Venomous (19 page)

“Is it really, though?” I spit out, speaking before thinking. “So Casey has a crush on him? Does that warrant all the crying and the breaking shit?”

“Look who’s talking, Mr. Takes Me Two Minutes to Cripple Someone,” she says. “This isn’t just a crush, hon. This is years of friendship and embarrassment on Casey’s part. You dealt with the venom your own way, but part of Casey is wanting what he can’t have, and you just yanked the support out from under
years
of propped-up baggage. What if that happened to you? What if a portion of this
crazy-ass
life you’ve built around yourself just got smashed?” She shakes her head against me. “There’s no right answer here, it’s everyone’s fault, but it’s not the end of the world. There.”

You don’t know a thing about me, lady.

“I’m sorry. I love you.”

“I know,” she says, and then as an afterthought, “and I think your mom’s home.”

The door clicks and opens to the sounds of my mom and Lon carrying groceries into the kitchen. My eyelids clamp together, and I take a deep breath. The siesta was nice, but we have to get out of here. Considering the state I’m in, I can’t deal with my family, especially if they’re meeting my girlfriend for the first time.

“Locke?” calls my mom. “You here, honey? We got chocolate milk.”

There’s no way of exiting without running into them. Make this quick. “In my room. Be out in a second.”

We straighten ourselves up and get our coats back on. Before I open the door, Renée grabs my face and kisses me, hard, as if we’re on our way to a quick demise. I open the door, and we shuffle into the kitchen.

My mom looks up from a paper bag and smiles. “Hey, babe, chocolate milk’s in the fridge—Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you had someone over.”

“It’s cool. Mom, this is Renée. Renée, Mom.”

“Renée?
The
Renée?” My mom squeals in delight and, in traditional Mom response, sidles over to us and gives Renée a huge bear hug, pulling my girlfriend into her maternal bosom. Renée’s eyes are just visible between my mom’s grasping arms, a look of panic lining her face. It’d be cute if I didn’t want to leave this place as soon as possible.

The person who gave birth to me pulls Renée back at arm’s length and beams into her face, but her smile suddenly wanes a bit, and then she decides to mortify the crap out of me.

“Honey,” she says, inspecting my girlfriend, “do you really need all that mess on your face? You’re so
pretty
!”

“
Jesus
, Mom,” I say a little too loudly. “Come on, don’t do this.”

My mom suddenly looks hurt and embarrassed, and I hate myself for it. “I’m sorry, kidlet, I don’t mean to be…It’s just, she’s got this beautiful
figure
, and this lovely hair, and then
BAM!
Captain Howdy!” For the first time in my life, I contemplate matricide. Like lightning, I pour myself a glass of chocolate milk and throw it down my throat. It helps. A little. Mostly I just feel nauseated.

Renée stays charming, picking up my slack. “Locke makes me wear it. He doesn’t want any competition, and it scares the other boys away.”

“Well, good. At least he knows a worthy investment when he sees one.”

“Yeah, he’s a pretty perfect kid.”

My mom glances sidelong at me and stage-whispers, “I like this girl,” which sends her and Renée into fits of well-choreographed laughter. I try to force a chuckle, but it dies in my throat. “So can you kids stay for dinner? I was thinking spaghetti, but if we have company, I could do something a little bigger, maybe make some chicken parmigiana—”

“Actually, we have to get going,” Renée interrupts before I can act like an even bigger dick to my mother. “We’re meeting Casey and Randall for dinner in a little bit, and we’ve already ditched ’em a couple of times in the past. You know how it is.”

“Sure, sure, no problem, have a good time,” she says, waving us away. I can hear it in her voice—
I don’t mean to cramp your style, you kids go ahead
. I feel terrible, like I’m hurting her, but I’m also enraged. Sorry I have my own fucking life to deal with now. If she had any idea what I’m going to have to deal with today—

“Honey? Come on, we have to run.” Renée’s hand is on my shoulder, pulling me away. I wave good-bye to my mom, and we move toward the door, thinking only about the fresh air, the sun, all things outside my fucking apartment.

Suddenly a blond blur darts in front of us, and Renée and I are confronted with ten years of overachieving young man smiling up at us.

“Are you Renée?” asks Lon peppily.

“I so am,” she says with a smile. “Lon, right? How’re those comics treating you?”

