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fiction: serial fiction
the crown, book one: chapter 7
The alabaster marble surfaces of the brownstone apartment shone softly in the midday light, their chalky planes echoing the pulsing body of noise. Two four-foot-tall speakers stood at the functional rear of the room, their volume high, the grinding sound of Creed's "My Sacrifice" blaring out into the open space. An expensive G scale model train ran patiently around its circular track, set on a table a few yards in front of the speakers, the clack-clack-clack of its wheels on the track lost in the din. Before the table was a couch, which was the center of this room and worth noting in a moment. Three yards in front of the couch stood three large screen TVs, one showing the Knicks losing to Philly late in the game, another focused on a talking head commentator as a stock ticker scrolled maniacally across the bottom of that screen, and finally a porno movie, showing six people of various genders and races wallowing in one another and some kind of clear oil. Each one blared its program into the cacophony. To the right of the couch, gauzy draperies covered a wall of glass and held the wan daylight at bay, casting a dreamy illumination over the smoky room.
The smoke was billowing from Damian Dare's cigar as he sat on the couch, leaned back, seven remote controls and a wireless phone lain carefully to his right, holding the cigar gingerly with one hand. A raven haired woman, of some Middle Eastern descent by the look of her, kneeled on her knees in front of Dare, her hands grasping either side of his open bathrobe, her head bobbing frantically up and down. Dare pulled the cigar away from his lips and let go a long, smooth stream of smoke, yawning after. He gazed boredly at the screens, and was just reaching for a remote control when the phone lit up, signifying a call was coming through. Dare reached past the phone to the leftmost remote control and tapped a button, dropping a shroud of silence on the room as the speakers and televisions all fell silent, text scrolling across the screens as the closed captioning kicked in. On the second ring, Dare picked up the phone.
"Speak," he said coolly.
"Remember when you asked me to be on the lookout for one of our mutual friends?" the cultured voice on the other end of the line said conversationally, as if it had been talking to Dare for some time, without pause.
"I'm afraid I can't be bothered to remember things that vague," Dare responded, reaching to drop a few ashes on the back of the woman in front of him, ignoring her twitch of pain.
"Ah, yes," the voice continued with a slight chuckle "you did say you'd have to be prompted. Then let me get my notes ... mmm, yes ... 'the Crown,' I believe, is what I'm supposed to say."
Dare sat up slowly. "The Crown," he said absently. "You've found her?"
"To be honest, my dear chap, I wasn't looking for her," the amused and urbane voice replied. "However, as I'm sure you recall my ... gifts allow me to be privy to all brands of ... unusual phenomena."
"Nigel, can we skip the preamble and get to the goddamned point? Just because we can't die doesn't mean we should sit yammering all goddamned day."
"You were always the most impatient immortal I'd ever met, Damian," Nigel laughed. "Very well. Somewhere in southern California, your former paramour has rediscovered romance with, I'd have to assume, some common mortal."
"California?" Dare asked. "You're sure?"
"Damian, dear boy, you know why you asked me to keep my ears to the wind," Nigel said chidingly. "I have three talents which make me unique. First and foremost, impeccable taste in style and comportment. Second, the ability to live, seemingly it appears, forever. Third, and perhaps most interestingly, the ability to perceive shifts in energy that fall on wavelengths that can only be considered unusual. The Crown's power is once again a factor in the world's splendor, and it is on the other side of the colonies from you."
"The last time you told me you thought you had her," Damian sighed, taking another puff on his cigar and glancing towards the windows, "it was just the meat discovering atomic energy."
"Mm, yes, yes, that's true," Nigel noted sadly. "How was I to know the poor dears would develop, after all these years, something I could notice. I'm up to two snifters of brandy a day, just to dull the buzz. Nevertheless, I was possessed of my full facilities when I woke up the other morning, and I was feeling fairly curious in my eternal tedium, so I took a bit of a look-see around, and there she was. It took me a bit to remember, but her energy always had this glorious kind of mango-shaded tint to it, and there it was, somewhere south of that glorious little chateau I vacationed in, near Sausolito. Then, I did some poking around and found out that a mystery man saved a bunch of people from a fire in Los Angeles and seemingly walked back in, perishing, but they never found his body."
"Flew away," Dare guessed.
"That would be my assumption," Nigel agreed.
Dare grunted a bit by way of acknowledgement. "All right, then, I suppose I'll have to send you something by way of thanks."
"Ooh, I remember that news story the yanks had, about some sad little boy from Hispaniola, lost in a tempest of politics and media coverage. I don't suppose you've got one of those around?"
"No, but they're not hard to come by," Dare said absently. "I'll make arrangements, and I'll speak with you soon, Nigel."
"Before you bugger off to whatever horrors you have planned for her, I'm just curious. You've been after her ever since we met. Why? I mean, I sort of understand your ... dedication to the suffering of other people. You've been doing that so long, why alter a winning formula? That makes sense. But I've seen you work, you go through women, even immortal women, like I go through doilies. I remember when Amara spent that decade, crying on your doorstep, before she finally wandered off and killed herself. Why does this one matter?"
Dare paused a second. "You know, I'll actually answer that. Why not? I don't believe you're any danger to me. My whole life, Nigel, has been about me controlling things. It's what I did as a soldier, it's what I've done after I stopped taking orders. I never got to control her, and with the power she can give, and everything I know ... well, I could do a lot more than I can do now, believe me. So, I keep you looking, I have a few other feelers out there. I found where she hid for centuries, in Australia, but it had no clues to where she went. I will possess her, and she will obey me, and I will have that power. Even if it takes centuries to break her resolve. Simple as that."
"Hm. One has to admire a man of such remarkable focus," Nigel admitted.
