Kaeden

by Naomi West

  “You’re right about those nice guys,” I mutter, remembering.

  “What’d you mean?”

  “In college,” I tell him, “I met a few of those nice guys. I’ve got to say, as a writer, that you made what we call in the business ‘a good observation.’ I know. It’s a very technical term.”

  “You’re a writer?” he asks, leaning in now. There’s genuine interest in his eyes.

  I try unsuccessfully to fight off the blushing. “Yes, I mean, I’m trying to be. Sort of trying, I guess. I need to work harder. I’m working on a book. I have 36,422.”

  “Wow,” he says. “Is that a lot?”

  “It’s like a third of a book, I think.”

  He nods. “Well, then … that’s good, right? What is it about?”

  I imitate how he looked a few minutes ago, when I asked about his favorite movie. I even take on his gruff voice. “Do you really give a shit about that?”

  “Ha, ha.” He nudges my hand; tingles move up my arm. “Maybe I do give a shit about it, yeah. Are you going to answer me or not?”

  “It’s about a girl who is not doing very well at college when a wizard visits her and tells her she is a witch and has to go with him to battle dark forces … that makes it sound really generic but it’s not. At least, I’m trying to make it so it’s not. It’s got lots of weird stuff in it, like this one bit when the wizard and the witch have to pretend to be real estate agents to trick a demon into buying a house built on top of an old witch’s burial site, to undo a curse.” I take a breath, finding refuge in my wine glass. When the long sip is over, I say, “But you didn’t ask for the whole plot!”

  “I can’t pretend to know shit about books,” he says, “but I reckon if it’s got any of your attitude in it, it’s got to be a good one.”

  “My attitude?” I laugh and take a long sip from my wineglass, so long that when I put it down, the glass is empty.

  “Maybe we should get some food too,” Kaeden mutters. “We haven’t even looked at the menu.”

  “That sounds good to me.”

  We turn to the menus and study them for a while, sometimes looking over the top of them to catch each other’s eyes. There’s something oddly intimate about looking at menus together. I feel like it marks a turning point in our … in our what? Relationship? I almost laugh at the word. Maybe it just marks a turning point in our whatever-this-is. He lays his menu down.

  “Are you thinking about something?” The question comes awkwardly, and I’m near-certain his cheeks turn sort-of red. He glances down at the table.

  “Is that the first time you’ve ever asked a woman what she’s thinking?”

  “Yes,” he admits, “and it feels damn, damn strange, I’ve got to say. Because usually I don’t give a damn. I don’t want to give you the impression that I’m a cold asshole, Fiona, but …”

  “You’re a cold asshole?”

  “Pretty much.” He nods, unabashed. “But you don’t have to tell me anything. You just had this weird look on your face, like you were thinking about something.”

  I put the menu aside. “Well, I guess I was trying to fit two realities in my head at the same time. The first one is what happened at the Firefly, in the storage closet. And now this one … doesn’t it seem crazy that those two can exist in the same world?”

  He looks at me for a long time and then turns back to the menu. “I guess I never think of things in those terms,” he says. “How about a double cheeseburger?”

  “At a place like this!” I exclaim. “I thought we’d be eating some sort of lobster baked in butter imported from Peru.”

  “What?” He raises his eyebrow at me. “They don’t got double cheeseburgers in Peru?”

  We laugh together as the waiter approaches. For a second, everything is perfect, and I begin to see the events with Kaeden as a road that led precisely here. Then I picture the road ahead—I don’t want to; it just happens—and see dates stacked upon dates, nights spent in candlelight and other devastatingly romantic vignettes. Our laughs get louder, more carefree.

  Kaeden turns smilingly to the waiter just as the men with guns smash into the restaurant, kicking the door down, looking ghoulish in their grim reaper masks.

