Demonic Po*nstar System Chapter 965: Realization

Kaiden Grey stood at the mouth of the loading bay behind the Meridian Galleria, eleven feet of concrete between him and the young men who had called his ladies cosplayers. They had just worked out who he was.

Then all three of them looked past him at the costumes, and the costumes looked back.

The red one was not wearing paint.

The red one was the axe from the mountain pass, the woman the entire country had watched hold a ridge open while the range got swarmed. She was smiling at them now, and there was nothing in that smile that wanted them to feel better about anything.

The tanned one had not looked at them once. She had a hand on Kaiden Grey’s arm and she had kept it there through every word they had said about her, as if the words never even existed.

"Bro." The wiry one had gone the color of the wall behind him. "Bro. Bro, that’s not paint."

"Shut up."

"That’s not PAINT." His voice climbed and cracked and kept climbing anyway. "That’s the axe lady. That’s the axe lady and that’s the cat one and you just said-"

He stopped, because there was no version of finishing that sentence that helped him.

The third one had gotten there a few seconds earlier and had not managed a word at all. He watched a lot of clips. He knew exactly what those women were like about that man because the internet had been making compilations of it.

A lot of compilations.

The corridor changed.

Nothing in it moved and nothing in it broke, and the gap-lights went on doing what gap-lights do.

It simply became harder to stand in. The air went into their lungs and refused to do anything useful once it got there, and fine grey dust came down off the pipework in a slow drift that none of them could account for.

The wiry one’s knees quit first. He went down against a roll-up door with his hands flat beside him and stayed there, and for a while the sounds coming out of him were not words.

Then they were.

"I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry-"

The third one wet himself and did not appear to notice, which was worse, and the stain went down his jeans while he kept his eyes on Kaiden the entire time.

"We didn’t know," he said, to nobody, in a small flat voice with nothing behind it. "We didn’t know. We didn’t know, we didn’t-"

He was going backward the whole time he said it, one slow step after another, both hands up around his own face.

The big one went the other way.

Because the big one had forty kilos, a class ring, and twenty-odd years of the world getting out of his way, and what came up out of him instead of fear was noise.

"WHAT?" It tore out of him at a volume that hurt, and it was aimed at everyone standing in that doorway. "You want some? You brought your monster whores down here for me?"

Nobody answered him, and that was worse than anything any of them could have said.

"I don’t care who you are!" His face had gone purple and there was spit on his chin and he was already moving. "I’ll beat the FUCK out of you and do your painted bitches after-"

He swung at Kaiden.

It was, to be fair to him, a real punch, thrown with his weight planted and his shoulder behind it, and it arrived flush on Kaiden’s cheekbone with everything the man owned.

His hand died first.

The sound was a grocery bag of dry spaghetti going off all at once.

Four knuckles opened against Kaiden’s cheekbone and the small bones behind them went to gravel, and his fingers ended up pointing in directions that had nothing to do with one another.

The rest of the punch had nowhere to be. Every kilo he had put behind it turned around at the wrist and started back up the arm looking for something softer, and it found all of it.

The wrist folded sideways. The forearm bowed, held a moment, and then one of the two bones in it gave up and came out through the skin in a bright wet bloom that reached the concrete before the rest of him did.

The elbow went backward, past where elbows stop. The shoulder tore out of its socket with a sound like a boot pulled out of deep mud, and that was the end of the arm, and the man it was attached to had not made a noise yet.

Behind him, Calypso made a low sound in her throat, delighted and entirely unhelpful. Bastet’s grip on his arm tightened by one finger.

His friends never moved at all.

One of them was still apologizing to a man who could not hear him, in the same four words, over and over. The other had both hands clamped over his own mouth and had stopped going backward, because he had run out of corridor.

Kaiden’s head had not moved. Not a centimeter, not a degree.

He stood there with another man’s blood freckled across his cheek and his eyes exactly where they had been through all of it, on the boy against the wall.

Then the pain arrived.

It came up the ruined arm all at once, and the sound that came out of him had nothing human left in it, a guttural bellow that broke apart in the middle and came back higher than it started.

