Chapter 1
Barcelona, August 6
“How can I explain it so that your ridiculously small fucking mind might understand it? Wielding is not a superpower, it is an art. Being able to produce or control an element, or a natural force or natural phenomenon. It’s not like being a superhero. It’s not a game people play with fucking tights. It’s a gift, one that we must perfect. Especially flesh wielders, like myself. I know every nook and cranny of the human body, the bones, the muscles, the arteries, the nerve endings, everything.”
“Whatever, wielding flesh is still a bunch of crap.”
Orestes Angelou looked through the corner of his eye at the man sitting next to him on the floor, declaring his work “a bunch of crap” with a false bravado that didn’t suit him. He was of a mind to give him a taste of how painful flesh wielding might be, but he would never waste his wielding abilities on a little moron like him.
“The best wielding ability has to be fire.” The other man said. What did he say his name was? Thomas? Jonah? Judy? Rudy? “Or earth” he added as an afterthought. “You can control almost anything with that one. Anything that comes from the earth I mean… Psyche wielders are plain terrifying. I mean, I can’t complain, water wielding is pretty cool too.” He took out a water bottle from his pocket and opened the top. He swirled a short stubby finger and the liquid inside formed a whirlpool, rising out of the plastic container, into the air in front of them.
Orestes gave up searching for his name. I will call you Rudy, he thought.
“Lightning is also very powerful.” he said, closing his eyes and resting his head on the wall behind him. He was beginning to regret agreeing to a partner.
“They’re pretty rare… Do you know a lighting wielder?” Rudy asked, his doe eyes looking straight at him as round as quarters. The water slipped back into the bottle without a drop falling out.
“I knew one, once.” Orestes replied, but did not elaborate.
Rudy went on and on about all the best wielding abilities with the excitement of a twelve-year-old kid who just discovered the other uses of his dick. Orestes sat in silence wondering where the world was going if the Sect was now admitting operators like little old Rudy here for important assignments like the one they were meant to be doing right now in Barcelona.
Orestes prided himself at being the best Special Affairs Operator of the Sect, the covert operation system of the Wielding Community. It consisted of a vast network of Wielders, trained to enforce the laws and protect their population from any threats.
“It’s almost time.” Orestes said, interrupting Rudy from his musings. He stood up and shook the dust off his trousers, while the younger man followed suit. The building they were in was almost abandoned; the paint was peeling off the walls, light bulbs hanging bare in the hallway, stripped of their fittings. The lone tenant of the sixth floor would be arriving in the elevator in a few minutes. Orestes could feel the person’s heartbeat getting closer.
He examined himself in the reflection on the broken glass window. His eyes were pink around his black pupils, his square jaw shaded by the newly appeared stubble and his black hair was tousled. He was short, thin, weak looking and somehow looked younger than his thirty-one years. He wasn't a very handsome man, he knew that much, and never failed to remind himself when chance brought him in front of a mirror. Orestes hadn't ever cared that much. Most men seemed to get along better with a man who was average looking, and women… well, many of them were shocked when they found out he was Greek –women usually expected all Greek men to look like the handsome statues in the Parthenon– but he had developed his own way with women. Wielding flesh was a useful ability under many circumstances.
“Fuck…” Rudy breathed, shifting his feet on the spot. He was rather short too, though not as thin as Orestes, with a mousy brown head and barely a hair on his chin.
“Never done this before?” Orestes asked him, leaning against the wall. Rudy shook his head, his eyes fixed on the elevator doors. “Stop looking so fucking nervous. Just stay quiet and watch. See for yourself what flesh wielders are capable of.”
With a faint ‘ping’ the elevator arrived and out came a middle aged man gone very much to seed holding a paper bag full of groceries. He was short, balding, pot-belied and sporting wire rimmed glasses that balanced on the near edge of his nose.
“Ha.” Orestes laughed under his breath, taking one swift glance at the new arrival. The man stopped short for a second upon seeing the two strangers standing for no apparent reason in the middle of the hallway, but picked up the speed and walked past them.
Rudy glanced at Orestes waiting for a sign for what to do.
“Excuse me, senior.” Orestes said in his softest, most polite voice, “We’re looking for apartment F1, but we can’t find it.”
The man turned slowly around and tightened his grip on the paper bag.
“No habla ingles…” he muttered, and turned to leave.
Orestes took a step forward.
“I happen to know you do speak English, Senior Alma. In fact, you spent two years in Edinburgh a few years back to study on your thesis. ‘Nutritional Assessment of Patients with Dementia’. Sounds fucking boring.”
Senior Alma looked at him with wide eyes behind his spectacles. Orestes sensed the sweat glands on the man’s forehead produce beads of salty perspiration that dribbled down to his wrinkled eyes; his heart began beating faster and his bladder suddenly felt much fuller.
“Do I know you?” he asked in English.
“I doubt it.” Orestes replied with a good-natured shrug. Rudy was looking from one man to the other. Senior Alma licked his lips.
“Look, if this is about the money, tell Santiago I don’t have it yet, but I’m close, v-very close!”