“They’re
great
,” he says, elated to be in front of my comics-savvy girlfriend. “I really liked ’em. Too bad you guys can’t stay for dinner. Locke, we’re having spaghetti tonight. And you can see some of the drawings I did at school today! Here, stay for dinner, I can show you, I did this one of Iron Man. And his armor’s really hard to draw. But I think I got it down. It’s just the chest plate, it’s a real pain, so I don’t think he looks perfect—”

“Lon.
We’ve got to
go
. Back off.”

Lon’s mile-a-minute speech stops dead with a frightened wheeze. Renée looks over her shoulder at me, equally taken aback—the voice that just spoke was commanding, cold, and impatient, exactly
not
how I should be talking to the best little brother ever.

I clear my throat. “Sorry, man. Rough day, okay? We’ll talk about it later. We need to go.”

“Yeah,” he says, looking down at his feet, ashamed to be shut down in front of company. “Sorry. I understand. Nice meeting you, Renée.”

As we tromp down the stairs of my building, Renée shakes her head. “That wasn’t cool, Locke. You don’t do that to a little kid in front of company. All he wanted to do was impress me, you realize.”

I don’t. Fucking. Care.

The cool New York air hits me, lowering my insane body temperature a few degrees. Every remedy for the venom—chocolate milk, cooling down, Renée—is frighteningly temporary. Every movement of my body is charged with fire. Every thought is murderous, persistent. This day could not get any worse.

And, as if on cue, Renée’s phone rings.

“Hello? Brent, hey, yeah—What…Oh, fuck. Yeah. Locke told him. No, no, we should get to him first…Right, exactly. Where is he? Okay. Yeah, sure, it’s cool. Yeah, I know where that is. Thanks a bunch, man. Bye.” She clicks her phone shut. “He’s at a bar on Seventy-third. Apparently, he’s called all the Major Arcana to try and put out some sort of hit on us or something. They were less than receptive, so Brent called me.”

“So what do we do?”

“We meet him at the fucking bar.” She sighs. “What else do friends do?”

The P&G Café is apparently a dive in the truest sense—it is neither large nor well-lit nor clean nor in any way cool. There’s a bar, some bottles, and a couple of tiny booths surrounding a broken-down jukebox. While its outside is lined with flashing neon depicting martinis and signs for steaks, it’s really only good for holing up and drinking yourself to death. It looks, honestly, like the kind of place I’d normally love to go and drink, probably with Casey. Today it’s the house of Dracula.

“Put on your game face,” says Renée, staring at the bar with the same dread. “You’ve seen Casey bad before, but nothing like this. Fuck, this might even be a learning experience for
me
.”

“How do we want to do this?”

“I’m gonna go in there and sit down with him and try to talk him down. After that, I’m going to tell him that you’re outside, and if he’s down, we should go somewhere and work this through. I figure we give
him
the choice, that way he doesn’t feel cornered.” She gives me a wary eye. “The most important thing is that
everyone keeps their temper
. You need to basically throw your pride away and apologize fully. Remember, in a situation like this, anger never solves any—”

The door to the bar flies open and there he is, standing in the doorway, hunched over and panting. Each time he breathes, a throaty, grating noise comes ripping through his mouth. His hair is mussed, in his face, and even though I know he’s only known about what happened since this afternoon, his clothes look like they’ve been slept in for a week. A line of spittle hangs lazily from the corner of his massive smile, and twitches every time he lets out a breath. His eyes are as big as dinner plates, but for a moment I almost think I can’t see any white in them, that they’ve glazed over with the deepest, darkest black.

“Holy shit,” he says, advancing on me. “I’m going to kill the shit out of you.”

“Casey, wait.”

U
P TO
my elbows, then my shoulders, in this monster’s mouth. Its huge, shiny eyes were only inches from my face, and the whirling tentacles at its maw seemed to be gibbering at me in hideous, hellish laughter. There was no doubt in this creature’s mind: I was lunch, a hatred-fueled snack.

Fine. If it was going to pull, then I was going to push.

I closed my eyes and felt the dark energies of the city, the fuel for our fires. Like a ham radio, my mind found the core frequency, the seething black heart of the city’s hate-flow, and tuned into it. Be a conduit, Locke. Use it. Your powers are the same as his, just a different form. Attach one to the other.

