The Magic Within: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Found Magic Book 2)

by J. A. Cipriano

  “Why not?” I shrugged. “What’s the alternative? Go find an orphanage and let the flit take over children one by one?”

  “Now you’re speaking my language,” Donovan replied, smirking at me in a way that made me wish he was corporeal so I could smack him. “But maybe you should set it on fire first.”

  “Why? So there’d be no chance of escape?” I asked before I could stop myself.

  “Well you know how they spell orphan, right?” Donovan sang in my ear, and the sound of it made me shiver.

  “O is for obliterating everyone inside.

  And R is for rockets to get those that hide.

  P is for plutonium, enriched of course.

  Because H is for hitting with unnecessary force,

  A is for artillery to pick off ones left behind.

  While N is for not forgetting the exit is mined.”

  It didn’t take long for me to find the motel despite the lines from his horrible song ringing in my ears over and over again. The place was so ordinary looking I probably wouldn’t have noticed it if I wasn’t looking for it specifically, which was probably the idea. The big sign in front was missing a whole bunch of letters so, even though I was pretty sure it was supposed to advertise rates, it didn’t really say anything intelligible.

  Even still, I approached the fading blue hotel and made my way toward the elevators, careful not to look up and be identified by wandering cameras, even though the idea of surveillance in a place like this was laughable at best.

  Then again, maybe that was the idea. Maybe it was supposed to look like a place no one would want to enter. If it looked nice, there might be random customers…

  “I remember this one time there was this Asian restaurant by where I used to live. The whole time I lived there, I never saw a single person eat there,” Donovan said, glancing around the narrow hallway with peeling yellow wallpaper. “I think it was a front for some drug dealers. I always meant to go back and check it out, but well, someone shot me in the face.”

  “Yeah… That happens to people sometimes…” I mumbled, stepping in front of a pair of elevators and pressing the up button. It lit up for a second before winking out.

  “I know, right? Who shoots people in the face for no reason,” Donovan said, running one finger along the bullet hole before peering at his finger. “No open casket funeral for me. What will my cats think?”

  “You have cats?” I asked as the elevator doors opened to reveal a wood-paneled room filled with the smell of damp laundry and old cigarettes.

  “Do I seem like a cat person?” He smiled at me in a way that made me wonder if he actually did have an apartment full of kitties.

  “I don’t know what to believe anymore,” I said as I rubbed my face with one hand and stepped inside the elevator, careful to stare at my feet. I had the hood of the stolen uniform up, but I wasn’t exactly confident of it keeping my features secret. If this was a spy base, wouldn’t they have crazy spells that could identify you through smell? I thought about asking Donovan, but that might make him feel helpful and decide to haunt me for even longer.

  I stared at the keypad for way longer than I should have before pressing the buttons for four, twelve, and six. The elevator doors shut with a hiss of compressed air and lurched sideways, throwing me off my feet. I smacked against the wall and stars shot across my eyes as I slumped to the ground.

  Before I could get up, the doors slid open to reveal a small chrome room. There was no one inside, which seemed a little odd, but maybe that room was wired with explosives to keep untoward visitors out? Still, what if someone had accidentally pressed the buttons in the order I’d pressed them…

  “Step out and place your hand on the scanner for identification,” a robotic voice intoned from somewhere above my head. I fought the urge to look for a speaker, but I didn’t. What if it was a trick to get me to look at a camera? Well, I wasn’t going to be that easy to identify. You had to get up pretty early in the morning to fool this little black duck…

  I shook my head and scrambled to my feet. Just outside the door, a panel in the shape of a splayed hand glowed with eerie green light. I took a step toward it, looking around as much as I could. What if my hair fell out, and they identified me? Sigh. I really should have dyed it again, but I didn’t exactly have time to run into a convenience store and get hair dye, let alone actually color it.

  The elevator doors behind me shut with a whoosh, leaving me trapped in the tiny metal room. Awesome. Why hadn’t the guy with the eyepatch told me what to do now? Was I just supposed to stick my hand on the glowing pad and wish for the best?

