“Where are we going?” Kaylee’s voice was tinged heavily with impatience. Drew hadn’t been exactly forthcoming on the reason she was calling for their little “meeting.” Normally, she was quite content to barge into Kay’s room with no appointment, but great aplomb, so it was not only unexpected, she’d dare say downright alarming for Drew to insist that they meet outside after school today. It couldn’t have been her birthday, which was tomorrow, because the McAllisters had always celebrated birthdays with family parties. This year the party tomorrow would no doubt be larger than usual, because it was her 18th. In just a few short months, she would be graduating from high school and be propelled into the fast track to take over one of father’s three main legitimate business ventures: a management consulting firm, the real estate business they laundered money through, and a software development company.
The McAllisters had set up a rather successful real estate business catering largely to large corporations looking for convenient plots of land. No one could really say whether or not they had started with crime and gone into real estate from there, or started real estate and discovered crime was just around the corner. As mobsters, they had fallen under the purview of the Stevens family clearly early on into their criminal history. The Stevens family had focused on loaning money illegally and running an underground gambling establishment, but their true purpose lay in keeping the law. There were different crime families spread along the coast, each with their own special little niches, and the Stevens family had somehow miraculously united them all and decided on some ground rules. The Eriksons were sex traffickers and ran adoption scams, the Correys ran chains of speakeasies and bars with… dubious practices, the Barkers ran drugs through a legitimate fish trade, the Cravens owned a music recording company that milked its artists mercilessly and one-sidedly, and then the McAllisters used their real estate business to move large quantities of money from a series of scams. They dabbled in the loan shark business as well. There were too many of them in strange geographic locations that overlapped a little and yet not enough to make them easy to control from a single base of operations, but somehow the Stevens’ had swooped in and demanded compliance and everyone had listened. They had been more than an extortion racket – they had been the kings.
The only problem was that the Stevens family was no longer in charge and everyone was scrambling to get ahead. Branching out into stronger legitimate businesses was a bold step Henry McAllister was taking, and the small companies were already threatening to stretch him thin. With the looming burden of the future of the family, Kaylee was not feeling particularly generous with her sister’s games. Andromeda, on the other hand, was defiantly oblivious as ever, giving a queenly little wave of unconcern. “There’s someone I want you to meet. It’s like… an early birthday present! From me to you.” The teen said, enthusiastically, a mischievous twinkle in her eye.
“So where is this gu- this someone, then?” Kay asked back sharply. They had gone out and had a nice dinner first, all the while Drew refusing to tell her any details. Leaving the fine establishment now, Kay felt the increasing urgency to figure out what the hell was coming next. She did not like surprises.
“You’ll see.” Why was Drew doing this to her..? Of all people, no one knew better just how deeply she detested surprises.
They took a taxi into a shadier part of town, and there little miss Pep-in-her-Step led her increasingly impatient and wary sibling quite purposefully into a string of dark alleys. “Drew.” Kay’s voice was taut, “I don’t think this is-“
As if the sound of her voice was some kind of cue, someone jumped out of one alley and grabbed Drew yanking her backwards by the shoulders. Kay pounced into the shadows after them, wrenching them away from the younger girl and slamming them face down into the ground. She put one foot hard on the back of their neck, applying an almost painful pressure and grabbing her gun in defense. An unfamiliar voice rang out. “Wow. Big momma in de house.” The voice was clearly male, and he emphasized house with the kind of emphasis one would expect from a basketball game. In her alarm, Kaylee nearly stepped too hard on the guy underfoot, remembering not to snap his neck at the last second. Her gun went up towards the source of the voice, which was a boy who had just separated himself from the shadows. The boy drew closer, applauding her quietly. He was a bit shorter than Kay, of average build but far less lanky. His brown eyes were darker than hers, but his hair a strange brown that bordered more on gold. His deep-set eyes and ears that stuck out slightly made his face a little funny-looking, but not alarmingly so.
The now thoroughly irritated girl opened her mouth to issue a threat, but then she caught sight of Andromeda, grinning from ear to ear. “Kay. This is Jacob O’Malley. He wants to be yours. Y’know, he wants to work for you.”
