Kane's Fate 4 Chapter 3

The four of us eventually managed to tear ourselves away from each other long enough to take a shower, but it maybe took way longer than we’d anticipated thanks to the feel of slick skin, soap suds, and hot steam. We finally made it into some clothes, and it was almost midday by the time we headed out of the shifter dorms and toward the quad.

It was as if the elements had heard Dean Canmore’s announcement because it certainly felt like summer had come early. The sun was held high in a clear sky completely empty of any kind of cloud, and the tips of the trees swayed gently in an almost nonexistent breeze. I could hear the faint buzz of bees in the distance, and I could sense the gentle flap of butterfly wings somewhere within the forests surrounding the school grounds.

It almost felt normal.

Even more so thanks to my best friend Auden, who was laid out in a sun lounger slap smack dab in the middle of the quad. He was topless while soaking up the rays, and he nodded along to whatever was playing in his ear buds. Huge sunglasses covered half of his face, and he’d set up a little margarita stand for himself, complete with its own ice bucket.

I glanced at Charlotte as we walked toward him over the quad, and she giggled as she immediately translated what my wordless look said.

Then my pusher girlfriend held out her hand and focused her telekinesis on the ice bucket beside Auden. It rattled slightly, but she managed to successfully levitate it a few feet into the air, with Auden none the wiser and still nodding along to his music.

“Now.” I grinned at Charlotte, and she twisted her wrist ninety degrees and spread her fingers so the ice bucket upended on Auden’s bare chest.

“Oh, what in the hell!” Auden scrambled in shock and fell off his sun lounger, and he whipped his sunglasses off to look around as he hastily wiped the ice water off his torso.

“You looked like you needed to cool off,” Charlotte chuckled. “But don’t come for me, this was all Kane’s idea, I was just the… Conduit.”

“I blame all four of you.” Auden pouted and shivered as the ice started to melt. “I wish I’d never texted you now.”

“Lies.” I smirked. “Besides, I was just looking out for your wellbeing. Wouldn’t want you to burn.”

We sat on the grass beside Auden’s little sunbathing spot and enjoyed the sun for a few moments. I was appreciative of any small pocket of stillness that could still be found in with all the craziness, and it was nice to just lay in the sun and hang out with my favorite people for a little while.

“So, what’s this top secret job you’ve got for Kane?” Demi suddenly asked, as if she could sense what I was thinking.

“It’s not from me, it’s from my dad mostly,” Auden said quickly. “I wouldn’t have ever put you forward for it, but he thinks you’ll be a good fit. And you’ll enjoy it, probably.”

“You’re being ever so secretive,” Indira chided Auden jokingly.

“Yeah, what gives, are you trying to make us guess?” Charlotte asked curiously.

“I’m not saying a word,” Auden chuckled and held his hands up. “Not really my place to. But you’ll be fine, I can give you the address. He wants to meet you in San Francisco this evening.”

“You’re not coming with us?” I asked my friend.

“Nah.” Auden shrugged casually. “I’d only get a lecture for spending too much of his money.”

“What does he even know about me?” I wondered out loud. “Why’s he so eager to give me a job?”

“Trust me.” Auden smirked from beneath his comically large sunglasses. “You’ll understand when you meet with him, but I’d be willing to bet my entire trust fund that this job is well within your wheelhouse.”

“You have a trust fund?” Demi muttered with side eyes to the other girls, who both just fell over giggling.

“Okay dude, I trust you,” I laughed in reply to my friend. “I trust your money, too, so…”

“Exactly.” My heavily pierced best friend grinned widely. “You weren’t questioning it so much when I bought you a first class airplane ticket.”

“True,” I admitted with another chuckle. “I could get used to that.”

“Seven o’clock,” Auden told me as he slipped his sunglasses down his nose and settled back into his sun lounger. “I’ll give you the address when I can be bothered to look at my cell phone again.”

We spent an hour or two hanging out with Auden and enjoying the sunshine, until we eventually headed to our respective dorms to get changed into something more befitting a potential job interview.

When we met back at the parking garage on the edge of campus, we all looked a good eighty percent fancier.

I’d opted for a white button down shirt that miraculously didn’t have too many creases in it, a pair of straight cut black jeans, and some military style black leather boots. I’d thrown on the only other jacket I had aside from band merch hoodies, which was a dark gray blazer in a soft cotton that my mom had insisted I pack on my first day at Meloria.

