Inherited Magic (8 page)

Chapter 27

It is a testament to the civilized order of things that few of us know what it is like to stalk through the dark, cradling a weapon and trying to kill before we are killed. It is unfortunate, though, that this civil order is paper thin and depends on everyone agreeing on it. Nor should it be surprising when someone breaks the rules and people set about hunting each other; police hunting after gangs, criminals chasing after each other and everyone else. You will get no end of “why” in court and “why” from sociologists, professional and otherwise. The main thing is that we are all convinced we are the good guy in the movie and that the credits are about to roll for someone else, but never for us. The lie seems childish, till you think about the possibility that you are wrong—that you are the bad guy and today your story will end and the credits will roll, a truth that is difficult to face. So we lie to ourselves and turn away, even under the most dire of circumstances, lest we be paralyzed. The world will go on without us; in truth, it will not even skip a beat. It was this fear that crept into John as he followed Owen into the darkened factory with his shotgun clumsily held at the ready.

Every shadow seemed to hide menace and he feared the sound of his breathing was enough to give him away, but John moved on into the shadows. This part of the basement seemed to store older machinery; there were racks and shelves full of motors and parts of various kinds, all covered in a thin layer of dust. One thing there was not was a trail of shattered patterns and twisted webs of chaos. He thought this might be an unwelcome sign. He wanted to tell Owen but was not so stupid as to break the silence. He consoled himself that Owen probably knew and already had a plan.

Owen, on the other hand, was trying to figure out what the hell to do. Despite what John thought, he had no plan or even a remote idea of how to search a vast factory. He wanted to resort to magic, but all the ways of finding a pattern that he knew would lead right back to him. Just because this guy was using twisted magic and seemed to be half crazy didn't mean that he was stupid. The fact that he had figured out how to unravel patterns showed he might, in fact, be smart as hell. Owen was not about to take any chances; he had not gotten old by being careless.

They stalked through rooms of salt bags, pallets stacked in racks, machinery sitting silent; it was a stark and cold landscape of shadows and industry. Owen cursed the cleaning crew for being so efficient; except for that first store room, there wasn't dust anywhere, and there wasn't a single track or scuff. What Owen didn't know was that the only reason the plant was shut down was for its yearly top to bottom cleaning, which they had just finished, and things would go back to a busy round the clock schedule in the morning.

Time crept by as steadily as the two creeping through the cavernous building. Owen was becoming worried about getting caught by the morning shift as much as he was by the killer, because, with every step, he was more certain that the killer was somewhere else. It would fit with everything neatly going wrong and straight to hell. The last thing he needed was to try to nail this guy in broad daylight with news helicopters, police, and everybody watching. His doubt was cut down in midstride, though, when he heard faint and distant snoring. He turned to John, who nodded. He had heard it too.

They moved more slowly, trying to be quieter than they already were, and each tried to banish their reservations about murder.

Chapter 28

Jimmy had no idea what was happening to him. He had felt like a god after looking at that screwed up book. He had hoped there were answers in it, but he had lost it. He had stopped to kill that ass clown that owed him a couple hundred, which must have been when he dropped it. Oh, well, so much for that. It was starting to worry Jimmy though; he wasn't feeling right, not sick or anything. Just not right, like parts of him were vanishing and not coming back. He wasn't sure if he was losing his mind, selling his soul, or on a terrifically awful acid trip while he was trapped in his closet.

All he knew for sure was that he was a killing machine and could finally do whatever he wanted, to whomever he wanted. So there were scores to settle and debts to “pay off,” all over town. Even though he had only been in town a short time, it was shocking the number of people that he could think of who had done him wrong or at least deserved to burn for one reason or another. Except for that kid. He almost felt guilty about killing that kid. He had been choking this guy to death while slowly cooking his guts (that never got old), when out of nowhere, this kid runs into the room with a fucking shotgun! The damned gun was bigger than the kid, and it scared the shit out of Jimmy. The kid started yelling at him to stop hurting his daddy and blasting away in every direction with the shotgun. Well, he wasn't about to stand there and get shot. Who would? Still, he felt guilty having killed the kid.

