Inherited Magic (19 page)

“No. I should.”

“Very well, then everything is settled.”

“No, I wanted to make sure—”

“Yes?”

“I can use a gun?”

“It might not do you much good if she sees it coming. But if you must, you must.”

Chapter 60

The phone only rang twice before she answered, even though it was eleven o'clock at night.

“This is Agent Harris.”

“I hope I didn't wake you up.”

“Not at all, John. I was just reading your surveillance reports; you're getting boring and predictable.”

“Allow me to change that. I need a witness for the duel.”

“John, are you asking me on a date?”

“I'm asking you to show up and witness the duel, perhaps to watch me die.”

“How romantic.”

“It's in three days at Winnimac Park, two in the morning.”

“You know you are going to make a lot of mages mad by inviting me.”

“Don't wear any surveillance devices or bring any cameras.”

“Why are you asking me, John?”

“Because if I survive, things are going to be different, and you need to understand.”

“What, that you can bend reality at your whim or that you're a kid who doesn’t know the rules?”

“No. You need to see what mages warring across the country will do.”

“That will never happen. Your friends are all afraid of change and losing their traditions; Veronica has been the only one to stir the pot in a hundred years.”

“That may be true, but I know things you don't; and things are about to change.” John hung up.

Veronica was the only one to stir the pot in a hundred years? John contemplated it; she had set all of this in motion because . . . If the rumors were true; she was looking for a Book so she could teach Peter magic. She and Peter had killed and done who knows what else to get the last bit of knowledge and power left over from a shameful past. What had been their end goal? Walk off into the sunset and live happy quiet lives? John doubted he would ever know the truth, but he doubted it was anything but selfish and self-indulgent.

John walked around the warehouse and started getting ready to go to bed, while he considered his own goals. They were selfish in their own way—he wanted these problems to go away and go back to living a normal life. Or as close to a normal life as he could at this point. He paused. Was that possible or even realistic? With a pang of sadness, he realized he had gone too far over the edge without realizing it. What kind of normal life could he live if he couldn't even explain his life to someone he cared about? Was he supposed to live a lie the rest of his life?

As he brushed his teeth, he studied his reflection in the small bathroom mirror. He had changed. It wasn't in his appearance; it was in his eyes, in the way he carried himself. He couldn't point to when it had happened; he just knew that it had happened. He wasn't better than he was, he wasn't worse than he was, he was just different. He finished up and went to bed; he didn't think he would fall asleep easily, but he did.

He dreamed.

He dreamed of Radha.

She was dancing in a sensuous slow way in front of large windows overlooking the city lights. She was backlit, so it was a moment or two before John realized she was nude, and it pleased him as much as it embarrassed him. Somehow, seeing her like this was a violation, but he wasn't about to stop watching. You, my dear reader, may judge the male mind harshly for that, but you also know it to be true either from experience or being honest with yourself.

He could hear faint and distant music. It was more than exotic; it was almost alien: low piping tones mixed with a mournful violin and an instrument he couldn't identify. Radha knew the music though and abandoned herself to it. Her arms arced, and fingers moved through complicated positions in a quick-quick-slow rhythm. Radha’s hips shifted smoothly, her legs arcing high through the air, feet turning surely under her, making her spin so that even her braided hair was part of the dance. Her eyes were closed; her face a mask of serene concentration and every part of her was given to the dance.

John had never seen anything like it. He was aroused, transfixed, and energized all at once. He could do nothing but watch and his previous shame for doing so melted away.

In the distance, behind the city, lightning flashed—there was no thunder though—and it flashed again, blinding John. When his vision cleared, he saw the dance as a mage would.

Her fingers traced interwoven lines of gold and red around dangerous broken patterns. As her arms arced past city lights, they traced encompassing circles and spheres. Her body positioned the axis and it spun, guided by her feet. Inside all this, there glittered the flurry of movement and rhythm of the dance and music. With a shock, he realized what he was seeing, and it was amazing in its complexity and simplicity.

In the morning, John awoke with a start, with the dream and its pattern firmly planted in his mind, and a smile on his face.

Chapter 61

John had practiced with his new pattern as much as he could. He altered a clip of bullets with the fire pattern from his grandfather’s ring—they would leave trails of fire in the air and start small fires when they hit, if he had done everything right. It was one thing to know guns killed; it was another thing to use them and know every time you picked one up you intended to kill. Ever since that night in the salt factory, John couldn't watch action movies, couldn't stand the images of lives cut short only to be followed by a well-rehearsed one liner. Life and death had taken on new meaning to him, and he was angry that in order to survive he had to kill.

On the morning before the duel, John felt as ready as he could. Veronica would have something up her sleeve, and that was to be expected. The issue was experience—she had done this before, and John had not. Killing the rogue madman didn't count in his mind because Owen had been there. So, as John went about heating his breakfast in a small microwave, he was doubtful and frustrated. His last few months had not had many bright spots in them, and he doubted there were too many to come, even if he lived. He watched the cheese boil out of the folds of his breakfast burrito and decided that it looked disgusting and wasn't going to eat it. He called Davy at the gym to let him know he wasn't going to make it in to get his daily ass kicking. He bathed, pulled on some clothes, and went in search of real food.

The diner was quiet and it was a contrast to the traffic outside. There is something about having breakfast while everyone rushes past you to work or their daily chores—not a lazy or mocking feeling, but a sense of curiosity. What lives do they live, what secrets do they keep, and what is kept from them? How did they end up where they are and are they happy? These were the things that John contemplated as he sipped his coffee and waited for the waitress.

