The Fate Excerpt

Goner

-X



….. Still 20 years back….

Ugh. How am I not dead?

Scrubbing my face as I come to on the shore with the sun, feeling like a hundred pound hammer securing a chisel in my skull in

tune with the beat of my pulse.

Still half alive and full wasted, I at least know these streets well enough that I don’t need the pin cushions I once called eyes to find a hole in the wall dive bar at ten a.m.

Like every time, I shuffle into the small space that might seat two dozen, I’m shocked that the rickety old bar stool holds my weight.

I still have enough brain power to muse at the fact that this place feels more like something out of a bad TV show.

Any one walking in, would probably mistake it for a demon bar out of B rank Sci-fi flick between myself and the bartender. Just two disfigured peas in a fucked up pod, both of us having more scar tissue than skin.

Juan doesn’t bother with a greeting or a glass.

Not for me.

Just takes out the silver pour stick off a top shelf bottle of bourbon, and licks his lips when he sets it in front of me.

“You look like shit.” The Spanish man leans biceps as big as my head on the bar, but they aren’t what have my attention.

Muzzle or no, those canines of his flare and his pants tent. As one of the very few privy to the berserker process, I contemplate on a one to ten scale how I’d rate my death at his hands.

Not that Juan can kill me that way again with the collars placed on all Mystics in Haven. I still know it’s where his head’s at though.

Always about food with them, and unfortunately for all parties involved, Berserkers have to fuck something just before or during the process of eating it.

You can imagine their kind were one of the few who volunteered for the power binding and appetite suppressors I refer to as muzzles.

Just because the scientists came up with a way to hold it back, doesn’t mean that he’s not what Juan was bred to be.

There are tons of names for the Spanish man’s condition, but chupacabra is native to him. Eldon, the founding King, never wanted flesh eaters here, but considering we’d have lost the Division war a year after it began without them.....

Imagine my teeter tottering hands, and Mystics winning that match.

Juan was likely bred in a cage like all the rest. His kind never had any real say coming into the world or that they’re more or less weapons of mass destruction, regardless of how they feel about it.

The process is tricky, considering.

Basically, hard core dungeon porn of nothing more than their dicks hammering a hole in the wall while they’re fed raw if not live meat to ensure ejaculation.

No such walls existed when Juan and I met. I figured letting him eat me alive while he pumped one out in my ass could be the key to a permanent death.

No such luck.

Took me about ten years to regenerate after that.

Juan knows my secret. I know his.

Believe it or not, he’s one of the few people I call friend. Knowing that I’ll come back from whatever tragic end, and likely pay the bills for this place with my bar tab alone.

“Keep teasing punta......” Those teeth snap, and he lets out a belly laugh, in response to the fuck off stamped on my forehead.

It’s not a death I’d repeat, not even for him.

Even so, having a dark, if not morbid, sense of humor is something we share. I still don’t get how he takes a shot without disturbing the ever present toothpick in his mouth though.

Suppressants don’t change what he is, and I’m fairly certain a good amount of his scar tissue is self-inflicted, trying to end the kind of existence that means beating off and nutting on whatever you plan on eating before it goes in your mouth......

Just goes to show it can always be worse.

He’s better than when we met.

Finds his own points and purpose. I snort into the bottle, bubbling the amber liquid before letting the familiar burn slide down my gullet.

“I could just snap your neck,” that’s actually a genuine offer on the enforcer’s part. Quick, clean, easy to come back from, and at least I know where I’d be waking up in a few months.

“Well, what if I found the one, and am not ready to die yet,” I droll, not sure where the thought or sentiment came from.

Maybe bitterness that while I’ve met another of the Nine in my time, I know there never has been a female of my kind, and none of the few people who share my secret are what I’d define as kismet.

“If you met the one Cabrone, there would be no question. When a man knows, he knows, and never has to ask.” The door sounds before whatever witty come back I can make pops off with the bottle still attached to my lips.

“Morning Chewy!” I spit out the long swallow, as the all too familiar and bubbly little voice chimes into our conversation.

I can’t really decide why though.

I mean, for one, what is a girl doing in a bar like this? For seconds, how is she so damned chipper this early in the morning? Thirdly, did she just call one of the most vicious enforcers in the city a pet name?

And how on earth is she smiling and hopping up onto the bar stool next to mine without screaming?

“How is Gran?” The girl I’d found, lost and have been beating myself up about is there. Really there, right next to me.

“Better Mija,” a Spanish endearment for a daughter or a kid that tells me why she got away with it, but nothing I really want to know about her now that she’s clean, smells like magic, and looks like an angel fallen from heaven. “Why aren’t you in class?”

“Still closed after the Witch’s newest shenanigan,” she raspberries, before going into a story that is so much more rather than less entertaining than anything I imagined in my head about how she ended up in a corner store at five a.m.

“I swear,” she huffs out, ignoring a call from said ‘Witch’, saved as just that in her phone. “He has to do all this on purpose, just for amusement.”

Her deep nod is interrupted by the bell of the door, and if I wasn’t sitting right there, I’d never believe what happened next.

Mid-jump at the sound, she knocks over my alcohol, jolting back on her bar stool. The slipper rather than shoe she is wearing flies up, hitting the singular hanging light bulb illuminating the entire bar, plunging us into darkness.

Just as I hear her hit the floor with the crunch of her seat and thump of her body, the sparks from said light bulb cascade and flare the spilled liquor all over the polished cherry top, only for the wee thing to scramble up, strip her jacket and try to put the fire out with it.

Problem is: She’s short, and the bar is chest high on her. So using the foot rest, or what she thinks is the foot rest, being the termite eaten peg of my stool in her panic.

Ensuring the creaky wood cracks, and the pair of us are on the floor with her plump ass right where I wanted it the night before.

She’s fully grown from what I can tell and wearing a University hoodie before you judge me.

Knowing his place like the back of his hand, it’s easy for ‘Chewy’ to grab a fire blanket, douse the flames, and navigate to the painted glass door at the front of the space.

Meanwhile, my hands wind up on her apparently ticklish sides. Right as my bartender shoves his hulking shoulder to shed light on us, her head slams from the intrusive blast crunching my nose before another yip lets out, and she rolls off me.

Once facing me in a kneeled position, light pouring in from behind her like a halo, or sigil from the creators, the girl pouts, “You might want to run before an earthquake happens.”

Regardless of the throb in my nose and the pain shooting behind my eyes, the only thing I can do is laugh. Throw my head back in a howling, belly shaking, soul deep laugh that I can’t remember the last time I had.

“I thought my luck was bad,” I chuckle, helping her up with the intruder gone and Juan working on the breaker panel.

“Well, your brother didn’t name you after the apocalypse cat,” she huffs through her cute tipped nose before adding, “obviously,” with a sassy eye roll getting to her feet.

“Jinx,” I grin down offering my hand, and that’s it. Those too true blue eyes bat up at me and no question about it. I’m a goner and I know it.