“Dapper.” Demi smirked when she saw me approach the garage.

My Komodo dragon shifter girlfriend had redone the complicated looking twist of cornrows on top of her head and then wrapped a silk scarf in a light shimmery champagne color around the base of the knot. She wore a tight fitting pair of white pants and somehow an even tighter orange toned shirt that accentuated her tiny waist and ample breasts.

Charlotte had opted for a pale sea-foam green dress with thin straps and butterflies on the bodice, and the light tone made her red hair stand out even stronger. She’d swept her hair up into a high ponytail that showed off her slender neck, and long droplets of gold earrings dangled from each ear lobe.

Indira was leaning against the door of her black Dodge Challenger, and my snowy owl shifter girlfriend had almost matched me with her outfit. She had on a pair of dark gray jeans and a white tank top that clung to her skin, and she’d thrown a black leather jacket over one shoulder. She wore a black choker around her neck, and her cleavage strained against the white cotton of her top.

In any instance, my girls were always gorgeous, but they seemed to have accidentally outdone themselves.

“You all look great.” I grinned as we hopped into Indira’s car.

“Should’ve seen the group chat,” Demi snickered as she slid into the leather seat behind me.

“Hey, you guys have a group chat?” I laughed and then quickly feigned jealousy. “Without me?”

“Girls only,” Charlotte said from where she sat behind Indira, and she stuck her tongue out at me playfully as she fanned the skirt of her green dress around her legs.

Auden had texted me an address whilst we’d been getting ready, and I quickly punched it into Indira’s built in GPS as she revved the engine and shot down Meloria’s winding, tree-lined driveway.

The tires kicked up a dirty cloud of dust and pebbles in their wake, and the campus driveway suddenly spat us out onto the road, where Indira eagerly accelerated even faster toward the road signs marked for San Francisco.

The drive wasn’t too long, an hour or so on the highway before we passed the huge welcome sign on the side of the road. It was late in the afternoon by the time we actually made it into the city, but the sun was still pleasantly warm and bright enough to warrant sunglasses, and the sky above the city only had a couple of wispy clouds interrupting the clean wash of blue.

“Any idea what kinda place we’re looking for?” Indira asked as she miraculously found a parking spot, and we climbed out of her Dodge Challenger.

“Honestly, no idea,” I admitted with a half shrug.

“I just hope Auden’s secrecy lives up to the hype,” Charlotte mused as she straightened her ponytail.

“Yeah, this better be good.” Demi grinned with her hands on her hips. “He’s got my expectations up.”

“Well, this parking spot is apparently only a block or two away from the address he gave us,” Indira said as she quickly pulled it up on her cell phone’s map and turned the device around so we could see. “Let’s go check it out.”

“The neighborhood doesn’t seem all too… Welcoming,” Charlotte commented quietly, and she inched herself closer to me as we walked the block.

She was right, though.

The part of the city we were in seemed dingey enough, and it was a far cry from the business hub of San Francisco that was all glass skyscrapers filled with law firms and hedge funds or overpriced coffee shops and gin bars that looked almost identical to each other.

The district we walked through felt more as though Indira’s tires would be missing by the time we made it back to her car, and I instinctively started to walk with purpose, with my chest out and my arms moving in time with my steps so they were expertly poised in a position to swing a punch quickly if I needed to.

But no one seemed to pay us particular attention.

We passed greasy haired burnouts in faded leather jackets and a guy with the largest beer belly I’d ever seen dressed in nothing but a pair of cargo shorts and a heavily stained vest that might’ve been white once upon a time. A small gang of kids loitered on a favorable stoop, though they didn’t say a thing as we passed them, which was actually more surprising.

Maybe they could sense I wasn’t in the mood for them to catcall my girls, so I had to give them credit for making that wise of a decision at least.

“Here,” Indira finally said with a thankful sigh. “This is us.”

We came to a stop outside an incredibly rundown looking bar, and I immediately felt my eyebrows arch skyward. The front of the establishment was all black, but the paint peeled away from the wall as if it were allergic to the plaster beneath, and the windows were covered in a thin film of ashy looking dust, so it was difficult to really even see inside.

The sign above the bar had been hand painted a very long time ago judging by how heavily weathered the lettering was, and it was definitely more on the grayer side than the pure white it once might’ve been. The sign simply read ‘Croak’s Public House,’ but the established date claimed it was from the nineteenth century.

