“Ready?” the King whispered to Cio. Then he dashed for the kids, mallet in both hands.
Cio took one last look at the cops and followed him.
“Hey!” Murphy called. “Stop!”
“M-Murph?” Syed asked.
“Freeze!” From where they were, the cops clearly couldn’t see the djinni, and the King hoped to keep it that way. The last thing he needed was to involve the NYPD in a hunt for an immortal killing machine, small though it was right now.
The King and Cio passed through the turnstiles together.
“When it starts,” the King whispered, “zig-zag. You got it?”
Cio nodding, drawing a shaping board from their bag.
“Freeze!”
Up ahead, the commotion got the best of the kids. They turned and screamed.
What could they have thought of the two vagabonds headed toward them? Or the two officers on their tail? But then again, what had they thought of the djinni? That it was just some trick of the light? An art installation? Or that it was the exact kind of shared hallucination you expected after a night of drugs in K-Town?
“Watch out!” the King hollered.
But with their backs turned, the djinni quickly clawed its way up the leg of the nearest Asian youth. He was a good-looking kid with strong cheekbones and a pointed chin. The kid spun and screamed, then threw himself to the floor, the djinni grabbing a clump of the kid’s gelled hair between its webbed fingers.
“Get it off!”
“KC?”
The djinni dragged the longest of its four fingers along the top of the kid’s forehead, blood dripping down. The kid wailed, his friends throwing themselves back against either side of the passage.
“Drop your weapons!” Murphy screamed. “I won’t say it again!”
But the King plowed on. “Cio!”
Cio flung the shaping board like a Frisbee, a rainbow trail in the air behind it.
The djinni yanked the boy by his frosted tips. Even with his friends’ screams and the cops’ growls and the King’s own clomping boots, the ungodly sound of wet Velcro echoed through the promenade. The kid’s scalp had come loose from his skull.
The boy shrieked, and a moment later, Cio’s board slammed the djinni square in its flimsy throat. The board, the djinni, and its pelt of gelled hair went flying. The creature tumbled past the kids, then rolled down the declined corridor to the PATH trains further back.
“Maniac!” Murphy screamed. Then with a familiar swish of leather, the King knew a gun was pointed in his direction. And with a second swish, he knew another was pointed at Cio. The cops would start firing the moment they were clear of the kids.
“Cio, you—”
“Zig-zag. Got it.”
They ran down the corridor, dipping toward and away from one another. In the pocket of the elevator access ahead, the djinni picked itself up. With its webbed fists, it shoved the Asian pelt down its throat, gulping the whole thing in one bite. Then it coughed like a cat on a hairball and ran.
Murphy fired. The shot echoing off the walls of the passage like a ping-pong ball. It took the King a moment to realize the bullet had grazed his left arm, leaving a gash in his sweatshirt and a line of blood in its place.
“Shit.”
Officer Murphy was as far from them as they were from the djinni. Behind him, Syed rolled the moaning kid onto his back.
“Syed requesting backup. 10-34. Assault in progress. Ambulance required. 34th Street station. Upper promenade. West side. I repeat.”
“Do they not fucking see?” Cio asked.
The djinni took a sharp right up a short staircase, its webbed feet slapping against the stone as it struggled to rise from one step to the next. Two sets of escalators joined at that platform. One set led up to the street. The other led down to the station’s lower promenade and to the Manhattan Mall’s food court.
The King rushed forward, launching himself up the four steps just in time to see the djinni hop onto the escalator down. “Let’s…”
But Cio wasn’t beside him.
The King found the kid squatting on the floor of the tunnel. A set of black bars divided one half of the corridor from the other, a holdover from a previous floor plan the King only vaguely remembered from his youth. The only purpose they served anymore was to clog up the tunnel during rush hour. Cio reached through the bars, his fingers extended, their shaping board just out of reach.
“Fuck it, Cio! Come on!”
“Almost…” Cio moaned, and Murphy fired. The shot landed right between the kid’s legs.
