All Hail the Shifter King
Title: Lords of Kensington, Part 17
Word Count: 2592
Note: I literally wrote this entire scene around the image of the sheets of magic at the end, shattering in slow motion while a car plows through them. Being a huge fan of awesome slow-motion crap in movies, I seriously couldn't resist. I also figured it was time I shared a fight scene where Ryder isn't getting his ass kicked. Dedicated to Seth, who not only looks great in red, but also has a tendency to jump off stairwells.
"I can't believe you went with black," Melissa complained, poking at Katrina's dress through the window of the garment bag, her brow knit in disapproval. "What about that magenta dress you tried? You looked so lovely in it."
"Mom, for the last time," Katrina sighed. "I got this one, I'm not taking it back, end of story."
"But the two of you in solid black... it's not a funeral!" Melissa crossed her arms over her chest and slumped in the leather armchair, obviously sulking. "I still think he'd look stunning in red."
"Mom, please."
"That beautiful tan, and that white hair?" Melissa leaned over. "By the way, I've been meaning to ask, please tell me that's natural. You don't need another Vanity Smurf like Alex was."
Katrina pinched the bridge of her nose, taking a few deep breaths to calm herself. She loved her mother dearly, but the day was wearing on her - after hours of trying on dresses, waiting for her mother to finally finish with her own fitting, sitting through an agonizing lunch while she listened to her mother recount every bad boyfriend Katrina had ever had (that was a real pleasure), she now found herself trapped at Kinsman Clothiers while Ryder tried on his tux, listening to her mother talk. She was tired, sore, and increasingly cranky - nothing appealed to her more than the thought of going home, cracking a bottle of wine, and hiding from the world for what remained of the day.
"It's natural," she assured.
"Good. And I'm not trying to be forceful, I just think you need a little something to spruce up, that's all," her mother said. "You're so plain all the time. No color in you... and really, you spend months in the rainforest and you're pale as can be, how is that even possible?"
"I spent a lot of time in the lab," Katrina replied flatly.
"Maybe you can get some color another way. A hat, maybe?"
"Good luck getting him to wear a hat," Katrina snorted, knowing full well that Ryder could hear everything they were saying even though the fitting room was on the other side of the store.
"No, God no, I wouldn't dream of covering up that lovely hair. Maybe a fascinator for you? Something cute, it can offset all that ridiculous silk." Her mother picked at the garment bag again. "Don't you think you'll look, I don't know, kind of cheap by comparison? He's going to look so dapper and -"
"Mom, I appreciate that you're trying to be helpful," Katrina snapped, "but I'm getting pretty sick of the insinuation that I don't look good enough to be seen with him."
"What? Kitten, no, I didn't mean that, I just thought -"
"Please," Katrina said, covering her eyes with one hand. "Please just stop thinking."
She kept her head down and her eyes covered long after her mother apologized and excused herself to head home - it was probably a solid half hour before she felt Ryder's fingers brush her arm.
"You okay?" he asked, concerned. Katrina looked up at him, wondering if she looked as tired and fed up as he did. No doubt being stuck in a stuffy room with people poking and prodding at him while he tried on clothing didn't sit well with him.
"I'm fine," she said, pushing herself out of the chair and leading the way out of the store. "Mom just got on my nerves."
"So I heard," he commented, stepping around a gaggle of teenagers that stared openly at him. "For what it's worth -"
"Don't," Katrina said quickly, and when she saw his wounded expression, sighed and took his hand. "I'm just tired," she said. "I want to go home and sleep."
"Alright," he said, putting an arm around her shoulders and hugging her close to him - as annoyed as she was, the gesture was welcome. "Let's get out of here and..."
She felt his body tense, and when she looked down the hallway she thought for a moment she was dreaming again, some horrible mix between the gas station and now, a hallucination or waking nightmare or something, anything that would mean the man staring at them from several storefronts down the hallway wasn't real, wasn't there.
But he was. He wasn't wearing the gear that he'd been wearing at the gas station, and she'd never seen his face before, but she knew somehow that it was Owens, the man that had nearly walked on her as she sat in the filthy snow, hidden by the coin magic. The rage-filled glare that he set on them was enough to make her blood freeze, and she felt the muscles in her legs bunch, ready to run.
