the opener to my novel - would you keep reading?
hi guys! nervous about sharing my work haha. this is the opening scene to my adult steampunk-noir fantasy debut, please critique if you are so inclined!
TW : violence/blood/murder
The corpse on the other side of the counter was getting to be rather inconvenient.
For one, Kesler couldn’t leave with it in tow until the joint cleared out. For two, Newt kept tripping over the guy’s legs and sloshing drinks all over himself. For three, the body would have gone all stiff by now, so he would have to chop it up to get it out of here unnoticed, which was always a pain to clean afterward.
And for four—he turned to Lenore, and murmured, “Delacey still out there?”
Lenore raised a blonde eyebrow. “What do you think?”
“I think he is. I was hoping otherwise.”
“He’s not leaving. And neither—” she tipped her head almost imperceptibly to where the body was pressed against the cupboards, “—is he. We should dance.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I didn’t ask if you wanted to. I said we should. You’ll look shifty glued to the wall all night.”
“Shifty? For all they know I’m just tired.”
“No one that knows you will believe that. Come on.”
As if to illustrate her point, the band onstage jumped into a swing number across the room. Kesler checked the clock. An hour to close, which meant two hours until everyone had actually cleared out. He considered Lenore’s offer.
“Kesler Marshall Alastaire,” said Newt suddenly, grabbing Kesler’s arm. He turned. Newt made a good effort to be intimidating, but Kesler knew him too well for it to work. (And he didn’t have a middle name anyway. He’d made up Marshall on the spot a few years ago while talking down a patroller. Newt knew it was fake, and teased him mercilessly.) “If you go out there and leave me with—with him—while you’re having the time of your life—”
“I’m not going.” He turned to Lenore, drumming his fingers on the counter. “I’m not going.”
“Delacey’ll shank you when you get out there. This could be the last thing you do.”
Kesler shoved her, and she flounced away.
Newt eyed him nervously. “You do look shifty, you know.”
“I know.”
“You’re sweating. Why don’t you take your coat off?”
Because his shirtsleeves were still covered in blood from earlier. And he was armed to the teeth—but then, that wasn’t out of the ordinary. He wiped his face on the wool of his sleeve.
Lenore reappeared next to him, eyes wide. “Get out.”
“What?”
“Someone,” she glared meaningfully at Kesler, “led Delacey’s guys here.”
“Someone who’s cleaning up your mess, you mean.”
Newt groaned. “I want you to know, Kesler, I always valued our friendship.”
Kesler briefly considered wringing Lenore’s neck, then reached for his gun, to make sure it was still there. It was. This calmed him minutely. “Oh, shove it. I’ll deal with him.”
“Who? The thug?”
“Delacey.”
“And leave us here?”
“Well, he isn’t after you, is he?”
“He may well be!”
Kesler cast his eyes around the room. There—a man in a hat and coat. No one came to a speakeasy so buttoned-up, besides, tonight, Kesler himself. Perhaps Lenore was right.
The man tilted his head, and the light hit his face. Lionel Pin. Kesler hurriedly turned back towards the wall and shucked off his overcoat. Instantly he relaxed, or focused. He took the folded-up newspaper he’d bought from a boy on the street earlier out of his back pocket and threw it on the counter too, just for good measure.
“Don’t come outside,” he advised Newt and Lenore good-naturedly, then swept towards the door, dodging vivacious pairs of dancers even as he kept one shoulder to the wall.
The cold Crest air hit him the moment he stepped outside, and the door to The Loaner slammed behind him. He kept a hand on the revolver holstered at his hip as he surveyed his surroundings. Smooth brick made up the street, worn down by foot traffic—there were no horses, no automobiles, not up here. A gaslamp flickered at the corner a few paces away, illuminating the paste-up mural on the building across the way.
It showed Kesler himself among other famous scientists in recent history: Jean Battement, Fineas Pauline. People that he’d looked up to as a boy. It made him flush, seeing his copper wiry hair and sharp, narrow features at such a large scale. The artist had smoothed over his dense freckles and darkened his tap-water eyes, which he wasn’t sure how to feel about. He’d always considered himself handsome.
Verne hadn’t even told him this was being put up; Kesler had found out while walking to Newt’s pub with Lenore some months ago, and she’d screeched with laughter and forced him into a photograph in front of it the next time they’d come around.
There—a shadow moving over the words crossing Battement’s necktie (Architects of Luminescence). Kesler flattened himself against the wall and almost silently cocked his gun, approaching the alleyway that opened into the mural.
Delacey got to him first, his shadow separating from that of the alleyway like two globs of algae. “Alastaire.”
Kesler raised the gun and stepped forward.
