Chapter Ten Kion
Chapter Ten
Kion
They’d found him.
Curled up tight underneath his shabby cot in the dormitory, Kion screamed in terror as a sweaty hand grabbed his tiny ankle and yanked him across the dusty floor.
He stared up at them in undiluted horror, Ralf with his burly build, Quaid and his gummy sneer, and red-haired Gerald, who was holding a leather belt.
It had been Ralf who’d found him, whose giant hand bruised his skin.
Kion scrambled to his feet. “No!” he cried, backing away and looking frantically toward the door, but there was no matron in sight to help him. “STOP!”
“Oh, look,” said Quaid. “The little monster is crying. Shut up!” He kicked Kion right in the ribs with a vicious fervor. Kion screamed as Ralf hauled him back up.
“Father Jameson says you got the devil in you. Says it’s gotta be beaten out.” Gerald shook the belt menacingly as Kion cried in pain and fright while Ralf ripped his shirt off him and forced him around, holding his wrists so he couldn’t escape.
“No, please!” sobbed Kion. It wasn’t fair. They were eleven and twelve and he was only seven. “I don’t, I don’t! I don’t got the devil in me!”
He hadn’t meant to show anybody his secret.
His secret was the only thing that kept him happy.
Sometimes at night, symbols—pretty ones, with fancy loops and swirls—would play in his mind, and he would draw them on himself with the fountain pen he filched from Matron Louisa.
Most of the time they didn’t do anything, almost like his fountain pen wasn’t enough to do… whatever he was trying to do.
But sometimes they made him feel different.
One made him fly just a little bit, hovering a few inches above his cot.
The other boys had seen, and instead of thinking it made him somebody worth being friends with, they ran. They ran right to tell the priest, who said that Kion was showing signs of demonic possession.
Kion didn’t think it was true, but he was becoming less sure.
A gentle, but firm, voice echoes from somewhere very far away. “Kion? It’s James. Your best friend. You’re in your flat. It’s 2026. There’s nobody in the apartment but us. Nothing bad is going to happen to you, all right?”
“Shut up!” Ralf snaps, and then the belt is cracking through the air and breaking the skin on Kion’s slender back. He screams, fighting to break free, but Ralf is unmovable.
“It’s all over, I promise you. You survived it. You’re not in the Waywardly Home. Can you press your heels into the floor? Feel what it’s like to be supported by the floor beneath you?”
The belt cracks down again.
And again.
“Take a deep breath, Kion. Like this.”
He cries so hard he throws up. He wishes he had a mum or a dad who could stop this. But he has nobody and nothing who will help him. So by the end of it, when he’s covered in warm blood and hot, deadly pain, he’s as he always is. Alone and scared.
The memory shatters into thousands of different pieces, like a mirror hitting cement. Kion’s chest rises and falls in a jagged, uneven rhythm as his vision begins to unblur. Tremors shoot through his whole fucking body.
He’s sitting on his black couch, a drink in one hand and James across from him. James. Kion blinks.
Right. Right. It’s 2026. Years have passed. He’s no longer in danger, but his mind—his stupid, broken mind—doesn’t seem to understand that.
“How long?” Kion rasps, staring down at the ice in his glass to hide the shame he feels trying to creep across his face.
“I noticed you’d zoned out perhaps two or three minutes ago. A longer one, this time.” James is as calm and clear as a pond in winter. No hint of judgment, pity, or otherwise, is in his measured words. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Fuck, no.” Kion throws back a sip of his drink. James is the only one on the team that knows about his…condition. For years, he’s been able to keep it that way, but the stress of dissolution’s made these flashbacks happen more often.
He had one yesterday in the bloody locker room shower.
Cutbacks have taken their toll on the water heater.
The shower had been too cold at first, like the lake where they’d dumped him and thrown stones at him.
It’s only a matter of time before somebody else finds out, and he doesn’t want that. At all.
Panaceas won’t work on old marks, so Kion uses a Level Three Illusionary glyph on his back to cover up his horrific scars, all the ruined skin and rough texture, while he changes in the locker room.
It’s one of the only Level Three glyphs he knows.
He’d hoped a Level Two would cover the mass of damage, but only a Level Three could suffice.
It took him ages to get it right. James only saw his bare back because the posh prick had walked in on Kion in his own fucking flat a few days after he had joined the team.