There. The pain, the evil. Every drop of innocent blood, every life shattered.

Focus it. Move it through your heart and into his.

My costume flared, grew, twisted. With one great push, I used every ounce of darkness I had and fired it into this beast’s obsidian heart with one concentrated blast.

And then, fireworks.

My hands exploded in shadows, sending crackling energy and burnt sludgelike tentacle flesh firing into the sky. The bolts of obsidian light rippled through the future-Blacklight’s system, burning away and absorbing every ounce of power he was deriving from the city’s black core. There was the sound of a thousand people screaming in anguish, and then the monster flew away, its flesh cracking and blowing away with the river breeze as ash, nothing more. I reeled back, taking a deep breath—I’d never released such a concentrated amount of energy before, and I’d never absorbed so much at one time.

My costume rippled and shook. So much darkness. So much avarice and guilt and hatred, pulsing throughout me. I was a god—no, God, the one, the only. I was power and strength, pure and unfiltered. It was incredible.

I stood, watching his slumped form, and remembered the three words he had spoken. The ones that mattered the most.

“I killed her.”

The costume twitched. I knew what I had to do.

T
HERE’S THE SATISFYING
tension of my knuckles hitting meat and bone, followed by the stiffening pain down my arm of the pressure from the punch, and then it’s dynamite, explosive, out of sight and into the stands.

Casey reels and falls to the sidewalk, but rolls on his back and scrambles to his feet just as I begin to shake off the pain in my arm. I feel my throat already begin to bruise at the points where his fingers gripped it, and the back of my head throbs from being slammed into a wall. My balance feels fucked-up. I’m pretty sure my face is bleeding. Wooo. Party.

“Stop it!” shrieks Renée, looking angrily between the two of us. “Stop it right now!”

Doesn’t matter what she says. The words enter my ears, but they’re indistinguishable and meaningless, like a bird or a rodent. From the moment that first swing was thrown, this was no longer about talking or having a good cry. This was about pain and anguish, violence and tears and hatred. Casey is completely absorbed by the black, and as hard as I’ve tried to contain it, the venom has taken over completely. We aren’t two friends arguing—we’re Frankenstein and the Wolf Man, two monsters ready to tear each other apart for the simple reason that the one doesn’t deserve to be alive in the presence of the other.

The point is, me and Casey are overdue to mindlessly beat the shit out of each other. It was the way we’d met, and the only thing we knew.

Casey charges me and throws me to the ground. I throw my arm around his head as we hit the concrete, and start punching him in the back and kidneys, but it’s no use, because he knocks the wind out of me with one strong fist to the stomach. The world swims. I will
not
pass out. As I try to regain my breath, he lets out a scream and punches me hard in the temple. I stumble headfirst into a wall and then hit the ground again, the concrete cheese-grating my face. White again. Fuzzy.

GET UP.

The venom grabs my limbs, twisting them into movements of precise violence. As he’s bent over me, savoring my pain, I lean back on my tailbone and send the toe of my boot arching right across his chin. His head snaps around as blood starts drooling down his lower lip, but that’s time enough for me to get back on my feet.

My mind is a cacophony of barked orders.
Do as much damage as possible. Make him hurt. Make him bleed. Don’t do so until he stops saying “please.” Go for the eyes. The throat. Knees.

I throw a right hook at Casey’s jaw, and he takes it like a bitch, an arch of blood whipping widely out of his mouth. As he staggers backward, I throw all my weight into my shoulder and send it firing into his solar plexus. I manage to take him off his feet, give him a few seconds of air before he slams loudly into the side of a parked car. The alarm goes off, a high-pitched rhythmic wail. It’s incredibly appropriate.

I suddenly realize that, disgustingly, I’m yelling, “MOTHERFUCKER! TAKE IT, MOTHERFUCKER! TAKE IT!” which is about the least dignified thing anyone could do in a fight, but whatever, this is the venom talking, not me. I change it to just guttural throat-noises, things that sound like I’m scraping my own windpipe with a violin string. I feel my fist swing out and collide with his mouth, his lips and teeth becoming a squishy mishmash with hard edges; I actually feel blood drip off my knuckles as I pull my hand back. I make a note of it and get ready to swing again—

Pain. The worst kind of pain.

