Lord of Unkindness: Chapter One

 Notes: Ahahahaa, what? Why? I don't even know, it just needs to come out. Have some vaguely-familiar urban fantasy with witches, familiars, strange powers and stranger love stories.

Title: Lord of Unkindness: Chapter One

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 Chapter One

 

Nobody comes to Vernon without a damn good reason.

It’s the least-populated city in all of California, LA-adjacent and with more buildings than people. Half the people who live here work for the government, and the other half work in the endless industrial warehouses that line every street and spill into every alley. Vernon is a town beaten down by greed and fueled by corruption; the perfect venue for witchfights.

People with all kinds of magic flock here for the chance to see and be seen; to compete among their own kind in a world where it’s dangerous to be acknowledged. No stage acts or mentalists to be found here; this crowd is made up of tattooed brujos with entourages twenty people thick, bone-thin blood witches who leak power from self-inflicted wounds, fae half-breeds who flinch from iron but wrap strangle-vines around their hands like boxing gloves. It’s a place for gambling, fighting, and fucking.

For Ciro, it’s a chance to learn things that people don’t want spread around.

His raven familiar is enough to get him through the door, and the difference in noise from outside the tin-and-brick warehouse to inside is staggering. Someone cast a hell of a silencing spell on this place. His raven flies from his shoulder to on top of his head, curling its wings down so the feathers touch the tops of his ears, and the sound becomes much more manageable.

“Good bird,” the man at the door, a foot taller and two feet wider than him, comments. He has a skull tattoo on his face that changes color from black to blood red depending on which direction he’s looking.

“He is,” Ciro says companionably before heading deeper into the crush.

It stinks of bodies and magic in here. There must be hundreds of people inside the warehouse, and the latent energy in the air is more magic than he’s been around for over a year. It prickles against his skin, tingling in every pore and making him itch. How funny, that it should affect him so strongly now. Ciro grew up surrounded by more power than most of these people have ever seen; more than some of them know exists. It didn’t take long for him to become vulnerable to it, though.

Eh, be fair. It’s not like you’re at full strength right now. Ciro would never have dared show his face at a formal event at anything less than full strength before, in case someone in his family got ideas.

Whatever. Ciro wasn’t here to gawk; he was looking for someone specific. He slid through the crowd like a shadow, long and lean and hard to distinguish in his black leather jacket and dark jeans. Just another pretty face, that was all he needed to be here. One more thrillseeker in a long line of them, come to drink magic and taste power.

The second floor seemed to thrum with energy—they’d probably moved the sex stuff up there. Good. Sex magic tended to be volatile, and Ciro had issues with how some people defined “consent,” even though good sex magic required consent to really take off. Some people didn’t care about that, and others used drugs to augment their results. Case in point…

Ciro shook his head slightly, putting the past out of his mind. The fight rings were ahead, and that was where he needed to be. He skirted the gamblers, only turning to watch when a cheer went up as a pair of bone dice gave double-sixes to its thrower, who looked surprised by his own good fortune. As Ciro watched, a small, slender brown hand sporting half a dozen silver rings clapped the man on the shoulder before vanishing back into the crowd. A second later, he got another pair of sixes.

“Lucky bastard,” one of the watchers grunted. The dice had been spelled to be unspellable—it should have been contradictory, given the nature of the event, but sometimes all a witch wanted was to experience life like there was nothing extraordinary about them. Luck was a real thing.

So was cheating.

Not my problem.

Ciro kept going until he got to the far side of the warehouse. It had been divided in two, a ring in the center of each of the crowds. In one ring were a pair of humanoid fighters, without gloves or mouthguards, beating the ever-loving hell out of each other. The smaller competitor, a wiry man who moved in a way that reminded Ciro of a spider, jumped up and over his six-foot-plus opponent, kicking her in the head as he came down behind her. The woman, built along the lines of the guy at the door but with a long blonde braid that would put a Valkyrie to shame, laughed out loud as she spun around, her tree trunk of a leg leading the way. It caught the little man in the chest just as his feet touched the ground, and he flew out of the ring and into the first row of watchers with a shriek. Most people in the crowd laughed, but some groaned as money left their hands.

