by Dante King
‘Course, I was usually thinking about an exam that I hadn’t studied for, or how to explain to my uncle that I’d left the shop unlocked all night and the town's local homeless population had spent the evening using it as a picnic area—not about a guy who was leaving molten fire behind him like some weird napalm-slug.
Nuts to it. I’m the one who’s more powerful than I should be anyway, right?
The path that led up from the graveyard at the bottom of the hill to the frathouse was a dirt one. Gravel crunched under my heels as I strode confidently down to meet the fuming, ranting Bradley. The staff felt good in my hand. It seemed to buzz, almost imperceptibly, with a sort of bottled anticipation in my palm. I could feel the grain of the smooth wood against my fingertips. The touch made me somehow aware of the latent power that resided inside of it.
When I was about ten strides from Bradley, I stopped. Something sure had got his panties in a bunch. His handsome face was contorted in a rictus of fury, his dark hair—coiffed and styled to magical perfection when I had seen him before the Choosing Ceremony—was all over the place. From this close, I could make out the pointed ears and high, proud forehead that denoted one of the Elven persuasion. He was ranting away in some tongue that I couldn’t understand, spit spraying from his lips and his teeth bared.
“Hey, Flamewalker!” I yelled, in way of greeting. “I thought I heard someone’s dulcet tones floating about on this balmy evening air. You should know, I’m a pretty astute dude, and it seems to me that you’re in the sort of mood where you could start a fight in an empty house. Am I right?”
Bradley’s head snapped around. To my slight consternation, I could see that there was a glow kindling in his light blue eyes. I wasn’t being poetic either—there was literally a fire burning away in the depths of those big blues, as surely as if someone had sliced off the top of his head and stuffed a candle in his noggin, like some sort of grizzly jack-o’-lantern.
He opened his mouth and bellowed wordlessly at me. As his mouth stretched wide, I could see that there was an orange glow emanating from the back of his throat. Looked to me like the guy’s insides were hot enough to bake pottery.
Maybe he’s suffering from some sort of occult indigestion? my pickled brain suggested.
“Hey man,” I said, “if you need some antacids or something, I’m sure one of my fraternity bros has got something that can help with that heartburn.” I was sure that this mature and diplomatic approach would win his reputably pompous ass over. Wealth and high-breeding often went hand in hand with manners.
“Fuck you!” Bradley roared at me.
Maybe not.
Was it just my imagination, or did the staff throb in my grip? It felt, almost, like the walking stick equivalent of a rolling of shoulders, a stretching of the neck, and a popping of knuckles.
My eyes narrowed.
“Fraternity bros?” Bradley snarled, and I saw that the fire in his eyes died a little. “Are you part of the fraternity that lives up here?”
“That’s right,” I said, “for my sins.”
“By the gods, it gets even worse!” the high elf raged. “That fucker Chaosbane!”
“What about Chaosbane?” I asked.
Without either of us seemingly making a conscious decision, Bradley and I had started circling each other like a pair of wolves squaring off.
“I thought it was some nerve that he put me into the shittiest fraternity house at Mazirian Academy—out of the center of the town, out of the action, out of sight—but now I find out that it’s the same bloody house that the latest piece of human scum has been placed in!”
“You know,” I said, “the thing about scum is; it always floats to the top.”
Bradley sneered at me. Then, he shook his head and carried on his ranting. “Fucking Chaosbane. . .my family always said that he was a couple of pickles shy of a full jar when it came to the plebs.”
This arrogant prick was getting dangerously close to standing on my last nerve. Like I said, I was always one to give someone the benefit of the doubt, but this sort of talk got very boring very quickly. Being employed in an oddball store like my uncle’s had made me a pretty easy and obvious target for mockery in my hometown. I’d developed a thick skin, and stupid insults had quickly ceased to carry any sort off sting.
