Inherited Magic (6 page)

Chapter 18

Jimmy didn't think of himself as a bad guy. He was though. He thought of himself as someone that people didn't like, and that made his life difficult. It was true. Few people liked Jimmy, but not for the reasons he imagined. He also just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time for most of his life. We can leave that up for debate. No matter how you cut it though, Jimmy was a felon—nothing glorious, mind you. He had been to jail for assault several times, as he had a habit of getting drunk and beating his sometimes girlfriend, frequently drug supplier. There were, of course, the things he did and never got caught for, but smiled about when no one was looking. The fact that he was on the run from charges relating to several young college girls who felt he had taken advantage of them with the aid of drugs and alcohol only added to his charm. It was also why he was in Chicago doing maintenance work for his uncle, off the books. He didn't think of himself as a bad guy, though—just unlucky.

When his cell phone rang, it was bad luck again as far as Jimmy was concerned. His girl had come home, flush with money, high on at least four illicit drugs, chain smoking, and tossing back beers. Money made her happy and horny, a combination that always worked out for Jimmy. So when his cell phone rang, again, and he saw it was his uncle, he knew his fun was over, and he had to answer it.

“Fucking what?”

“Don't answer the phone like that, makes you sound ignorant.” Jimmy's uncle thought of himself as a nice guy and very sensibly hated Jimmy.

“Hello, how can I help you today?” The sarcasm was so heavy it ruined any chance of comedy.

“A pipe burst in the building at Kenmore and Bryn Mawr. We got a lot of work and cleanup to do. Get your tools and get dressed.”

“Who's to say I'm not already dressed?” It was, after all, almost one in the afternoon.

“Be there in half an hour and be sober.” The line went dead before Jimmy could even start to say something. He turned to tell his girl the bad news, only to find she had passed out face down on the bed. He contemplated her naked backside as she snored; she had ended up in an awkward position, with her arms to one side and her knees half under her, so that her ass was raised slightly, but triumphantly, in the air. He had seen better—he'd had better—but this was what was in front of him and it really wasn't all that bad. He could be a little late for a good cause, and she didn't even have to wake up for it. Jimmy wasn't a bad guy, he just wasn't so particular about how he got what he wanted.

Chapter 19

Jimmy was late, of course, and didn't care. The only thing that upset him was that he was closer to sober than he wanted to be, and his uncle not only chewed him out for being late but for not showering either. He hated his uncle almost as much as he hated the sight of water running out from under doorways and down stairs in that damned apartment building. Even after they got the water shut off, there was a steady stream coming from . . . Hell, everywhere. The only upside to the whole thing was that he knew, off the bat, that his uncle was going to have to leave him alone and unsupervised in these poor people’s apartments. Since they were studio apartments mostly, he didn't think he would find much, but who knows? He might get lucky again this afternoon.

It was hell, though. Setting up a half dozen shop vacs to clear out the standing pools of water. Jimmy and his uncle set up makeshift barriers to keep the lower floors from flooding and then making sure the shop vacs stayed emptied and running. Work! Whose idea was it, anyways?

Finally, they went into apartments to assess the damage and do what they could. Since most of the residents were at work still, they had the run of the place, or, as his uncle put it, “The responsibility of making sure these people didn't lose everything they owned.” This meant that, true to Jimmy's prediction, he was frequently working alone in people's homes.

The first place must have belonged to some waitress. There were restaurant uniforms scattered about and some cheap furniture, nothing much. Jimmy found her stash of bad weed in the kitchen and kept it for himself. The next place was a student’s; nothing there but an expensive looking tablet that had not been damaged by the water yet. That went into a plastic shopping bag, never to be seen again by its owner. The third place was pathetic. There was nothing there: just a bed, some cheap clothing, and a small journal by the bedside. Jimmy opened the now soggy journal and flipped through it, hoping to catch some small chuckle off it.

He got a lot more than a small chuckle.

What John had experienced when he opened The Book was a carefully planned introduction: a well-organized effort to open a mind and plant a seed without damaging or hurting the often fragile and delicate human psyche. What Jimmy experienced was a series of water logged pages whose ink had started to run and blur. These patterns were very little like their original form and lacked any kind of intent or kindness to the reader. Then, there is also the basic difference between Jimmy and John. Moral differences aside, Jimmy had a long history of drug abuse, aberrant behavior, and he was arguably a psychopath, whereas John just had poor self esteem and a bad case of depression. Next to Jimmy, he was the picture of mental health. The result was predictable.

The pain started behind his eyes and quickly spread through his head, like ants happily marching to a Disney tune. It was unbearable and beat the worst pain he had ever felt by a mile. He dropped the book and screamed, trying to claw the pain out of his head. Removing large sections of hair and scalp in the process. When that failed, he started throwing up: something primal in him wanted to reject what he had seen, at any cost. When that failed, he threw his head back and screamed till only his voice filled his head and everything else was lost in a dull roar.

