Brink city, p.1
Brink City, page 1
Brink City 1
Dante King
Copyright © 2020 by Dante King
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
v002
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
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About the Author
1
There are many sounds in this world that people consider to be soothing; the distant hum of a lawnmower on a sleepy summer afternoon, the dawn chorus of birds, and rain on a tin roof, to name but a few. To me though, nothing relaxed the spirit and calmed the mind like the soft rasp and gratifying click of a twelve-gauge shotgun shell being slotted into the loading port of my Winchester Model 87.
I took a deep breath, sighed it out slowly through my nose, and allowed myself a small smile. Outside the enormous window of my converted warehouse apartment in Bushwick, a capricious drizzle was starting to fall over New York along with the evening. The streetlights had only just flickered lazily into life, each one now crowned with a halo of orange mist. The ubiquitous sound of sirens wailed mournfully in the distance. Overhead, the last rays of the dying sun fought a losing battle with the light pollution across the underside of the mackerel skin clouds.
“It’s going to be one of those nights, is it, you moody bitch?” I muttered, my eyes gazing out across the East River at the unmistakable, one-hundred and two storied art deco celebrity that was the Empire State Building.
Fuck me, but I loved New York. Loved the way that the glitzy, glamorous veneer of the place had almost—but not quite—eclipsed its dirty, seedy soul. The city reminded me of a jewel-encrusted Hollywood actress who has made it to the top and is now the toast of the town, her fame concealing the fact that she sucked a hundred dicks and broke a hundred hearts to get there.
I grinned out at the night again. I chambered a round with a pleasing shick-shuck of the lever-action—which, as far as sounds go, is up there with the cracking open of a beer can or the extracting of a cork out of a good bottle of merlot in terms of satisfaction—and loaded one last cartridge into the weapon.
“Wowzas, Matt,” said a rather high-pitched and enthusiastic voice from behind me, “when it comes to intimidating things to see when walking into a room, a man loading a shotgun and gazing pensively out into the night has got to be up there!”
I turned around, placing the Model 87 carefully on a side table. My foster-brother Lennox had just walked into the room. His jet-black hair was slicked back on his head in a style that would have garnered an appreciative nod from the Fonz. A pair of thick tortoiseshell glasses perched on his long nose. He was about four and a half feet tall and kind of swarthy, with pointed ears and avocado-green skin.
He was, in short, a goblin.
“Shit, Lennox, it’s only just gone six pm,” I said. “I’m not usually used to seeing you until I get back from work.”
Lennox shot me a grin and walked over to the fridge. “Yes, well, if you must know, I finished work on the little invention I’ve been tinkering on, and I have a promising meeting with some potential investors.”
I raised an eyebrow at this. I had a lot of respect for my foster-brother’s brain, but little to no regard for his commonsense. He had been somewhat of an engineering ninja during his college days and had made a mockery of every test that he had ever sat. However, he had been ejected during grad school after one of his clean energy prototypes exploded after hours, reducing a wing of the engineering block to rubble and killing a team of janitors. After his expulsion, Lennox had called me up and said wistfully, “That’s the problem about pioneering right out on the edge, Matthew; you get a cracking view and a new perspective, but it’s not very safe.” He seemed quite unperturbed that his invention had claimed the lives of half a dozen innocent cleaners.
“Is it something that is liable to turn my apartment into a crater?” I asked him.
Lennox tapped the end of his long, green nose. “I’d tell you,” he said, “but then I’d have to kill you.”
I looked slowly from my foster-brother to the shotgun on the side table and back again. “Is that, right?” I said, smiling wryly.
Lennox cleared his throat uncomfortably and extracted a bottle of cranberry juice from the fridge, unscrewed the lid with a deft twist of long, dexterous fingers, and took a long pull. He had a real thing for cranberry juice, did Lennox.
“You got yourself another UTI?” I asked as I buttoned my crisp white Armani shirt.
“No,” said Lennox, missing my stab at humor as usual. “You know, the cranberry’s power of healing is not limited only to the urinary tract—though, for some reason, most people focus on this aspect of their nutritional properties. They also aid in digestive health, liver function…”
I tuned out while Lennox rambled on. That was the thing about geniuses and wunderkind; they might be able to give you the square root of pi as easy as, well, pie, but Lennox wouldn’t have been able to spot irony if it was served up to him with a parsley garnish.