"The hallway behind us," Ryder said quietly, his fingers tightening against her shoulder. "You ready?"
"Ready," she whispered, and the moment he released her she pivoted, hugged the garment bag to her chest, and bolted for the hallway.
It was easier said than done - there were dozens of people between her and the entrance to the hallway, and even more in the hallway itself, a long corridor that ran to the bathrooms and beyond that, the entrance to the maintenance hallways. She dodged around people when she could, collided with them when she couldn't, and had to vault a toddler that came running out of the family room before she hit the double doors with her shoulder and plowed into the quiet back hallway. The corridor continued straight ahead, or branched off to the left, running behind the bank of storefronts - she hesitated for only a split-second before she felt Ryder's hand hit the small of her back, guiding her forward. She ran forward, through another set of double doors, and then his hand hit her left elbow and she planted her foot and twisted left, entering the narrow stairwell door he held open for her.
He stopped her there, clamping his hand to her shoulder in a wordless order to stay put. She leaned against the wall, panting, adrenaline making her blood thunder in her ears. They stood on a platform overlooking a concrete stairwell, the only light provided by a battered metal fluorescent light fixture above them. Ryder placed his hand on the door's push-bar, looking through the small glass window, and a sheet of gold light pulsed around his hand before a heavy grinding sounded from the door, the push-bar melting and twisting to hold the door shut.
Seconds later, with an audible pop, the lights went out.
With no source of natural light to focus on, Katrina's eyes were immediately night-blind, and in a moment of panic she reached anxiously for a railing, for Ryder, anything to steady herself. He took her hand and pulled her toward him, but rather than an embrace he placed her hands on the cold metal railing, then slung his garment bag over her shoulder.
"Stay here," he whispered, his lips brushing her ear, and she felt a vibration through the railing as he climbed up on top of it, the cuff of his jeans brushing her arm. She looked up, squinting to see him in the darkness, and the pulse-glow flickered beneath his shirt for just a moment before he stepped out into space.
The noise that echoed up through the stairwell sounded like nothing a living creature should be able to make - a combination of scream and screech, it was so loud and so agonized it made her gasp and clap her hands to her ears, tying to block it out. Lightning trails of red magic scrawled their way up the walls around her, dissipating with a crackling noise like splintering plastic, the screaming cut short by the sound of bodies striking concrete.
"Let's go, Kat!" Ryder called up to her, and using the railing as a guide she took the stairs as fast as she could manage, making it perhaps halfway down the flight before she heard the sound of something huge striking the sealed doorway above her. She rounded the corner and nearly lost her footing as she slipped - Ryder caught her around the waist and for a moment the coin's light illuminated the twisted, broken bodies beneath her. "Keep going," he urged, pointing her toward the next flight down, the placard on the wall reading P1.
They burst into a parkade that was just as busy as the mall above them, cars vying for parking spaces and shoppers wandering around, trying to find their parked vehicles.
"Where is the car?" Ryder asked her, grasping the door handle so that the coin-magic could melt it shut like the doorway above them. Katrina looked around, trying to get her bearings, reading the signs painted onto the pillars.
"The opposite side of the mall," she finally told him.
"That's not helping our situation."
"Sorry, if I'd known someone would try to kill us again, I would have been more conscious of where I parked," she shot back, falling into step beside him as they dodged around a pair of minivans and wove their way through the rows of parked vehicles. Every time they emerged from around the cars a vehicle would start following them, innocent shoppers likely trying to secure their parking space, and their eagerness to chase them between aisles made Katrina's nerves twitch.