“Work for-? Goddammit, Drew. Who the fuck are these guys?” Oops. There went her patience. Kay never lost her patience… except with Andromeda. She always lost all sorts of composure with this one.
Jacob moved a little closer, hands up in an “I am unarmed” gesture. “The dude under your foot would be an offering.” He said with a grin. “An offering of loyalty.” As Kay stared at her foot nonplussed, he continued. “That would be Kevin Swan. Were you… looking for him?” His voice was cheeky, because he knew very well that any McAllister would be. Kevin Swan was a techie who had been supporting the Correys in the recently budding power struggle. Old-time mobsters could never have imagined what one good computer whiz could do to tip the balance of power, but he had proved himself indispensable to the Correys. Website design had added popularized their business, and some evidence of hacking skills had caused information leaks that had nearly downright destroyed them at times. So far as anyone could figure, however, his services were open to the top-bidder, so all of the three other families had been hunting him in the hopes of recruiting him, or at the very least dragging him away from the damn Correys.
Kay looked down and stared at him for a bit, actually studying his features. They were a little smashed against the ground, but by all accounts he fit the description. She stared up at Jacob, pointing her gun at him again. Her hand and voice were perfectly steady. “Alright. I’ve got your name. State your business. You want to work for me? How? And why him?”
Jacob shared a conspiratorial grin with Andromeda for a half-second. “Just like I remember.”
“Kay? Do you remember a girl named Jessica O’Malley?” Drew asked conversationally.
“No.” Was the blunt, uninterested response.
“She was the girl you pummeled for me in Freshman year. Turns out, she was bullying Jakey here, too, cause they happened to have the same last name. She was… picking on him after school. He was right there when you found her.” It sounded like she was easing into a story, and Kay simply did not have the patience to deal with one of her stories right now.
“So, what, this some kind of pain fetish he wants to indulge. Or he wants to thank me for saving him or some crap?” She snarled. Both were motives she didn’t trust as far as she could throw him. Hero worship was easy to disappoint, and pain fetishes were, in her personal opinion, mostly kind of creepy.
“Nothing like that.” Jacob interjected smoothly. It seemed like Drew was letting him take-over from here on. “I just want to be your personal Merlin.” He pointed at Swan before she could ask. “Like what Kevin Swan over there does, I’ve always been good with the computers. In fact, most people say I’m a little more than just ‘good.’ But the bird you got underfoot isn’t so reliable, now is he? A true rising King deserves loyal vassals, wouldn’t you agree?”
Soft, brown eyes bored into him for a long minute, then their owner finally turned her attention to her wayward sister. “You went to the trouble of dragging me to some back alley to claim some gaming nerd is my early birthday present?”
The question was clearly not directed to him, but Drew apparently didn’t need to defend her “early birthday present to Kay.” He laughed. “A gaming nerd? If you think those kinds of games excite me, you’re looking at the wrong league of skills, big momma.” He said with a grin. “You aren’t going to be some King Arthur, and I don’t mean ‘Merlin’ like your wise side-kick who eventually brings you to ruin. I want to be your tech wizard. I don’t care about Jessica O’Malley. I’d already had her on a path to destruction when you expedited the process. What matters to me is what you showed me that day. Let’s just say I want to be the one to part the Red Sea for you. I want to see what the world you make looks like, and I am willing to do anything to help you get there.” His eyes glittered with glee.
Kay had gone back to looking at him over the course of this speech, but now she once again turned back to Drew. “So… you got me an insane wannabe king-maker for my birthday.” Drew laughed. Jacob grinned and gave a cheesy bow. Kay stepped on Kevin Swan’s neck a little harder, gave a very fake laugh, and scoffed to herself, “Why doesn’t anyone want to get me something normal for my 18th birthday?” Then she snarled, “No thanks. I prefer not to work with people with no marbles to lose in the first place.” She spun on her heels and walked off, ignoring Kevin Swan. Drew would take care of him.
Jacob called after her, “You will eventually though.”
“Fat chance, asshat.” Was all the reply he got, but little did she know that his persistence would win her over in the end.
(Original date written unknown as it is saved from a site no longer running.)