Delacey spared it only a glance before he turned back around to face the mural. “‘Architects,’” he read bitterly. “I’d hardly call you an architect. I would have written ‘sabeteur.’ ‘Child-king,’ perhaps, yes?”
What had happened to bring Delacey to him, as Kesler understood it, was this: he’d provided Newt and Lenore pure lumen, and they had smuggled it to some Neat folk. This was all well and good, but one of the Neat fellows, evidently, had nothing but a soup bowl between his ears, and had blasted the roof off a building with the lumen. So he’d come up here and tracked down and attacked Lenore and she’d managed to cut his throat—It was self defense is all, Kesler. Kitty Cat. I’ll call you what I want so long as I’m bootlegging all this for you. I’m just letting you know Delacey might be paying you or I a visit tonight so you should bring your good guns. The Neat fellow’s at The Loaner. His name was Rickie or something. Thanks, Kitten.
Kesler had slipped away from work briefly and found the freshly exsanguinated Rickie catching flies behind Newt’s bartop. There would be no way to move the body until late in the night—people wouldn’t balk at a dead man being dragged through the roads in broad daylight, but Kesler couldn’t afford to attach his name to the smuggling business—so he left a hasty note for Newt. Sorry mate. Lenore’s fault—NOT my decision to bring him here. Will move him tonight promise.
Delacey must’ve guessed he and Lenore would be here.
Now, he said, “How an individual uses lumen is not my responsibility.” The wording was stiff, and came out sounding like he’d rehearsed it. He had. “Especially not pure lumen smuggled from Crest.”
“Do not trick me. I do not care about the lumen. You know of the dead boy in that building, yes? He was killed by that little blonde harlot. You are good friends.”
“If he can be taken down so easily by a girl petite as her, he should have chosen better aspirations than smuggling lumen in Cresten back alleys.”
A gunshot and several shouts rang out from inside the pub. Delacey’s attention was caught, and Kesler turned, heart in his throat. Patrons fled, holding hats onto their heads and shoving their arms into coats as they ran. Newt and Lenore were not among the crowd; they must have stayed inside.
There was a noise behind him and Kesler whipped back around to see the glint of a tiny deadly blade. He caught Delacey’s arm as he dodged, but the blade nicked the cartilage of his ear.
Kesler was tall and wiry and young, Delacey was short and soft and moustached; neither of them were built to fight. But Kesler’s two revolvers were. In the commotion from the Loaner, he and Delacey danced around each other for another moment, before Kesler raised the gun to Delacey’s chin and fired.
Blood and grey matter exploded over the paste-up mural. Good. Maybe they’d finally get rid of the damn thing. Delacey’s body bounced off the wall and Kesler caught it before it hit the ground, holstering his revolver and looking around like he’d merely taken an embarrassing fall. People still flooded from The Loaner, but no one paid him any mind. He could hardly blame them—every Crestener knew the quickest way to be killed was to stick your nose in a killer’s business.
Kesler looped Delacey’s limp arm over his shoulder and began dragging him to the edge of the city. An onlooker might have thought them friends, if not for the mangled mess on Delacey’s shoulders and the way the toes of his shoes dragged on the ground.
Judge, he swore. The word was technically a prayer, but he hadn’t considered it more than a vestigial habit in years.
At last he reached the border of Crest. A fence stretched around the entire perimeter of the city, stopping only for the docks and the lifts and the one broken spot near the Finery borough. It was perhaps as tall as Lenore and made of solid iron bars, wide enough to stick a hand through but not a shoulder. The top was flat and covered in something mimicking gold and, on top of that, bird shit.
Kesler considered his options briefly, then leaned Delacey against the fence, hoisted himself up so he straddled the top of it, and then pulled Delacey up after him. It was quite the exercise.
On the other side of the fence was a small ridged foothold, then nothing. Open air as far as anyone could see. Occasionally he’d find himself marveling at the technology that kept all of Crest afloat up here. Most days he hated it. Today he found himself simply doing his best to ignore the vertigo.
Kesler wrapped an ankle around one of the iron bars and heaved Delacey’s limp body up and over the side, watching him fall for a moment only to make sure it didn’t get caught on any machinery that might’ve been in his path. It didn’t.
He hoped no one was directly beneath. Usually he disposed of bodies on the other side of town in Finery, where the land beneath them was blackened and dead and uninhabited (and to have a usual in this situation was despicable, he knew). That was where honorable funeral send-offs were, anyway, only honorable funeral send-offs let the deceased drift down with a bed of flowers and a glorified parachute. To know the folks ended up where they ought to, albeit with a hastier arrival, gave him a small bit of comfort.