The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 447: 447 | The Young Master’s Practice

The dart buried itself in Radiant’s left eye.

Not the real eye. The poster version. A glossy promotional shot ripped from some magazine two years back, the kind of image that showed up on lunchboxes and billboard advertisements and the sides of city buses that Silas Malfoy had watched burn on three separate occasions.

Radiant’s grin filled the entire frame, that impossible smile with the impossible teeth and the impossible jawline, the costume all red and white and blue and gold like someone had designed a man specifically to make other men feel inadequate about existing.

Silas pulled another dart from the cup on the armrest and threw it without looking. It punctured Radiant’s forehead with a wet thwack that made the poster ripple against the concrete wall. The wall itself bore dozens of identical wounds, little constellation patterns of dart holes spreading outward from Radiant’s face like the poster had developed a skin disease.

"Seventeen," Silas said to the empty room. His voice came out flat and nasal, the kind of voice that belonged in a classroom asking whether the homework was really due today. "Eighteen."

Another dart. This one caught Radiant’s chin, tearing through the paper and exposing the grey concrete beneath. The Symbol of Hope now sported a chin wound that looked like a bad shaving accident.

The room was dark because Silas preferred it dark. Light required tolerating things he could see, and most of the things Silas could see annoyed him on a level he had stopped trying to articulate when he was fourteen.

The space had once been a storage sublevel beneath a warehouse on the eastern edge of a city that did not matter, in a building that appeared condemned from the outside and functioned as something considerably worse on the inside. Bare concrete floor.

Exposed pipe running along the ceiling in parallel lines that dripped condensation at irregular intervals, each drop catching the faint blue light from the single functioning monitor mounted on the far wall. A leather armchair that had been expensive before Silas burned three cigarette-sized holes into the left arm.

A side table with a cup of darts, a half-eaten protein bar, and a phone Silas had not charged in four days because charging it required finding the cable, and finding the cable required caring.

Silas’s right leg bounced against the floor. His foot struck the concrete in a pattern that changed tempo every nine seconds, faster when his thoughts accelerated and slower when they pooled into something heavy enough to sit on his chest.

The tapping never stopped entirely. The tapping had not stopped since he was nine years old and everything he loved caught fire because of something living inside his body that he had never asked for and could not return.

"Nineteen."

The dart sailed wide and hit the concrete wall six inches from the poster’s edge. Silas’s jaw tightened. The black flame that lived behind his sternum flickered once, sending a brief pulse of heat through his esophagm that tasted like ash and copper.

"That one didn’t count."

From the doorway behind the armchair, a voice emerged with the particular quality of someone who had been watching for several minutes and had chosen this moment to announce their presence because the moment before would have resulted in property damage and the moment after would have resulted in worse.

"The seventeenth throw also missed, Young Master. By approximately four centimeters."

Gerard stood in the doorway with his hands clasped behind his back and his posture suggesting that his spine had been installed by a carpenter rather than grown by biology.

He was tall in the way that old houses were tall, all vertical lines and narrow construction, his frame draped in a dark suit that looked expensive and permanent, the kind of suit that did not wrinkle because it had already reached an agreement with gravity about the terms of their relationship.

His hair was grey and swept back from a face that had been weathering since before Silas was born.

His eyes held the color of storm clouds and approximately the same warmth. He carried a silver tray with a glass of water and a small dish containing pills arranged in the color-coded sequence that corresponded to Silas’s Thursday afternoon medication schedule.

"It counted." Silas threw another dart. This one struck Radiant’s neck, and a small curl of black fire licked along the dart’s shaft before Silas noticed and snuffed it with a thought. The charred smell lingered. "They all count."

Gerard crossed the room and set the tray on the side table with the gentleness of someone handling a sleeping infant, though the gentleness was directed at the furniture rather than the contents. He had replaced this table twice in the past month. Silas had burned the first one entirely and cracked the second one with a coffee mug thrown during an argument about laundry.

"Shall I count the ones in the wall, or only the ones in the gentleman’s face?"

"He’s not a gentleman."

"The poster’s face, then."

"All of them count. I said what I said."

Gerard looked at the poster. The magazine image showed Radiant in what appeared to be a candid photograph from a charity event, though nothing about Radiant was ever genuinely candid. The hero’s golden hair caught some distant photographer’s flash. His costume strained across shoulders that seemed to occupy a different zip code than normal human anatomy.

The caption beneath the image, now partially obscured by a dart lodged in the paper, read RADIANT: TWELVE YEARS AND COUNTING.

"Perhaps," Gerard said, removing the protein bar wrapper from the side table and folding it into a square with the attention to detail of someone who believed littering constituted a moral failure, "the Young Master might consider directing his energies toward something other than photographic vandalism."

"I’m practicing."

"You’ve thrown one hundred and fourteen darts at that poster since Monday."

"Sounds low."

"That figure accounts only for the darts I’ve retrieved. Several have melted."

Silas’s leg bounced faster. His fingers drummed against the armrest in a pattern that syncopated with the foot rhythm but never quite aligned, creating a dual percussion that made the room feel smaller than it was.

The scars on his hands caught the monitor’s blue light, thin lines of burn damage tracing pathways across his knuckles and between his fingers that looked like practice rather than accident because they were practice rather than accident.

The Architect had been thorough about many things, and the conditioning of Silas’s relationship with fire had been among the most thorough.

"I want to kill him," Silas said.

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