  6

  Kaeden

  My instincts have been well-honed with more hours than I can count of bloodshed. Bloodshed makes a man sharp, which is why, when the gunfire starts, an outlaw doesn’t cower like other men; he turns his mind off and acts without thinking. The mind just gets in the way at times like these. But usually my instincts would drive me to immediately get to fighting. Right now I find myself grabbing Fiona around the wrist and dragging her back from the overhanging balcony, out of view of the men down below. She makes to talk and I press my finger against her clammy lips. I force her down with two of the waiters, both men, who are already cowering. Everyone is cowering except an old gray-headed man who looks like he was a soldier once. We meet eyes, and we both know the truth: everybody in here is dead, even if we’ve both got pieces. There’re six men down there and they’ve all got semi-automatic rifles.

  “Don’t move,” I tell her quietly.

  I crouch down low and sneak back to the balcony, lying on my belly and poking my head over so I can just about see what’s going on. All six men have got Nine Circles jackets on, the bastards, and their leader is the biggest goddamn bastard I’ve ever seen, even bigger than me. I’m so used to seeing small men, it shocks me for a second. That must be Reaper, their president; the man has a reputation for size. He holds his gun casually, slung over his shoulder, as his men make a circle around him and one man covers the entrance.

  I take out my cell phone to dial the fellas, but I’ve got no service; either luck is a bitch or they’ve got some high-tech shit going on.

  “Hello, folks,” Reaper says, gesturing with his rifle. It’s a good-sized weapon—an AK-47—but he handles it like it’s a pistol. His voice is deep and booming, the sort of voice that makes old men hurry along to their graves. “I understand that you’re all afraid. I don’t respect that. I can’t respect men like you, sir, for example.” He wanders over to a mid-twenties man, built like a football player, with wide shoulders and dusty blond hair. His face is flattened, the way fighters’ faces often are. He crouches down with another biggish fella. “Why aren’t you fighting? If this was the old days, you would be running to the long hut to gather whatever you could lay your hands on: a spear, a sword, a hatchet, a hoe. It did not matter. You would fight, sir, and you would fight hard.” The man flinches as Reaper waves the AK-47 in his face. “But now you cower like … well, a coward. A cowherd would show more bravery than you!” Reaper laughs like a little girl, which is about the craziest thing he could do right now. The entire place holds its breath at the out-of-place noise.

  He lets the laugh trail off and walks back to the center of the room. My mind is racing, but it’s not racing too much. There’s no one in here who looks up for a fight except for the old fella, and he’s only got a pistol on him; he opens his shirt to show me. I nod, gesturing back that I’ve only got the same. His old forehead wrinkles. The entrance is covered, and the back exit is down the stairs and across the main floor, which the Nine Circles have covered. Anyway, they’ve probably got men at the rear covering for escape. Fuck. Fuck and shit. Shit and fuck.

  “You are all probably wondering if this is going to became a nasty incident, like the sort you’ve read about in the newspapers.”

  The bastard’s enjoying this way too much. I expect that, I guess, but what I don’t expect is the way he paces around, almost like dancing, or the way he always seems on the verge of exploding into anger, laughter, something. He has a chaotic look about him, the sort I’ve seen many times working with dangerous violent men, but this is something else, too. It’s not that he’s losing control; it’s that he’s trained himself to keep control while letting it go, which is a much more dangerous thing. Looking at the old gray-headed fella, I know he sees the same. Maybe he saw some
of that shit overseas.

  “This could go that way, it’s true, but I have no intention of gunning you all down like fucking rats!” The explosion comes, causing those closest to him to crouch down even further, hit by the shockwave. “But I would much prefer to make a deal.” He hands his AK-47 to a man at his side, tall and big but looking like a kid next to Reaper, and then takes a pistol from his back pocket. “Here is my deal: if Kaeden Jackson, otherwise known as Silence, does not surrender himself to me, I will kill one person every minute.”

  Everybody gasps, a sound louder than a single person’s scream.

  I make to stand up right away. It’s not even that I get some bullshit noble impulse about how much of a hero I am. I just can’t let innocents die. I hate it when innocents die; folks who are just going about their regular business; folks who never chose the outlawing life.