I carefully fastened my tie while my foster-brother babbled on. It was one of my special bespoke working ties—hand-stitched Italian silk with a thin garrotte of high-tensile piano wire running through it. I had personal experience of how well it could handle the strain when it came to quietly disposing of a three-hundred and fifty pound were-rhino, and it looked the bee’s knees too.
Once my tie was knotted just so, I took my jacket from the back of the chair over which it had been resting. This too was a custom bit of gear, paid for by my generous employer, Don Balducci. I had broad shoulders and a muscular chest but a long, trim torso. My favorite suit—a fucking beautiful three-piece of blue herringbone tweed—was tailored to fit me like a glove. It was also what they called ‘bullet-resistant’, made from a material that was fifty-percent lighter than Kevlar and a shitload thinner and more flexible. I didn’t know the ins and outs of it—no doubt Lennox could have bored the pants off me if I’d asked him about it—but I did know that it had cost Don Balducci a cool fifteen grand. I hadn’t yet been required to test its efficiency when it came to bullet stopping, but I hoped that for that sort of money it’d do its job—if it was ever required.
“Matthew? Matt?”
I blinked, looked up while I shrugged into my fancy jacket. “Yeah, Lennox?”
“I–I just wanted to say, man, that, you know, I’m grateful for you putting me up these last couple of weeks, you know?” Lennox said. He fidgeted on the spot.
“You’re my foster-brother,” I said simply. “We’re family. It’s no problem.”
Lennox nodded. The bottle of cranberry juice twisted backward and forward in his clever hands. I prided myself on my intuition, but even Stevie Wonder could have seen that Lennox had something else on his mind.
The two of us had attended the same college—myself on a track scholarship, Lennox riding the tsunami-sized wave created by his prodigious brain—until I was forced to drop out. That was the year when I, along with about one-percent of the population of the United States, found out that I was an Umbra.
Umbras are, essentially, a race of people that sit between normal humans—whatever the fuck a ‘normal’ human is—and the Otherworlders; your goblins, lycans, boogeymen, and other monster-folk that came through the portal at the turn of the twentieth century. Umbras are, physically, human in every respect. The only hint that a stranger might get that the person they were talking to was not strictly human was in their hair color. Mine, for instance, was a midnight black so deep that it shone a rich blue in direct sunlight if I let it grow out. That—as well as to showcase the scar that looped from my temple around my right ear—was why I kept it short on top and shaved around the back and sides. Physiologically though, we are stronger, faster, and possess far more endurance than the average human. We are gifted with the sort of abilities that are found only in the most elite of human beings—Olympians, professional athletes, and strongmen, for example. With training, an Umbra can easily surpass the cream of the human crop.
Needles
“You gonna spit out your question, Lennox, or are you going to chew on it a little longer?” I asked, buttoning my waistcoat and smoothing my tie.
“I just—you know, I was just cogitating once more on how it was that you came to find yourself in the, ah, racket—if that’s the right word—that you’re in, man,” Lennox said.
“I told you when you turned up on my goddamn doorstep, man, it was a natural progression of circumstances,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I understand that,” Lennox said, pushing his spectacles up his crooked nose, “but it’s just so—so—so cool, you know. Like, that that actually took place within our little family, sort of thing.”
I snorted. “Whatever you say, Lennox. It is what it is. I dropped out of college, took up with a bunch of people that our foster parents would have called ‘undesirables’—”
“Tut-tut-tut, Matthew,” Lennox scolded me mockingly, “you should be ashamed of yourself. Not least because you acted so stereotypically.”
I laughed shortly. “Yeah, well, that sort of thing is a stereotype for a reason, isn’t it? It’s because it happens a lot. I had no other options, needed money, ran with the wrong crowd, dabbled with the sort of pricks that put the petty in petty-crime, yadda-yadda-yadda. Next thing you know, I’ve drawn the attention of my employer.”
“Don Balducci?” Lennox asked, though he knew full well that was who I worked for. I figured he just enjoyed the little shiver of fearful respect that the Don’s name conjured in people.
“That’s right,” I said. “The Don heard about that particular penchant I had for being able to see surges and disturbances of magic in the real-time. He figured he could make use of that. And so, here I find myself.”
I stepped around an ebony coffee table, on which a much-thumbed novel, Creation Mage sat, and crouched down behind one of my comfortable leather sofas. I opened a cabinet, revealing a small safe, and punched a code into a number pad. There was a pause, then a homogenous voice issued from the safe. “Poor people have it, rich people need it. If you eat it, you die. What is it?”
“Nothing,” I said.
