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

"God help me," he sighed with disappointment, "I need students."

"What?"

"Nothing. These people, how are you going to find them?"

Sandy's face screwed up. "I don't know. I guess I've put more thought into being the chosen one than in being the one doing the choosing."

"Chosen one?"

She sighed. "If this were a book or something there'd be—like—a secret society out there all set up to handle this stuff. Actually they'd probably show up right about now to tell us how everything has worked since... I don't know, ages past."

Jonah snorted, thinking of how slowly his notebooks were filling up. "That would be more convenient."

"Yeah. The Order of Convenience would be all set up with a list of people who were destined for greatness and had to learn the secrets of magic... Sorry. Unknown forces."

Jonah McAllister pursed his lips. Looking at his reflection in the window and past it the illuminated cabin where his research sat, not updated since that morning.

"Then..." he said. "I guess you get to be the first member of the Order of Convenience. Choose us up some chosen ones."

Sandy's eyes gleamed and she seemed to go off in two or three directions at once.

"Bring on the students," Jonah muttered.

The Recruits

Nights were particularly bad.

There were noises that were expected around the house that weren’t there anymore. During the day they were both at work. They wallowed in work. They shoehorned work into the house, into the bedroom, filled every nook and cranny with work when they could, but inevitably they would have to stop. And at that exact moment there was silence. A silence that took over, made everything impossible, drowned out conversation, ate up the food at the table before either of them could get a bite, and then it sat there with them, the invisible third person at the table.

And then there were the bills. If anything loomed as large as the silence it was the bills. At times they were everywhere, mountains of them that threatened to topple over and drown them in a sea of paper. Most were from the hospital. Those went unpaid. Bill didn't see the point. The rest had always been there and, before… they had been eagerly paid, now they just wallowed around with the rest, waiting for money to come in. Some were paid eventually, others just thrown on the pile.

Bill's not paying the bills.

It was hard on them both, he supposed, but it was hardest on Jenny.

He looked over at her sitting in the passenger’s seat. The moonlight made her look so frail. Frail but beautiful. He wanted to tell her that, but… Everything out of his mouth sounded dishonest these days, so frail, like her, easily swallowed up by the silence that existed between them. So he forced a smile and kept on driving, locked away in a cage of false words and actions.

Why they were even bothering was beyond him.

It was a night out of the house he guessed. A night away from the silence and the misery. Oh, it would be waiting there for them when they got back, anxious like a dog left in the house alone all day, but at least for a little while they could get away.

“They didn’t say what this thing is?” Jenny asked.

“Not really. A get together. 'Meet the neighbours', maybe?”

He wanted to tell her the whole story, about how he had gone up on a job himself (he had had to fire all but two of his techs) and while he was patching in the cable box the large woman had come up to him in between navigating furniture movers through what she must have thought were sensitive areas of the main floor. She had seemed pleasant enough and he had grumbled a few things back to her. The conversation interrupted his concentration and meant the job would take longer, but he hadn't really minded. More work meant not having to go back to the cold cafeteria leftovers and the cool sheets in the bed they still shared. Maybe that part he didn't want to tell Jenny. And it was nice to have some conversation other than Jenny's ghostly sighs. Before he knew what was happening he had let slip that, like many people in the area, the Hernandezes were struggling. He had tried to back pedal, his face flushing with masculine embarrassment as he tried to focus on the cable box. But the woman had seemed sympathetic and Bill had walked away with both a box of spare wiring and an invitation to a 'get together'.

He had looked around at the humdrum bourgeois trappings and with whetted curiosity decided to get out his suit and tie.

It had taken very little persuading to get Jenny to come. It took very little persuading to get Jenny to do anything. It took a lot of effort to get Jenny to care. The dinner invitation was, as all things were: ‘fine’, but she had unenthusiastically put on an old dress and skipped over her array of makeup.

The lane was shrouded in darkness as he pulled the car onto it. A pair of pillars where a foreboding gate might hang yawned open before them, beckoning. For a moment he felt lost in an old black and white movie as the large house with its staring windows, which had seemed nowhere near as unnerving when he had been running wire only two days prior, loomed up out of the trees. Its gruesome teal siding did little to dull its nearly gothic appearance or to mask the hideous death that might await unsuspecting strangers (or even suspecting ones) inside.

There was a time in the past when he would have joked about that, back when he had not been afraid of death, but that was no longer the case. He