QSFer BL Jones has a new MM sci-fantasy romance out: Sound Can Shatter.
When Caleb Moon was eighteen years old, he took the powers forced on him as a child and began using them to protect the world as the superhero, Crescent, fighting alongside fellow supers his childhood friend Tate, girlfriend Mei, and brother in all but blood, Rex.
Two years later, he has a missing brother, an ex-girlfriend, and a whole lot of confusing tension going on between him and one of his best friends. Add to that the shattered bones of his relationship with his older brother, Jamie, and the perpetually strained one with his disapproving father, and Caleb’s entire support system is crumbling around him at the very worst time.
Facing pressure from every direction in his personal life, it doesn’t come as a shock when his superhero life starts spiraling into chaos, too. Between rage blackouts and bisexual awakenings, Caleb’s sense of self is shattering.
But Caleb Moon has been a survivor since he was four years old, and he’s not about to quit now.
Warning: Deceased parent, alcohol abuse, eating disorder, vomiting, violence, death of a minor character
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Excerpt
The Racket of Emotion
Barricade and I can’t keep this up for much longer.
We’ve been fighting Mages in a factory parking lot for what feels like hours, although I know it can’t have been. It’s just my exhausted brain playing with my perception of time.
I’m weaker than I should be, thanks to the Mages’ ritual, or whatever the hell it was that made me feel like all my strength was being sucked out of my body by some unseen force, to the point where I almost lost consciousness.
A tall, blond-haired Mage throws a green fire ball in my direction. The flickering emerald ball careens through the air in a terrifying show of magical power, triggering a fear response that clicks and fires off like a gun without a safety. No matter how many times it happens, I’ll never get used to magical fire being lobbed at my face.
Barricade throws up a shield to absorb the fire ball before the thing can get anywhere near me. In another battle, on another night, Barricade would have kept his shield up constantly, not letting it drop, to make sure I’m protected and able to get close enough to take the Mages down. They’re no match for me when it comes to a one-on-one fight, or even as a group. These Mages have no formal combat training at all. That was clear right from their first attack at the Anti-hero concert.
Just getting near enough to land a couple of good hits is the challenging part.
Barricade, who stands at my left, close enough for me to reach out and grab his shoulder if I wanted to, turns his head to meet my eyes. He exchanges a look with me that I can easily interpret. He’s feeling it, too. The only reason he dropped his shield is because he’s running out of energy, which means keeping his shield up is going to become increasingly difficult. Barricade is strong, far stronger than me, but we all have a limit, and Barricade is close to his.
We need to shut this down soon, or the Mages are going to end up winning by default.
I try to console myself with the fact that our odds have been worse than this before, during other battles against powered-up armies. Robots. Giant acid dogs. Bizarre, alien-looking creatures with too many teeth and dripping slime that escaped a supervillain’s lab. Just. Wow. There have been so many of those, you don’t even know.
I dip my head in a quick nod at Barricade, wordlessly communicating “we’ve got this, right?” Barricade is scarily good at reading people. Far better than me, which is funny, and occasionally frustrating. He nods back at me, agreeing with the lie, his mouth twisting up into a somewhat maniacal grin that means “fucking right we do”.
A new flush of adrenaline hits my veins like a class A drug, and I grin back at him just as broadly.
At least I know we’re on the same page, even if everything else is going to hell. Barricade doesn’t revel in the thrill and danger inherent in the life of a super as much as I do. But he gets it more than Frost does. More than Wrath. Definitely more than Polaris. For them, it’s about duty, a way of using their abilities to make the terrible atrocity of what was done to us mean something. Make it worth everything we lost.
In another world, where there are no superheroes or supervillains, I think I would still crave the fight. I think that I would have always been something dangerous, Liquid Onyx or no Liquid Onyx. Not a FISA agent, though. That wouldn’t be my first choice if I didn’t have powers. I’m a legacy at FISA, a descendant of many agents before me. But if I was normal, I’d probably choose to serve my country via the military. My family has a long history of becoming soldiers, too.
I’m not my brother. Someone able to play a part, to trick and manipulate. That’s not the kind of warfare I would ever have been suited for.
