The New Magic - The Revelation of Jonah McAllister - Landon Wark (bill gates best books TXT) 📗

Absently he opened the drawer in the nightstand beside the bed, carefully pulling out a disordered stack of hundred dollar bills and counting off eight of the ten that dwelled there. The rest fell back into the drawer. It was all the savings he had from his efforts since arriving in this place. He would have to spend some time making some more money, an activity that had come to irk him over the past months. Gone was the giddiness that had led him to be so careless back home. Money had become more of an encumbrance, a chore, than anything else. He had to carry it with him wherever he went, make sure not to spend his last quarter in the lobby vending machine so he could copy it again and again, hours at a time. Just to afford this tiny, pungent room. The same words over and over again.

Then again, everything about the last few months had become an encumbrance to him. He had not once run afoul of the law since leaving home, but the fear—now working its way into paranoia—was always there. He had not been able to sleep for very long each night, nor in the same place for more than a week for fear that the giant man would be there, standing over him when he woke.

Although he had not worked up the nerve to make the attempt to find out; they had to be looking for him. He had nearly killed a police officer and obliterated a motel.

Every noise was an armed team coming to get him, every awkward stare was someone watching him, waiting for him to make a mistake. When the feeling set in he would move to a new place and to new rooms that seemed to be getting smaller with each move. He was growing tired fast, his eyes ringed in dark circles, his face covered in coarse stubble and tongue laced in acid for anyone who would cross him.

And there were times, in the confines of the poorly lit hotel rooms and in the back of nightly buses, when he had nothing but his thoughts and notebooks, that he thought he truly might go insane.

He stretched out slightly and fell back onto the pile of papers littering the bed.

Keeping the maid out of the room was becoming another daily battle and he missed the privacy of his tiny bachelor apartment and the quiet security of the lab.

He missed his home and the way his parents would feign interest in his activities during their weekly phone calls. He even missed sitting in the back of a lecture hall listening to the other students talking about their escapades.

He sat, staring at the eight hundred dollars on the bed and found his thoughts straying to that woman in the deli. Not her exactly, but the book she had been carrying.

He chewed on his tongue for a moment.

“There's people out there looking for... magic,” he muttered, immediately regretting his choice of words.

Outside of his tiny room, on the rare occasions he had to head outside and clear his mind he could feel the same kind of quiet desperation that existed in the world. The social and economic unrest that had (he assumed) enabled him to easily cross the border were pushing people over the edge... Well, it had been for years, but now that he was close to it he could manage to get a look around the manic headlines and see into the human cost of it.

He gathered up all the papers and the notebooks that had grown exponentially over the past few months. His arsenal had grown with it, but not nearly as much as he would have liked. The various encumbrances and chores were weighing down on him far too much for him to break new ground. With no two dollar coins that would not raise suspicion he was hampered with an eight fold increase in the time it took to make an appreciable amount of money.

He rubbed his exhausted eyes with the heels of his palms and looked over at the bills sitting beside him on the bed.

He needed help. Both vocationally and psychologically.

Sandy Jenkins sat in her car, an old, but still serviceable, box shaped hunk of fibreglass and steel sometimes called a Buick. It got horrible mileage and with the rising price of gas stayed in the overpriced parking lot of her building more and more often while she took the bus.

The hotel was semi-clean. That was the most that could be said for it. It had the look of a bare bones establishment, the kind that didn’t even have cable in the post-streaming universe. No coffee, no free breakfast, certainly no pool and in a part of the small city that was hardly ever frequented by anyone due to location. It was, from her encounter with the young man in the diner, pretty much what she would have expected.

She had made up her mind not to come for the rest of the promised money a dozen times over. She didn’t need it, not really anyway. But, her curiosity kept drawing her back to the problem until finally she relented and now sat in the parking lot of the respectably frill-less operation.

Where would someone staying in a hotel like this get that much money? Why had he been afraid of the police?

The idea that she had stumbled onto a mystery, like one in the books lining her shelves at home prodded her into investigating further. The persona of one of the women detectives within settled over her and her vision became sharp, her hearing acute. Every detail of the parking lot jumped out at her as she opened the door, determined to go inside and find out as much as she could. She imagined herself alert, svelte and ready for action… Maybe not svelte.

Maybe