“We in a motherfucking sewer and you need to ask?”
The King rolled his eyes. He was too pained and too dizzy, and he had very little time before the morning rush again filled the tunnel with trains.
“I can help,” the kid said hopefully, almost desperately.
“You don’t wanna do this shit.”
“Hell I don’t,” Cio said. “What’s more important than this?”
“You think I’m some fucking ninja turtle?” the King asked, his eyes never leaving the piece. “Is that what this is about?”
Cio frowned. “I think you’re Michelangelo, man, but you ain’t no turtle.”
The King ceased his spray. He coughed on the black in the air, then he turned. “You wanna paint like me?”
“Not like-you like you.” Cio shrugged. “But yeah, man. What you do is fucking magic.”
The King realized suddenly that this was the moment the druid had warned him of. He knew it like the scar on his chest. Like the sinews of the veil between our world and the djinn’s.
Say no, the druid had said. But why? What harm was a little light in the darkness? What harm was a pupil, a fan, a friend?
He’s the thread you must not tug.
The King stepped back to survey the piece. To see it for what it was. You could tell a lot from someone’s art. Maybe everything. And Cio’s art wasn’t bad. It was rough, sure. But it wasn’t bad.
“You’ll need to chip in for cans,” the King said. “I barely got dime for my own.”
From the corner of his eye, the King watched realization dawn over the kid’s worried face.
“Holy fuck, man!” Cio leaped and whooped and spun like he’d scored a touch-down. Then he pulled the King from the work and hugged him tight. “You won’t regret this.”
“Ah, ah, ah,” the King said, pushing Cio away from his chest with too much worry. Too much fear.
He saw it in the kid’s eyes.
“Sorry,” the King muttered, pulling the strips of fabric that remained of his shirt back over his chest.
“The mark,” Cio said. “It didn’t heal like the rest.”
The King turned, looking at the four empty tracks and the support beams between. He owed the kid an explanation, he knew. For how he’d let the Red get the better of him. For how he’d beaten the kid down.
“Magic fades,” the King said. “Human shit lasts forever.”
Cio nodded once. And after a moment, he nodded again. Like he got it. All of it. What the King was about and why.
“I’m sorry,” the King and the kid said together.
The King continued. “I had no right to—”
“My brothers’ve done worse.”
A northbound express train rattled through the station. Its passengers didn’t see either of them standing there on the downtown platform. And even if they did, they didn’t see the two like they saw each other.
“You’re a good kid,” the King admitted. Then he raised his spray can to the wall, and he made another mark.
Author’s Note
Whew! I’ve been hanging onto that story for a good six months, and I’m thrilled you finally got to read it.
When I started out, I only planned King Cage as a standalone novella to tie in with the forthcoming Deva Spark series. But once I realized how much I loved the characters and the world, I knew I had to write more King Cage stories. And fast.
More than anything, I want to see what happens when the King and the Ashen Lord butt heads. Nothing has ever been easy for KC, and it’s only going to get worse.
See for yourself in book 2, King Cage and the Slaughterhouse Blues. This full-length novel has a kick-ass story, epic action sequences, and some really wild locales. It’s by far my best novel to-date, and it’s out now!
I’ve included a few sample chapters of it after this author’s note, and I think they’ll really whet your appetite. (Wink, wink.)
After the sample, you’ll find a special offer to get the exclusive King Cage prequel absolutely free. It’s called King Cage and the Coney Island Lights and it’s… illuminating. (Okay! No more puns!)
But before any of that, pop over to Amazon and leave a review. As a new author, I depend on reviews to help new readers find me. Just a few words about your favorite part is all it takes to help convince people like you to read the book, so please…
Leave a quick review today!
Thanks for reading!
—Mike Stop Continues
July 10, 2017
King Cage and the Slaughterhouse Blues (Chapters 3-4)
Chapter 3
The King arrived at the wall breathing hard, the red bandana swinging from his neck. Cio was missing. So was the flashlight. So were the cans.
The piece had seemed so alive a few minutes earlier, the painted djinni pressing his four webbed fingers against the glass. But now the creature was gone, and it seemed as if the feast, the family, and the woman were nothing more than color and line.
“Cio!” the King called, his heavy breath drawing in the thick, August air. It pooled in his sickened lungs, and he coughed, hacking up something thick and sour, only to swallow it back down. “Cio!”
Then he saw it. An arrow sprayed on the cement where there was none before. It aimed deeper into the underground, deeper into the dark.
The King followed, stopping only where the tunnel ended at a rusty, metal door. It was pried open just enough for a lanky seventeen-year-old to pass through.
The corridor beyond glowed the dull red of a photo studio, with a leftward arrow on the opposite wall. The King stepped through, water splashing immediately over the lip of his boot and under its tongue. The floor was lost beneath an inch of dusty, dark water, and it left the King feeling like he’d dug his toes into the mealy pulp of a rotten apple.
The King grit his teeth and ran. Ancient water echoed like thunder against the narrow walls of the emergency passage, clawing up the King’s jeans in spurts. His knees were wet by the time the corridor found its end, and his gut had turned.