There was a whirr and a solid clu-thunk, and the door of the safe swung open. I reached inside and pulled out a pair of Colt 1911 Combat Commanders and a handful of spare magazines. The matching handguns were stainless steel, shorter in the barrel than the classic 1911 so that they were easier to conceal and had walnut grips etched with a single bull’s horn. The corno portafortuna was an Italian symbol for luck. The weapons had been gifted to me by Don Balducci; a little thank you for detecting the rhythmic thaumaturgical heartbeat of a timed hex-mine. The device had been planted in one of his illegal distilleries where he’d been brewing murder rum—the latest synthetic magical alcoholic stimulant doing the rounds of the local college campuses.
“Oh, come on!” Lennox cried delightedly. “A gun safe that asks you riddles to gain access to it?”
“The latest thaumaturgical model,” I said.
Lennox shook his head. “You must be earning too much money.”
I snorted. “Is there such a thing?”
“Now, that you mention it,” Lennox said, looking around my spacious, but modestly furnished apartment, “what the hell do you spend your money on? All jokes aside, you must be doing tolerably well for yourself.”
I shrugged enigmatically. “I spend a shitload on whores, drink, and guns, Lennox, and then I squander the rest.”
I loaded the Colts and slipped them into the double-shoulder harness I wore under my jacket. I fastened the spare mags into pouches on the harness and on my belt.
“Look, Matthew,” Lennox said, watching me with wide eyes as I went through my pre-work routine. “I know that before I appeared on your doorstep and sought succor we hadn’t seen each other in a few years, and I appreciate that you’re into the whole mafioso scene now and there’s probably a code of silence or whatever, but can you tell me something?”
I buttoned my jacket and then sat on a chair and fished my boots out from under it. “What?” I asked.
“Have you ever actually, you know, killed anyone before?”
I grunted non-committedly.
“Oh, come on,” Lennox pressed, “you can tell me! We’re family!”
“Why would it matter?” I asked. “You’ve fucking killed people, haven’t you?”
Lennox waved a dismissive hand at me. “Oh, please, those poor souls were sacrificed on the altar of science,” he said. “Besides, it’s not like I meant to have that doohickey of mine explode and vaporize them, is it?”
I looked at the agitated goblin. “Honestly, Lennox,” I said, “sometimes I wonder.”
I laced up my polished brown leather brogue boots—loafers would have looked better with my suit, but they’re a real pain in the ass if you have to administer a work-related kicking to some motherfucker or chase someone down—and walked into the open kitchen. I opened the cutlery drawer and pulled out a curved Karambit combat knife. I slipped the knife into a sheath at the small of my back, walked back over to the side table, and picked up my trusty Model 87.
“So, who the fuck are these investors you’re meeting with?” I said, checking the safety was off on the shotgun—it was my opinion that anyone who managed to blow their own foot off with my Model 87 just because the safety was off shouldn’t have been using it in the first place.
“Well, they’re not investors per se,” Lennox said. “More government representatives who may or may not be interested in my little innovation. A shark-tank of sorts.”
“I see,” I said. Part of me wanted to ask what it was that my genius foster-brother had whipped up in the spare room that he had turned into a laboratory, but I didn’t have the time to hear his explanation.
“But,” said Lennox with the over-casual air of the ludicrously keen, “if you were to make the introductions with your pal, Don Balducci…”
“And start an arms race?”
“I never said it was a weapon!”
“It’s always a fucking weapon with you, Lennox. Even if you set out to build a nun’s nursing home, you’d end up with a goddamn munitions factory.”
Lennox muttered and took another swig of cranberry juice.
I sighed and looked the goblin in the eye. “Look, if these government guys get your gadgets, then it won’t be long until they end up on the streets, but at least they might do some good elsewhere before that happens.”
Lennox laughed. “What a tender heart you have,” he said. “But, to appease your skepticism, I shall divulge to you that, thanks to those pesky devils in China, I’ve started going in for the more… espionage focused items.”
“Is that right?” I said, trying to keep the dubiousness out of my voice.
Lennox snapped his fingers. “In fact,” he said, “I’ve got a little something for you. A thank you present of sorts.”
The goblin dashed off to his room. I glanced at my Omega and saw that I only had a few minutes before I was due to be picked up.
Lennox reappeared as I was shrugging on my overcoat in the hallway. He was positively vibrating with suppressed excitement; an Energizer bunny on crack would have been hard pressed to be anymore pumped up.
