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

the muzzle pointed at the second figure. There was the snap of the firing pin hitting the casing and then... silence. Misfire. The second figure lashed out with a fist, striking Serge on the jaw. His ear rang and the world swam for a moment before he caught hold of the wall.

"Sons of bitches!" Serge spat as he regained his equilibrium. "Who sent you!"

The third man stepped into the room. Serge re-aimed his gun and pulled the trigger again. Nothing. He ejected the defective round and pulled the trigger. Nothing.

The third figure extended a hand and said something. Against the wall, Serge's hand felt the wall become soft and his skin sink into the fluidic drywall. He pulled against it, but the wall refused to let go of him, becoming solid once again in an instant.

His mind spun as he tried to aim the gun, oblivious to the knowledge that it refused to work anymore. One of the intruders, his face a grimace of hatred and rage stepped forward. Serge pitched the useless gun at him, but with his arm pinned in the wall there was little strength in it and the intruders batted it away.

A fist flashed and Serge staggered back against the wall, twisting his arm. His ears rang louder.

No one had sent the intruders, of that he was now certain. There was too much madness in the blows for this to be strictly about business.

"I want you to think about my little brother," the one stalking towards him confirmed what he already knew. "Rotting away in some hole. I know you don't remember him. He got caught smuggling your shit."

The third intruder pulled the injured man to his feet as the first stood, just outside of Serge's grasp.

"Your brother was a mewling bitch!" Serge, still unsure of exactly what was going on, fell back on schoolyard taunts.

"He was," the man agreed grimly. "But he was blood."

The man reached out a hand and started to speak something.

Serge coughed, a wet deep cough. His lungs burned. He tried to curse once more, but all that came out was a gurgle. Bitter tasting spittle filled the back of his throat with a few more hacks. His mind spun with uncomprehending panic, trying to wrench his hand out of the wall. He spat, fruitlessly trying to purge his throat and lungs of the bitter fluid that was inexplicably filling him. Serge fell to his knees as the edges of his vision dimmed.

The door to the closet burst open and the last sight that the minor lord of this city had was that of his wife bursting out of the closet, pistol barking in a futile attempt to save his life.

Roused from the near constant state of semi-sleep that hung over her, Aegera picked over the sounds of the small office in the back of the garage that she had claimed as her place of business and study. A few sheets full of refinements to the spells that Jonah had churned out scattered along the desk and to the floor as her elbow slipped, a consequence of the jerking motion of her start. Unconsciously she began picking them up, wincing at the old dates on the pages before she realized what the noise that had pulled her from her stupor was.

After a few more rings she managed to find the antiquated flip-style phone—a burner phone they had called it—and read the notification on its screen before the device vibrated in her hand.

The first rule of magic club: voice only, no texts.

It was actually rule seven or eight, but her brain had slotted all the rules alongside the pop culture segment of her brain and retrieved them accordingly.

"Yes?" she answered. The call was from a number she thought belonged to one of her Adepts, but her memory was too hazy at the moment to be sure.

The first rule of magic club: no caller ID.

"-need you!" The voice on the other end of the phone was frantic and laced with an accent that made the English nearly impossible to make out. As she, with equal urgency, tried to calm the caller he slipped into the regional dialect and burst through an entire conversation she couldn't begin to understand.

There was a commotion over the line, of the phone being knocked around and then a woman's voice took over.

"This... Christine." Her English was even more broken, but at least her voice was calm. "I... Initiate. Also, EMT. They call me here."

"I—Okay, Christine. What's going on? What is happening?" Aegera over-enunciated.

"They call me here," she repeated. "They call you."

"Yes." Was it some kind of drunk dial.

"They help need. There... will be big trouble."

Diagnostic Failure

They burst into his room while he was sitting with his hands to his temples, on the verge of sleep, still trying to retain the thoughts that he was working on. It was a losing battle, but one he felt was necessary to fight.

The spike of adrenaline with the pounding on the door woke Jonah McAllister's mind to its fullest.

He was in the process of both defending himself and asking what was going on when the people barging through his door plopped the body of a man down on the stack of papers in the centre of his table. Blood spurted and flowed over the tabletop, staining the papers red. Their words were still barely visible on their faces, and as he tried to salvage as many of them as he could, blood smearing all over his fingers, Aegera grasped his hand.

"What the hell is going on?" he asked frantically.

"They won't take him to a hospital," she replied with forced measure. "He's one of my Adepts."

Jonah tried to wipe the sticky blood from his hands onto his clothes. Brief germophobia rose within him before being overwhelmed by the horror of a