by Landon Wark
"Yes, Yuri." Aegera glared at him with hostility. "Why was it necessary to bring him here?"
"The... police found us. We were meeting at—"
"Yeah, the police found you with the body of a man who literally drowned in heroin," Aegera shot at him amid the chaos of the others clearing off the desk.
"What?"
A hand, stained with the vital fluids of its owner grasped him by the wrist, pressing weakly into his flesh. Panic filled eyes locked with his own and the lips began to move, weak hisses passing through the throat.
"Herrrrr."
Jonah pulled back, the hand slipped away from his wrist, the strength nearly gone from its fingers. His brain sifted the sentiment out of the groan.
"You have to help him," the one Aegera had called Yuri said, much more matter-of-factly than Jonah was prepared for.
His brain started mapping out a plan of action before balking. His foray into altering the human body had stopped after Sandy, but that had been something small, biochemical. And he had had assistance from the others. It was wholly another thing to attempt internal surgery. His eyes darted over the bloody shirt and he took another step back.
"He's going to die!" Yuri shouted. "You do nothing and he dies. What kind of man are you?"
"What the fuck, Yuri?!" Aegera spat.
"You want us to follow you and you do nothing for us."
"You and your goddamn friends were stealing bags of potatoes when we came to you!"
"We stole because the—" He uttered a word in his native language. "—would not let us have anything! And now that we have a way to get justice you won't let us have it!"
Jonah glanced over at Aegera who was trying to hold down the victim's legs. She clenched her jaw. He cared even less than she did about the transparent chauvinism, but the Adepts were held together with spit and chewing gum as it was.
He held up a hand as Aegera was about to let go of the man's legs.
"Shut up."
His eyes fell once more on the source of the blood gushing out of the... patient(?). A small series of phonemes and the man's legs ceased moving. Aegera stepped away as if he had just shouted "clear". Jonah wiped his hands on the loose sweatpants he had been wearing during his self-imposed house arrest. Avoid bacterial infections. That was one of the few things he knew about treating a goddamn gunshot wound.
His mind spun through all of the textbooks he had read in preparation for what they had done with Sandy. A couple of conversations with Clayton James and nearly a dozen half-remembered medical shows overheard in the family living room.
"There's no exit wound," he whispered to himself upon lifting up the fleshy pulp of the man's side. He let go immediately upon the realization that he was probably grinding the bullet against vital organs simply by moving him.
Make the bullet go away. was the thought that came to him.
He exhaled. Making the bullet go away was easy, a simple change to the procedure he had used to hollow out his laboratory/cavern and it would be done. Keeping the flesh around the bullet was an entirely different matter. He began to plug phonemes haphazardly into the procedure. The periphery of his conscious mind began cataloging results in case something like this would be needed in the future.
"Can you do it?" Aegera asked nervously, the question falling on Jonah's tuned out ears.
He tried to imagine the place where the bullet was resting and began the words to remove any metal objects in that area. Almost instantly more blood welled up from the wound, pouring down the man's side onto the laminate covered press-board of the desk.
"Shit! Shit!"
Jonah clamped his hand over the squishing, oozing pulp as the man's screamed in pain. His already pale face became a ghoulish ashen shade. There was a clamour around him as he called out for some kind of help. He hadn't expected so much blood. His mind reeled as he clutched emptily for a way to seal off the wound. His mouth fumbled the words and he was forced to pull his hand away to concentrate on the geyser he was trying to cap off. Thinking of the wound as something other than a gaping hole in a human body helped.
The wound knit together quickly under the force of the words. The man's eyes rolled backwards into his skull, his breathing quickened.
"Shit!"
"He's dying." Yuri pushed in towards the dying man, held back by Aegera's slender but powerful presence.
"Yeah! I'm not a doctor!" Jonah shouted.
He could try to open the wound again and set things right inside, but he couldn't see what was happening internally. If he had some kind of x-ray device. His brain started spooling through plans to create one: He could use the light scattering phonemes he used to create the camouflage field and... He clamped down on the thought, trying to focus on how could fix-
The man's muscles spasmed and then released, a held breath escaping with a gurgle. Having never heard one before, Jonah made a mental note of what a death rattle sounded like before the reality of the situation overtook him. Had there been an EKG machine in the room a loud, long beep would have filled the silence. They all looked to each other, knowing what had just happened, but each afraid to break the terrible silence in the room.
Jonah McAllister had never seen a person die before. His experience with death was limited to that of an elderly grandparent. As he looked at the muscles spasm in a desperate bid to keep the body functioning and the eyes rolled up in a sudden release he felt the need to steady himself with the table next to him.
"You let him die," Yuri said.
"I'm not a doctor," Jonah whispered as he dropped onto a stool.
"He did everything he could," Aegera turned on Yuri. "If you hadn't gone off on some shithead revenge fantasy—"
The man scoffed. "The great Jonah McAllister is human after all."
With a downcast visage Jonah rapped on the table weakly. His mind spun through all the things that he would have to do if he was going to save someone with a bullet hole in his side. He arched his shoulders and stood.
