CHAPTER 5: THE HEXLING

  SOUTH END—OCTOBER 17th, 1992 | AFTERNOON

  ?

  Cameron stared at his blood-stained denim vest, splayed haphazardly onto the chair on the opposite end of their loft; if one could really call it that.

  This was home for the South End Sables, an abandoned office in an abandoned warehouse a few blocks from the main thoroughfare, bordering Oldport and the main drag. Since they’d been together, the place had been retrofitted. Plumbing, electricity. It was passable, and the large windows offered a fog-soaked view of the bay and the old port authority buildings. Couches and tables lingered around the loft, along with beer bottles, dishes, old CDs and a large stereo system.

  Mercedes sat in an old leather chair, spinning her ushanka cap in one hand. In her other, she held a small cage, and cooed to the wispy, moving ball of purple-pink flame trapped neatly within it. Its plasmatic eye was still and unblinking.

  “We’re fucked,’ Cameron said, shifting his attention to Mercedes.

  “We’re fine,” she insisted.

  “How in the world are we fine, Mercedes? How?” Cameron stood up, pacing the room in a black hoodie with talon-like rips in it, relatively unscathed save for a few scratches and dings on his face.

  “David is going to take care of it,” she said.

  “David taking care of it is how we ended up here.”

  Mercedes stopped spinning her ushanka cap and placed it onto the coffee table between her and Cameron. “You did good, you know.”

  “Are you even listening to me?” he said, voice raised to a low shout. “We killed Hausser’s lap dogs, she’s still alive, and we’re sitting on a crate of guns that we haven’t sold, and David’s grand plan of building what, street cred, from the whole thing is going to bite us all in the ass!”

  Mercedes stood up, looping her caged, pink flame back onto her belt loop. She crossed over to Cameron and shoved a finger into his chest, hard, and looked up at him. “We made a statement, Cameron. So what if the guns aren’t sold? You said we'd be better off with them anyways. If word of this spreads like you said, like David wants, people will see us as two things. Strong, and as risk takers. Unpredictable, strong risk takers. That’s worth more than whatever we would’ve made even if Elizabeth was game and bought the damn guns from us. We’ll have people lining up to join the Sables. How is that bad?”

  “It’s bad, Mercedes,” Cameron began, shoving her back. “Because that’s not what is going to happen. Leaving Hausser alive, for one, was stupid. She knows what we look like. Other people in this fucking borough know what we look like. She knows and people know. And Elizabeth knows people, too. Put all of that together, and tell me, Mercedes, what do you think happens next?”

  She was silent. Even if she wanted to speak, Cameron wouldn’t let her. He continued, face flushed red, brows pulled tightly into a glare of spite.

  He shoved her again. “I’ll tell you. It means by the end of the day she has someone after us, or one of the bigger fish that normally don’t look twice at us smaller fish—like the 8th Street Gang, like the Lancaster Boys—start looking. If they don’t make an example out of us, they take our rackets. Take the crate. Take this warehouse. Take everything we’ve spent the last five or six years building up from nothing.”

  “We can handle it,” she insisted, shoving him back. “We have to. And sooner or later, we’d get noticed anyways. They’d see us, absorb us, or, like you said; make an example out of us. But right now? We have something going for us. Something that the South End is talking about. Something that—”

  “That’ll get us all killed, Mercedes! Fuck!’

  Mercedes was quiet after that. She sat back down and stared out the window. Cameron remained upright, pacing around the room. He held the back of his neck with both hands and tried to steady his breath, but everything set him off. The sound of his boots on the floor. The way Mercedes looked at him as he paced, her brown eyes defiant and haughty, like she knew what was best. Brown eyes like David’s own.

  “Where is he?” Cameron asked. “He should be back by now.”

  “I don’t know,” Mercedes answered, her tone challenging.

  “We should go,” Cameron said. “You and me. Right now. We can.. I don’t know, we can find somewhere else to hold up for a while, tell David once we’re there.”

  “And just leave him out there? Why don’t you go, Cameron, if you’re so worried?”