  Fiona grabs my arm.

  “How long have you been there?” I whisper, shoving her back.

  “You can’t give yourself to them,” she hisses. “He’ll kill you.”

  “Get back there!” I snap, struggling to keep my voice low. I look back to the waiters, cowering like fucks. “Why’d you let her up here?” I turn as the old guy creeps around to us, ducking low, moving well for a gray-haired fella.

  “You the one he’s asking for?” the old man says. He’s got a snaky scar on his forehead, all jagged, and he’s missing one of his front teeth, a square pitch-black rectangle.

  “Yeah.”

  “You giving yourself up, then?”

  “Yeah. Take her. This is my lady. Keep her safe.”

  “Thirty seconds!” Reapers roars, jumping from one foot to the other. He’s so heavy that a nearby table judders a glass to the floor, where it smashes loudly.

  Fiona glares at me as the old fellas takes her by the arm and drags her back to the hiding place, but she can’t shout or snap unless she wants to bring a storm of lead down on us. She shouts with her eyes, though: huge roars that make me wonder for a second what it’d be like to be one of those regular folks, cower with my girl, go home, and talk about how hard it was and how lucky we are. But I’m not regular folk.

  I stand up with my hands over my head. “Reaper!” I call down.

  He spins on me, aiming the pistol. The grim reaper mask tilts sideways, Death regarding me. “You’re a big target, Silence. Your reputation undersells you.”

  “You’re a bigger target. I reckon your reputation was right. How are we doing this? The stairs are behind me. You won’t hurt these fine folks if I turn around to walk down there, eh?”

  “That depends. What weapons’ve you got?”

  “I’ve got a pistol and a knuckle-duster, two knives, and a flashbang grenade.”

  “A braver man might’ve used the flashbang to clear this place,” Reaper taunts. “I never took you for a fucking coward.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” I shrug. “We both know what you just said makes no goddamn sense. We both know you’re just trying to make me look bad. Who gives a shit? Are we doing this or not?”

  Reaper gestures to two of his men, and then to the tablecloth of a nearby table. At first I’ve got no clue what they’re doing, but then they take the cloth and bring it to right underneath me, spreading it out like a hammock.

  “Throw down everything you’ve got, and then get down here in ten seconds flat. One second longer and I kill that red-haired slut over there.” He nods to a forty-something woman with dyed red hair, her multicolored nails spread over her face. She makes a loud whimpering sound when the men with the guns turn to her.

  “Fair enough.” I grit my teeth as I give up my weapons, but there’s no choice. That comment about the flashbang was bullshit. The only way out of this is backup … backup or somehow getting Reaper to fight me man to man. I toss the weapons down and his men catch them in the hammock, and then I quickly pace to the stairs.

  Fiona catches my eyes; I catch hers; a moment stretches that has nothing to do with time. Stay, she pleads. Stay. I shake my head quickly. I can’t, I silently tell her, not with everything that’s at stake. I give her a nod which I hope means that she ought to have a good life, and then I get going.

  I walk onto the lower floor with my hands raised over my head, past the cowering crowds—men and women on dates, families, their fancy dinner clothes wrinkled and dirty now—and right over to Reaper. I’d walk right to the man’s face (or mask) if it wasn’t for his two goons stepping up in front of him and crossing their rifles. I square my shoulders, staring at Reaper.

  “You’d be better off showing me some respect,” Reaper mutters, talking only to me now. “You’re going to be with me for a long, long time, Silence. You don’t want to start things off like this. You’d be even better off if you fell to your knees like the dog you are and licked the shit off my boot.” His men snigger. “I’ll teach you some manners, though, don’t worry about that. I’ll teach you how to behave like an obedient little kid. One day I’ll remind you of how you swaggered over here and you won’t be able to believe it. You’ll be my fucking pet.”

