Magi Legend

by Andrew Dobell

  But what she noticed next sent a chill racing up and down her spine and all of a sudden she knew who they were.

  A small insignia on one of the shoulders of the men in the shape of a shield with a crucifix on it meant one thing and one thing only—these guys were the Inquisition.

  “Keep still, don’t move!” the men shouted. “You three, secure the rest of the house. Make sure there’s no one else. Go!”

  Jessie listened as several of the men left the room and ran upstairs, she could hear them quite clearly as they moved around above her.

  Jessie cursed to herself; what could she do? She felt helpless and knew she’d be discovered in a matter of moments should just one of the men head towards the small kitchenette.

  As it stood, her friends were beyond help, from her at least. She’d only recently become a Magus and hadn’t progressed beyond the rank of Apprentice yet. Taking on however many Inquisitors, all of them heavily armed, would be suicide. She could surrender herself, she thought, and maybe she’d survive this. Maybe.

  Hell, who was she kidding? This was the Inquisition. She felt reasonably confident that her friends would be dead in a matter of moments.

  No. She needed to get out of here. She needed to find Amanda and warn her that the Inquisition was in town. Looking up, just across from her, the glass patio doors at the back of the house were invitingly close. The key rested there in the lock, waiting to be turned and the doors opened.

  But she couldn’t just walk up to the doors and unlock them. She’d be seen and likely killed.

  Scared and frustrated, she looked around the edge of the Island again and saw her friends, helpless in the clutches of the Knight Inquisitors.

  As she watched, another man, dressed similarly to the others, walked into the house.

  “Report,” the man said.

  “Three Witches apprehended, sir. The rest of the house is being searched.”

  “Our Intel said there were four. Where’s the other one?”

  Jessie shivered. They were talking about her. She needed to get out of here.

  As she watched, she suddenly noticed that Alex was looking in her direction. His face hadn’t moved, but his eyes looked right at her. Suddenly, she felt a faint, gentle presence start to slowly press on her mind. It might have been there for a while, but the casting had been so subtly done that she just hadn’t noticed it. It was Alex, he wanted to create a Mental Link with her, and he’d been careful to make the working as covert as possible to avoid detection. It had worked so far. But had she not seen him looking at her, she wasn’t sure she would have noticed it.

  Jessie opened her mind and allowed Alex to Link with her.

  ~Jess, you have to get out of here,~ Alex told her.

  ~I know, but how?~

  ~I’m going to create a diversion. The moment I do, get out through that door. Keep low and run like hell. Trust no one and find Amanda, they have to know about this.~

  ~But what about you?~ Jessie asked.

  ~Forget about us. Just get ready, okay?~

  Jessie shifted her crouch to one she could move from quickly. ~Ready,~ she said.

  She peeked around the corner once more, wanting to see her friends one last time. She saw the man she assumed to be the leader step forward, pull a gun, and put it to Roxy’s head.

  “Where’s the other one?” the man asked.

  “What other one?” Hayden replied, defiant.

  Jessie felt a sense of pride that her friends were being so strong and standing up to these bullies, but she knew the Inquisition’s reputation, and she knew what was probably about to happen.

  “So, it’s like that, is it?” the man asked. “Well, consider this your final warning.”

  She could see Alex had closed his eyes. He had started to psych himself up for creating a distraction; he knew what it would mean for him.

  The man continued to speak, “I’m going to ask once more, and then I will start redecorating, understood?”

  “Crystal,” Hayden said, as Alex suddenly stood up and with a surge of Magical energy, sent out a shockwave of Kinetic force at the men.

  It caused the Inquisitors to stagger backward, and in one case, fall over.

  The shockwave blasted through the ground floor of the house in a heartbeat. It smashed most of the windows, including the glass in the patio doors that fell out into the garden. Shouts of shock and surprise sounded in the room from the men while gunshots rang out.

