Mage Hunters
Volumes 1-3
Shards Of Glass
Resurrection Day
The Intron Code
Andrew C. Piazza
Contents
Title Page
Book One: Shards Of Glass
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Cass
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Cass
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Polonius
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Cass
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Dread
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Cass
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Cass
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Cass
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Stephen
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Cass
***
Dread
***
Cass
***
Cass
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Polonius
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Dread
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Cass
Dread
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***
Cass
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***
Cass
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Cass
Author Notes
Book Two: Resurrection Day
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Mickey
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Dread
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Mickey
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Cass
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Dread
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Jolly
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Mickey
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Cass
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Jolly
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Dread
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Mickey
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Shifty
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Dread
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Cass
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Cass
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Mickey
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Cass
Author Notes
Book Three: The Intron Code
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Fly
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Cass
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Cass
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Cass
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Dread
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Kel
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Cass
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Kel
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Jolly
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Cass
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Dread
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Shifty
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Cass
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Kel
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Jolly
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Dread
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Lysette
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Cass
Epilogue
Author Notes
Shards Of Glass
Andrew C. Piazza
Other Books by Andrew C. Piazza:
One Last Gasp (novel)
Strange Days (short story collection)
Mage Hunters Series:
Shards Of Glass
Resurrection Day
The Intron Code
Author Bio, Free Giveaways, and more at
www.AndrewPiazza.com
____________________________________________
Copyright © 2012, 2019 Andrew C. Piazza
All rights reserved.
foreword
For those of you who are new to the Mage Hunters series, the books are written in an unusual style. Rather than a single, consistent point of view, the story shifts back and forth from third person perspective to varying characters’ first person perspectives. Chapters in third person start with three asterisks (***), while chapters in first person begin with that character’s name.
***
Dr. Adjani had finally taken his jacket off when the call came to ruin his night. He didn’t answer it at first; he finished hanging up his suit jacket carefully, deliberately, before looking at the caller ID on his phone.
McCoy. Of course it was McCoy. No doubt with some fresh disaster on the project for him to fix.
The project. The Project. So much was riding on it. But he’d already spent all day holding McCoy’s hand, surely she could hold things together for a few damn hours before the subject went to sleep?
He let the phone ring as he removed and hung up his tie as carefully as he had his jacket. She could wait a few more seconds.
Still, he supposed that if she was calling now, it must have some importance. He had stressed the severity of calling him on his cell phone after office hours before. It seemed another lesson would be necessary.
“Yes?” he said, pressing the button on the phone to answer it.
“It’s… It’s Alice.”
“I already know that, Dr. McCoy, your caller ID came up on my phone.”
“I, uh… I’m really sorry to have to call…”
“If you feel like you’re wasting my time with your call, then apologizing for wasting my time only takes up even more of my time. If you aren’t wasting my time with your call, then you are now wasting my time with your meaningless apology.”
He could actually hear her gulp over the phone. Adjani wasn’t sure whether to be pleased that he had driven home his point so deeply, or annoyed with McCoy’s pathetic display. She was a double Ph.D., for God’s sake, you’d think she’d have a bit more confidence in herself.
“I’m…” she began again, then stopped herself. “We have a… a problem.”
“Then clearly you should hurry to the point.”
“We may have, um,” she said, her voice cracking slightly. “We may have lost containment.”
Adjani froze. His arm stayed stock-still in the act of hanging his tie on its designated spot on his tie rack.
His face was unaccustomed to the wrinkles of emotion, but now, the skin on Adjani’s scalp drew back in alarm and a cold sweat began to form. It was his turn to gulp, swallowing down hard before he spoke again.
“What do you mean? What exactly do you mean?”
“I got a call from the custodial staff at the office…”
“You’re not there? You’re not at the office?”
“No, I… my daughter, I… it’s past dinner time, I had to…”
“You’re not at the office.”
“No.”
Unbelievable. He took his eye off the ball for one second, for one second, giving it to McCoy, and she promptly dropped it.
“Then you got a call from the custodial staff because there is nobody else in the entire building, correct?”
“I was headed straight back once…”
“Tell me exactly what the custodial staff told you.”
“It’s not good. I mean, it sounded… I know there’s three dead.”
Adjani closed his eyes. Three dead. There would be no way to sweep this under the rug, then.
“The subject killed them?” he said.
“On purpose, you mean?” she asked. “I don’t know. The guy who called me was terrified and could barely string two sentences together.”
Yes, what’s that like? Adjani thought.