I didn’t know if that was the same case for the other guys in the fraternity. Damien had the aura of a guy who’d been kicked around a lot by life, despite his bluster. Rick might have been big, but I had a feeling he had a marshmallow-like center under all that muscle, and Nigel…
While I was thinking this, Bradley was still carrying on with his little monologue of self-pity.
“Now, he goes and puts me out here with these guys,” he spat, the light flaring behind his eyes again.
I was struck by a sudden idea. “Yeah, too bad for you, huh?” I said. “I bet your family and friends all assumed that you’d get into the most prominent, central frat, you being such a bigshot and everything?”
Bradley’s eyes narrowed. He pushed his hair out of his eyes and molten fire spattered across the ground behind him, as if it had been water and he’d just climbed out of a swimming pool.
“And instead,” I continued airily, “here you are with the outcasts and the weirdos.”
My plan was a simple one: I was going to wind this guy up. I was going to wind him up tight. When you do that to a bullying, shit-talking dickhead like Bradley, chances are that they either break or unwind all at once and, in either scenario, they lose all control.
And, when they lose all control, you have an edge. And what are edges for, if not to push someone over?
“That’s right,” Bradley said snidely. “I don’t know what the delusional idiot was thinking, putting someone of my breeding and my social standing with you lot.”
“You know what I reckon?” I said with the air of someone imparting some delicate information to an unstable moron. “I reckon that Chaosbane, mad as a spoon as he might be, is a perceptive guy. He’s put you in the fraternity that best suits your inner nature, Bradley.”
Bradley’s eyes narrowed further. His nostrils flared.
“What the hell is your name?” he asked. I was aware that the smile that had spread across his face was far from a friendly one. It was the sort of smile usually attached to something circling underneath a luckless surfer. Heat was definitely rising in shimmering waves—like a hot road baking in the sun—off the top of his noble forehead
“Justin,” I replied. “I’d like to say it’s a pleasure, but I don’t want to lie right to your face, man.”
“And, you’re saying what exactly?”
I noticed that his eyes, nostrils, and mouth were glowing brighter; as if the banked coals inside of him were being fanned by a bellows.
“Goddamn it, Brad,” I drawled. “I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you. I’m saying that you’re not quite the hotshit man about town that you think you are. You’re one of us, buddy—an outcast and oddball! And there ain’t nothing wrong with that.”
For a moment, I thought that my barb had been too subtle for dear old Bradley Flamewalker. He stood, shoulders hunched, breathing heavily, his glowing eyes fixed on me.
“Welcome to the club, brother!” I said cheerfully, my arms outstretched in a mocking hug.
The final comment might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, as far as Bradley Flamewalker went. Clearly, the guy had an ego that he should have been carting around in a trailer behind him and some very particular ideas on just what the world owed him.
With a furious cry of rage, the handsome high elf charged toward me.
“And here we go,” I said.
Liquid fire flicked off him as he ran at me; head down, like a bull that had been stung one time too many on the ass.
At least, I noted, as the wrathful otherworldly aristocrat pelted toward me, I had him running the right direction—away from the frathouse.
I rocked on the ba
lls of my feet, making sure that I was balanced, but outwardly retained my casual pose: one hand clutching my staff, leaning against it, an amiable smile on my dial.
Just as Bradley reached out his hands—and I highly doubted he was going in for a bromantic hug—I pivoted, quick as a whip. I spun in a neat three-sixty, taking a single step off to one side. I felt the heat of Bradley as he streamed past me like a freight train. It was like standing too close to a furnace when the door was opened. As he barreled past me, I brought the staff swinging around and smacked him over the top of the melon with it.
The staff thrummed in my hand as I made contact with the back of Bradley’s thick skull. It might not have been quite what the ghost of Barry Chillgrave had in mind when he’d tended to me in his shop, but it did the trick on this occasion. Bradley went ass over tit, his own impetus carrying him further down the hill. He somersaulted in a way that made me want to hold up a scorecard for him, rolled a few times, and settled in a cloud of dust and a smattering of gravel in the middle of the path.