  Jessie didn’t look, she just ran for the patio doors as hard and as fast as she could. She slipped through them, cutting her arm on a shard of glass still in the doorframe, but she didn’t stop.

  More shouts and gunfire rang out as the door behind her was shot up in her wake.

  They’d seen her.

  In the garden, she bolted towards the nearby fence. Jumping from a garden chair to a table, she vaulted over the fence. Gunfire from suppressed weapons sounded behind her and peppered the fence as she disappeared over it.

  Located in the heart of suburbia, their home had houses on either side of it and behind it, each with a similar backyard adjacent to theirs.

  She heard shouts and movement behind her, back in their own garden. She sprinted for the next fence at the side of their neighbour’s yard. She glanced back and saw one of the Crusader Knights come into view, no doubt standing on the table that Jessie had used to vault the fence.

  Jessie didn’t think, she just let her Magic flow and do its thing. Following her instincts, she let her Magic show her the best route.

  She adjusted her course and got some cover from the well-maintained bushes and trees in her neighbour’s yard as bullets, fizzling with Magical energy zipped past her, hitting the trees and mud.

  She jumped the next fence and landed in another garden. Jessie veered right as a dog started barking at her. She didn’t hang around. Instead, she vaulted the next few fences and hedgerows before heading to the street.

  She had no time to think. With a glance down the road, she ran to cross diagonally, following her instincts.

  She had a sudden urge to turn left. She did, just as a car turned onto the road behind her, its wheels screeching as it fought for grip. She caught a quick glance at it as she ran, seeing someone lean out of a window and fire their weapon at her. She ducked behind a car sitting in a driveway. She could hear the pfft pfft of the shots before they slammed into the sides of the vehicle with metallic bangs.

  She didn’t stop for long though. Running down the side of a house she started leaping fences again.

  Jessie kept to her strange route through the streets of Brooklyn for as long as she could but didn’t see any more of the Inquisition.

  As soon as she could, she hailed a taxi and took it into Manhattan, heading for The Jade Palace and hopefully some protection.

  ***

  Amanda appeared beneath a tree in Brooklyn just opposite the house Jessie had fled a couple of hours before. Amanda had been at her townhouse when the call from Stella at The Jade Palace had come in, saying that one of the new Magi in the city had come to The Palace in a state of shock and that Amanda should come down to see her.

  Jessie had been upset, but not as distraught as Amanda had feared, given the situation. She’d sat and listened and comforted Jessie, taking in everything the young Magi said. Amanda had remained calm and had done her best to be supportive and yet measured in her responses. Afterwards, Amanda made sure Jessie was taken care of, before undertaking her own investigation. Her first order of business—checking out the house where the coven had been attacked.

  Looking at it now, on the quiet street with no one about, it seemed fairly innocuous, apart from a few blown-out windows on the ground floor.

  Using the local Essentia, she Ported over the road and appeared on their front porch. Examining the front door, she could clearly see it had been forced open and would not close anymore.

  Pushing the ruined door open, she walked inside and into the open-plan living area. Slightly off to her right
, close to the front of the house were several pools of blood, no doubt where the rest of Jessie’s coven had been killed.

  Ahead, at the rear of the house was the kitchen and the shattered patio doors just next to it. The whole room looked a mess with broken glass and furniture scattered about, while bullet holes perforated the walls everywhere she looked.

  The bodies of Jessie’s coven were missing, but Amanda knew the Inquisition well enough by now to know that they usually disposed of the bodies themselves, usually through cremation. The cleansing fire purged the Magus of the demon within, or so they believed.

  Concentrating, she pulled on the threads of Essentia once more and cast her mind back through time to watch the attack take place.

  Partway through, she paused the action and sent her senses around the building to count up the number of men who had been here. She wanted to know the size of the problem.