Dare simply grunted in reply.
"Well, ta, my dear boy." Nigel said, as the phone clicked.
Dare set the phone down and crossed his arms, pondering for a moment. He spared a second to flick more ashes on to the exquisitely arched back of the woman in front of him, and snickered. "I would have easily forgiven your father's debt for a much less impressive prize than you, Nawal. Hm."
Dare picked up the phone again, and hit a preset number. "Eliot? Yeah, Damian. Look, I need to cut the vacation short and get out to LA. Mm, maybe not LA, but I think it is. Just get the plane ready and start researching local detective talent. Discreet talent. Yeah. No, no, leave the Russians alone for now. Oh, and see about a Cuban boy, maybe ten, twelve, some shit like that. Crate one of the little bastards up and ship 'em to Nigel over in Stratford-upon-Avon. He should still be there, and if not, they'll get it to him. Right. Call me back in an hour."
Dare tossed the phone back onto the couch and grabbed a handful of Nawal's shoulder length hair with his now free hand. He pulled her head up roughly, and she gazed at him, uncomprehending. He stood up, still pulling her by the hair, and lifted her into a position, bent over the left edge of the couch. Tossing his robe aside, he entered her roughly, thrusting angrily at her, still holding her head back by the hair as she grunted and groaned.
"Mm," he said, putting out the cigar on her right buttock, eliciting a sharp cry of pain. "You still sound like you could be enjoying this. Oh, I know."
He jerked himself out of her, eliciting a gasp, and thrust himself into her anus, which did get another yelp of pain and surprise. As he thrust into her, she cried out on every stroke, and he smiled. "That's better," he said gently, more to himself than to her, and started roughly smacking her right buttock as he went.
* * *
It has been a few days since the fire, and James had spent some of it learning the sorts of limits of his powers. They ended up in a small house Tonya owned, a few miles west of Palm Springs, where she figured he could let loose and learn his limits without any real interruptions.
James stood, holding a stone twice his size, easily over his head with both hands. His shirtless form dripped with perspiration, and the crisp, dry desert air shone with the vibration of heat across the dusty expanse of Tonya's property.
"So, what's up with this Damian Dare cat?" he asked conversationally, walking the stone back to the large pile of them he'd assembled in kind of a heap in the middle of the open, arid field.
Tonya sighed. "I hoped you'd forgotten about that," she sighed. She sat, swinging her denim-covered legs, on a wooden fence surrounding the house itself.
James gently sat down the stone atop his impromptu hillock, backed away from it slowly, hands still raised to catch it if gravity took hold. He then turned around, walking back towards her. He gingerly took the towel from her shoulder, where he'd left it moments ago, and wiped his forehead. "I didn't forget it, just because I happen to be a convenient bulldozer. Is he gonna be a problem for us?"
"I told you, it's been ..." Tonya started, and paused to contemplate, brushing a braid out of her face. "He hasn't seen me in more than nine centuries. I don't want to talk about him. He's the past, and you're the present."
"You know what bugs me?" James asked offhandedly. "I mean, I'm living every dream I could ever have. Hot, rich woman in love with me, I love her, and oh yeah, I get super powers in the deal. I got the present covered like a mug. What I don't have a grasp on is the future. One day I'm not gonna be here, and the shadow of this asshole is still gonna hang over your life. He lives in the US, so do you, he's mad connected and, from what you say, mad determined. That worries me, since your whole plan is 'run' and 'hide,' which can't work forever. Especially when you have forever to worry about it."
Tonya bit her lips and dropped her head. "Fan Hu figured out I had a shadow, without me ever telling him," she said quietly. "He was a monk in what's now Tibet, I'd been with the monastery for about sixty years then. Walked up to me, after dinner, and asked 'Will you ever find a space of peace, your feet not set to run?' I left about a year after that. Set-Djed has been in my life for so long ... I'm okay, James. I'm happy. I have you. I have hip hop. I have money and freedom and a whole world of interesting things happening. You know how you told me, growing up, you worked so hard to avoid cops? Set-Djed, Damian, he's like that for me. A threat that I can never get rid of. I just work around it, just like you did."
"There's thousands of cops everywhere," James countered, "and thousands more soldiers behind them. This is one guy. One very hard to kill guy, maybe, but still, just one guy ..."
"... who has studied every possible way there is to kill, maim, and hurt people for the last few millennia, and he's damned good at it." Tonya interrupted.
"Whatever," he answered dismissively. "He can't fly. He's no stronger than I am. He breathes air. If I could get him airborne, I could toss him into orbit ..."
"He's stop you with pressure points, with some weapon he'd have with him," Tonya said, shaking her head. "He knows what the Crown can do, and he's had forever to get ready for it. Please, James, don't make me lose you any sooner than I have to."
"Okay, baby, okay," he said, cradling her head in his arms. "I just think we need to plan for the possibility he might come knocking."
"I have a helicopter, waiting, ready to run anytime," Tonya said into his chest. "Cars, a plane at Long Beach Airport, one at Ontario ... I've got plans. We're okay, James, just focus on being us, okay? Please?"
James nodded, resting his chin on her head. "I'm antsy, I guess. I ... I want to do stuff, and this seems the smartest thing to do."
"You're not gonna start wearing your underwear on the outside, are you?" Tonya asked playfully.
"God, no, that's dumbass," he shuddered.
"Tell you what -- let's spend the rest of the week here, then head back to LA and think of stuff you can do that won't put us both in the spotlight. Fair?"
James nodded solemnly. "Only thing is, I can't make a deal this momentous without some kind of sex to seal the deal."
Tonya pushed him away and leapt down, laughing, running for the one-story paneled house, James right behind her.
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