  “I’m not worried, I’m.. I’m angry, Mercedes, and you should be too! He put us in this situation!”

  “Cameron, you’re the one who fired first. You shot the gun. David didn’t even tell you to. You just did it.”

  “He—”

  “And you’re the one who killed Theodore. You didn’t have to, but you did. You know why? Because he was going to kill you if you didn’t. And I killed Martinez for the same reason. It happened. We’re here. Man the fuck up and deal with it, alright? Shit, Cameron, what happened to you? When we found you, you were the opposite of this. You weren’t worried and up your own ass. You were strong, still are, but back then, you’d just do things. You’d do things without second-guessing, without thinking about what came after, and that got us places. David is doing that now, same as you used to, and all you want to do is bitch, and bitch, and bitch! Moan, and bitch, and cry about it! We’re trying to build something here. If you want out, Cameron, just say it! Cut the theatrics and just go.”

  His gaze tightened. “You need me.”

  “Needed. If this is how you're going to be, maybe we don't. Not anymore."

  “Yeah? Without me, neither of you would’ve gotten anywhere. I’ll bet David would be stealing from bludheads like Rosco, and you’d be turning tricks, selling yourself to whoever could pay.”

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  “But that didn’t happen. Won’t happen. And now we’re about to be somewhere, Cameron, really somewhere, and you want to call it quits. What was the point of it all, if not to try to be something more than this?”

  It’s what he wanted, or so he thought. This. Beating, stealing, running rackets. Making money the easy way. The memory of his mother flashed before his eyes. Her wrinkled dress shirt. The name tag that read JESS. One of the last things she said to him on that day was a request. She wanted him to do better than her, and the more Mercedes spoke, the more he wondered if he was, or if he had been.

  It wasn’t long after she passed that he got picked up by David and Mercedes, both young, both ambitious, who’d made a name for themselves in some small way. David, at the time, was known for stealing Pauper, which he wore at all times like a trophy, and being an up-and-comer for the Lancaster Boys. A protege of an underboss, so he often liked to say. Flanking him was Mercedes, whose first stint into crime began with her theft of the trapped sprite she had with her at all times. Stolen from a witch, who Mercedes said let her keep it just for the sake of it. Two mundies who tried, in earnest, to make a name for themselves in a borough where bigger and badder and meaner things had already aligned themselves with bigger, badder, and meaner names.

  Maybe that’s why they took Cameron in. He was a weapon for them, same as the glove David wore, same as the sprite Mercedes kept trapped in that cage.

  He’d always known it, and for a long time, it never bothered him. Cameron was content in being their attack dog and their window smasher. Their enforcer and their sandbag. It gave him a brother and a sister. Gave him purpose. But the longer he lingered on Mercedes, staring at her with an acuteness, the more he thought of his mother, and how she might think of him if she were still alive.

  Two loud thuds; a door swung open and someone hit the ground.

  Cameron saw Mercedes’ eyes widen. She reached for her heavy bowie knife, slick as a spider, and threw it. He turned in the direction where it was thrown.

  The knife was lodged into the front of a brown leather jacket, held forward just enough so that it was away from the man’s body so as to catch the knife in the dense material. He was older and just shy of six-feet-tall, broad-shouldered with a checkered flat cap. Fifty-something, with medium-length blonde hair mixing with sheets of gray and silver and a beard to match.

  In front of him was Crazy Rosco; a skinny thing, with long brown hair, squirrelly eyes and bruises all along his face and body. An oversized, sweaty wife beater hung from his torso under a half-buttoned Hawaiian shirt—palm trees and patterned coconuts covered in splotches of red. All he could do was groan before he lost consciousness.

  “Who—” Mercedes began.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to sit tight, I’m going to sit tight, and together, we’re going to wait for the Civic and Occult Authority," said the intruder.

  Mercedes inched her hand closer towards the caged flame on her belt loop. Cameron reached for his gun.