She was just about to comment on how it might be easier to risk heading back into the mall when a man came charging around the side of a pickup, catching her with his shoulder and throwing her into Ryder. He stumbled but quickly recovered, stepping over her after she fell to the ground to put himself between her and their attacker. As she shoved herself out of the way, scuttling backwards until her back struck the rear bumper of a small sedan, the man managed to grasp Ryder's arm and violently twist him into a shoulder throw, sending Ryder tumbling to the pavement. A glimmer of honed steel reflected in the dingy fluorescent lights as the man produced a knife and swung in a vicious arc - Ryder rolled out of the way and kicked his feet into the side of the man's knee, gaining his feet in the time it took his assailant to regain his balance, and dodged three more lightning-fast swipes with the knife before he managed to catch the man's wrist, jerking it backwards with such force that the bones snapped clear through the delicate skin. The man howled with pain and his skin rippled with the signs of a panicked shift, sheets of black liquid sloughing off his limbs and dripping out from beneath his clothing, his face contorting and lengthening into something distinctly feline. The horrible sounds of his pained cries ended when Ryder took the knife, rolled it in his fingers, and jammed it into the unfortunate kin's throat, drowning his keening wails with blood and dropping him to the ground in a twitching, gurgling heap.
When they started off again it wasn't at a discretionary, cautious pace through the stationary vehicles - it was at a full run, twisting and dodging their way around cars and people alike, not stopping to see if they were being followed. Occasionally Ryder would grab her arm and yank her in a different direction, zigzagging through a bank of cars before sprinting down an open laneway, and she was reminded of the night they'd fled through the bazaar in Makeh, twisting and turning through the narrow walkways between the crowded stalls and shacks, the screams of the attacking caseiya closing in on them. She'd been terrified, and the fact that they were in a more modern setting now did nothing to ease that racing, panicked fear.
It wasn't until they were approaching her car that he finally slowed, stopping her near one of the large pillars and motioning for her to stay put. He leaned out into the lane, looking in both directions, and after several seconds had passed he motioned for her to come out.
"Get in the car," he told her. Her first reaction was to argue with him - the "What the hell are you going to be doing?" and the "Please don't tell me you're not coming" - but she'd learned months ago that the fastest way to get herself abandoned in the middle of dangerous territory was to question his instructions. She dug in her purse, pulled out her keys, thumbed the remote start button, and ten rows over she saw her car's headlights blink and heard the engine start. Jogging into the lane, she tried to work out the fastest way to get to -
The force of the explosion, though fairly distant, was still enough to make her stumble backward a few steps, her feet tangling as the sheer noise of it made her ears so loud she was sent into a piercing deafness, her head suddenly feeling stuffed full with pressure. Stunned, she stared blankly at the fireball that had just seconds ago been her clunky little sedan - the car she'd driven to university every day, that she and Gavin had taken on countless roadtrips, that -
The sheet of shimmering gold light that exploded into being to her left was larger and brighter than any she'd seen before - rather than a small shield, it was a literal wall, as wide as the laneway and just as tall. She turned toward it in what felt like slow motion, registering at least a dozen of the walls placed perhaps a foot apart, leading toward the vehicle that was bearing down on her at ludicrous speed from up the lane, driving against the right-of-way. The car struck the first wall and immediately the front end dented significantly, and for a moment the wall seemed to bend inward, flexing stiffly before it finally shattered into thousands of sparkling fragments, and as the car plowed through to the second, then third, then fourth barrier Katrina was struck from behind hard enough to send her sprawling forward, landing between two vehicles in the next row of cars with the sound of breaking glass echoing all around her. She yelped as she skinned her hands on the rough ground, dropping the two garment bags she'd managing to cling to so tenaciously, and twisted to find the vehicle at a full stop with smoke pouring from beneath the crumpled hood, a black-haired woman lying half-through the shattered windshield with her neck bent at a grotesque angle and her head oddly misshapen. Ryder was standing just inches from the final, cracked barrier, staring at the dead woman with his face unreadable, the knife clenched tightly in his hands and swirls of navy pigment dancing beneath his skin.
She was about to call to him when another vehicle - a small, black SUV - rounded the corner from the opposite direction and screeched to a halt ten feet away. Before either of them could react, the driver's door opened and the salesgirl from Ravens climbed out and regarded them from behind the open driver's side door, a wry smile on her face.
"I'm always late to the fucking party," she sighed, and nodded in Ryder's direction. "Figured you could use a ride, M'Lord." When Ryder and Katrina shared an uncertain glance, the girl sighed and motioned more urgently for them to join her. "Would give ya a password but there ain't one, so unless you wanna be wasting time calling Ben and Az, let's be on our way, yeah?"