When he finally opened his eyes again, he realized that the dull roar had been the outside wall of the apartment being blasted outward in a fiery expression of his pain. Jimmy looked out over a part of town he was still getting to know and suddenly knew he was a fire god. He felt the heat in his veins and the hot power with every breath.

“What the hell happened? Are you all right?”

Jimmy turned to see his stunned uncle standing in the doorway, pale and shaken from not only the shock of the explosion but from the sight of Jimmy standing bloody and calm in front of what was once a wall but was now an expansive view of the city’s northside. His uncle had always irritated Jimmy, but now he looked small, weak, and worthless.

“Fuck you.” As he spoke, he felt himself will the fire into his uncle. It was easy, easier than speaking the words. The result was satisfying. His uncle clutched his chest and struggled briefly before blood and steam erupted from his nose, ears, and mouth. He fell to the floor, convulsing and trying to scream through his own boiling blood.

Chapter 20

Uptown and the North Side of Chicago are by no means quiet and peaceful. The area didn't have the reputation that the south side did. It was still rough though. The area had gone through a brief and hearty attempt at gentrification, but when the economy turned bad, the area regained its gritty edge with a vengeance. Don't think that there were muggings and rapes in every alley; no city is that serious. The real story was the vast diversity of the people that lived there, not just in an ethnic sense but also in an economic sense.

BMWs parked next to cars that were a few pounds of rust held together by paint. Condos with million dollar views of the lake and the city shared the same street as halfway homes. Facilities for the mentally ill and homeless sat next door to restaurants known for their eighty dollar steaks. People will tell you that every city is like that, but not every city is the same, and no city is like Chicago.

So residents of Chicago’s north side were used to police sirens and helicopters. There was the occasional fire in a high rise, and every so often a pipe burst in winter and froze rich and poor to the pavement together. Normally, sirens and helicopters just signaled to the local population to watch the evening news. This time, there were explosions. Gang members used the better part of judgment and got off the streets. Average, everyday people tuned to the local news or asked each other what was going on. Those who were better off oddly shared the same instinct as the gang members they loathed . . . and simply hid away and waited for things to quiet down. Because, say what you want about that part of the world, it is not every day there are explosions and burning bodies in the alleys. That only happened in distant lands in front of news cameras, not here, never here.

Owen and John had a very different reaction, though. True, they shared the dread and fear that others did and they hoped no one else got hurt, but as they sat in the shop and watched the news on TV, both of them felt connected. It was too crazy and too close to home for their liking, and both suspected that someone was doing evil things with magic.

“You had better go home.” Owen used one cigarette to light another. “See what you can see.”

“The cops are all over my building. You saw the news.”

“Don't go in your building; don't admit you live there, just wander past. It's amazing what you can learn from news crews and bystanders at a crime scene. Just don't get photographed; they take pictures of the crowd sometimes.” Owen was pretty sure this was John’s fault. There were too many connections to ignore. He just wasn't sure how yet.

“I'll be careful.”

John feared someone had found The Book. He also wasn't happy about the fact that he couldn't talk to Owen about it, no matter how many times he tried.

Chapter 21

John stood at the Bryn Mawr L stop, looking at his building. Looking almost directly into his apartment as people in white suits and wearing masks and goggles wandered through his stuff and searched with assorted gear he didn't recognize. He guessed they were looking for explosives or traces of chemicals. What they would never find was what John saw in the building’s pattern and the patterns around it. Even from the L stop, he could see that something bad had happened. The normally orderly pattern of the building’s wall had not only been blasted out but looked like it had been unraveled. Parts of the pattern extended out into open space and just halted or were tangled with patterns and threads around the building. One poor pigeon that must have been caught in the blast was fused to the outside of the building and not quite dead yet. He hoped the people searching his apartment wouldn't find it because it just screamed urban legend to him.

The disruption in the patterns was so severe that he was able to track them out the hole that was his apartment wall, down to the rooftop of the neighboring building, then rooftop to rooftop, as the trail headed further north towards the Loyola campus. It was worse than the sloppy magic he had done on his first attempts; someone was destroying patterns. Was that possible? The destruction left a visible trail, as the world quickly tried to fill the void left by them. The chaos was astounding to John, who had come to respect and enjoy the idea and visuals of an ordered universe.

As he tried to make sense of it, the thunderous roar of another explosion rolled across the landscape and smoke leaped into the sky. It was somewhere further north, and as John was trying to see where, he spotted a dark figure sailing through the air, leaving a trail of ripped patterns behind it.

It was a human figure, but its patterns were all wrong. There were too many threads bisecting places that were normally gentle curves, and there were flashes of a fiery pattern that wandered throughout, leaving behind damaged and altered shapes. The most troubling part, though, was that the light inside was flickering and smooth. The normally angular light that seemed to lock and hold everything together in living objects was disfigured and unraveling. As the figure got closer, John could see the man was in pain. He came down for a landing in an alley and fell, stumbled, and launched himself into the air again. He dropped something in the alley though. Its pattern was damaged, but John was afraid he knew what it was.