"I'm not a goddamn doctor!"
"Yeah. I can see that." Yuri sneered and turned towards the door.
Aegera went after him with a haranguing that was only half heard, and what was heard was dismissed. Jonah was left with the dead body. He absent-mindedly went about placing papers over the man's face. Lacking the appropriate cloth for a death shroud, it seemed like the thing for him to do.
The whites of the man's eyes were still visible, staring out at him with whatever accusation the white eyes of a dead man could muster. He supposed he should have tried to close his eyes but he neither knew how to do it or how to muster up the courage to touch the former man.
If he were to request it of Aegera she would have someone (the coroner?) come and remove the body.
Jonah slumped down in his chair, looking at the tracks of blood the casters made on the floor.
"I warned you that something like this was going to happen," Aegera said angrily as she stormed back into the room.
"I couldn't save him," Jonah exhaled, staring at the corpse's hands sticking out from beneath the papers he had placed over him.
"We have to get the Adepts under control," she continued, clearly not having heard him. "This is a huge cluster fuck. If they think we're going after the oligarchs then they're not going to hold back. Whatever little restraint they had for the little... I don't know, cult, in their midst? That's gone."
Jonah shook his head. "This shouldn't be happening."
"What?" Aegera stopped in her obsessive pacing of the blood soaked floor.
"This shouldn't be happening! It should be 'Ooooo', 'Ahhhh' and 'Okay, I get it now'. There's—" He swallowed, having resisted using the word for so long, but what was the point if everyone else was saying the same thing. "There's magic in the world and the only thing they can think to do is to go out and kill someone with it?!"
"You kick a dog long enough and it's going to turn around and bite you."
"People are not dogs," he said, frustrated. "They shouldn't be thinking
with their lizard brains."
"We've got to do something to rein them in."
"So, go rein them in," he muttered.
"I..." Aegera paused. "I don't know how. You've got to do something."
"And what am I supposed to do? I can't—"
"I know. We can't change human nature. I'd settle for being able to change your nature."
"The Adepts are your responsibility." Jonah got up and tried to retreat towards the back room.
"And if I could, I'd take away their guns. But, that's not going to happen. Have you ever seen a movie about living weapons? 'cause this is how they always turn out! What do you want me to do? Kill them?"
"I—My advice is to let them fight. The problem will solve itself."
"And innocent people are going to die. What happened at the house? Imagine that, but across an entire city. An entire country."
Jonah paused. "You can let them know that when I'm finished it won't be necessary."
Aegera scoffed. "Yeah. You think that you can make everyone gather around the campfire and sing kumbaya. I can tell you right now that's not going to happen."
"It will."
"No. Yuri's said it before. This isn't about money. Maybe in some perfect world people are going to all sit in a circle and listen to some economics/physics lecture, but I can tell you, if you give people a gun they're going to start looking for those who've wronged them. For fuck's sake, you just saw it!"
"I-I—" Jonah sat back down and swivelled his chair around to face her, evoking the villain in any number of melodramas. "We're not here to fight with the authorities. We just have to make them understand."
Aegera shook her head. "I come from a land that's still in the Middle East because it refused to differentiate between two countries of slightly different assholes. The other side isn't going to want a ceasefire with us assholes. As far as they're concerned, we're them."
"What do you want me to do about it?" Jonah vocally threw up his hands. "We have to stick to the plan. They'll understand... They will."
"This... this is going to end badly," was all that Aegera could manage. "It's not going to go the way you think, Jonah."
"We'll see," was his response as Aegera walked out of the room. "Send someone to pick up this..." He trailed off as his eyes fixed on the corpse lying under his clumps of paper.
None of Aegera's Initiates came for the body as Jonah waited for first one hour and then two, pacing around the floor littered with bloody papers that had once been his preliminary plans for the perpetual motion generator (or as close to that definition as his forces allowed).
Perhaps the wait was a punishment for his not seeing things her way. He felt like leaving the room, going out and abandoning the body of the fallen Adept, but that felt like a betrayal.
He sat down at one of the workbenches he had set up around the periphery of the room, grasping a pen and clicking it nervously as he stared at the coagulating blood dripping off the arm onto the floor below. He imagined the dead eyes staring vacantly back at him with violent accusations.
"I'm not the one who got you killed," he grumbled angrily. "What the hell were you thinking?"
His hands shook as he continued clicking the pen. He had made exactly one good decision since that night in the lab and that had been Sandy. Back at the house he was convinced he was in need of an assistant and she had filled that role well, but she had since advanced into more of a lieutenant, mastering logistics and personnel. And he had lied to her... Maybe not exactly lied when he had said that things didn't necessarily have to become violent. But he knew she was right. She bet on the darker part of human nature and she'd never go broke because of it. And still he insisted on sending her out there. The only person he might consider to be a friend was out there with the worst of it.
Because someone has to spread the word, and you're not exactly Mr. Charismatic.
"You really are a piece of shit, McAllister," he muttered.