Word Count: 2592
Note: I literally wrote this entire scene around the image of the sheets of magic at the end, shattering in slow motion while a car plows through them. Being a huge fan of awesome slow-motion crap in movies, I seriously couldn't resist. I also figured it was time I shared a fight scene where Ryder isn't getting his ass kicked. Dedicated to Seth, who not only looks great in red, but also has a tendency to jump off stairwells.
"I can't believe you went with black," Melissa complained, poking at Katrina's dress through the window of the garment bag, her brow knit in disapproval. "What about that magenta dress you tried? You looked so lovely in it."
"Mom, for the last time," Katrina sighed. "I got this one, I'm not taking it back, end of story."
"But the two of you in solid black... it's not a funeral!" Melissa crossed her arms over her chest and slumped in the leather armchair, obviously sulking. "I still think he'd look stunning in red."
"Mom, please."
"That beautiful tan, and that white hair?" Melissa leaned over. "By the way, I've been meaning to ask, please tell me that's natural. You don't need another Vanity Smurf like Alex was."
Katrina pinched the bridge of her nose, taking a few deep breaths to calm herself. She loved her mother dearly, but the day was wearing on her - after hours of trying on dresses, waiting for her mother to finally finish with her own fitting, sitting through an agonizing lunch while she listened to her mother recount every bad boyfriend Katrina had ever had (that was a real pleasure), she now found herself trapped at Kinsman Clothiers while Ryder tried on his tux, listening to her mother talk. She was tired, sore, and increasingly cranky - nothing appealed to her more than the thought of going home, cracking a bottle of wine, and hiding from the world for what remained of the day.
"It's natural," she assured.
"Good. And I'm not trying to be forceful, I just think you need a little something to spruce up, that's all," her mother said. "You're so plain all the time. No color in you... and really, you spend months in the rainforest and you're pale as can be, how is that even possible?"
"I spent a lot of time in the lab," Katrina replied flatly.
"Maybe you can get some color another way. A hat, maybe?"
"Good luck getting him to wear a hat," Katrina snorted, knowing full well that Ryder could hear everything they were saying even though the fitting room was on the other side of the store.
"No, God no, I wouldn't dream of covering up that lovely hair. Maybe a fascinator for you? Something cute, it can offset all that ridiculous silk." Her mother picked at the garment bag again. "Don't you think you'll look, I don't know, kind of cheap by comparison? He's going to look so dapper and -"
"Mom, I appreciate that you're trying to be helpful," Katrina snapped, "but I'm getting pretty sick of the insinuation that I don't look good enough to be seen with him."
"What? Kitten, no, I didn't mean that, I just thought -"
"Please," Katrina said, covering her eyes with one hand. "Please just stop thinking."
She kept her head down and her eyes covered long after her mother apologized and excused herself to head home - it was probably a solid half hour before she felt Ryder's fingers brush her arm.
"You okay?" he asked, concerned. Katrina looked up at him, wondering if she looked as tired and fed up as he did. No doubt being stuck in a stuffy room with people poking and prodding at him while he tried on clothing didn't sit well with him.
"I'm fine," she said, pushing herself out of the chair and leading the way out of the store. "Mom just got on my nerves."
"So I heard," he commented, stepping around a gaggle of teenagers that stared openly at him. "For what it's worth -"
"Don't," Katrina said quickly, and when she saw his wounded expression, sighed and took his hand. "I'm just tired," she said. "I want to go home and sleep."
"Alright," he said, putting an arm around her shoulders and hugging her close to him - as annoyed as she was, the gesture was welcome. "Let's get out of here and..."
She felt his body tense, and when she looked down the hallway she thought for a moment she was dreaming again, some horrible mix between the gas station and now, a hallucination or waking nightmare or something, anything that would mean the man staring at them from several storefronts down the hallway wasn't real, wasn't there.
But he was. He wasn't wearing the gear that he'd been wearing at the gas station, and she'd never seen his face before, but she knew somehow that it was Owens, the man that had nearly walked on her as she sat in the filthy snow, hidden by the coin magic. The rage-filled glare that he set on them was enough to make her blood freeze, and she felt the muscles in her legs bunch, ready to run.