  She counted nineteen men, in total, both in and outside of the house. As she watched the rest of the confrontation play out, she felt fairly sure that none of the men in this group were Magi. They all seemed to be Initiated but they carried Magical items that would allow them to take on Magi such as Jessie and her coven mates, especially when they were caught by surprise. As they left with the dead bodies of Jessie’s coven, an Aegis sprang up around their van, blocking it from Amanda’s Scrying Magic so she couldn’t follow it back to their base.

  Amanda scowled. She’d come to hate the Inquisition early on when one of their number, someone she later learned was called Mary Damask, had killed Liz’s sister, Francesca and Fran’s boyfriend, Stephen. They had hunted down that Magical Gold Book with a single-minded determination that had been scary to see. She’d also since learned that a different Inquisitor had interviewed and tortured some of her old friends from New York to find out more about her.

  She had foiled Mary Damask’s plans for the Gold Book that day, and although Mary had fled the scene, she felt sure that she might one day try to exact her revenge. Given that her presence here in New York had been made common knowledge and with Lucian’s death making New York a place of interest, she felt reasonably confident that it was only a matter of time before Mary showed up.

  Was this raid the start of it?

  Finishing her sweep of the house and satisfied she’d seen everything, Amanda walked out into the back garden through the patio door.

  As she stepped outside and ruminated on her previous run-ins with the Inquisitors, she thought back to her beginnings and the attack in the alleyway. She’d never been back there, she realised, and the urge to see it again grew inside her.

  Amanda Ported from Brooklyn to a familiar alleyway in one of Manhattan’s red-light districts. In the darkness of the alley, flashes of memory came back. She’d been walking past here on her way to the shop at the end of the road. She’d been grabbed and thrown down the length of the alley. Rolling through dirt and puddles, she’d ended up covered in scratches. She remembered the terror she’d felt like a visceral thing, as the Demon had stood over her, readying itself to kill her.

  Some Magi are introduced to Magic and monsters gradually and with time to take it in. Amanda had been thrown into that world without warning.

  Walking down the alleyway, she arrived at the scene of the attack and of her Epiphany when she first used Magic.

  The alley widened, and Amanda came to a stop next to where Stuart, her protector while she worked the streets, had died. Punched by the twelve-foot-tall, hideously powerful Scion, he’d been pulverised and buried beneath crumbling brick. Amanda looked at the rebuilt section of wall and ground where Stuart had died, its colouring different from the brickwork and concrete surrounding it. She wished she could have saved him; Stuart had been a good man and didn’t deserve to die in such a horrible way.

  She turned and looked at the burn mark on the opposite wall where she’d blasted Horlack with an outpouring of raw Magical energy, and remembered the intense gut-wrenching terror she’d felt that night.

  Seeing that electrical energy shoot from her arms had been both a miracle and, at the time, scary as all hell. But she’d destroyed Horlack, vaporising him into nothing.

  “You alright there, little lady?” a fragile voice asked from behind her.

  She turned and looked at the bearded face of a homeless man sitting amongst the rubbish piled up between two dumpsters. He’d made a little den for himself and peered out from it, looking curiously at Amanda, no doubt wondering what a young girl like her might be doing wandering an alleyway at night. “Hmmm?” she answered him.

  “Are you okay? You look lost,” he said.

  She smiled. “No, I’m not lost. I’m just… remembering a few things.”

  “Well, creepy alleyways are no place for pretty girls like yourself.”

  She could see he had no connection to Essentia. He was a typical Riven mortal and no real threat to her. “Thank you,” she said and walked over to him.

  He looked scared as she approached as if he expected her to attack him or something. Instead, she scanned his mind telepathically and quickly knew that he was just down on his luck. He wasn’t a threat to anyone and just needed a helping hand to turn his life around.

  Working a bit of Magic in her jacket pocket, she conjured a suitably large roll of cash into her hand. “Peter, is it?” she said.

  “Uh, yeah, how did you know?”

  “I’m your guardian angel, and I’m here to help you.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Amanda pulled out the roll of cash and offered it to him.

