WHO: Kaden WHEN: 5th of April WHERE: At and around Kaden’s new school WHAT: 365 days and counting WARNINGS: Some thoughts of violence and death
The school library wasn’t open after school every day; the school couldn’t afford to staff it that often, but Tuesdays and Thursdays it was open till four. So, Tuesdays and Thursdays, after classes, Kaden was there till four. Like a limbo between school and his other life. A transitional period. You thought a lot about limbos and transitions and that neither-here-nor-there place-that-wasn't-a-place when you spent a bunch of time with Hecate. Most of it in a car between Staten Island and Cobble Hill, or Cobble Hill and Sleepy Hollow. A lot of time to think, in a car.
That limbo space, he spent a lot of time in it. Who could move straight from a classroom packed with other kids to an afternoon alone with a death goddess and her pets? Or straight from physics practice tests to intense examinations of a wizard’s magical paraphernalia? Well, Kaden could. Did. But straight from one to the other made him feel too much like he was faking something. Well, he was faking something. Like, he had two whole separate lives, he couldn’t just switch out one, replace it with the other, without getting confused about which one was supposed to be the fake one. Like... maybe he should have been able to and there was something wrong with him that he couldn’t. Kaden spent a lot of time thinking about things that could be wrong with him.
Hecate juggled names and personalities and histories as easy as breathing. He’d seen her do it. He’d seen her switch. Months ago, they’d been driving back from a foraging session in her overgrown (even in winter) Staten Island garden when a call came through from another life. Another life that was as real to her as this one. He’d turned his music right down and listened in, piecing together parts of a story that centered round a missing girl. After the call Hecate had looked at him with dark eyes, considering eyes. “If I ask you to wait in the car and watch Clementine,” she said. “Will you?”
Kaden figured his options were ‘walk home, bitch’ or ‘hang out and witness something that’s probably going to be unbelievably cool’, and he shrugged his assent like he wasn’t bothered either way (though he really, really was.) Hecate had instantly made his day by doing an illegal U-turn on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (illegal and impossible – she used some kinda magic to phase her car through the barrier and oh-gods-she-was-the-coolest) and shot them westbound.
Outside of a high school and not far from the edge of a swampy, frozen wildlife refuge, Hecate left him in the car with the window down a crack, and he’d held a fussy Clementine in his lap and strained his ears to hear what was going on, watching her talk to parents and cops and if he didn’t know she was Hecate he might have been fooled. Her accent changed, her voice was rougher, the way she moved was different, stiffer but younger. Everyone called her Darcy like that was the only name she ever had.
He’d seen her switch back to Saffron the moment they got back to the hotel and there was a crisis that needed fixing. Back and forth and back. He supposed you really had to know who you were to be able to do that without fucking it all up or fucking yourself up.
Kaden couldn't do that. He couldn't be Matthew one second and Kaden the next. That felt wrong. There had to be a change. A distinction between his lives. A space that was just his. Just him alone. No names or anything. Sometimes he needed that but also sometimes he hated it. Loathed it beyond belief. Sometimes it – although he supposed it wasn’t unique in this – made him wanna just scream.
Sometimes he didn’t know how he felt but at least if he was sitting alone in a library on a Tuesday or a Thursday he could use the time to himself to do homework. It didn't matter if it was Kaden or Matthew balancing chemical equations so long as the balancing got done.
Not many people hung out in the library. Some, but not heaps. There was one regular girl he kept seeing, she sat at the same table every day and didn't leave till she was kicked out. She'd said hi a few times, not much else. She seemed lonely but coping with it, so Kaden had decided to let her keep coping. He didn't really wanna make friends with her. Or with anyone else he might end up freaking out or pissing off if he lost it again like he did in Burlington. Kaden figured that was only a matter of time.
Hard to freak out an ancient goddess though. That's why Qebhet was cool. She'd already seen him lose it anyway. Kaden didn't like thinking about that time she'd come to find him in the Hole and he'd been losing his shit on the old bus. He thought about it all the time, but he didn't like it.