  “Agent, please remove your glove and place your hand on the scanner, or we will have to begin the intruder protocol.” The voice intoned, though it sort of sounded bored.

  I wasn’t quite sure what the intruder protocol was, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like it. I sighed, not sure what to do, when a thought struck me. They didn’t actually want me dead… right?

  I consoled myself with that thought as I jerked the leather glove off my right hand and looked at it for a long moment before placing my palm against the panel. Warm light flowed out over my hand and LEDs above me began to strobe all different colors. It would have been cool looking if my nerves weren’t so tightly wound together I was sure I’d explode like an over-stressed spring.

  “Identity confirmed. Abigail de la Mancha.” The panel beeped and turned to a shade of soft pink.

  “I can’t believe that worked,” Donovan said, rubbing his chin with one slender hand. “The agency must really be slipping.”

  “Yeah… well—” I started to say before the floor beneath my feet opened up, and I fell to my doom.

  6

  “We wondered if you would show up here,” the agent with the huge, ridiculous smile on his face said. He wasn’t very tall, standing maybe five and a half feet and had short buzzed blond hair. He leaned forward on the metal table with his elbows. It made the cuffs of his cheap black button-up fall down to reveal wrists the color of milk. “Agent Phillips told us about your ‘interrogation’ but we didn’t think you’d actually come here. We didn’t think you were that dumb.”

  “Glad to prove you wrong,” I replied, looking down at my hands. They were bolted to the table so I couldn’t move my wrists. My feet were no better. My ankles were shackled to the chair I was in, which was, in turn, welded to the floor. There wasn’t anything else in the solid steel room. At least, nothing I could use to escape, or better yet, as a weapon.

  In fact, if I hadn’t seen the agent enter through a door, I wouldn’t have even known there was one. It had opened and closed like a magical portal in the wall, leaving no trace that it had ever been there.

  “What’s your play, exactly, Abby?” he asked, bushy blond eyebrows snaking up on his face. “We’ve tried to get you to come in for the last several weeks, and you just stroll in here? What gives?”

  “You guys killed Stephen.” The words sort of tumbled out of me before I could stop them. “You sent a killer demon after me, one that made it so I had to beat up an eight-year-old girl…”

  “So you’re here for revenge? To stop us? What exactly?” He shrugged and stood up, his own chair scraping across the metal floor. “Explain how coming here works in your twisted little brain.” He gestured at me. “You’re sitting there in your bra and panties. You have no weapons. You have no way out. Even if you tried something, this room would fill with gas and knock you out before you could even blink.”

  “The play is simple,” I said, looking up at him and smiling sweetly. “I don’t need to blink.”

  The restraints holding me in place opened, releasing me. The man backpedaled, a look of horror filling his face as he stumbled backward over his chair. He hit the ground with a clatter that reminded me of someone dropping a platter at a restaurant.

  I stood slowly, my pink hair draped over the front of my face and took a step toward him. He crawled backward on his hands, which was a little crazy because h
e was supposed to be a trained agent, right? Weren’t they all bad asses?

  “If you’re waiting for the gas, well, let’s just say it isn’t happening.” I dropped down next to the agent and grabbed him by his collar, pulling him up toward me.

  “How?” he asked, eyes wide in fright.

  I jerked his keycard from his belt. “Don’t worry, no one actually knows I’m here. See, when I abducted Phillips, I actually took a bunch of his biometrics and implanted them in a chip in my palm. I added some code to, well, put me in isolation and delete the record of it.” I tapped my head. “Remember, I have lots of skills up here.”

  “You mean…” he swallowed as I swiped his card on the door. It opened with a hiss. “You chose me? Why?”

  “I didn’t choose you. I just told the system to send the most junior analyst who had access to the files I wanted to see.” I exited the room and stepped into the empty hallway. “Congratulations, it’s your lucky day.” The door slid shut, locking him inside. “You’re officially important enough.”

  To be fair, it had been a little more complicated than that, and technically, Stephen had come up with the idea. We’d just needed a little biometric information to get the ball rolling since no one was going to be letting him inside.