  “Yeah, I’m not really into that shit,” I tell him, loud enough for the whole place to hear. “I don’t see why’ve we got to get into all that weird shit, truth be told, when we could just settle it like men right here. Clear a circle. You talked about what men used to be; well, here we are. The two biggest men in the whole goddamn city. Clear a circle and let’s fight.”

  There are small holes in the grim reaper mask for his eyes. They widen a fraction, and then narrow. “You’re an idiot,” he says, “if you think I’m going to risk my advantage on a fucking fistfight.”

  “Then you’re the coward!” I snap, slamming my fist into my chest. The goons turn the guns on me but I don’t give a damn. There’s no way in hell I’m going with this prick, even if it means my death. As long as Fiona is safe, fine; let what’ll happen, happen. “You talked like a big man, Reaper. What a fucking shame to find out you’re a boy, pretending to be big because you’ve got a gun in your hand.”

  “Get on your knees,” Reaper says, voice trembling, “hold your hands up to me like I am God, and beg for my forgiveness.”

  I laugh on reflex; the request is so unexpected. He’s not joking, though, even remotely. His partially-hidden eyes are deadly serious.

  “There is no way in this world I’d ever do a thing like that. An outlawing man knows better.”

  “Fine.” Reaper sighs and tuts like a schoolteacher. “Then I guess I’ll have to do things my way.”

  He lifts his hand and shoots me all in a flash, so quick that I don’t register it at first. I hear the screaming, though, a whole roomful of screeching and roaring and crying and pissing. And through it all I hear one scream over all the others: Fiona, screaming with so much pain it’s a wonder the tendons in her neck don’t snap.

  Then I feel the bullet, a hot, scorching point of agony.

  7

  Fiona

  Time seems to slow when the giant man in the mask shoots Kaeden. I managed to crawl my way to the edge again by slapping at the old man’s hands, causing him to curse but to back away as well. What was he supposed to do? He didn’t want me screaming, and when it comes down to it, I’m nobody to him. So when the man in the mask fires at Kaeden, I watch it all unfold in front of me: the bullet smacking into his shoulder, Kaeden taking a staggered step back and then falling to the ground; Kaeden struggling back to his feet only to have another masked man slam him across the face with the butt of his rifle. Then I realize that I’m screaming just like everybody else; my neck aches; my throat is already hoarse.

  I kill the scream and watch, frozen, as the leader in the mask paces over to Kaeden. Somehow I know he’s smiling, despite the mask. There’s a smile in his step. “See?” he says, leaning down over Kaeden as blood pools into the patterned carpet. “All you had to do was show a little respect. I’m not asking for all the respect in the world, you dumb fuck, but, well, it’s too late now anyway.” He brings the gun to Kaeden’s hea
d. “Bye-bye, moron.”

  I feel myself split into two halves. These two halves go to war: one telling me that I care about Kaeden and seeing him hurt will be the worst thing to ever happen to me; the other telling me that Kaeden is nobody to me, a man I barely know, and that if he is killed now it will simply be a sad story and a lost opportunity, not the end of my world. They wage a vicious war, the side that cares finally winning, my chest going so tight that, for a terrified moment, I think I might be paralyzed.

  But I’m not. I manage to stand up. I manage to throw my hands over my head. And I manage to shout, “Stop!”

  Suddenly, the masked man pauses. The whole restaurant turns to me. “Um, yes?” the man says, laughing. “Can I help you, miss? I’m in the middle of something here. You’re a fine one, though. If you’re so eager to play, I’m sure we can oblige.”

  “You can’t kill him!” I call down, shocked that my voice is working properly. “You just can’t!”

  “Can’t I?” The man hefts his gun as though checking it’s real. “I’m pretty sure I can, sweetheart.”

  “You can’t!” I cry, heartbeat making it difficult to know just how loud I’m shouting; it drums in my ears.

  “Fiona, stop!” Kaeden roars, struggling to his knees. “Get down! Just get the fuck down! This isn’t your business! This is club business—” The butt of the gun crushes his throat, sending him to the floor again.