"AAAGH- MY ARM- MY ARM, MY ARM, MY-"

He went down on his knees in his own blood with the wreck of it clutched against his chest. The screaming climbed up into the pipework, came back off the walls on both sides, and would not stop.

Only then did Kaiden look at him.

He stood over the man kneeling in front of him and gave him absolutely nothing, and the big one made the mistake of raising his head.

Whatever he found up there emptied him out. The noise went on because the arm had not stopped, but everything else in his face quit at once.

"Please-" The word broke coming out of him, pitched high and childish, with nothing of the bull left anywhere in it. "Please. Please, don’t, I’ll go, I’m going, please-"

The other two did not stay for it.

The third one came off the wall and ran, and he was screaming before his second step landed.

"HELP! SOMEBODY HELP US-" He made it four strides before he put his shoulder into the wall hard enough to spin himself half around, came off it, and kept going without ever once stopping the noise.

The wiry one got himself up off the roll-up door, went over his own feet at the mouth of the bay, and came down hard on both palms.

"I didn’t touch him! I didn’t touch anyone, I swear, I never touched him-" When he scrambled up, his jeans came with him only as far as his thighs, and he ran the rest of the way out holding them with one hand.

Neither of them looked back, and neither of them said a word about the man they had come in with.

Which left the big one, dragging himself toward the daylight one-handed with his ruined arm trailing behind him, and his voice went the whole way.

"That’s assault." It came out in a wet, high, wobbling register nothing like the one he had arrived with. "That’s awakened violence against a civilian. That’s illegal. That’s- you can’t- that’s ILLEGAL-"

He got himself around the corner, and the sound of him went with him in stages, until the loading bay was quiet except for one boy’s ragged breathing.

Damian had watched every frame of it.

"...Is that going to be a problem for you?" His voice had almost nothing left in it. "He’s not awakened. He’ll go to the police, there’ll be a-"

Then he stopped, because he was asking a man who had painted an alley wall with three people whether he was worried about paperwork, and he had been standing right there when it happened.

Kaiden’s attention was still out at the mouth of the bay where the other two had gone, tracking the sound of them across the lot until there was none of it left. For those few seconds there was nothing in his face that had any business being on a person.

Then he came back from it, and it was gone, and he looked down at Damian with mild offense.

"You speak as though I’d ever hurt civilians."

Damian’s legs went out from under him.

He slid down the wall until he was sitting in the dock grime, and then he started to laugh, and it was a horrible thing to listen to.

"Of course." It came out in pieces around the laugh. "Course it’s you. Course it’s-"

The rest of it turned into a cough that brought blood up off his split lip, and he had to stop and get his breath back off the brick behind him.

"All the worst days of my life," he said, to the pipes, to nobody. "You’ve seen all of them now. Every single one. You were even there when Aria had to come to the police station..."

Kaiden crossed to him and crouched down, forearms on his knees.

"Yeah. I had fun looking after Lux while Aria had to beg the police to let you go."

"..." Damian did not look at him.

He had his head back against the brick with his good eye shut, waiting for it, because he had heard it once already in an alley and he knew what shape it came in.

"Who swung first?"

"...Me."

"At the fat one?"

"Yeah."

"How long have they been at it?"

"Weeks." It came out flat. "Since one of them worked out whose brother I am. I stock inventory here, three shifts a week. I wanted my own money." He stopped, and what came next was quieter. "Whatever. It doesn’t matter."

Kaiden let that sit for a moment. Weeks of it, in this corridor, and Aria had not known a single thing about it.

Calypso had stopped enjoying herself somewhere in the middle of it.

"Damian-"

"You can just say it." The eye stayed shut. "Whatever it is. I’d rather you said it."

"Say what?"

"That I’m an idiot. That I got beaten up behind a smoothie place over words." His chin was going and he was fighting it and losing. "That I should have walked away. I know all of it. You don’t have to do the-"

He was crying by then and past caring that he was, and the misery coming off him was a different animal from the tantrum Kaiden had heard in an alley.

Back when Kaiden went for a late night stroll with his girls, there had been a spoiled kid screaming at the unfairness of a world he had never once looked at directly.

The boy in front of him now had looked. He had gone and tried the honest road, gotten his teeth kicked in on it, then gotten back up twice.

"Walk away?"