Hard to freak out an old wizard either. Kaden didn't think it was possible. That was something easy about Merlin and Qebhet and Hecate. Unfreakoutable. Kinda safe like that.
Kaden finished his sheet of equations, and slipped out of the library a few minutes before close, just in case the girl tried to walk with him to the bus stop. Head starts, they were important. He’d learned that a long time ago.
It was Tuesday. The fifth. No Merlin today, he had something on. He hadn’t elaborated what. Sometimes, Merlin elaborated a lot, other times he didn’t. He gave Kaden the impression that curiosity was great up to a certain point but if he crossed a line he might be turned into something unnatural. You know, again.
Tuesday. The fifth. Qebhet wasn’t expecting him but Kaden bet if he showed up anyway she’d find something for him to do. Only, she was a death goddess. Marcie had taken Tragos’ body to her. Qebhet might remember what today was. She might ask him about it.
Maybe he’d just go home.
The place Marcie had found for them to live was okay. He didn’t really know how he felt about it yet, even weeks after they’d moved in. It was close to a lot of good food joints, a fried chicken one he could smell from his window sometimes, a bodega that sold cheap pizza bagels, a White Castle round the corner.
He'd gotten fascinated with what went on in the street below his window. From his bed he watched the shopkeepers, he was starting to pick up patterns of when the lights went off at night and when activity started in the morning. None of them down there knew his patterns, though. He'd never lived somewhere where he was anonymous before – the Enodia didn't count. Back in the Hole, everyone knew he was a Murphy. A badge of dishonour. Sometimes he'd hated it. A lot of the time. But he thought maybe he hated this anonymity thing too. What was a Selznick? A borrowed dead name. A nothing. But better than being a Murphy, a dead man all over.
The food was good round here though. And the apartment, well, he liked that Marcie liked it. Also if anyone tried to ruin it for her he was going to come at them with a linoleum knife and a bucket of battery acid.
He should bring something home for her today, maybe. Flowers. Food. Something pretty she’d accuse him (not… unfairly) of having stolen. Or maybe not. Maybe he should pretend like today was any other day and no one they loved had ever died on it.
Or he could break the one rule Hecate had given him when he left the Enodia, when she bound a leather bracelet so heavy with magic he couldn’t look straight at it for days around his wrist. Don’t go looking for trouble.
He could arm himself, he could – this will shield you from their sight she’d said – he could take the bus over to Manhattan – it will only hold if you do nothing to draw their attention – he could wait till Ares stepped outta the gym and shoot him square between the eyes – do you understand me? – he could go to Soho next, he remembered exactly where Melpomene lived – this is protection only– he was never ever gonna forget that place – you cannot use it for revenge– he could break in, slide a knife into her gut, watch her bleed out.
Bring Marcie a bloody knife and a smoking gun. Yeah, yeah she’d love that.
Don’t go looking for trouble.
He wondered if Marcie would take his body to Qebhet’s, too.
This was a fucked up thought and he knew it. Kaden hesitated at a set of traffic lights, looking back over his shoulder toward the bus stop, and the girl whose name he refused to ask. He only looked, though, and when the lights changed he turned his back and crossed the road, making it down half the block before Vincent appeared in front of him, walking backwards, shaking his head. Turn round, dude. He was pointing back toward the bus stop and the girl like an undead wingman, but Kaden looked at his phone like changing the track he was listening to was more important, and kept walking. Vincent stepped outta the way so Kaden wouldn’t walk through him.
He was about to turn another corner when Vincent appeared again at his shoulder. "Kaden" he said, kinda insistent, and edgy. Vincent could be a little edgy, especially when it came to—
"Yo, Selznick!"
— them.
Circling round on their bikes, like vultures. But see, Kaden could handle vultures. Only carcasses couldn't handle vultures, right? He straightened up from his hunched walk, and felt himself loosen. Kaden overthought so many different aspects of his life, but not this. This little shot of adrenaline wasn’t about thinking at all.
"Where you going, Selznick? Hanging out with all your friends?"
"Meeting up with your mom, Quintana."