Casey’s knee hits my groin and doesn’t move, just keeps pushing harder and harder. I yelp, feeling my testes lunge up into my intestines, and curl over on my side, clutching my aching manhood.

Heh, aching manhood. It’s like a line out of a romance nov—

He’s up on his feet and kicks me in the stomach before I can reach out and grab his leg. I feel my gut cave in on two sides now, from between my legs and from its front, and something in the back of my mind prepares itself for the loss of my stomach contents. I lean my head back, grit my teeth, put out my hands, and wait for a second kick.

“
STOP IT RIGHT NOW!”
screams Renée, launching herself onto Casey’s back. He sways and stumbles like a lush, caught in midkick and now trying to regain his balance while a harpy bites his shoulder, screams into his ear, drags her nails across his scalp. A crowd has gathered around us, watching with something between horror and amusement on their faces. For the first time in a while, clarity explodes into my mind—Jesus, what are we doing?

Casey reaches around his shoulder, grabs Renée by her shirt, and in a single swift, brutal motion, whips her around his front and tosses her onto the ground. She lands with a thud and a small cry.

Clarity vanishes. The venom is everything. The pain in my groin and face slowly, piece by piece, flows out of the rest of my body and nestles itself in my heart.

I’m on my feet. Casey growls obscenities at me. I don’t listen. I send the back of my hand booming right into his cheek, smashing his face to the side with a small shower of blood and spit. He stumbles back a few steps, wipes off his eyes, lets out a bestial war cry, and then charges me.

And for once, everything slows down. Normally, the venom doesn’t act this way. There’s none of the car-crash-slow-motion fear that one gets when something goes horribly wrong before your eyes. But this time, things change. This time, I watch intently, knowing just what will happen.

Casey charges me. I sidestep as he pulls back his fist. His knuckles nearly graze my cheek, but just miss it. And with Casey swinging at air, I take one step forward and send my fist arching up into where his stomach and chest meet.

Right on target.

The world just stops.

My life freezes. It’s like someone hit the pause button on my existence. I step back and take it in. My face is a malicious grin with reddened eyes. Every muscle in my body looks taut beneath my clothing, pulled tight in both rage and anguish. Casey is actually lifted off the ground by my punch, his cheeks puffing out, his feet hanging about a foot or so above the floor. His body is hunched over my fist, crumpled, like a badly raised circus tent.

I feel powerful. I feel immortal and dark and stark raving mad. I feel like every fantasy character I’d concocted for myself at bedtime, every grand villain or hideous monster I’d used to make my poisonous core into a weapon or a shield against everything else. This is how Vlad the Impaler must have felt, Alexander the Great, Charles Manson—invincible, powered by something beyond their control and feeling deliciously wonderful about it. This is how Blacklight feels. It’s fantastic. It’s better than every fantasy I’ve ever dreamed of, every fight I’ve ever walked away from. Better than sex, than love. Paradise in ebony.

This is nice,
I think.

Isn’t it, though?

BAM
, I’m in the fight again, and after a second of floating, Casey hits the ground. He tries to push away from me, coughing, sobbing, but I grab the collar of his shirt and pull. One of his bloody, drooly hands reaches out and does the same to me. For a second I see his face, my friend’s face, pained, hurt—

—and then he smiles, and I know that no matter how powerful or dark I just felt, he understands.

He yanks, and uses the force of me pulling up to head-butt me right in the face. The world shatters, and all is silent for a second, but consciousness spins back into view.

We’re both on our feet, but just barely. My head is still swimming from the head butt, and Casey’s still choking from the uppercut, and the people circling us are looking more worried than excited now. We’re heaving, stumbling, trying to gather our wits, ready for the next move, the next punch. Our eyes meet, and although bloody and bruised, I can tell he’s still ready to fight.

“Stop.”

Somehow, through the car alarms and the whispering audience and all the city’s noise, we both hear Randall and look up at him. He stands at the front of the crowd, arms folded, Tollevin flanks him, aghast. Randall’s expression is one of mixed contempt and grief—he’s disgusted by us, but it’s obvious he didn’t expect anything less. There’s a smudge of blood on his shirt. I then take the time to look at our battlegrounds and see lots of it, spattering the sidewalk, my clothes, my fists…
JESUS.
Now that I look at it, there’s blood everywhere, even smeared on the walls and the car we hit. This place looks like a food fight at Hannibal Lecter’s place. I had no idea there was this much blood in a person. Or that I could shed it.