“I don’t know who Santiago is.”
The man’s eyebrows contracted with confusion, and Orestes could almost hear the faint sparks of Alma’s synapses firing away in his brain, trying to figure out the situation.
“Just do it.” Rudy muttered under his breath, but Alma heard him and took a step back, bumping into the wall.
“Please, take whatever you want.” he said in a panic.
Orestes sighed. He hated killing men. Something about the sight of a man crying like a baby in sight of his imminent death made his stomach turn. Women were his favorite. They were generally much more graceful in death. Also, there was a tender irony in taking the life of a person who gave life. It was almost poetic. He liked that, he liked poetic things. Its art, he told himself.
“What should it look like?” he asked Rudy, tearing his eyes away from the terrified man. “Natural causes? Robbery gone bad? Good old fashioned murder?”
Rudy gaped at him and Orestes rolled his eyes.
“Sounds like you owe people money, Senior Alma. Sounds like they’d probably kill you for it anyway, so… murder it is.”
The smell of urine reached his nostrils a second after he sensed the man’s bladder releasing. Pissing himself too. Fucking ridiculous.
Orestes closed his eyes and felt energy coursing within him. It charged through his every cell, filling him, flowing incessantly like waves in a stormy sea.
He opened his eyes and focused on Alma’s whimpering face. Controlling the charge inside him, he wielded the skin cells above the man’s right eye to tear open. With the precision of a surgeon, Orestes made the cells of his epidermis burst open, and almost simultaneously, the dermis, accompanied by the dribble of blood, all the way down to the bone.
Alma cried with pain and slapped a hand onto his fresh cut. The paper bag fell to the ground and tore, sending vegetables and fruit rolling around them. A bag of rice burst open.
Orestes picked the hairline-thin blood vessels around Alma’s left eye and burst them one by one so that a large purple bruise appeared, and for good measure, he cracked his cheekbone too. The man screamed again and collapsed to the floor, sliding down the wall.
“What’s happening to me?” he cried in agony.
“You’re being murdered.” Orestes said.
It was time for bigger injuries. The police would be all over this one, and he had to make it convincing.
Perhaps the assailant choked him…Orestes thought, and made the man’s skin bruise around his throat and tightened his windpipe long enough to create a lack of oxygen that would appear in the post mortem examination. Alma coughed and gaged and wept.
Perhaps he fought a little too… The mans’ knuckles bruised and a few of them cracked too. He paused to think, trying to ignore the pleas and crying. Perhaps there was a knife involved… Orestes bit his lip with concentration as he wielded Alma’s body to stand up. He added another inspired touch tearing the skin and flesh of Almas right index finger right down to the bone, making sure that the cells split themselves in such a detailed way that it appeared as if a knife had made them. The bone cut itself in two and the finger fell with a lame ‘plop’ to the floor. Alma screamed as blood poured out of the stump and Orestes made him move and dance around like a puppet in a mock imitation of a fight. The blood spatters on the walls had to be realistic.
“Please, please…” Alma cried.
“Orestes-”
“Shut up. I’m almost done.”
He let Alma’s body fall to the floor and took a moment to savor the effect his wielding had had on the man; his heart was racing, his blood pumping, but the adrenaline coursing through him made Alma less aware of the true amount of pain, so Orestes lessened it. The man writhed and screamed as a couple of his ribs cracked spontaneously and more bruises appeared.
“Now for the finishing touch.”
The heart was one of his favorite organs. Easy to manipulate. But it is such a cliché, he thought. A lung on the other hand is much more original, less predictable.
Again, he made the cells of Alma’s skin tear open on his chest, going deeper and deeper, all the way into his core. The man screeched and fainted, but Orestes revived him. The cut reached his left lung and with absolute precision, he punctured it.
Slowly and painfully Alma died.
He shook and trembled, but in the end he lay still and all was silent.
Orestes looked around. Rudy had squatted on the ground and had his hand over his mouth looking shocked. He‘ll get used to it soon enough, he thought. This is our job. And I am the best at it.
He strutted his way to Alma’s side and knelt over his head. The dead man’s glasses had slid off his nose and hung lopsidedly off his ear.
“You have no idea why you died.” Orestes sighed, studying his face.
“Can we go now?” Rudy asked suddenly, sounding disgusted.
“Yes. Until the next one is found.” He said, standing up.
“Next one? How many are there?”
“We kill one and another appears. In a minute, a day, a month, sometimes even years. That’s how it goes.”
They walked to the elevator side by side when Orestes’ phone rang. He fished for it in his pocket and answered. A man’s voice with a heavy French accent spoke.
“Angelou, another has been named.”
“Yes?” Orestes said, stifling a sigh.
“A woman, Estella Luna. Information will be sent to you shortly. ”
“Okay, monsieur.”
With
increasing trepidation I realized that my characters weren’t speaking to me anymore,
they weren’t telling me their stories. It was as if they had fallen silent,
hurt by my interest in words on a screen rather than what more they had to say.
I was beginning to worry that when the time came to start the next book I would
have lost all connection to them.
