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

Absently she tallied up the twenty books on a ledger that floated to her out of the corner of the room. A possible twenty new Initiates at the next scheduled meeting. She was running that as well. More people to teach, to train. More people who would not look at her funny when she announced to the world that things like conjuring and teleportation were real.

Jonah would kill her if he heard her using those terms, but it was hard to accept them as anything else. To call them anything else was to question how they worked, and that was too mind-boggling to consider.

She sighed and grabbed a snack cake from her stash beside the sofa. The face that had used to belong to Sandy Jenkins greeted her from the warped metal of the fridge, the rippling filling in the fat that had once been packed around her jowls.

Jonah and she had appeared about two miles from where they had disappeared, without their clothes. At first, she had been concerned about that last part, but since they were alone… Jonah might have been embarrassed, but he was too busy shouting victory like a madman into the night’s sky. He seemed to have forgotten that they had almost just been killed.

He remembered a few hours later. They spent weeks trying to find out what had happened to the former inhabitants of the house, but there was no trace of them. It was as if they had just disappeared into thin air. Jonah became obsessed over the matter, spending days making phone calls and trying infinite combinations of words to track them down. When nothing turned up he had sat, catatonic in a hotel room for another week.

He blamed himself; that was for certain. It was evident in the way he now presented the words to the new recruits. After the food and the money and all the rest of the Basics, there were the words that would propel a man through a brick wall and others that would electrocute him where he stood. There were defensive techniques and offensive ones, designed to discourage anyone who might come after them again. It was becoming obvious to her that…

The door to the private room in the rear of the apartment block basement flew open and he emerged into the shadowy light of the room. He seemed comparatively well rested tonight, his eyes wide and bright. For a moment she felt a sharp pang of envy.

“You look like hell,” he said as he grabbed the pot of coffee from the machine. “You know, those things will make you fat.”

She put down the snack cake, only half finished and glared at him.

He took a long sip straight out of the pot. “How’s Tom working out?”

She sighed. “He’s okay. He has… unusual appetites. I worry about showing him too much.”

There were more than enough of those worries to go around.

“How many do you have so far?”

“About ten who are fully devoted. Maybe forty or more who are on the way up. A lot of them seem content with just the money thing. Not a ton of ambition.”

He was on his way back to his room with the pot of coffee.

“It’s a shame,” she called after him. “I could really use some help.”

“Promote someone,” he said.

There was a moment of tension in the air as Aegera made the decision. “Jonah.”

He turned towards her.

"I'm not sure I trust them."

Jonah's brow furrowed.

"I have to show you something."

Twilight of the Psychopaths

Raymond Polaski was a sociopath from a long line of sociopaths. His great grandfather had been a minor coal baron in the motherland who had fled when the commies took over. (The Nazis had been fine, but fuck those pinko assholes). His grandfather, a lawyer and state senator, had been arrested for beating his grandmother when Raymond was two. His father had used some of his grandfather's political connections to force some intervention for his buddy Charles Keating in the late 80's.

There was nothing terribly glamorous about the sociopathy of Raymond however. No dinner parties, no opera. None of the trapping that came along with the various serial monsters that would be called upon when his ilk showed their faces in movies or series. There was especially no murder. The occasional trip to a strip club and a cocaine dealer at work, but other than that...

Truth be told the seediest thing that he had ever done was paying a few people to pick up jobs in a competitor's (Awe he thought the guy's name was. Something Frenchy/Africany anyway) district and then clamour about unionizing. Pushed the guy out of the running for a bonus and increased his own by eight thousand. It was not something he had made a habit of, but that year he had planned on buying a new car. Not too shabby. Dipshits like Awe didn't know how to use the gradient anyway.

As physics showed work was only done through gradients. Muppets slid down the gradient into the cold oblivion of mediocrity money was released for use by their betters.

Imagining it was one of Raymond's favourite daydreams when the old man was blathering on during meetings.

He tilted his pencil as the presentation screen went black and the old man went on, thinking that maybe he could get a few more interns to replace some of the guys who were angling for a raise in some of the Eastern offices.

The meeting ended without much pomp and Ray found himself sitting in the conference room with three other guys who had evidently zoned out as well.

"Do you believe that guy?" Phil, one of the others said. "He's running this place like it's forty years ago. Just... fuck, get the hell out of the way."

"Well, we