Modern Pantheon: Ghost

by Grayson Barrett

  Chapter 18

  There are three things in the world that I know I can count on. My focus ring is one of them. Since that was lying in some cranny up in a random skyway above the streets of Minneapolis, it wasn’t much help.

  My wards ranked as number two on the list. That is, the series of protective spells I’d put around my triplex apartment.

  Attacking a mage on his home turf is essentially the equivalent of suicide – breaking into that same mage’s home isn’t much easier. At least, not without him or her sending a cascade of pre-programmed spells your way.

  Burning a mage’s house down, however, works like a charm.

  I rounded the corner of the block and fell into a stunned daze. Smoke wafted heavily into the air, visible from a mile away like a menacing black tower. It couldn’t be my house, I figured. I pulled in behind one of the two fire engines parked across the street. Stepping out of the car, my paperclip focus wrapped tightly around my finger, I strode toward the police barrier. The whole neighborhood had gathered around. A few even parted as I strode on through. Some I recognized. Others recognized the grim expression on my face and stepped aside.

  The bastard burned down my house.

  “Sir,” I distantly heard a fit man in a blue-black outfit call out to me as I stepped past the barrier. “Sir, get behind the barrier.”

  When he put his hand on my bicep, I shrugged him off as I looked at the still smoldering ruins.

  Empty windows hung on the fragile, front wall. Through the black void of smoke, I saw a few burning shingles. That was all that remained of the roof. The two units connected to mine were completely indistinguishable now from the wreckage of my own place. Only yesterday they’d been three, entirely distinct places. Each porch had its own separate railings around it – mine with its faded paint and disrepair, my landlady’s with her perfectly garnished metal ones, and the woman in the middle with her picket fence-like designs. Now, they were the same.

  Ruins.

  The musky smell of burnt wood was laced with a tangy chemical smell. I stared, my mind in a daze.

  “I live here,” I said.

  “You do?” the man, who I recognized as a cop through my hazy disbelief, said. “Which unit?”

  “One on the right.”

  His grip tightened. “Fire started there. It started fast. Come with me. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  I brought a spell to mind. Taking off my ring and holding it firmly in my hand, I felt it immediately tug toward the ruins. Magnetism wasn’t my specialty, but I’ve pulled this off hundreds of times on a smaller scale. Increasing the pull between my ring and the target inside, I felt my hand budge toward the ruins. Glowering at the wreckage, I rethought my approach.

  I wasn’t sure if I pulled my arm out of the cops grip, or if he let me go. Frankly, in my angered state of mind, it didn’t matter. I slipped the paperclip ring off my middle finger and set it against the side of the truck opposite the house. Then, I increased the power of the spell up by a hundred or times.

  The paperclip dented perhaps a quarter of an inch into the side of the truck, but from the side of the wrecked house; my wrecked house, a thin staff of wood emerged. Flinging out of the wreckage, the staff speared into the door on the opposite side. Blackened ash and drywall sprayed over the narrow lawn, and even out to the cracked sidewalk as the staff pummeled through the blackened wall. The bulk of my house collapsed outward with a reverberating crack.

  The cop beside me forgot what he was doing and ducked in surprise, hiding his head behind his arm. I canceled the spell between my ring and the staff. After letting the paperclip ring drop gently into my hand, I strode around the truck to collect my mage’s staff.

  This was the third thing I could count on. While it had charred wood on the outside, the inside it was pure steel. The focus was layered with over a dozen different spells, and as in tune with me as a sharpshooter is to his favorite rifle. The wood quivered beneath my palm, waiting. Yearning to find the man who encased it in the inferno.

  “Sir!” the cop regained his nerve as swiftly as he lost it and turned toward me. I was done playing by Imperium rules – hell; I was done play by anyone’s rules. I’d been framed. Stripped. Made to run like a doe from a tornado. And that was the stuff I could deal with.

  But this...

  My house may have been a rundown shack in the beaten-down side of town, but damn-it, it was my rundown shack, and they had no right to burn it down. And what of the neighbors? What of Ms. Klein? Was she still alive? They had no right at all.

  And not only my house, but my laptop, which contained a small library of research. My spellbooks. My notes. The only picture I had of my real mother. Everything. Gone. Burned to the ground.

  With a gentle flick of my staff, the cop stumbled away as he made a step in my direction. Having what I needed, I didn’t linger. Without a word, I strode past the barrier in the same way I came. The crowd parted as I walked.

  I noticed that I’d never shut the car door, let alone taken out the keys to Cameron’s Mercedes. Setting my staff, my only remaining possession, into the passenger seat, I slammed the door closed and drove off.