  “You think you’re so clever, don’t you?” Donovan asked, eyes roaming over my mostly naked body. “And I like the new look, very— down-on-her-luck hooker.”

  “I am clever,” I growled at the ghost as I pulled open the door to the next interrogation room. Sitting inside was a cart full of supplies. Ah, the joys of government drones who follow orders no matter how absurd.

  A few minutes later, I was dressed in clothing that fit and armed with a machine gun and a taser. As I looked around the tiny room, I barely resisted the urge to spout off a snappy one-liner. Who would hear it anyway? The ghost? Pass.

  “You know they’re going to kill that analyst right?” Donovan asked as I moved toward one of the terminals and swiped the guy’s card. “He probably has a wife and kids, or maybe a cat…”

  “Not my problem,” I replied, ignoring the guilt tickling the back of my neck that told me Donovan was right. I wasn’t sure why I cared since the agent worked for the agency trying to kill me… but I did.

  “That’s my girl,” Donovan said, sitting down on the desk and leaning back on his hands as I surfed through the files until I found what I was looking for. I wasn’t quite sure how or why I knew my way around their network, but I did. It was probably thanks to the experiment that had turned me from Abby Banks Super-Zero to Abby Banks Super-Hero.

  The flit’s chamber was located just a few floors away, and like I’d thought, it was impossible to delete all the files on the thing since they had backup upon backup. Still, most of the equipment used to summon the demon was in one giant room, and since most of the backups were kept offsite, it’d take them a while to go get them and reconstruct the ritual used to summon the demon, if say, someone blew the ritual chamber up.

  I reached in my pocket and patted the tiny, magic-infused device. I wasn’t quite sure how strong the explosive was, but Phillips’ files had said it should more than do the job. It was kind of crazy because all I’d done was put in the details of my target, and it’d spit out a device from inventory. If all of their stuff was this easy to spec, it made me wonder who had designed the system, and what other events they had contingencies for. Did they have one for aliens too? Were those even real?

  Part of me wanted to spend a few minutes joy-riding through their files just for funsies, but that seemed like a poor use of my time, even if no one was supposed to know I was here. I stood up and pushed the chair back under the desk. As I made my way out of the room, I shut off the lights. You know, to save energy.

  “I know you just did that so it would take longer to find that guy,” Donovan said, jerking his thumb at the interrogation room door. “But I’m not going to press the issue.”

  “Good,” I replied, swiping the stolen keycard on the exit door. “It’s nice of you to let me pretend I’m trying to save the planet one turned off LED at a time.”

  “Hello, Abby,” Stephen said, flashing me his perfect smile through the open door. His sapphire eyes gleamed as he stepped through the doorway, one hand reaching out toward me. The door shut behind him with a whoosh, leaving us alone in the room.

  “How?” I squeaked, taking a step backward. My world melted away as I stared at him. He didn’t look sunken and injured anymore. Rather, he was his perfect chiseled self. His fingers touched my face, and my heart started going a million miles a minute. “I thought you died…” I murmured as a horrible thought struck me. I was hallucinating. I was making it up… Oh god I was crazy.

  “I didn’t die. I’m a vampire. We’re notoriously hard to kill. You should have known that,” Stephen said, pulling me close to him and wrapping one hand around my body. “Did you miss me? You know, after you left me for dead on the floor of a cabin in the middle of nowhere?” He jammed a gun into my ribs so hard, it hurt. I cried out and tried to push him away, but he held me fast. “I wondered if you’d try to get in here. Everyone told me I was crazy, but well, I guess I proved them wrong, didn’t I?”

  He spun me around and shoved me forward, his weapon pressing into the small of my back as the world around me faded away, distilling into a hazy darkness.

  “Stephen.” I swallowed, trying to resist the urge to cry. “Stephen, what are you doing?”

  “Betraying you.” His words were like fire in my ear, burning me to the core and reducing me to cinders in the space of a breath. “I thought that was obvious, Abby.”