After this pause, there’s no more momentum. I feel numb, obliterated. I can’t even cry. There’s nothing left in me, like the venom has passed out from exhaustion and left a big empty room behind. I open my mouth and feel my lips sting as the blood and mucus coating them stretches and then cracks.

I turn to face Randall. “Brent call you?” I manage to hiss out. He nods, slowly. “How do I look?”

“You’ll be okay.”

Greeeeat. “You okay?”

He opens his mouth to say something, and then his eyes widen. “Locke—”

A hand grabs my hair and yanks, accompanied by the most gut-wrenching scream I’ve ever heard. Casey sweeps me off my feet and slams my head into the car’s hood. Everything swirls purple before going straight to black.

“Locke? LOCKE?”

A hand slaps my face awake, and I sit up on the pavement. Tollevin crouches in front of me with a glass of water, which he shoves into my mouth, and I gulp greedily. The side of my forehead cries agony.

“Oh fuck,” I mumble. “How long was I out for?”

“Only about twenty seconds,” he says, shaking his head in disbelief. “Long enough to make us worried, though. Jesus, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s possible to kill you. Man, you need to see a mirror.”

The details of the situation rush back into my head. “Where’re Randall ’n’ Casey?”

“Over there.”

I follow his finger to a couple of yards away, where Casey sits with his back up against a wall, head between his knees. Randall crouches in front of him, face pained and exhausted. A small trail of blood runs from Casey, dribbling down the pavement and into the street.

Okay, friends accounted for. Next problem. “Where’s Renée?”

Tollevin hisses, “She’s inside the bar, man. Now might not be the best time.”

“Help me up.”

“Locke…fuck.”

Tollevin yanks me to my feet and hands me my glasses, surprisingly intact. I hobble into the bar, dark and ratty, and find Renée on the stool, picking her nails to pieces. Great black gobs of makeup drip down from her animal eyes, darting every which way in case of predators. One knee moves pistonlike; her foot beats out a double-bass rhythm. The bartender, a cute girl in her midtwenties, has a hand on Renée’s shoulder. As I enter, she takes just enough time to return my glance and turn away in horror. The more I walk, the more I feel the blood move down my face.

“Renée?”

She shrieks and goes a foot in the air. Instead of going to my face to help me, like they should, her hands go straight to and into her mouth, her fingers shoved between her teeth. Her eyes well up with tears, and her shoulders go up in a defensive posture. Jesus, how bad
did
Casey beat me? We didn’t get that out of hand, did we?

“Renée.”

“Look at you,” she gurgles. “Look at yourself.”

She stands up and marches out of the bar, crying quietly. I follow her into the street, as fast as I can.

“Renée.”

She turns the corner, trying to outwalk me. What the fuck? I grab her shoulder and spin her,
make
her look at me.

“Renée!”

Before I can say anything else, she’s screaming and hitting me, pounding her fists at my shoulders and neck and making these horrible leathery noises in the back of her throat again. My wounds scream out in soreness, so I just put my arms up and back off. I take the hint and don’t touch her again, just follow her.

“Renée.”

Past the remaining members of the audience, disgusted, whispering. I start switching sides to make sure both ears can hear me.

“Renée.”

She walks to the curb and throws one hand up, the other one clutching at the back of her neck. I pray that our appearances will make every cab driver in a three-mile radius turn their
OFF DUTY
lights on.

“Renée.”

A cab pulls up in seconds, and she’s inside it, barking her address. I grab hold on the door handle and try to keep her from closing the door.

“Renée.”

She screams and yanks with all her might before crawling into the far corner of the taxi and hiding her face. The cab, whose driver probably thinks I’m a budding Ike Turner, disappears with a screech and a cloud. I memorize the plate: EVH5604. Soon, though, it blends in with the New York City mob of yellow cabs, and it’s lost, taking my repulsed girlfriend with it.

“Renée.”

The wounds on my face and the bruises on my arms sting as my sweat and blood roll into them, as if someone had dripped poison into my open gashes and aching muscles. Somewhere in the distance, there’s a high-pitched wail, growing louder and louder.