“Eh, he lasted longer than the last one.”

“The twins should try her on.”

“Ha! They’re not that stupid.”

Ciro turned his attention to the other ring, one where the hoots and hollers of the watchers were augmented by the hisses and growls of dozens of different familiars. Witchfights traditionally happened between familiars, the beasts a physical representation of their masters’ magical nature, not their personal strength. Bigger didn’t always mean stronger, which made for some wild witchfights.

Someone nudged Ciro’s side. He looked down at a short, gray-haired woman holding a clipboard. “You here to watch, bet, or fight?”

“Bet,” he said, because he knew if he said “watch” he’d get chivvied out as quickly as he’d gotten here. “Who’s on the roster?”

She turned the clipboard toward him so he could read it. Regular English—good. He could handle Spanish and basic Chinese as well—very basic—but the last fight he’d gone to had listed all the competitors in Runic. The one before that had decided to go with emojis to name their fighters; that was what he got for trying to get anything useful out of a witchfight associated with Comic-Con.

Ciro scanned the upcoming matches. There, just two down, that was what he was looking for. Got here just in time. “Fifty on the eagle in four,” he said, betting on a totally different match.

“Poor odds on that one.”

Ciro smiled. “I like a longshot.”

The woman huffed and held out her hand. He laid down the fifty-dollar bill, and with a brief flare it vanished. She’d logged it with her magic somehow; useful in an environment where most modern technology wouldn’t work.

That was the thing about magic; it had a tendency to fuck things up, especially delicate technological things. It took a lot of money and research to create a device that could withstand the energy bursts associated with high levels of magic, like the kind found in this place.

Lucky for Ciro, he knew a guy who knew a guy. He meandered closer to the ring past a bruja’s silent black panther, which stared at him with bright golden eyes, much to her escorts’ amusement.

“A witch with a bird? One bird? You think that’s a threat? Mama, your baby’s danger radar is broken,” one of the men said in Spanish to the woman in her colorful dress, shawl pulled close around her shoulders. Ciro nodded at her before moving on, and the last thing he heard was the man whining as she smacked him on the arm. Game recognized game.

Good that she didn’t get too good a look, then.

Ciro wandered until he found a good vantage point for the fights, on an empty oil barrel next to a load-bearing column that was rusted all over. A spotlight illuminated the ring, where a chimpanzee was currently fighting with a tiger. Ooh, tough matchup. At first glance it seemed like the tiger should have had every advantage, but the chimp’s grip was brutally strong. It managed to get its hands around the tiger’s neck and squeezed, and that might have been the end of the fight right there if the chimp had positioned itself better.

The tiger, hacking and coughing, made just enough space to bring its hind paws into play and clawed viciously at the chimpanzee. It fell back with a screech, bleeding, then hit the ground as the tiger got its jaws around the monkey’s neck.

“Hold!” The spotlight turned red, and the crowd went wild. The tiger released the chimp, which turned and ran over to the sideline as quickly as possible, slipping back into a slender woman’s embrace. The tiger prowled the ring once, victorious and pleased with itself, before returning to its own witch, an Asian businessman in a three-piece suit who bowed to his familiar as it returned to his side.

“Mr. Zhāng takes the match!” the same voice shouted, and now Ciro could make out the man sitting near the back wall on a tall chair, controlling the spotlight with one hand and holding a megaphone with the other. “Congratulations to all the winners! Up next, it’s Vira Bogdanova’s Russian bear versus Jackie Fraser’s terrorizing terrier!”

This was the match Ciro had come here to watch. Surreptitiously, he pulled his phone out of his pocket, turned it on, and began to film. Magic pulsed all around him, but the image on the screen didn’t even waver. He smiled a little bitterly and watched the fight begin.