"The hallway behind us," Ryder said quietly, his fingers tightening against her shoulder. "You ready?"
"Ready," she whispered, and the moment he released her she pivoted, hugged the garment bag to her chest, and bolted for the hallway.
It was easier said than done - there were dozens of people between her and the entrance to the hallway, and even more in the hallway itself, a long corridor that ran to the bathrooms and beyond that, the entrance to the maintenance hallways. She dodged around people when she could, collided with them when she couldn't, and had to vault a toddler that came running out of the family room before she hit the double doors with her shoulder and plowed into the quiet back hallway. The corridor continued straight ahead, or branched off to the left, running behind the bank of storefronts - she hesitated for only a split-second before she felt Ryder's hand hit the small of her back, guiding her forward. She ran forward, through another set of double doors, and then his hand hit her left elbow and she planted her foot and twisted left, entering the narrow stairwell door he held open for her.
He stopped her there, clamping his hand to her shoulder in a wordless order to stay put. She leaned against the wall, panting, adrenaline making her blood thunder in her ears. They stood on a platform overlooking a concrete stairwell, the only light provided by a battered metal fluorescent light fixture above them. Ryder placed his hand on the door's push-bar, looking through the small glass window, and a sheet of gold light pulsed around his hand before a heavy grinding sounded from the door, the push-bar melting and twisting to hold the door shut.
Seconds later, with an audible pop, the lights went out.
With no source of natural light to focus on, Katrina's eyes were immediately night-blind, and in a moment of panic she reached anxiously for a railing, for Ryder, anything to steady herself. He took her hand and pulled her toward him, but rather than an embrace he placed her hands on the cold metal railing, then slung his garment bag over her shoulder.
"Stay here," he whispered, his lips brushing her ear, and she felt a vibration through the railing as he climbed up on top of it, the cuff of his jeans brushing her arm. She looked up, squinting to see him in the darkness, and the pulse-glow flickered beneath his shirt for just a moment before he stepped out into space.
The noise that echoed up through the stairwell sounded like nothing a living creature should be able to make - a combination of scream and screech, it was so loud and so agonized it made her gasp and clap her hands to her ears, tying to block it out. Lightning trails of red magic scrawled their way up the walls around her, dissipating with a crackling noise like splintering plastic, the screaming cut short by the sound of bodies striking concrete.
"Let's go, Kat!" Ryder called up to her, and using the railing as a guide she took the stairs as fast as she could manage, making it perhaps halfway down the flight before she heard the sound of something huge striking the sealed doorway above her. She rounded the corner and nearly lost her footing as she slipped - Ryder caught her around the waist and for a moment the coin's light illuminated the twisted, broken bodies beneath her. "Keep going," he urged, pointing her toward the next flight down, the placard on the wall reading P1.
They burst into a parkade that was just as busy as the mall above them, cars vying for parking spaces and shoppers wandering around, trying to find their parked vehicles.
"Where is the car?" Ryder asked her, grasping the door handle so that the coin-magic could melt it shut like the doorway above them. Katrina looked around, trying to get her bearings, reading the signs painted onto the pillars.
"The opposite side of the mall," she finally told him.
"That's not helping our situation."
"Sorry, if I'd known someone would try to kill us again, I would have been more conscious of where I parked," she shot back, falling into step beside him as they dodged around a pair of minivans and wove their way through the rows of parked vehicles. Every time they emerged from around the cars a vehicle would start following them, innocent shoppers likely trying to secure their parking space, and their eagerness to chase them between aisles made Katrina's nerves twitch.