Cio yapped, probably more afraid of having his cock blasted off than a death blow to one of the arteries down there. He was lucky adrenaline made such poor shots of even the greatest marksmen. They both were.
The King swung back around. The djinni was out of view.
“Cio!”
“Got it!” Cio threw himself in the King’s direction. The canvas bag rattled as he slipped the shaping board inside.
The King and Cio hopped on the escalator together, racing for the lower promenade.
“I did good, didn’t I?”
Again, Murphy fired. The shot launched clay pellets from where it hit against the tile above the King’s head.
“Murph, we’re still in Midtown,” Syed said, joining Murphy as they raced up the steps to the escalator platform. Then both disappeared from view.
The King and Cio stumbled onto the tiled landing below. To the left was another set of turnstiles and the safety of the undercity’s endless night. To the right were two sets of glass doors leading directly into the Manhattan Mall’s food court, its restaurants closed, its lights dim.
The bottom lip of the far-right door was wet. And though the djinni was too large to squeeze through the crack between, the King saw it racing for the second set of glass doors ahead.
“Slippery fucker,” the King muttered, dropping to his knees. He swung open a plastic case at the side of the escalator and flicked a switch. No sooner did Murphy’s first foot land on the escalator’s steps, the machine changed directions and the cop toppled back into Syed’s waiting arms.
“Fight or flight, KC?”
The King rose. The decision could spell the end for both of them. The cops were close, and unless they got some distance, the King and his apprentice might end up spending the next decade in jail, if not on life-support in Bellevue’s coldest wing.
On the other hand, if they let the djinni get away, there was no telling the damage it would cause. The people it would eat. The power it would gain. When it came down to it, the King knew he couldn’t live with those consequences.
“Stand back.”
Cio grinned. The King raised the tremendous mallet in a wide arc over his head and brought it down against the lock of the nearest doors.
The glass was reinforced, so it didn’t shatter. But with a hollow snap, the two doors swung open, and the two vandals ran after the blue djinni.
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King Cage and the Slaughterhouse Blues
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There’s something rotten in Coney Island, and it isn’t the hotdogs…
A new djinni’s on the loose, and its idea of a fun ride isn’t the Cyclone or the Tilt-a-Whirl. The creature’s a body-snatcher that feeds on its victims’ desires, consuming them from the inside out until all that’s left is light.
To make matters worse, the King can’t paint fast enough to capture the spirit before it jumps from one body to the next. But with the djinni gaining power fast, the King will have to figure out something soon, or Coney Island won’t just burn…
It’ll go supernova.
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Also by Mike Stop Continues
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1/ King Cage and the Worth Street Djinni
2/ King Cage and the Slaughterhouse Blues
2.5/ King Cage and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Free!)
3/ King Cage and the War of Rikers Island (Oct 9, 2017)
Deva Spark
1/ Modern Rock (Coming Soon!)
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Short Stories
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About the Author
“The further you go, the further you can go.”
Mike Stop Continues writes thrilling, provocative urban fantasy stories about portal-hopping heroes, outlandish entities, and worlds both near and far. Space is cold and the ocean dark, but the far reaches of the Omniverse are wonderful, wild, and alive. Why not go there?
Check out Mike’s new adult thriller Underworld, and stay tuned for the upcoming Deva Spark. The story follows Taylor Song on her mission to save music from the Faceless Man, a corporate warlock who sees art as an impediment to capital gain. Can Taylor navigate the tumultuous media industry without losing herself or her friends to the otherworldly threats at every turn?
MSC is an international and inter-dimensional traveller, a devout futurist, and a fervent supporter of open culture.
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Thank You
The Team
Cover — Álvaro Galván Rivera
Editor — Alyssa Archer
Beta Readers
Oliver Altair
Brian Olsen
David Pietrandrea
Ricardo Pérez González
John Jennison
Michael Marino
Jamie Gioe
Open Culture License
Copyright © 2017 by Mike Stop Continues
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
I call this the fanfic license because you are free to share the work with whomever you want and to create non-commercial works based on it. For the exact terms, read more.
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King Cage and the Worth Street Djinni Page 6