That regret didn't stop him from keeping up his rampage though, nor did it actually dampen his joy at being a god suddenly. It was hard work though, all that killing and flying around. He had thought it would be endless boundless energy, but he did get tired. That got him to thinking: Am I still mortal? He had gotten lucky and not been shot yet and dodging the cops was ridiculously easy now. He was the one controlling the fire, so there was no reason or way for it to burn him. But was he still mortal? Again, he wished he had not lost that damned notebook. You and I can sit here and comfortably make the comment that Jimmy never thought about finding out whose notebook it was, why it was notebook, or why something so powerful was left laying around. This says a great deal about Jimmy's general intelligence, and how much his thinking was being warped by his status as a “god.”

Mortal, immortal, or just downright crazy, a hard day’s killing will wear a guy out (especially if it starts out with lots of booze, drugs, and sex with unconscious girlfriends). He needed a place to hide and Jimmy knew he couldn't just get a hotel room. His common sense as a criminal was intact and had not vanished into madness yet, and on some primal level he knew he had to hide. But where? He had flown over the city and considered options from the mundane to the morbid. He had never forgotten a crazy fucker in jail that told him about the “Gacy Motel,” where you show up at the door and kill everyone so you can sleep in the bed. That was a bit much for Jimmy because he didn't like the idea of hurting kids. Even assholes have limits, even if you can count them on one hand, and abandoned them when they get inconvenient.

So when he saw the Morton Salt Factory, he smiled. He had been offered a job to help out as a temp on the annual cleaning; it had sounded too dirty for the pay to him, so he’d turned it down, but he knew the building was empty. There had to be all kinds of good places to hide in there, and no one was likely look there. It was the perfect place to catch a nap and plan for bigger and better.

Chapter 29

They could see him. At the far end of a wide aisle of pallets stacked high with packaged salt. He sat at a desk in the shipping department, his feet propped up on a box clearly marked “out.” He snored deeply and evenly, with his head back—not the image of a man with a guilty conscience. As they crept closer, John could see the man was disgusting, in every sense. He was covered head to toe in random splatters of blood and body fluids, his face was mangled as if it had been clawed by a wild animal, and there were sections of his scalp that were just bloody and raw. The man’s pattern was falling apart as John looked at it. Not unraveling, it was simply collapsing slowly in places while, in others, it seemed to be burning. Whoever this guy was, he was a horrible sight in every sense of the word and John knew he was dying.

Still, they crept closer, ever so slowly. Owen had decided he wanted to get close enough for a single clean shot to the head. He, too, had seen the state the man was in and was sure he wouldn't be able to wake up in time. He was wrong, of course, because it was at that very moment that Jimmy opened his eyes. The three of them were there. Frozen in that brief instant of “holy fuck,” where there was no doubt, no mistake, about what had to happen next. The only question was who would walk away and who was about to die.

Everyone exploded into action.

Owen blindly fired, hoping for a lucky shot. It wasn't. It missed but destroyed a significant portion of the desk. Jimmy had launched himself straight up into the air and stayed there. John rushed blindly forward, trying to get a clean shot at the now flying Jimmy. It was the start of a cluster fuck.

People see shootouts and gunfights in the movies, and they think that there is some sort of sense and thought that goes on. In the case of seasoned and trained professional soldiers, there is an element of strategy, but they train for years. Between the three of them, there was no actual training, just a lifetime of movie shoot outs and a lot of violent video games.

Jimmy clumsily threw a stream of fire at Owen, who dodged to one side. The flames quickly spread over the racks and pallets. John, who realized he was doing something stupid, fired blindly. It actually startled and upset Jimmy slightly, causing him to move away from Owen, and that was part of the reason he missed. Jimmy switched his attention to John and decided that he genuinely hated him and was done playing, so he set about making the air around him burn. He hadn't tried that yet. Owen was busy trying to see past the growing inferno next to him. John, meanwhile, had a moment of clarity that he would never forget.