But I can see myself in camo, buried somewhere in the desert. Blinded by the sun. Surrounded by enemies I can only get glimpses of. Covered in paint, dirt, and blood. Red, not black. Maybe even with Tate Bishop, large and laughing and probably still the best of us, at my side. We’d have each other’s back in that world, just like we do in this one.
Mei would probably tell me the part I would struggle with was the following orders given to me by any brand of authority. She might be right. I’m not a fan of going in blind. I like to know the whys of what I’m doing. From what I know of the military, questions are troublesome things.
Although, from my experience with FISA, anything attached to the government has a strict aversion to open, honest communication.
Barricade is looking at me still, mouth split open, corners dragged sharply up at both sides. I can see his teeth, even though it’s pissing down with rain and there are no lights apart from the fire and charges of magic created by the Mages.
And the moon. I can trust that bastard to illuminate my battlefield.
My Liquid Onyx blood gave me superior senses, so I’m able to see without much light. It makes it easier to patrol the city, not having to rely on dim streetlamps or flashing signs to make my way around. It gives me the advantage in most street fights, too, especially in dark alleys where shadows make good accomplices.
Barricade jerks his chin to my left, indicating a Mage who appears to be gearing up to take another shot at us.
These Mages are persistent, I will give them that.
Knowing Barricade is with me, I throw myself back into the fight with little care for the inevitable consequences if we keep going without any reprieve. There’s no choice. The Mages won’t stop coming unless we put them down, and there’s no chance I can leave that up to the FISA agents. As good as they are, I couldn’t abandon them to save my own life.
If I falter and die, then I falter and die. It’s what I signed up for when I became Crescent. To fight till the last.
Barricade stays close by my side, resolutely supporting my severe lack of self-preservation, and we move together in well-practised tandem.
I’m able to get the best of two other enemy Mages before—fuck. Before I feel it.
There’s a particular cadence to the sound of loss when felt for the first time. It’s the screech of metal against metal, like the scrape of a knife getting dragged across steel.
I heard it for the first time when I was eight.
Jamie fell off a large rock on the beach and cracked his skull upon impacting the smaller rocks below. We had to go to the hospital to get him checked out, since Dawn was at the base so we couldn’t just ask her to take a look at him like she usually would.
Mum was going to leave me with Lady Mars and Rex in Colbie, but Rex insisted on going to St Azrael’s in person to make sure Jamie would be okay. He buzzed around my brother like a concerned blond bee. Jamie let Rex fuss, only pretending to complain about his manic fretting, just like he always did. Jamie was far more patient with Rex than he was with me. Not that I fussed over my brother. At the time, I was mostly annoyed with him for getting hurt and transforming our fun afternoon into one big drama.
Point was, if Rex was going to Danger City, then I wanted to go, too. Danger was massive and busy and full of potential hazards for a person like my best friend. Rex daydreamed too much. He sometimes got so lost inside his head or stuck in a book he was reading that he would walk right into the road. I’d have to walk beside him, steering him by the elbow back onto the pavement, or directing the few cars on the roads in Colbie to drive around him. I even convinced my mum to buy Rex light-up trainers for his birthday to help in the winter when it got dark far earlier.
After a few years, the people of Colbie learned to look out for a flash of white-blond hair while driving through town.
In a city like Danger, he would be in real trouble. I couldn’t let him go off on his own. Mum would be too distracted by Jamie to pay attention to what Rex was doing.
We had to sit for ages in the hospital waiting room before Jamie was let in to see a doctor, who ended up giving him a couple of stitches for the cut on his head. I sat outside the medical room, playing some game on my mum’s phone, while Jamie got stitched. Rex was inside the room, up on the examining table with Jamie, holding my brother’s hand and talking a mile a minute about nothing and everything.
I could hear what Rex and my brother were feeling, the soppy twang of an acoustic guitar, when they held hands and looked at each other. Rex attentive and earnest. Jamie soft and indulgent. It seemed really stupid to me back then. Jamie had been hurt far worse before, he didn’t need to be coddled so much, and he would never let anyone else treat him like Rex did. Not even our mum.
I didn’t understand their weirdness with each other.
In my defence, I was only eight. Hindsight is an odd thing, sometimes.