Kion had expected James to shower him in useless pity. He hadn’t. Instead, James had given him a long, even look and asked what had happened. And then he’d lifted up his own shirt. There, snaking across his torso, was a small white scar that looked like it could be from a knife.
“Courtesy of my father,” said James, meeting his eye. “He was ashamed to have a child as weak as I was. I was struck by an elf-shot in the country when I was two.” James turned, and he saw another, smaller mark, on the back of his left shoulder. It must have been where the elf-shot had hit.
Kion’s eyebrows had raised. Unseelie elves—dark elves—had famously terrible aim when it came to their disease-spreading arrows, but on the rare occasion they did manage to strike a victim, the poor bastard would develop any range of Unseelie illnesses: debilitating, chronic diseases that weakened the body horribly.
“The Fading Fever,” James explained, turning back around.
His throat bobbed. “I was bedbound, constantly ill. An insult to the Ridgeshaw legacy. We hadn’t yet realized that lacker immunosuppressants could treat it; we thought I’d forever be ill.
So he…tried to take care of it himself. My mother stopped him only just in time. ”
Staring at that ruined skin on his torso, Kion had realized that even though James was the poshest twat he’d ever known with his cashmere sweaters and steam-pressed trousers, they were both sorry bastards.
It had been enlightening.
Now, Kion slumps back in the sofa. James regards him quietly, sipping his own drink. He sits on the armchair across from him with one leg folded over the other. “If you cannot control the flashbacks, Kion, perhaps you can work on controlling the way you begin to drool. It’s ungentlemanly.”
Anyone else might be grievously offended. It’s an outrageously nasty thing to say. But Kion feels his lips twitch in something that could grow into a grin if he let it.
He doesn’t. But he comes close. He always does, with James.
James sighs, tapping a finger against his glass. “Do you remember what we were talking about before you disappeared?”
He has an inkling. Grimacing, Kion throws back the rest of his drink and crunches loudly on an ice cube. James levels him with an annoyed look.
“You’re chewing on that ice cube because you don’t want to admit that you do, and because you know I absolutely hate it when people speak with food in their mouths. Well played, I suppose.”
“Thanks.” Kion promptly loads another ice cube into his mouth.
“Idiot,” says James fondly.
“Spoiled brat,” he says around the frozen blob.
“Fine, then.” His friend rolls his eyes. “I’ll answer for you. We were speaking about a certain Taissa Cho. Honestly, Kion, I don’t believe for one moment that you’re dating her. What’s happening? Why the ruse?”
Kion bites down on the ice. Hard. It sends freezing fissures up his gums. He won’t lie to James. He just can’t. He knows James can keep a secret, but…
The contract is thorough. If he tells James, and James accidentally lets it slip, Kion and Taissa both lose everything.
As much as James clearly doesn’t want to admit it, Cho could be the difference between dissolution and re-advancement into the Major League.
And fine, if he’s backed into a corner, he’d rather fucking lie than lose his family.
Plus, James clearly doesn’t want Taissa on the team, for more than just Cho’s splendidly annoying personality.
He doesn’t trust her history. Kion knows his friend, and his friend is as cutthroat as a viper when it comes to eliminating perceived threats.
There is absolutely a chance that James would try to get Taissa kicked off the team by revealing the relationship is fake to the public.
He would probably donate some more of his money to the team to soften the blow, but James’s dwindling piles of cash are nothing compared to what might come calling with this PR scheme.
As much as he hates to admit that, Kion knows it.
James Ridgeshaw IV is used to having things his way. His mother has spoiled him silly, perhaps in an attempt to compensate for the absolute fuckwad that was his father. Was, past tense, because James Ridgeshaw III is very, very dead. Pity.
The subsequent twenty-two years of coddling—her nagging about his career choice excluded—from his mother has shaped James into a man whose spoiled nature makes him ruthless.
Usually, Kion can admire this about his best mate: It’s a bloody marvelous thing to gain the godlike confidence of a wealthy wanker after such a horrific childhood, to wrench back the power to make demands and shape your own life.
When James sends food back in a restaurant because it’s slightly lukewarm, or shamelessly bribes cabbies to go over the speed limit so they can make an event, Kion grins, because it means his friend is nowhere close to being like him—shattered and scarred and so completely fucked in the head.
Right now, though, that ruthlessness won’t benefit any of them. Not if James manages to cut Taissa out from the team, and they’re back to square one.