He waited, and when McCoy didn’t continue, he said, “Don’t make me ask for more information.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just… the things he was saying. It didn’t make much sense. He talked about the walls bending like taffy. The air changing shape, whatever that means. And I could hear… things… in the background, things that weren’t human. What… what…”
“Calm yourself,” he said, although whether he was speaking to McCoy or to himself, he wasn’t sure. “We knew that the impossible would become possible once we brought the subject back to life. That was the entire point of the exercise.”
“Still…”
“And it’s not like you haven’t seen plenty of mage’s Tricks before,” Adjani said. “It’s an integral part of our business, after all.”
“We went too far on this one. I told you that he was too far…”
“Enough. Are you still in contact with the custodial staff?”
“No. I heard something that sounded like a… a damn hyena laughing… and then the guy screamed and the call cut out.”
“Conjurations,” Adjani said to himself. “That is bad.”
Conjurations. Top of the list of the Tricks that had been forbidden to the subject.
The subject had been made well aware of that list, well aware that ticking off any one of the magical activities on it would result in his termination. He’d known that, and he’d done it anyway.
Which meant he was ready for a fight.
It was an unaccustomed feeling, the panic, rising up like a swirling wave of electricity inside him. Still, for all the terrible implications the subject’s defiance meant, there was still a strong current of curiosity mixed in with Adjani’s panic.
The walls were bending like taffy, the custodian had reported.
Alteration magic? That powerful? If it were true, then whatever else was happening in that office building, history was being made as well. No Maestro had ever managed to control that level of magic in all the years of recorded study.
McCoy’s trembling voice pulled him out of his thoughts.
“What do we do?”
“What anyone does when something like this happens,” Adjani said. “Call the police.”
“The… are you…”
“Are you really about to ask me if I’m sure?” Adjani said. Something about rebuking his subordinate brought his emotional level back down to that of a glacier. “Do not identify yourself when you call. Route the call through the office switchboard. Make it appear as if the call is coming from within the building.”
“She said this couldn’t happen. She said he would be under our control if we…”
“She,” Adjani said, “is not a part of this equation. She is not our concern right now. Right now, our concern is containment.”
“How do you expect to contain that?”
“I do not. That is a job for the police. Hence your phone call. Make it now and stop wasting time talking to me.”
He ended the call and tossed his phone onto the bed, the gesture amounting to practically a temper tantrum for him. His panic mixed with curiosity was wearing off now. In its place, was annoyance and anger at the titanic mess he was going to have to clean up. It was going to get a lot worse before it got better.
“Trouble at the office?” a voice said behind him.
A momentary splash of adrenaline surged through Adjani, before he recognized the voice and the surge of fear twisted into mere annoyance. When it rains, it pours. Of course he would have to endure not only one thorn in his side tonight, but two.
He finally turned to face the voice behind him. Sitting in a chair was a lean, middle-aged man. Salt and pepper hair and beard, both trimmed neatly, and the expensive suit that he wore was tailored. His legs were crossed casually and he seemed more at home in Adjani’s bedroom than Adjani himself.
“How did you get in here?” Adjani asked.
The uninvited man in the chair shrugged. “Teleportation is an extremely convenient and discreet method of travel. And what, no hello?”
“Hello, Matthias,” Adjani said.
Matthias’s thin lips curled into a smile that didn’t extend to his eyes. “You don’t sound happy to see me, Dr. Adjani. That hurts my feelings.”
Dr. Adjani swallowed down on his distaste. “I have a bit of a situation to handle.”
“That’s an understatement,” Matthias said. “I don’t know what on Earth made you think that bringing Polonius back from the grave was a good idea.”
“I thought he might be able to help in continuing to refine the procedure. There’s still…”
“Who gives a solitary shit about refining the procedure?” Matthias said.
“I do,” Adjani said. “You may have given up on it, but I haven’t. It still has possibilities.”
Matthias rolled his eyes. “It’s a shell game, Adjani. It always has been. Whether you knew it or not, whether you want to admit it or not.”
“You don’t work for Revival Tech. You haven’t put in the years that I have trying to build…”
“No, no I haven’t,” Matthias said, interrupting Adjani again. “And I don’t care. Not about your feelings, not about your board of directors or stockholders or whoever the fuck you pretend to answer to. You answer to me.”
Adjani stayed silent.
“Or have you forgotten?” Matthias said. “Have you forgotten how you came to us, came to me, back when your company was about to fold? When you had nothing to show for all your experiments, even after your company spent their bottom dollar on hiring Polonius?”
“I remember that we had an understanding…”
“Have you forgotten that we were the ones to provide the expert who really made your resurrection experiments work?”
