Gabriel claimed? Could he really be so bad that Nebula had spent the past twenty years hunting him down? And if he was alive, why hadn’t I heard? What hadn’t he reached out to me after so long?

  “All this…you did all this, for one man? Innocents have fought a war of oppression and starvation because you wanted one man?” I asked.

  Gabriel nodded. “Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.”

  “So I’m to believe that using that monster Ziavir was your idea of a poor chisel? He’s a manipulating, mind-infecting, psychopath who kills people,” I snapped.

  Gabriel raised an eyebrow and said, “You’ve killed people, Griffon, and have led others to do the same. In fact, you were quite ready to kill me in cold blood a minute ago. Don’t preach morality to me when you don’t practice it. You and Ziavir are more alike than you are aware. Compulsive and stubborn when you believe you’re right.”

  “I am nothing like that man!”

  Gabriel rubbed his forehead. I could tell this wasn’t how he had intended our conversation to go down. We were quiet for several moments. Neither of us so much as looked at each other. My pulse slowed and the anger settled in my gut. Gabriel wai
ted. When I had calmed down, I took the conversation in a different direction to avoid making another attempt on Gabriel’s life.

  “Why are you here, Gabriel? Why now, after six months, do you show yourself,” I asked.

  Gabriel, as per usual, avoided my question to ask one of his own. “Why do you wear the mask?”

  Another test. Always a test when it came to Gabriel. The gun was a test, and now so is this. But he already knew the answer. He was the first Shaman, after all, before he passed the role down to me. He, and he alone knew my real reasons. He sought something by asking. He wanted me to voice my feelings so he could use them, manipulate them for his designs.

  I looked up to see Gabriel staring at the Shaman mask draped over a mannequin head. The mask was a soulless black, the color of midnight in Chicago. Dark studs dotted the brim of the nose and across where eyebrows would be. The small eye sockets were white lenses. A white hand print streaked across the right side of the mask leaving a long stretch of finger marks. I wanted the mask to invoke fear in my enemies. That way they could feel the same fear they loved to summon from those weaker than they.

  I never really told anyone except for Gabriel why I wore the mask. Only he understood my motivations. Everyone had theories. Chamberlain and Alison believed I wore it to protect the ones I loved. A noble guess, but a shameful lie. Thomas believed I wore it to protect my identity as Outcast Emissary, but I wore the mask long before I ever became the Outcast Emissary. Michael believed I sought to be a symbol of hope to suffering Outcasts to let them know they didn’t have to fear anymore. Close, but shamefully not my reasons for the mask either.

  None of them were the truth. The truth was much more personal to me.

  “Freedom,” I whispered. “I’m free when I wear the mask. No more pain. No more slavery or order or authority over my head. I can say and do all the things I wish and be free from the consequences. When I wear the mask…I can be anybody, and that means not being the one person I hate over all others…myself. As Shaman I can do the things that no one else can do and be what no one else can be.”