She was just about to comment on how it might be easier to risk heading back into the mall when a man came charging around the side of a pickup, catching her with his shoulder and throwing her into Ryder. He stumbled but quickly recovered, stepping over her after she fell to the ground to put himself between her and their attacker. As she shoved herself out of the way, scuttling backwards until her back struck the rear bumper of a small sedan, the man managed to grasp Ryder's arm and violently twist him into a shoulder throw, sending Ryder tumbling to the pavement. A glimmer of honed steel reflected in the dingy fluorescent lights as the man produced a knife and swung in a vicious arc - Ryder rolled out of the way and kicked his feet into the side of the man's knee, gaining his feet in the time it took his assailant to regain his balance, and dodged three more lightning-fast swipes with the knife before he managed to catch the man's wrist, jerking it backwards with such force that the bones snapped clear through the delicate skin. The man howled with pain and his skin rippled with the signs of a panicked shift, sheets of black liquid sloughing off his limbs and dripping out from beneath his clothing, his face contorting and lengthening into something distinctly feline. The horrible sounds of his pained cries ended when Ryder took the knife, rolled it in his fingers, and jammed it into the unfortunate kin's throat, drowning his keening wails with blood and dropping him to the ground in a twitching, gurgling heap.
When they started off again it wasn't at a discretionary, cautious pace through the stationary vehicles - it was at a full run, twisting and dodging their way around cars and people alike, not stopping to see if they were being followed. Occasionally Ryder would grab her arm and yank her in a different direction, zigzagging through a bank of cars before sprinting down an open laneway, and she was reminded of the night they'd fled through the bazaar in Makeh, twisting and turning through the narrow walkways between the crowded stalls and shacks, the screams of the attacking caseiya closing in on them. She'd been terrified, and the fact that they were in a more modern setting now did nothing to ease that racing, panicked fear.
It wasn't until they were approaching her car that he finally slowed, stopping her near one of the large pillars and motioning for her to stay put. He leaned out into the lane, looking in both directions, and after several seconds had passed he motioned for her to come out.
"Get in the car," he told her. Her first reaction was to argue with him - the "What the hell are you going to be doing?" and the "Please don't tell me you're not coming" - but she'd learned months ago that the fastest way to get herself abandoned in the middle of dangerous territory was to question his instructions. She dug in her purse, pulled out her keys, thumbed the remote start button, and ten rows over she saw her car's headlights blink and heard the engine start. Jogging into the lane, she tried to work out the fastest way to get to -
The force of the explosion, though fairly distant, was still enough to make her stumble backward a few steps, her feet tangling as the sheer noise of it made her ears so loud she was sent into a piercing deafness, her head suddenly feeling stuffed full with pressure. Stunned, she stared blankly at the fireball that had just seconds ago been her clunky little sedan - the car she'd driven to university every day, that she and Gavin had taken on countless roadtrips, that -
The sheet of shimmering gold light that exploded into being to her left was larger and brighter than any she'd seen before - rather than a small shield, it was a literal wall, as wide as the laneway and just as tall. She turned toward it in what felt like slow motion, registering at least a dozen of the walls placed perhaps a foot apart, leading toward the vehicle that was bearing down on her at ludicrous speed from up the lane, driving against the right-of-way. The car struck the first wall and immediately the front end dented significantly, and for a moment the wall seemed to bend inward, flexing stiffly before it finally shattered into thousands of sparkling fragments, and as the car plowed through to the second, then third, then fourth barrier Katrina was struck from behind hard enough to send her sprawling forward, landing between two vehicles in the next row of cars with the sound of breaking glass echoing all around her. She yelped as she skinned her hands on the rough ground, dropping the two garment bags she'd managing to cling to so tenaciously, and twisted to find the vehicle at a full stop with smoke pouring from beneath the crumpled hood, a black-haired woman lying half-through the shattered windshield with her neck bent at a grotesque angle and her head oddly misshapen. Ryder was standing just inches from the final, cracked barrier, staring at the dead woman with his face unreadable, the knife clenched tightly in his hands and swirls of navy pigment dancing beneath his skin.
She was about to call to him when another vehicle - a small, black SUV - rounded the corner from the opposite direction and screeched to a halt ten feet away. Before either of them could react, the driver's door opened and the salesgirl from Ravens climbed out and regarded them from behind the open driver's side door, a wry smile on her face.
"I'm always late to the fucking party," she sighed, and nodded in Ryder's direction. "Figured you could use a ride, M'Lord." When Ryder and Katrina shared an uncertain glance, the girl sighed and motioned more urgently for them to join her. "Would give ya a password but there ain't one, so unless you wanna be wasting time calling Ben and Az, let's be on our way, yeah?"