He rose up and walked past the body, filled with a cold rage. The heavy coat that Sandy had brought him for the rare occasion that he might see fit to grace the world with his presence slipped over his shoulders as he took one last look at the body. They didn't need to fight. Whatever grudges they held, they could just let them go and be happy with a world of... He swallowed. Magic.
He closed the door to the apartment and with a word sealed it. The barrier would hold up against almost any physical force short of a powerful explosive that would likely take out most of the wall with it. He considered leaving a note for anyone who might come to remove the corpse, but decided he would only be gone for a few minutes.
Ahead of him the long, odourless hallway that led to the elevator stood before him, but he stayed planted where he stood. It took him a full minute to recite the formula and then, with a flash of reddish light the hallway was empty.
Nearly a kilometer away, in a dark alley inhabited only by a pair of transients, an identical but much more muted flash foretold the arrival of Jonah McAllister. The arrival was not exactly stealthy, but he had managed to reduce the brightness by almost an order of magnitude.
The transients glared at him with wide eyes in the street lights as they scrambled up from beneath the ratty blanket that must have provided nearly zero protection from the cold.
Get used to it, he thought as he walked to the mouth of the alley, where it met with one of the seldom used streets of the city.
The old payphone stood like a monument to an ancient civilization that had died out ages ago. A relic whose purpose could only be deduced by the most skilled historians. Graffiti, the sacred inscriptions of that old era covered the clear plastic that surrounded it down to waist height.
Jonah pulled the receiver from the cradle and pulled a coin out of his pocket and fed it into the slot. A word and a second coin appeared between his fingers. He fed that into the slot and repeated the process nearly two dozen times.
He checked the watch on his wrist before dialing the long number. The line buzzed for nearly a full minute before a rushed voice answered.
"Hi, I'm calling about a case... Yeah. It's—Well the case number is... I'd rather just give you the case number."
The voice on the other end yawned and mumbled along with the clacking of computer keys.
Jonah's breathing ramped up slightly as the voice spoke.
"No... Keep looking for them. I... I don't care about the cost. Just find them."
He slowly replaced the receiver in the cradle and pushed his fingers into his temples.
He slowly fed another string of coins into the slot and dialed, much more slowly this time. The line buzzed and he thought at least a dozen times about hanging up. He should hang up. It was a stupid thing to do. Stupid as hell, but he... he needed a voice on the other end of the line. He needed a way to surface from beneath the waves, if only for a moment. The line clicked and the staticky connection picked up.
"You've reached the McAllisters. Jonah, if you're listening: We miss you. Please, come home."
He braced his hand on the edge of the plastic surrounding the phone, placing as much weight on it as he thought it would bear.
"We can work everything out together. Just, please come home."
A tone buzzed and the line waited for a message, but he merely stood there. Saying anything would be an unforgiving mistake. As it stood anyone monitoring the line could be forgiven for thinking the call was from one of the many scam farms that operated in this part of the world. But if he were to say anything. If he were to breathe into the receiver too hard, they would know. And he wasn't ready for that. Yet.
He curled his hand up into a fist. There was a time, fast approaching when they wouldn't be able to stop him, when no one would, but that was still in the future. Best to stay quiet.
With a quivering exhale that condensed in the night air around him, Jonah clenched his hand into a fist. He might still be weak and he might still be mortal, but what he could do was try to keep the few friends he did have safe.
>
At least until everyone understood. And they would.
Someday, everyone would understand.
There was only a dribble of milk left in the bottom of the carton that Harold Klum pulled out of the refrigerator and he angrily poured it out into one of the dirty bowls lining the cupboard, redoubling it until there was enough to pour some cereal into.
"Pouring cereal into the milk," he muttered in German. "Animals pour cereal into the milk."
He checked his phone, as he had diligently for the past week. Hilde and Roth had not been very receptive when he had made the claim that there was actual magic in the world. At least, not at first, and Roth was still pretty standoffish, too entrenched in the weird strain of Catholicism that his family was into. Hilde had said she would come back, but that she wanted to see her family first.
That he, of the three of them, would turn out to be the adventurous one was an irony that was not lost on him.
He could make milk, and a few basic other foodstuffs, some money. It was a liberating feeling, but when he got a feel for what some of the others were capable of, it made him feel somewhat inadequate. The woman who had picked him out of the bar could apparently alter her form, command lightning and speak with sea-creatures (though he had not seen any of this for himself). Even the man he had managed to get as a roommate could make marijuana plants grow at a phenomenal rate.
And yet he could not make milk or clean the dishes.
Harold sat at the table and took a spoonful of his cereal. It really wasn't as bad as all that. He had been prepared to bolt when the door had opened up onto what he had been certain would be an army-style barracks. But the apartment was actually quite nice for the city. Two bedrooms on opposite ends of the dwelling ensured privacy and the furnishing were relatively new. His roommate claimed he could make the rent by himself, but making that much coinage took up a tremendous amount of his time. Time better spent on other things.
Like pot.
At least he spoke German.
Harold began mentally composing an email to his father as he spooned out another few bites of cereal.