“Established eighteen seventy-two?” Charlotte muttered under her breath as if she’d sensed me wondering. “How is this place even still going?”

“Beats me,” I replied in a quiet voice.

I noticed the group of kids that had been hanging out on the stoop a few doors down and drinking from bottles wrapped in crinkled brown paper had suddenly stopped talking. They were now all staring at us with hard eyes as we stood outside the decrepit pub, and their ringleader, a tall skinny guy with limp blond hair and a silver ring in one eyebrow, fixed me with a steady glare.

“Maybe we should go inside,” Indira offered with a humorless smile when she noticed me looking over my shoulder.

“Yeah.” I nodded and kept eye contact with the young guy as we edged toward the entrance of Croak’s pub.

Demi pushed the door open with a loud creak, and the four of us carefully stepped inside.

It was kept purposefully dark within, with no overhead lighting, and the dusty windows acted as a barricade from the sunlight outside. There were a couple of backlights behind the bar, and a blinking neon sign that had seen better days, but that was it.

There was a white-haired old guy who looked like he was close to falling asleep at his table, with his withered hand clasped firmly around a glass of scotch and vacant eyes that stared straight through the amber liquid. The only way to tell he wasn’t petrified like a statue were the few slow blinks of his eyelids every couple of seconds.

The only other person in the joint was the bartender, who was an impish looking young guy with spiky black hair and heavy black eyeshadow smudged from his lashes to his eyebrows. He was covered in more piercings than even Auden, with two silver rings curved around his bottom lip and one in one side of his nose, and his ears were almost completely covered with similar heavy silver jewelry.

He took one look at us and just stood there drying a glass with a dirty old rag while waiting for one of us to speak.

“Hi,” I said with a tight smile. “I was wondering if you could help us.”

“Depends what with,” the bartender immediately fired back with a sly grin, and he expertly flipped the glass in his hand as he watched us approach the bar.

“I’m here for… A job interview,” I said carefully.

“A job interview.” The bartender nodded and slowly looked me up and down. “That figures. Through the door and down the elevator.”

The impish looking barkeep grinned knowingly at us as we passed him, and the four of us headed through the door he had pointed out and came face to face with the elevator the bartender told us about.

“We have to ride in this thing?” Charlotte half-whispered.

“This is definitely not up to code,” Demi muttered darkly.

The elevator looked like something out of an old Hollywood hotel, with diamond shaped shutters and exposed wires, but there was no one around to ride it down for us. We piled into the old metal box, and I heaved the cage across so that it could click into place.

There was no panel of buttons indicating different floors, just one singular white button with a single arrow pointing toward the floor, and my companions and I shared a loaded look.

“Down the rabbit hole we go,” Indira finally murmured, and she pressed her finger into the circular button.

The elevator gave a long, tired groan before it eventually decided to move, but when it did, it shuddered so badly I thought the cables would snap there and then.

“How far down do we even go?” Demi muttered after a minute as she tried to peer downward through the diamond shaped shutters.

“Yeah, the basement can’t be any more than a story or two, right?” Charlotte agreed. “Feels like we’ve been going way longer than that.”

“Maybe the elevator is charmed.” Indira offered with a shrug.

“That’d be the most likely explanation.” I nodded to the gray-eyed shifter. “Though why they couldn’t just make it feel a little less like a haunted house, I don’t know.”

“Yeah, if they’ve spent the time placing magic on it, why does it feel like we’re gonna fall to our deaths?” Demi chuckled dryly.

We spent the rest of the elevator ride in silence, and though we were here on Auden’s advice, I couldn’t help but feel as though we were walking into something that wasn’t quite one hundred percent correct.

Something felt off. Nothing felt particularly threatening, but it just felt weird. Maybe it was because Auden had purposefully been so secretive about it all, and it was my own curiosity getting the better of me.

But I could tell the girls were just as on edge as I was.

The elevator came to a sudden stop, and a pathetic ding sounded around us as we finally hit the ground. Everything was still dark aside from the dull bulb that blinked above us, and my girls all just looked across at me with curious eyes.

I shrugged and pulled the grating back.

After the dusty gloom of Croak’s Public House, the chaos that assaulted my eyes the moment I hauled the elevator cage away made me blink furiously in surprise.

It was an ocean of neon and noise.