  The older man caught on to both of them at once and dived toward the kitchen, withdrawing a weapon of his own from under his coat—a heftier handgun— and emptied his clip into the faucet. Cameron saw a flash of light, a dim teal, radiate from where the man leapt. Water sprayed out from the kitchen faucet and it took a colored outline, the same dim teal, and the man swiped his arm to the side.

  A solid shard of ice, lance-like in proportions, zipped towards Mercedes and pinned her into the wall behind them. She cried out in pain, blood tinting the ice red, and gripped the cage on her belt loop. The plasmatic eye woke; and she threw the cage into the ground.

  “Mercedes!” Cameron yelled, reaching for his gun once more, pulling it out towards the older man.

  Before he could fire, something else was already beaming towards him. From the small cage a sprite emerged, expanding from its miniscule size into a ball of purple-pink flame no larger than a disco ball. It blinked once, twice, and a third time, and each time it spat out bursts of fire towards the man.

  “Don’t just stand there, Cameron, shoot him!” Mercedes groaned, still pinned to the wall. She tried and failed to remove the large shard of ice, only cutting her hand in the process of trying to remove it.

  Water from the faucet jetted out.

  It was everywhere. The counters, the floors. From it, the man conjured a small wall, which melted immediately after the sprite’s flames had finished firing. The new pile of water took on a dim teal glow. It erupted as a small wave of frigid spikes, peppering Cameron right as he fired. Thorns of ice stabbed into his torso and his arms, prompting the bullet to miss its target.

  The man clenched a single hand, and the ice surrounding Cameron took on a new form, molding around him as a heavy and cold extraskeletal prison. Frost encrusted his skin, immobilizing him. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t even pull the trigger. The gun slipped from his hands and hit the ground.

  “Call off the sprite,” the man said, glancing towards Mercedes.

  She leered at him with open defiance.

  The will-o-wisp persisted. Another blink from its plasmatic eye and another burst of flame bounded toward the man. He pivoted, cocked his arm back and pulled. The lance-like shard lodged into Mercedes' shoulder rebounded back towards him. It skewered the sprite and melted in the process.

  Now freed, Mercedes rushed towards him.

  “No!” Cameron yelled. “Mercedes, wait!”

  Everything slowed. With each step she took, he tried to focus. Cameron gritted his teeth and burrowed deep. He tugged and pulled at the lingering fury sitting in the depth of his stomach, and he could feel it coming; the burning that spread through each of his veins.

  She had no weapon, only an anger that guided her into recklessness, like a cornered animal lashing out against its natural predator. She stood no chance, and she knew it, but she could not help herself. With a stunted dash, Mercedes reached for Cameron’s gun on the floor.

  The old man leered at her with tired and hollowed eyes, and as Cameron felt his power bubbling to life, he felt his heart sank. He recognized those eyes. They were the same as his. It was the same way he looked at the people he’d beaten, and robbed, and humiliated. The same look he’d given that old man in the alleyway so many years ago. The same stilled and carnivorous leer that Germaine saw when Cameron killed him so many years ago.

  Mercedes stepped into the water while rushing towards him, and a dim teal light erupted around it.

  The man clenched his fist. A frozen spike impaled her, entering through her stomach and exiting through her back.

  Blood spattered onto the walls and onto Cameron’s face.

  His veins erupted in a deep scarlet, and in a sudden, violent outpour, droves of velvet-red poured out from his eyes and ears and nose and mouth, washing over his skin and hardening. Everything but his face and his scalp took on an ivory texture, bone-like, yet glistened with the sheen of steel. Cameron broke through the ice at once and ran towards the man. Water glowed. Water froze. Shards flew towards him, only to break against his new set of skin.

  “You're the one they told me to worry about,” noted the man. He held his hand out in front of him, and the surrounding water awaited his orders. “The hexling."

  CAMERON KESSLER

  MERCEDES GARCIA

  CRAZY ROSCO

  LEROY WATERS

  Enjoying BRINEHAVEN? If so, please a review or a rating, it helps this story gain much needed visibility!