I jogged down the path, patting the staff as I went. I had an inkling that Bradley was not going to be the sort of guy whose ego let him bow out after getting knocked on his butt just the once. I was not disappointed then, when he hauled himself to his feet.
“You fucking common piece of shit,” he spat. His eyes were glowing an incandescent white now. He was not a happy chappy.
“Hey, takes one to know one, pal,” I said flippantly.
Bradley got to his feet.
I may not have been surprised that he did this—I hadn’t hit him as hard as I could, and I’d already accidentally killed one person that day—but what did take me aback was the way that he seemed to grow in front of my eyes. I swore, as he unfolded himself out of the mud and gravel, he loomed over me by at least a foot, and I was an easy six-foot-two.
“Uh,” I said, my wisecracks deserting me for the moment.
Bradley straightened up, and blue flames licked across his shoulders and down his arms. His eyes were just white orbs in his face now. When he grinned in savage delight at my nonplussed expression, the inside of his mouth was a volcanic orange.
“This,” I said, “would be what Damien was saying when he spoke of ‘going inferno’?”
Bradley pointed at me.
“Your goose isn’t so much cooked, as fucking incinerated, peasant,” he growled. “I’m going to—”
It was my education that gave me the advantage in this situation. And not my formal education at school and college—no, that would have been about as much use as a wheelbarrow with rope handles. What I was referring to was my cinematic and literary education. The Lethal Weapon and Die Hard series, Stephen King’s Gunslinger novels, any film that Sly Stallone or Arnie had ever been in—all of these had taught me one thing.
The best time to hit someone was when they start trying to get all intimidating.
My staff flicked out and caught the seven-foot Mega-Brad—as my brain had labeled him—square in the nuts. The motherfucker might have had flaming eyeballs and gone through an instantaneous growth spurt, but he sure felt that sack-tap.
Mega-Brad doubled over and adopted the universally accepted pose of a man who’d just taken one to the brovaries. His legs bowed inward, and he clutched at his groin. I rolled over his back, so that once more I was standing downhill from my adversary. I spun around and used the staff to sweep the legs clean out from under Mega-Brad. He went down hard, the breath whooshing out of him in one great expulsion.
This time, though, he didn’t so much rise to his feet as explode upward. I staggered backward as Mega-Brad bounded to his feet in a rain of blasted dirt and gravel.
“Now, I’ve got your attention, Flamewalker,” I muttered. “Time to get your ass away from my frat house.”
Mega-Brad made a show of dusting himself off. As much as he tried to downplay it, I could tell that he was more than a little sore.
“I bet that one tickled, didn’t it?” I said. I twirled the staff. “Talk about a hardwood.”
Mega-Brad pointed at me once again. Then, he placed the same finger into the middle of his chest. A bizarre, glutinous set of transparent orange scales bloomed from where his finger touched his chest. They moved aside, and another set appeared, shifted aside, and another set came into being. I was reminded of sex-ed classes, when you watched a video of a cell dividing.
In no time at all, Bradley Flamewalker was covered in what basically amounted to a suit of see-through armor.
“Let’s fucking fight!” he bellowed.
“Isn’t that what we’ve been doing, dumbass?” I asked. I started to walk slowly backward, drawing Mega-Brad further away from the frathouse, back down the hill toward the deserted graveyard.
Flame rippled across Mega-Brad’s entire body then. “You’re going to need more than a stick to get through my shields,” he said.
I thought that I could remember how to pull off the Storm Bolt from memory—or would have been able to if it hadn’t been for all the Green Fairy that me and the frat boys had polished off. The thing was, though, I wasn’t much in the mood for spreading the egotistical asshole all over that hillside. Not unless I had no other choice.
As I backed slowly away, I felt my pockets for anything that I might be able to use against this big fiery bastard. My hand found the little spellbook on the second pat.
“That’ll do it,” I said.