We stepped out of the elevator into a magical, underground copy of San Francisco. It was a sprawling mass of unfiltered magic, with weird food trucks, street vendors, and market stalls that sold enchanted items of various questionable tastes according to their illuminated signs. There were fire and water naturalists performing street acts using their powers, shifters let their feras roam free without worry of discovery, and I even spotted a brothel of seers, all with milky white eyes and pale skin.

“Woah…” Demi whistled as we stood there and took it all in.

“What the hell is this place?” Charlotte muttered in awe with her green eyes wide and round as she stared at a stall owner cutting up a huge round melon fruit that was a strong pink color.

“Is Auden’s dad some underground criminal mob boss or something?” Indira asked me in a quiet voice.

We watched as a group of two or three gangster looking types, their bodies thin like rakes and dressed in sharp pinstripe suits, with fiercely long fingernails sharpened to razor points at each fingertip, quickly passed our group without a second glance toward us.

“Maybe…” I murmured in reply as I watched the pinstripes go. “But Auden would never have sent us to somewhere where we’d be unsafe.”

“That’s true,” Demi agreed with an eager nod that looked like she was trying to convince herself of that particular truth.

“Let’s explore.” Charlotte offered a smile. “It’s just different, that’s all.”

My redhead pusher girlfriend was right, as she always was.

There wasn’t anything particularly threatening about this underground magical version of San Francisco, and if anything, it was our own ingrained human nature that made it seem questionable in our minds.

The sprawling neon metropolis was actually a completely free space for magical beings, without having to hide their talents from the humans above, and it reminded me of a slightly more unhinged version of the Meloria quad.

There were more pinstripe gangsters that wandered about, but they seemed harmless enough. They were all ridiculously tall, slim, pale skinned, and long nailed, and they all walked with an air of effortless importance.

I guessed they were this subterranean city’s version of police, or community officers at least. I didn’t wanna tell them that, though. I had a feeling they’d make me pay for that insult.

The stall owners and market vendors that lined the makeshift streets were far more energetic, and they hawked their wares in loud, booming voices that owed to a good portion of the noise and chaos.

There was one particular gentleman, who was maybe the largest human I’d ever seen, but one of the most well dressed, too. He was completely covered in piercings, but unlike Auden and the bartender above us who only wore plain silver bands, this stall owner was completely bedazzled. Every piercing in his face and his ears was home to a diamond or some other sparkling jewel, and so every time he moved beneath his bright blue neon sign, he beamed like a human rainbow.

Which I found quite funny, because he was selling rolls and rolls of cloth in weirdly muted colors.

The four of us walked together down a tight street that seemed to be mostly dedicated to selling food or edible charms, which really surprised me.

One vendor, a young woman with a buzz cut dyed a bright green color, hollered over at me as we passed her stall. She had thick graphic eyeliner in a coal black that hid her brown eyes almost completely, and her pale lips were turned up in a constant smirk.

“Hey, you!” she called out to us again and nodded eagerly at me when I made eye contact. “I’ve got some charmed passion candies that’ll make your women love you even more!”

“Think I’m good on that front!” I shouted back over the ruckus with my own grin on my face.

The green-haired girl laughed loudly as Charlotte wound her arm around my back, and then I gave Indira’s ass a light smack as she walked a little further ahead, just to further my point.

The snowy owl shifter glanced over her shoulder at me with a rueful smile, and I just chuckled again at the glint in her gray eyes.

One thing I really noticed as we walked through the underground city’s equivalent of a food court was that there were people from all over the world down here. I could see a Turkish kebab stall, fit with a rotating slab of meat sizzling against the flames, and I saw a place selling patties filled to bursting with spicy vegetables solely manned by an old woman with gray dreadlocks and a look in her eyes that meant serious business.

We passed a place that looked like a mini nightclub, and the two burly blond guys who manned the stall spoke together in heavy German accents. They were selling pre-packaged shots of liquids in various different luminescent colors, which according to their sign, were magically enhanced energy drinks. “So you could spend the entire night on the dancefloor of a club without worrying about fatigue.”

Which seemed a far cheaper option than what some humans did.

We finally came to the end of the street and found a two-story building that looked like what ‘Croak’s Public House’ once wished it was.

It was painted entirely black, but the front of the building was covered in intricate white filigree that looked like a backward tattoo on the brickwork. The sign above the door was curved in plain white neon, and it just read ‘The Bar.’

“If anyone down here knows where Auden’s dad is, someone in here will,” Demi chuckled. “Right?”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I agreed with my shifter girlfriend and smiled down at her. “But if you wanted a cocktail, all you had to do was ask.”