After twenty minutes I got bored waiting outside on my uncomfortable, green upholstered hospital chair and told Mum I wanted to go and get something to eat. Mum gave me a few pounds and sent me off to find a vending machine. But instead of using the one closest to Jamie’s room, I decided to take a wander around, in the hopes that Jamie’s doctor would be done by the time I got back.
I’m not sure how long I spent walking down glaringly lit corridors, my trainers squeaking along the well-polished floors. There were printed-out arrows stuck to the floor, directing people where to go. I followed the big red arrows until I found myself standing outside what looked like another sort of waiting room, smaller than the one I’d been in when we waited for Jamie’s doctor.
Through the window in the door, I could see a woman with limp red curls and badly bitten nails sitting in a hospital chair. She wore torn jeans and a large woollen jumper. Her eyes were puffy, and she had black streaks on her cheeks.
From outside the room, I could feel what she felt. The fear, which made my stomach clench painfully. The impatience, which made my temple pound.
Sometimes I feel other people’s emotions as if they’re my own. Then there are times when emotions are like specific noises. Not all emotions sound the same when felt by different people, although the sounds for a certain emotion are usually similar, no matter the person feeling them.
I pushed open the door and went inside the small waiting room. The red-haired woman didn’t look at me when I came in. She had her eyes fastened on her hands, which were clenched in her lap by then.
I sat on the opposite side of the room and tried not to stare. It was hard, though. Her emotions were so strong. I felt compelled to reach out with my power and change them, to switch off her fear and dampen her impatience. But Mum taught me it wasn’t right to manipulate people’s emotions without their permission, even if I was trying to help them. She told me it was a violation, and because she was my mum and therefore knew everything about everything, I believed her and obeyed her word.
It hurt, not to help the red-haired woman. Her emotions banished mine completely, linking us together as we felt the same piercing dread and thrumming anxiety.
When a tall, weary looking doctor came into the room some time later, it was a relief to finally feel a rush of something else.
That relief was short lived.
The woman, who the doctor called Mrs Spenser, looked up with a mixture of hope and trepidation swirling around inside her.
The doctor came and sat down next to Mrs Spenser. I tried not to listen as he spoke to her in a hushed voice, since Mum taught me it’s rude to listen in on other people’s conversations.
It was hard, though. The room was small, and I wasn’t in complete control of my enhanced senses yet.
Despite my best efforts, I heard the doctor tell Mrs Spenser he had done everything he could, but her husband, Martin, did not survive the emergency surgery. The doctor said Martin lost too much blood. He said Martin died. He said he was sorry.
He sounded sorry. And tired. Mostly tired. I could hear his exhaustion and his sorrow. It sounded like the creaking of wind blowing through an old house. It sounded like heavy rain dripping through a shoddily patched up roof.
Then, the doctor’s creaky tiredness and drip drip drip of sadness was swept away. It was all shoved aside, making way for the screech of metal on metal. It made my head burst with pain, how loud Mrs Spenser’s sudden stab of grief was.
That first note of loss is always the sharpest for me to feel, like a spike driven directly through my skull, into my brain.
Mrs Spenser hearing about the death of her husband in a small hospital waiting room was the first time I felt it.
The more time I spend around a person, the more attuned I become to their emotional resonance. It becomes a matter of proximity. Someone I’ve spent a significant amount of time around could be standing feet away or the length of a football pitch and I would feel or hear a strong emotion radiating from them.
So, when there’s the sound of a hundred blades being dragged across a metal surface pulsing like a sonic wave somewhere across the factory parking lot, I know. When I feel like a ten-inch spike is driving itself deeper into my brain than it ever has before, I know.
I know something world-ending has happened. I know something, possibly the very worst thing, has just happened to my best friend.
Author Bio
BL Jones is a twentysomething British author who spends all her free time reading and writing and taming her three much younger brothers. She works as a BSL interpreter in Bristol and lives with a temperamental bunny named Pepsi. She’s been writing stories since she was five, rarely sharing them with anyone except her numerous stuffed animals. BL has had a difficult journey into discovering and accepting her own queerness, and therefore believes that positive, honest, and authentic stories about queer people are very important. She hopes to contribute her own stories for people to have fun with and enjoy.