“Oh, yes,” Adjani said. “Your expert. Let’s talk about her.”
“She has a name, Doctor.”
“I know she has a name. I don’t like to use it.”
“Even after she saved your company?” Matthias said. “She and Polonius, working together, finally fixed the little problems with your ‘procedure’, and…”
Now it was Adjani’s turn to interrupt. “No. No. They didn’t fix it. Not really. The Revival process is still flawed.”
Matthias’s teeth flickered in a sneer. “Who cares?”
“I care. You sent her here, and everything about her was poison. She didn’t give us a real fix.”
“What she gave you was good enough. Good enough to save your company.”
Adjani left that sit for a moment before speaking.
“She disgusted me,” he finally said. “Polonius followed her around like a puppy, you know. When we Revived him, all he would talk about was her. He called her his ‘Isis’ and his ‘goddess’. Pathetic.”
“Yes, well, she’s not exactly high on my list of favorite people, either.”
“I think she killed him,” Adjani said. “Polonius. He wasn’t sick. He wasn’t frail. I think she seduced him, learned anything she could from him, and then killed him.”
“Of course she did. That was the plan all along.”
“What?”
“Well, not all along,” Matthias said. “At first, we were as interested in the prospect of resurrection as you were. But once we realized that it was nothing but a pipe dream, we kept our eyes open for other opportunities with your company. And we found them, didn’t we?”
Adjani stared at the floor, stunned. “Where is she now?”
“No idea,” Matthias said. “After she killed Polonius, she disappeared into the wind. There’s some rumors about Korea, but with her, she could be anywhere. But she’s a problem for another day. You have a mountain of an issue to deal with right now. Best to leave you to it.”
“You’re not going to help me?”
Matthias laughed and stood to leave. “Are you joking? There’s no way I’m tangling with the bull that’s running loose in your china shop. Talk about a suicide mission. No. You brought Polonius back, you figure out how to return him to the Earth.”
Adjani found himself staring out his window onto the city below. He barely realized it when Matthias walked out of the room, calling out “Best of luck, Doctor,” as he left.
A deal with the devil. He’d clearly made a deal with the devil, although this particular deal had two devils in it, both Matthias and his murderous “expert”.
No. No, there was no time for this. No time to waste thinking of how Matthias’s expert had deceived him. No time to think of her at all.
All there was, was how to sort out the problem in front of him. No crying over spilled milk. Th
ere wasn’t any turning back, not now.
He’d sold his proverbial soul for this. He’d sold many souls for this, not just his own.
“The only way out, is through,” he said to his reflection in the mirror.
He began to put on a fresh shirt and tie, and prepared himself for the phone call from the police. It was going to be a long night.
Cass
It had only been a week and a day since the nightmare op that had taken Stephen away from me, but when SWAT called, I had to answer.
Of course it was in the middle of the night when the call came. Rogue mages and bad guys in general have terrible manners when it comes to arranging the time and place of their particular meltdown.
Somebody really should send a nice note to all the psychos out there to simmer down every once and a while so that we could recover emotionally from a rough operation. That would be awfully nice of them.
I looked at my phone, even though the particular ring tone had already told me who was calling. It was the office, all right.
The shit must’ve really hit the fan if SWAT was calling in Squad Four. After the meat grinder we’d been through the week before, we should’ve had months to mentally recover.
What the hell. It wasn’t like I’d been sleeping much anyway, those last eight days since my team had been chewed up.
I dragged myself out of bed and shrugged my way into a set of the navy blue tactical fatigues we always wore. By the time I did up my bootlaces and clipped on my gun belt, my mind was fully awake and I’d shaken off the dreams of inhuman monsters I’d been lost in moments ago.
I dumped my equipment bag on the bed and took all of ten seconds to glance through it and make sure everything was there. It always was. Survivalists and preppers like to call it a “go bag”; a pre-packaged duffel bag or backpack with the essentials one might need if disaster struck. Grab it and go.
Well, disaster was my profession, so my go bag was grabbed on a regular basis.
After that, all that was left was my Glock, sitting there on the nightstand like a bad reminder that I should’ve gone into accounting or some shit like that. Hell. Who was I kidding? I’ve been stuck firmly on this path since I was a kid. There’s nothing else I’m good at.
Still. When I went to grab it, a little of the skin of my forearm was exposed, and I could see the pinkish line of skin that served as a rude reminder of one of the many wounds I’d endured just over a week ago. It was fading fast already, but flesh that has been knitted back together with magic always holds that freshly-healed pinkish hue for a few weeks until it fades back to normal.
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 1