The King stepped up into an irregular chamber made of the same old brick as the corridor. There was a doorway on each of the room’s five walls, though the other tunnels’ doors were between two and six feet off the ground. Like they’d been built by teams with very different measuring sticks.
Wind rushed through one of the lower passages, drawing old wrappers and spoiled napkins and empty plastic bottles along with it. Any given scrap might have taken months to tumble this far before collecting in a tremendous pile along the opposite wall. Judging by the logos, much of it had been there for decades, wasting away without any hope of moving on.
A long spray marked the door above the pile of old wrappers.
The King leaned both hands on the foot of the doorway and jumped, loose drops of dark water splashing all around. One foot caught on the lip of the door. The King wrapped his left hand around a brick protruding a few feet up. But the other foot swung low, knocking swaths of old trash to either side.
The room echoed with the squeal of rats. And when the King looked down under that colored light, he found dozens of beady, red eyes peering up at him.
The druids had shown the King on more than one occasion the stupendous workings of the hive-mind. Rats in great number could accomplish the unthinkable when they joined together, like so many raindrops dragging heartland cities to the sea.
Together, the rats circled and screeched. Together, they barked orders and threats. This was the second time they’d been disturbed today, and they were not above making an example of the King’s leg. This much the King understood of their skittering tongue. So before the hive graduated from anger to attack, the King tugged himself up over the lip of the passage, racing on.
The red light and the rats’ cries faded quickly, until the King was certain only his own slurping footfalls had followed. In what little light reached the far end of the corridor ahead, the King could just make out the glittering edges of a metal ladder, leading down.
/> Experience taught the King that it was stupid to go headfirst into the dark, stupid to journey too deep into the heart of New York City, stupid to act without thinking. But if he had any hope of catching up with the djinni—and with Cio—stupid was exactly what he needed to be.
Panting hard, the King squeezed his hands and the insides of his boots against the rails. He slid down along the outside of the ladder, the rusty metal chafing his palms the whole way down. The King hit the ground hard, first with his feet, then with his ass, then with his shoulders and skull.
He was in a small room with an open door. There was a larger space beyond. An underground warehouse. Perhaps one of the originals the sandhogs had carved out when they’d first mined the city’s sewers, subways, and tunnels.
“KC?” Cio’s voice echoed from the other side of the hollow chamber, the distant, swinging flashlight marking his location. Rows of titanic, steel shelves divided one side of the warehouse from the other.
“On my way!” the King called, rolling back to his feet.
Wood and metal and brick and tile lined the shelves, the floor strewn with jackhammers and pushcarts and drills. With the right scrapper, the King could fund the work for months, if not longer.
But tomorrow was a privilege the King could rarely afford. So as he ran through the dusty rows of treasure, he paused only to grab a big, steel mallet that rested against one of the shelves. There was no killing a djinni, but a good blow sure would slow it down.
The King turned right at the far end of the storeroom’s aisles. Cio was some fifty feet ahead, still leaving dashes of spray paint behind him.
“Blue?” the King hollered, seeing the marks for the first time in flashlight. “You’re using the fucking blue?”
“It’s almost empty,” Cio said. “I figured—”
“That’s our only goddamn blue.”
“Oh,” Cio said. “Damn.”
They paused before two massive, sliding doors that opened onto a strip of rusty utility tracks. The line had been out of use for so long that it didn’t even have a third rail.
“Which way?”
“That way… or that way.” Cio swung the flashlight to either side. Then back behind them. “Or maybe that way.”
“Jesus.” The King grabbed the light.
“You got no idea how fast it is, KC.”
But he did. Only one Blue had ever gotten loose before. And like this one, it ran.
“In the five-sided room,” the King said, rolling the flashlight up and down the tracks. “Did the djinni eat?”
“Yeah, a rat,” Cio said. “How’d you know?”
“There.” The King held the flashlight on a solitary, wet footprint a few yards up the abandoned track. It was decades since the last Blue, but the King never forgot how the porous creature leaked. Especially after it ate.
“Come on.”
Chapter 4
The utility track inclined sharply. After a broad arc, it met with a newer set of tracks. That set met with a third the King knew well, even from a distance. The uptown N-Q-R-W.
Just as the King and Cio reached the junction, the tunnel groaned with a rush of air and light and racketing wheels. The two men crouched behind adjacent support beams, an express train hurtling their way like a stampede of mechanical bulls.
“Which way, KC?” Cio hollered.
Hard wind slapped the King’s face, leaving flecks of ash and dead skin and cement pellets in its wake. If the djinni had left footprints, for sure that same gust had dried them.
“Well?”
The King squinted hopelessly into the wind, then turned as the last of the train cars swung past.
“South.”
“Why south?”
The King swallowed. The nearest station was just two blocks away.
“First it eats.”
The two men ran, leaping from one side of the tracks to the other, mindful of the slick crevice between. It wasn’t nearly so wet as the B-D-F-M, but the August rain still flowed like the blood of a slaughterhouse.
As the King crossed from the shadows of the tunnel into the light of the station, he pulled the bandana back over his nose.