A squeal of tyres and the bike blocked the path ahead. Curt (real name Curtis Krinsky) and Duckman (real name, Phillip Duckmanton) zagged their bikes behind Quin (real name, Josef Quintana).
Long haired, tank top wearing Quin stared Kaden (real name, in this life at least, Matthew Selznick) down. “You wanna say that again?”
Kaden shrugged. “Sure, you wanna hear it again? Cos your mom sure did last night.”
Same old same old. Kaden didn't mind these guys. Duckman actually gave him a run for his money in PE, and Curt was funny. A dick, but funny. Kaden had been paired with Quin's girlfriend in biology and Quin didn't like that at all, which made Kaden flirt with her more whenever Quin was around. There was just something about it that had nothing to do with Sasha. Sasha was fine, but Kaden wasn't interested. Kaden got the biggest kick out of being a pain in Quin's ass.
Quin threw the first punch, Kaden the second, one that knocked Quin back over his bike. From his seat on his ass, Quin threw his helmet at Kaden. It bounced, and Kaden picked it up and hurled it into traffic.
"You're a fucking dead man, Selznick!"
Same old same.
Four blocks into the chase – after another, bloodier scuffle in front of a laundromat – Kaden lost them. Duckman might be fit but he wasn't 'there's shit all else to do with my life except run up and down the Enodia stairs' fit. Also, Vincent had pointed Kaden towards an escape route. They couldn't haul their bikes up a fire escape, and Kaden was a rocket up stairs.
Nursing a split lip, a shockingly painful fist, and a deep sense of helmet destroying satisfaction, Kaden met up with Vincent and the boys walked together, dead and alive. Told you they were waiting for you Vincent said.
Sometimes Vincent didn't ask questions, he made statements with questions hidden underneath them. Well, not that hidden. When he did this, he didn't look Kaden directly in the eye. It made the questions easy to ignore if Kaden felt so inclined.
He also hadn't really told Kaden they were waiting, but the warning had been clear enough and Kaden wasn't gonna play dumb and pretend like he hadn’t missed it on purpose
"Yeah, you did," Kaden said, passing his tongue back and forth over the cut in his lip. Marcie would worry, but she was the one who wanted him to go to school.
Oh, lies. Yeah, he wanted it too. But that's what he'd say, if she got on his case about fighting. You wanted me to go to school!
It didn't really count as fighting, anyway. A couple of punches. That wasn't a fight.
One of them might have a gun, Vincent said.
"Then we could mess with them together," Kaden said, without hesitation. Or any thought. "Haunt their asses."
A flare of some fierce emotion crossed Vincent’s face, and he stepped backward away from Kaden and vanished— into thin air, or maybe he’d jumped sideways into a building, Kaden didn’t catch it.
"Shit," he said. "Vincent, don’t be a pussy!" He earned a few looks, for that, but y'know, what could you do? Guy yelling at no one in the street, no one really gave a shit about that anyway. "Viiiiincent. Vincent!” Kaden felt like kicking something, but there was nothing around to kick. “Alright— I'm a dickhead, okay?!"
Nothing.
"Fine, you touchy bastard!" Kaden shouted at the wall, pretending not to be gutted, since, y’know, if he was gutted it was fully self-inflicted.
Whatever. Vincent would be back. He better be, anyway. He was like, Kaden's best friend or something.
Since stepping outta the Enodia all that time ago, Kaden had been fostering a number of techniques for surviving in the world. Choose jobs with death goddesses and wizards over flipping burgers or pumping gas. Choose a dead kid as his best friend and a dog who used to be a queen as honorary second best. Choose getting punched in the face over spending time with a girl at a bus stop.
Don’t bring up Tragos, ever, even though he’s been dead one whole year.
Don’t ever bring up Lil T, ever, even though he’s been alive one whole year.
Don’t ever abuse the magic charm that Hecate gave him the night before he left the hotel. The three strands of dark leather woven together round his wrist, brown in direct light and black in the shadows, that she’d poured her magic into for months. Don’t take it off. Don’t break her one rule: Don’t go looking for trouble.
Kaden ran his tongue across his bloody lip. The cut was deep, metallic and hot, his lip turning into a fat mess around it.