He could feel the air around him getting hotter and hotter, well past anything he had ever felt before. This was no oven blast; this was “I now understand the terror of burning alive” and John would have nightmares about this moment for the rest of his life. He fought to bring his shotgun to bear, but it seemed to be moving too slowly; everything did. He saw the patterns and flames wrapping around the man who was about to be his killer. Some distant part of his mind saw the beauty in it, but there was no thought. There couldn't be. It was pure action and reaction. Like it or not, all the players had made their choices ahead of time and set things in motion. Now it was down to a simple question: was John going to shoot before he started trying to breathe flames?

John pulled the trigger and watched his potential killer crumple and fall violently to the ground, crushing what was left of the shipping desk in the process. The air around him cooled quickly, and he could smell burning hair and see that his clothing was burnt in places. He stood there a moment, in shock and terror at what he had done. He felt a hand on his shoulder, gentle and reassuring. Turning, he came face to face with the tribesman, who looked sad but smiled reassuringly before vanishing. These few heartbeats would forever leave a stain on John.

“Did you get him?” Owen yelled past the growing flames.

“Yeah . . . I got him.”

Chapter 30

They could hear sirens as they drove, and at one point, it seemed like every fire truck in the city was racing past them, lights blazing and loaded with adrenaline pumped heroes-in-waiting. Owen had shut off the police scanner and the radio, so there was no way to know how much worse the fire had gotten. It had already been bad when they had started running for the door, and by the time they had pulled away, there was a plume of smoke and fire competing with the city’s skyline. Neither of them spoke. Owen drove while he smoked and John sat in the passenger seat, staring out the window.

They ditched the car in an alley by an L stop and rode the Brown Line the rest of the way to the stop on Western Avenue. As they got off, a Chicago police officer gave them a dirty look from where he was leaning against the wall, sipping coffee. Owen seemed not to care, despite carrying a bag full of evidence and smelling like a burning factory, so John followed his lead and they never got a second look.

Officer Caver knew something was up with those two. Everything in his experience and training told him to stop them and see where it went. Everything except the gentle tick of the clock he heard. He was going to retire soon, leave his wife, and move to Mexico with his mistress. The thought of her brought him to a standstill. Why risk a future with a pretty young thing like that? He watched them go and told his instincts to shut up for once, while he dreamed of warm beaches.

John followed Owen down the stairs, out to the street, down the alley, and through the back door of the shop. It was over, in John’s mind, and as they headed down to the basement, he felt nothing but miserable and tired. He was trying not to think, trying not to face the fact that he had just killed a man and then left his body to burn in an inferno that would no doubt destroy millions of dollars’ worth of property. Even without that thought, the collateral damage from the evening mounted quickly. How many dead before he acted? How many dead because he was foolish? It was hard to get his head around it, hard to face, easier to follow Owen to a blank wall in the corner of the basement. Owen made no attempt to hide the pattern he used or the safe from John. The kid was stupid, but he would never be a thief. John, however, was not paying attention because he was struggling with his guilt.

“Did you fill out your time card for the week?”

The banality of the question shocked John for a moment.

“I said; did you fill out your fucking time card!?”

“Yes, sir.” John could only mutter.

“Good.” Owen opened a bottom drawer in his safe and pulled out three large rubber banded stacks of cash and thrust them at John. “Get lost, and never come back.”

“What . . .”

“Kid, you aren’t lousy at magic, but you are careless and dumb as hell sometimes. Playing Harry-fucking-Potter with your damn color by numbers spell book killed how many people? Burned down a factory endangering how many firefighters? Cost how many people their jobs?” Owen paused to contain himself before lowering his tone. “In the not so old days, you would have been shot for this. As it is, I am going to have hell to pay, but consider yourself lucky to be alive.”

“I—”

“Just shut up, kid.” Owen dropped his guns on the work bench. “This episode of stupidity has more than proven you shouldn't handle this power. So there is the last of your pay, with a generous bonus. Use it. Go away. Find something else to do with your life. Lock the door on the way out and never come back.”

“Owen—”

“Get the hell out, now.” Owen didn't raise his voice, but the gravel in it said it all.

John packed the bills into his pockets, dropped the guns on the work bench, and did as he was told, locking the door on the way out.