Unfortunately, it did not look like the irate high elf was going to give me a few minutes to peruse the book, select my spell, and then use it on him. That was too bad.
Speaking of the devil, as these thoughts were running through my head, Mega-Brad decided that he was sick of this slow, ominous advance and was going to charge me and flatten me like a raccoon under the wheels of a semi.
I turned and legged it down the hill toward the graveyard. It pissed me off to turn tail and run from a guy like Bradley, who was, essentially, nothing more than your stock standard bully. ‘Not just a pretty face,’ was what Enwyn had said to me back at the Academy, and I remembered that now.
I wasn’t going to go toe-to-toe with Bradley, not without some magic on my side. A man could be as brave as he liked, but that wouldn’t be any comfort to him when he’s just a streak of gore on the ground somewhere.
I dashed into the forest of headstones, crypts, and simple wooden crosses. I chanced a look over my shoulder as I went and saw that Mega-Brad, as big and strong he was, was definitely not the speediest greyhound on the track, not with all that armor on. It also looked to me as if that protection came at a price when it came to maneuverability.
To test my theory, I slowed down a little and let the big guy catch up until he was right on my heels. Then, without warning, I turned left down an avenue of crumbling gravestones and pulled up. The Flamewalker Express sailed right past me, before he dug his heels into the soft turf and skidded to a halt. He lumbered about and glared at me. I gave him a little wave.
“Whenever you’re ready,” I said.
Mega-Brad stomped toward me, but I stood my ground. I’d made my first test, and it had come back promising. Now it was time for the second.
Could my vector alone hurt him?
Bradley looked like he expected me to move. I didn’t.
“I could squash your head like a bloody grape, Justin,” he said.
“Maybe if you stopped with all the chin music, you might,” I replied. “Stop talking and put your money where your mouth is. Then, when you’ve done that, I’ll put my foot where your money is.”
Bradley lashed out with a cry of fury. His punch was exactly the sort of swing that I’d expect an angry man with limited imagination to throw: a wild haymaker, trailing fire, that streaked over my head as I ducked. His fist smashed into the tall, elegant marble gravestone that I had been standing in front of and went through it like it was made of gingerbread.
Note to self: do not put your face in front of that.
Rock fragments rained down, but I scarcely notice
d. I smacked the butt of my staff into the back of Mega-Brad’s knee joint, then spun and delivered a beautiful baseball swing right across his shoulder blades.
My staff vibrated in my hands, so hard that I almost dropped it, and the orb flashed a warning red. Gobbets of flame splattered off the diaphanous armor like molten lava, but the shield held. Bradley barely stumbled.
By the time that he had turned around, I was already boosting off through the maze of graves.
“All right,” I said to the staff, “I guess brute force won’t work against that shell of his. Time to learn me some magic!”
A length of wood shouldn’t be able to give off the impression of an eye-roll, but somehow the staff managed it.
I ducked down behind an ivy-covered sepulcher and pulled the spellbook from my pocket. I thumbed quickly through the pages until I found the only page that did not appear blank or blurred to my eyes.
“Storm Bolt,” I read, my eyes flicking over the description of the spell and the way in which it was cast. “I think you’re going to be my last resort, I’m sorry to say.”
Next on the list was Paralyzing Zap.
“That sounds promising,” I murmured to myself. “Point your vector toward your target and—”
A sudden wave of heat washed over me, and I rolled sideways on instinct, staff in one hand and spellbook in the other. Bradley’s twin fists drove into the ground, right where I’d been crouched a moment before. There was a flash of flame, and a circle of grass about two yards in diameter was suddenly nothing but blackened carbon.
This guy was playing for keeps!
As I sprinted off down the row of graves, with Mega-Brad in hot pursuit, I found that I was actually quite enjoying myself. It was like being inside of a video game, in a way, and Bradley was nothing more than a boss whose weakness I had to figure out and exploit. I looked behind me and saw that Bradley was no longer there.