  “This is a joke, right? This is a joke. I can’t take that.” he stammered.

  “It’s yours. Here, take it.”

  Gingerly, Peter reached out and offered his hand, into which Amanda dropped the roll of money. “What’s the catch?” he asked, staring at the cash.

  “Just promise me you’ll go to the bank, deposit the money and start to get yourself sorted,” she said.

  “Oh, I promise. I will.”

  “You’d better. I’ll check on you tomorrow, and if you’ve started to sort yourself out, I’ll double it with another deposit into your account,” she said, smiling. “Deal?”

  “Deal!”

  She smiled at him once more, and in full view, Ported away with an extra flash of light for the man’s benefit, leaving him aghast.

  Amanda appeared in the basement garage of her brownstone in Greenwich Village with a soft pop of air.

  She really did hope that Peter sorted himself out.

  But there were other more pressing matters for her to deal with. First, she needed to speak with Shaun.

  She approached a frosted glass door to one side of her basement, passing her custom Fireblade Motorbike and a couple of cars they kept down here. The room beyond these modern glass doors had been created by Amanda only a few months ago to Shaun’s specifications. She stepped inside to the hum of computers and servers working away in this pristine space, the door swinging silently shut behind her.

  To her left, several cabinets held more computer power than most spy organisations had, while to her right, the wall had been covered in banks of monitors, below which sat several workstations where Vanessa sat in her large, comfortable-looking leather office chair.

  At the back of the room, opposite Amanda, Shaun sat facing her behind his desk, engrossed in something on his trio of screens. She couldn’t see his face, only the top of his head, distinguished by the ridge of bone that ran over the top of it.

  “Hi, Mandy, how’re things?” Vanessa asked. Both Shaun and Vanessa had expressed stipulations about joining her coven. The main one for Vanessa had been to deal with a criminal gang that wanted her dead because of some hacking she’d done before she’d ever met Shaun. Amanda had managed to call off the group, meaning Vanessa could walk the streets safely once more.

  “Hiya, I’m grand, thanks. Although things out there are becoming a little troubling,” she said, waving her hand absently towards the street.

  “What’
s up now?”

  “The Inquisition is in town and they’re not playing nice.” She noticed Shaun’s head pop up from behind his monitors. He looked like the classic Nosferatu Vampire with his white skin, sharp teeth, and talons. She’d procured him a Magical item though, that when activated would hide his appearance, but he wasn’t using it right now.

  “The Inquisition?” he asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, shit, that didn’t take them long.”

  “No, it didn’t, but I suspect it might be personal,” Amanda confessed.

  “Really?” Shaun asked, his curiosity piqued. “And what makes you say that?”

  “I fought… well, we fought them a couple of years back, killed a couple of their men, and stopped them from getting their hands on an artifact.”

  “That would do it. Who did you piss off?”

  “A woman by the name of Mary Damask apparently, she’s the only…”

  “…the only female member of the Conclave of Grand Inquisitors,” Shaun finished for her, “Yeah, I know who she is. Her reputation is well known. She’s out to prove herself and to prove her dedication to their cause. Rose through the ranks very quickly and some tip her to be the next Witch Finder General. Certainly, her ambition alone could get her there.”

  “Feckin’ excellent,” Amanda said. “I always get the bat-shit crazy ones.”

  “So, what’s happened?”

  Amanda related the story of Jessie’s encounter with the Crusaders and of her subsequent visit to the house. “So, can you look into it? Try and find them?”

  “Won’t be easy. The Inquisitors are good at this. It might be that they find you first.”

  “Then, I’ll be ready,” Amanda said. “I wouldn’t want to disappoint them.”

  - Nowhere

  Alicia sat naked, leaning up against the vertical steel girder she’d been left bound to, in what looked like a warehouse. How did she get here? Her memory was all fuzzy and she had trouble making sense of anything.