“You know me too well,” Demi giggled. “I wanna see if they’ve got any magical ones.”

“I thought swapping magic was prohibited.” Charlotte said from where she still had her arm wrapped around my waist.

“What do you mean?” I asked her curiously.

“Like at Imperium,” the redhead explained. “They’re looked down on for swapping magical roles.”

“I don’t think that extends to potions and charms.” I shrugged. “My mom’s been giving me charmed health tonics for years.”

“Yeah, I think it’s mostly charmers down here,” Indira said. “Well, from what I’ve seen, anyway.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Charlotte said with a nod. “I mean, I use my pusher abilities on other people and things.”

“Exactly.” I smiled down at my redhead girlfriend and marveled at her bright green eyes.

“I could explore this place for days,” Demi giggled. “It feels decadent.”

“Let’s get a drink and do some digging, then,” I told my girls. “I could go for a beer.”

We pushed the black door of The Bar open and found it to be far livelier than Croak’s upstairs.

It was dark and dimly lit, but more for aesthetic purposes. Everything was painted black, and the only light was the pure white neon that was roped almost everywhere inside. Neon ran along the bar and beneath the shelves that carried the various bottles of alcohol behind it, and it ran along the edge of the floor so we could at least find an empty table.

The chairs were mismatched but comfortable, all upholstered in black leather, and the table was empty aside from a glass bulb that held a single flickering candle.

After a moment, a waitress came over to us with a wide, welcoming smile that showed off her perfectly white teeth. A jewel stuck to one of her front teeth glittered every time she spoke, and her hair was dyed a pastel shade of blue that she’d scraped into a tight high ponytail. She was dressed in black leather from head to toe, and I purposefully made eye contact with her to avoid the bulge of her cleavage as it fought to be freed from the black corset cinched around her tiny waist. She wore a black choker like Indira, but it was made from leather with a thick o-ring hanging between her collarbones. She also wore a chain necklace that gathered on the curve of her breasts, and she had the same heavy eyeliner as the buzz cut market stall girl we’d seen before.

“Hi, welcome to The Bar!” she greeted the four of us. “Would you like a menu, or do you guys know what you want?”

“A menu would be great, thanks!” Demi replied with a wide smile, and my shifter girlfriend craned her neck around to watch the waitress disappear behind the bar for a second.

“See something you like?” I smirked, and Demi’s caramel colored skin flushed a little at my words.

“None of you can deny how hot she is,” Demi countered with a playful huff.

The girls ordered a weird variety of cocktails, but I stuck with a bottle of beer on purpose. I wanted my girls to have fun, but we were still in a crazy underground magical city, and I wanted to still be able to look after them if needed.

“Excuse me,” I managed to catch our waitress as she passed by our table, and she stopped in her tracks.

“What do you need, sir?” she asked with a polite smile, and I tried to ignore how she curved the word ‘sir’ around her tongue.

“I was just wondering if you knew where we’d be able to find someone,” I explained in a tight voice, and Demi tried to fight off a bout of giggling.

“Who are you looking for?” the blue-haired waitress asked, and her mouth turned up in a smile when she caught Demi’s blush.

“My friend’s father, I have a job interview with him,” I told the waitress. “His name is Mr. Lowrey.”

The blue-haired waitress laughed immediately as soon as I told her Auden’s father’s name, and I shot a glance at my three girlfriends, who all shrugged.

“You don’t know what Mr. Lowrey does?” the waitress asked curiously, still with her a laugh in her mouth, and I watched as the jewel on her tooth sparkled against the neon that surrounded us.

I shook my head, and she giggled again.

“I can see why your friend put you forward.” The waitress smirked and knowingly eyed my arm muscles stretching against my shirt.

“What do you mean?” I asked with a laugh.

“Here.” She just handed me a leaflet from her apron and headed back to the bar with another chuckle to herself.

I unfolded the card, and the four of us gathered around excitedly to read what it said.

It displayed a huge glass cube covered in thick chains and spotlights shone to the center, where two beings were in the midst of a bloody battle. I noticed a crowd around the cube, and I realized it was more like a boxing ring.

“Oh, shit…” Demi giggled.

“Yeah, I can see why Auden put you forward, too,” Indira chuckled.

The writing on the leaflet was huge and enticing.

California’s Biggest Magical Fight Ring - Top Prize $100,000!