“Sorry I'm late,” said the tribesman, as he sat down across from John in the booth.

John stared in shocked disbelief.

Not only was the tribesman wearing a very expensive suit and tie, his braids were tied back into an almost respectable ponytail and he had trimmed his beard. John sat frozen as the man across from him scanned the menu. John could tell from his pattern that he was not hiding himself, but it was no less of a shock when the waitress asked him if he wanted coffee.

“I suppose you only have that dreadful tea in the yellow packets?” he said, with a British accent.

“Sorry, but that's it.” The waitress was young and she found his accent charming.

“Coffee, then, if you please. Are you ready to order, John?”

“Y-yeah. I'll have a ham and cheese omelet.”

“Pancakes, toast, fruit, or hash browns, sweetie?”

“White toast please.” John didn't take his eyes off the man across from him.

“And you?”

“French toast and bacon, please.” He smiled at the waitress, and his teeth shone like jewels they were so white. She smiled back at him coyly and left.

“What the hell?” It was all John could manage.

“I thought we might have breakfast together.”

John wanted to think of him as the Tribesman still but the shirt and tie were throwing him. “Who the hell
are
you?”

“I'll tell you my name later. If you survive.” The waitress arrived and poured his coffee with a wink; he resumed once she had left. “We think you will survive, especially considering that shiny new trick you've got. It's impressive.”

“Thank you.” John was feeling manipulated again; it was making him angry.

“It's not in the Primer; where did you learn it?”

“Is that what this is about?”

“What breakfast is about?” How they fixed their food so fast confused John, but the waitress skillfully landed the plates with a smile and vanished.

“No, watching me. And why I was the only one who could see you, anyway?”

“You weren't meant to, and I did what I could to hide, but there were times when you just saw me. Not sure why.” He picked up the syrup and drowned his French toast in it.

“Nice to know. Why watch me?”

“You have a Primer. That makes you dangerous; we watched you to see if you were going to abuse the power it gave you.”

“You could have tried helping me out from time to time.”

“No. I couldn't. Besides, you did well on your own, even come up with a new trick we haven't seen before. How did you do it?”

“Why do you care?”

The tribesman-stranger-Englishmen studied John harshly before answering. “You don't get it, do you?”

“As everyone is fond of pointing out, no.”

“What do you know about prime numbers?”

John responded with an irritated look as he chewed a mouthful of omelet.

The stranger ignored John and launched into an explanation. “Numbers divisible only by one and themselves. They start off fairly common and get further apart and are harder and harder to find as they get larger and larger. In some circles, it’s very big news when a new one is found.” The stranger looked as if he had given this lecture a hundred times and was doing word for word from memory. “Patterns are the same way. There are only so many ways they hold together without collapsing. We don't know who put together the ones in the Primer, but with a few exceptions, they make up the totality of the working patterns we know.”

“So all that lost knowledge everyone is going on about . . .”

“Is lost to mages at large, unless you have a Primer, and then you know almost as much as there is to be known. The math of the patterns only works so many ways.” The stranger moved his bacon to the small ocean of syrup that his French toast had vanished from.

“So that makes me special, even among mages.” John smiled.

“It also makes you dangerous and a target for everyone else, but you're getting used to that, aren't you?”

John forced himself to hold his smile firmly in place for a moment before responding. “You want to know how I came up with that pattern, in case I die tonight.”

“Yes.”

“You had better hope I live then.”

“John, be reasonable. These mages represent the rotting corpse of a shameful and dark part of human history. The idea of this duel is brutal and barbaric—”

“Then stop it.”

“That would . . . expose things we would rather not have in the open just yet. You could join us though; leave and never come back. They would think you ran away and who would blame you? No one would find you with us.”

As the waitress cleared the dishes and refilled their coffee, John considered why he wasn't going to accept. It wasn't a matter of honor to him that he had to fight Veronica. He realized that, on some level, he was living out the formulaic story of a student avenging his teacher, but no one else was going to face Veronica. What else did he have? No family that he knew of. Radha had been clear she didn't want to see him. School had fallen by the wayside. His plans with Conrad were important but was that a burden he really wanted to carry?

John looked out the window and asked; “Where would we go?”

“I can't tell you unless you accept, but you could never come back. You would be hunted.”

“Hunted.” John didn't like the word, especially when he was staring down the receiving end of it. He would be alive, perhaps even happy, but hunted and never to return. He looked out the window at the city as people and cars made their way past his small corner of it.

Hunted.

Never to return.

They were ominous words, spoken with drama and theatrics during movie trailers, followed by explosions and death-defying stunts. They were not words that applied to his life. If they were, they would be nothing like the movies; they would be moments of quiet terror as he waited to be found. It would be him forever looking over his shoulder wondering whom to trust. He had a vision of himself in a crowded bar: alone despite the thronging humanity around him; afraid amidst the joy and friendship.

“No. I have to stay. If not for Owen, then for myself.”

“Good luck to you then. I hope to talk to you again.” The stranger got up and pulled a crisp hundred-dollar bill out of his dress slacks. “Breakfast is on me.” He carefully placed the bill on the table. The waitress would be thrilled with her tip but disappointed that she didn't get a phone number. John watched him as he walked out the door and down the street. It was shocking to see him not just vanish into thin air. On some level, John realized this moment would mark the point of no return; there was no changing his mind now.