“Time,” he demanded, climbing the three metal steps onto the uptown N-Q-R-W platform. The tile was white and the beams were rust red. They were back at 34th Street.
“Twelve twenty-five.”
The platform was dead for 12:25 on a Friday night. August was a month of parties, and you’d expect a crowd. But after all that rain, what was one more drink? Especially on the last Friday before school started back up and the cold set in.
The King shoved the flashlight in Cio’s bag, and the two men stalked forward. There were four staircases along the platform. Four paths to the 34th Street Station’s promenades. With eight subway lines, the PATH trains to Jersey, and the pedestrian-sealed tunnel to Penn Station, the djinni could go just about anywhere.
But it wouldn’t. The creature would want to feed, and fast. Of all the djinn, the Blue was one of the rare few who didn’t come through all at once, but in little drops, like a river through a leak in a dam. Each bite added to the creature’s mass, its strength, its brutal intellect. And though you never knew which bite would finally free the river, you knew the consequences for all the towns downstream.
Somewhere beyond the first staircase, a woman yowled. With a glance, the King and Cio lunged around opposite sides of the stairs. The King with his mallet and Cio with his rattling bag of cans.
They found the woman at the near end of a wooden six-seater. Blonde hair hung from her bowed head, a pool of red around her feet.
“Which way did it go?” the King asked.
The woman looked up. Tears clung to the corners of her blue eyes, though none yet had fallen.
“It bit me… A rat… A blue rat…”
Cio kneeled beside her.
“Is it bad?” the woman muttered, peeling her hand back from the wound.
Cio’s olive skin paled. The King pinched his lips. There was a handball-sized bite missing from the woman’s calf. A loose artery spat blood in sputtering bursts.
“I can’t feel it.”
“KC?” Cio whispered.
The King swallowed. “Which way?”
The woman pointed to the next staircase. “Is it bad?”
“We’ll get you help,” Cio said, wiping his eye with his wrist.
They took the steps two and three at a time, using the handrail to propel them on. And at the top of the staircase, they turned.
The 34th Street Station’s promenade was painted the same rust red as the rest of the platforms. At times, you were barely able to squeeze through the hundreds of thousands that came through the station for work each day. But now the promenade was almost empty. Even the evangelists were gone, a smattering of their pamphlets left trampled in the corners of the station.
“KC?”
“Looking.”
Rows of turnstiles surrounded by black bars lined both the left and right of the promenade. Two rows of heavy cement columns cut the floor in thirds. Down the leftmost third, two police officers leaned against the metal shutters of a closed newsstand.
Beat cops were typically paired across age brackets so the younger officers could learn from their more experienced counterpart. This pair was no different. The older had a pasty, Irish face and fair hair. The younger had golden skin and a dark beard, longer at the chin than the jaw.
The King took heavy strides toward them, Cio trailing behind. They had to tell the cops about the woman downstairs, but the King and Cio were both Harlem natives. Neither were used to being trusted by the cops, and both knew they had everything to lose. Especially now, with a djinni on the loose.
The King stopped at the dead center of the promenade, still some forty feet from the cops.
The officers ceased their chatter, their eyes on the King.
“There’s a woman downstairs who needs a doctor,” the King called. The head of his mallet left a red splatter on th
e tiled floor. He must have tracked it from the blonde.
The cops strode forward. “Say that again without the mask.”
“There’s a blonde woman,” the King said carefully. “Right below where we are now.”
“And drop the weapon.”
“She’s bleeding, bad.”
“KC?” Cio whispered. The King glanced left.
Through the row of turnstiles, the King saw the torsos of a group of Asian kids rocking in a drunken circle near the token booth. They had slick hair and a strict black-and-white aesthetic, laughing and chattering in a language of peaks and valleys the King couldn’t understand.
“How ‘bout you show us?” the older officer asked. He was closer now, and his name tag read Murphy. The younger’s read Syed.
“KC,” Cio whispered. “Look.”
“Wish I could,” the King said to the officers, taking a step back to get a better view of the kids.
Their circle had shifted, and the King now saw the blue djinni at their center. It was larger than he’d drawn it, about a foot tall. The creature’s knees bent out and its neck hunched forward. Its bulbous potbelly seemed no better a center of gravity than a water balloon, the mongrel rocking on its twiggy legs with hunger its only guiding force.
One girl stuck her toes out, pulling them back just as the djinni lunged. A boy with slicked-back hair kicked the djinni from behind, a few drops of water bursting from its porous skin. The djinni spun towards its aggressor. It snarled, its fat lips wide and its serrated teeth bare.
The kids laughed.
Something turned deep in the pit of the King’s stomach. Where the kids saw a harmless subject to their teenage whims, the King saw a creature of legend whose eyes—big as they were—were no bigger than its stomach. The blue djinni was hungry, and just as soon as the kids grew tired enough or cocky enough, the creature would feast.
“Take off the mask,” Murphy repeated, unlocking the holster of his gun. And who could blame him? Everywhere the King went was off limits. Everything he did was illegal. The only difference was that tonight, he was going to have to do it all in full view of the city’s finest.
King Cage and the Worth Street Djinni Page 5