He ran down the stairs and across the street, through traffic, ignoring the blare of horns and people yelling. He had to hurry; he didn't know who else saw the man leaping through the air or who might have seen him in the alley. It was a mixed blessing that almost everyone was hidden away from this very maniac. There was no one to report a flying killer, and there was no one to point the direction for the police. Time was of the essence in getting what he dropped. No matter how few people were out, things still vanished in alleys. His heart raced and his feet thundered on the pavement as he turned the corner into the alley. It had seemed so much closer from his vantage point on the L platform.

There, in the street, lay his journal, burnt around the edges and still damp from the flood waters and, in some places, blood. John opened it briefly and flipped through the pages. The patterns were ruined by water; the ink had run, causing them to disfigure and distort. Only the briefest of glances caused John’s head to spin and his eyes to hurt. This was quickly followed by a sense of shame and guilt. This was his fault, and people were dead. He shoved the wrinkled notebook into his coat and ran as fast he could back to the L stop and perhaps the last remaining payphone in Chicago.

Chapter 22

Owen wanted to kill the kid.

He had never been as angry in his life as he was the moment that John said it was his “journal” that had started all the commotion. He paced the full length of his apartment several times, cursing himself for taking the kid on as a student. He wished he had been cold and heartless enough to let him wander off and get himself killed or sanctioned. Now, as his teacher, he was responsible for him, and in the long run, responsible for making sure this mess got cleaned up. It was going to attract attention and make trouble that Owen didn’t want or need. He calmed down and cleared his head by smoking a cigarette; there was no point in making the situation worse. They could deal with the fallout later, but right now they had to solve the problem before it got worse.

He went down the back staircase to the basement of the building. It was his warehouse and held shelves full of items gained through the pawn shop. Some of them were useless, and of no value, others were rare and could fetch a hefty sum from the right buyer. Little of it really meant anything to Owen. He walked past it all, to a spot in the corner. Without a word or gesture, he traced a pattern in his mind and a section of the wall faded away, revealing a large safe door. He spun the combination lock a couple of times, and it opened with a satisfying click.

The safe was about the size of a large refrigerator and was compartmentalized, so there were a variety of storage spaces within. There was a long tall section, out of which Owen pulled two shotguns. From a small drawer, he pulled out a pair of pistols. There were rings, books (some ancient some new), loose gems, and gold coins. The most valuable thing in the safe, though, was the gold tablet. It was thin, too light to be actual gold. There was writing on both sides, and along one edge it appeared to have been melted, as if removed from something—an idea that scared Owen because the tablet was impervious to any magic he knew and he prided himself on knowing a lot. Whoever had made it had done so using knowledge long lost and that meant it dated back to the so called “golden age.”

Owen closed the safe and resealed the cement. He took the guns to his workbench and set about cleaning them. A line from Sun Tzu's ‘Art of War’ came back to him; “Weapons are tools of ill omen.” It echoed the truth in Owen’s own mind that nothing good came of weapons. He saw them as the refinement of man’s greed and stupidity and was angered that he now had to take them up, to right a wrong done by his student.

“Owen?” John’s voice came in a muffled shout from the back room upstairs.

“I'm in the basement.” Owen heard his father’s tone in his voice. That flat emotionless statement of fact that only hinted at anger with its sharp clipped edges. John knew things were serious, but as he approached Owen, smelled the gun oil, and saw the guns laid out, he tried to deny the facts.

“Owen . . .”

“Just what the hell were you thinking?”

John just stood there, lost in his own shame and guilt.

“Keeping something like an attempt at a spell book and leaving it lying around. Do you know how old I am, kid?”

“No, sir.”

“Damn older than you're ever likely to be. I got old by being careful and smart. So far, you've been neither. I took you on as a student because I felt bad for you. I didn't want you to get yourself killed or hurt someone else. Then guess fucking what? You pull this shit, and now we HAVE to kill someone.” Owen paused to calm down. “Have you ever forgotten a pattern?”

“No, sir.”

“Do ever have a hard time knowing which one does what?”

“No, s—.”

“Then why the hell did you pick up your crayons and make a spell book!?!?” Owen’s voice boomed through the building and John’s head.

“It felt significant. I wanted to preserve it.” John felt tiny and weak, worse than when Barb had left him. “It's the first serious thing I've ever done with my life. I wanted to preserve it.”

“Kid . . .” Owen wanted to soften. He understood: the world was big and cruel, and magic made you feel like the tables could be turned. He handed John a pistol.

“We have to kill him?” John hefted the pistol and was terrified at how natural it was in his hand.

“Yes.”

“I don't know if I can.”

“Look, kid. I'm gonna cut through all the crap about this being your fault and get to the point. You can stand here now and be all moral and self-righteous about not killing and sleep well tonight, knowing you won't have to. In the morning, though, you are gonna have to hear about how this idiot killed people all night long, people with families. You can either do something about it now or after people are dead.” Owen held out a clip for the pistol. John hesitated, but took it. “Do you know how to use that thing?” Owen asked.

“No.”

“Damn, kid. Am I gonna have to teach you everything?”