  The door in front of us opened to reveal so many agents I couldn’t count them. They were dressed so similarly in their body armor that they all sort of blended together into a throbbing mass of finality.

  “Why…” I whispered as my heart shattered for the second time in as many days.

  “Because he’s a jackass,” Donovan said, leaning against the doorframe so blood dripped down his face and formed a mask. “That’s why you should have let me kill him.” He touched his chest with his right index finger. “I’d never betray you…”

  “You did betray me,” I replied, staring dully at the throbbing mass of people behind the ghost. Only… only they weren’t pointing guns at me, at least, not in a way that told me they should have.

  “Um… duh,” Stephen said like he thought I was talking to him. “Get with the now.” He shook his head. “Honestly, I thought you were smarter than this.” He shrugged. “I guess everything special about you really did come out of a magic ritual.”

  The interrogation room where I’d locked the agent earlier opened just before I drove my elbow into Stephen’s stomach as hard as I could. I hadn’t meant to do it, honest. Something about him completely betraying me made everything sort of distant and strange seeming. He buckled in slow motion as I spun on my heel, tearing the gun from his hand and thrusting him forward into the room full of soldiers as they surged forward.

  I fired, pulling the trigger in bursts and spraying the corridor with hot lead. Bullets tore into the soldiers’ riot shields as I threw myself out of the entryway and slammed my hand down on the door’s controls. Instead of closing, the door wheezed and sparked. Acrid smoke floated from the opening in the wall, and the sound of gears grinding to a halt filled my ears. Had they overridden the controls by force somehow?

  I moved, pivoting while the soldiers were pinned down just as a chair flew at my head. I ducked, and it crashed into the computer terminal. Sparks leapt from the display, arcing out in electric flashes as the blond agent strode toward me from the interrogation room.

  His eyes were distant and opaque as he looked at me, but this time a grin slid onto his face. “So you’ve come to visit me at home, Abigail,” the agent said in the twisted robotic voice of the flit. “My new handlers tell me I should be honored.”

  I drew my own gun and fired at him just as Stephen’s clicked empty. The burst struck him fu
ll in the chest, tearing apart his clothing to reveal the bulletproof vest beneath as he strode unconcerned through my hail of bullets like Superman.

  Soldiers surged through the door as I ran at the flit. He swung one meaty fist at me. The blow caught my shoulder, spinning me into a sort of broken cartwheel as I dove past him. Shots rang out, pinging off the metal all around me and bouncing everywhere. I spared a glance at the flit, even though I shouldn’t have. He turned, despite being pelted with bullets and moved to grab me.

  I scrambled to my feet as a stray bullet caught me in the hand. Pain shot through me, only… only it wasn’t as bad as it should have been. There wasn’t any blood. My eyes widened in understanding and shock. They were using rubber bullets… So they didn’t want to hurt me after all.

  The flit grabbed me by the throat and lifted me into the air. My vision went hazy as I pointed my gun past his ear and let off a burst that sent agents running for cover. Unlike their weapons, mine was filled with good old-fashioned lead. My other hand throbbed uselessly at my side as I tried to make it grip the taser.

  The flit’s chokehold tightened, cutting off my air supply and making everything distill into a single point. Stephen was that single point. He was moving toward us, heedless of the gun pointed in his general direction. He had a smirk on his face I could only classify as smug jerk. Was he counting on me not shooting him? After what he’d done?

  My fingers tightened around the taser, and I drove it into the flit. He spasmed, jerking like a broken mannequin as he released me. I landed flat on my back and rolled to my feet as I fired the machine gun down the hallway at Stephen.

  The bullets caught him in the chest and flung him backward in a sort of slow motion fall. He crashed into the ground, his shirt torn to reveal his bullet-proof vest. I threw a caustic glance in his direction as I sprinted forward, my body momentarily ignoring its need to breathe, or you know, feel pain.

  I slammed into the first soldier’s shield with my shoulder and rolled, spinning my body past him as I swept into the hallway and into the throng of soldiers.