Mage Hunters Box Set

by Andrew C Piazza

  Cass couldn’t help a little grin. Going to get the band back together, indeed.

  “Well, then… there’s just one more person we need to talk to,” she said.

  Michael frowned, searching through his papers. “Who?”

  Cass

  Mickey’s apartment was on the outskirts of the city, in one of those areas where the twenty-somethings liked to congregate, where the rent wasn’t too expensive but you were still close enough to the city to easily catch a taxi home after a night of too much drinking at the bars.

  Michael knocked on her door while I fiddled with my sleeves. I’d been wearing prison issue uniforms for so long, it felt a little weird to be back in civilian clothing.

  The door opened a crack, and Michael barely had time to say “Hello”, before Mickey’s eyes lit up and she pulled the door open wide. She rushed out into the hallway and grabbed me in a hug that I somewhat awkwardly returned.

  “Oh my God!” she said. “Cass! They let you out!”

  I’ve never been much of a hugger, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, so when I broke free of the hug, I made sure it was done gently. “Well, they kind of let me out. This is Michael from the FBI.”

  “Hunh?” she said, looking over at Michael and barely registering him. “Oh, hi. So… oh, shit! Jason! Jason!”

  I frowned for a second, then realized she was talking to a cat that had shot out of her apartment and ran down the hallway. Mickey shut her door and waved us over, chasing after her cat and blocking him before he reached the stairs.

  “Come on, come on, you guys!” she said. “You have to help me catch him before he gets outside!”

  “Miss,” Michael said slowly, “I’m a federal agent.”

  Mickey waved him off. “Hey, that’s great, you’re a federal agent. Now help me catch my cat.”

  I traded a look with Michael and shrugged, struggling to hide my amusement. Mickey had us block one end of the hallway, and her cat stopped short, watching us carefully.

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “Now, chase him towards me.”

  “He’ll run right past you,” Michael said.

  “No he won’t, silly,” she said. “He won’t see me.”

  “She can make herself invisible,” I explained, and when Michael raised an eyebrow at that, I added, “Are you starting to see why I want her?”

  “Fair enough,” Michael said, and we both chased Mickey’s cat in her direction.

  We could still see her, but Jason the cat clearly couldn’t, because he ran right up to her feet. She scooped him up with practiced ease, scolding him lightly as she carried him back into her apartment.

  “Jason Momoa, you bad little kitty,” she said, pulling her door open a crack and walking back in to her apartment. “You know you’re not supposed to go outside.”

  I couldn’t help a little laugh. “You named your cat Jason Momoa?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Do you watch ‘Game Of Thrones’? Doesn’t matter. Come in, come in. Watch the door, though; don’t let any of the others get out.”

  “The others?” I asked, stepping into her apartment, careful to watch to make sure no other cats were going to make a run for it out into the hallway. “How many cats do you have?”

  “Don’t judge me,” she said, leading us into her apartment, and that ended up being her entire answer.

  “I heard you got fired,” I said, once Michael and I were inside and the door was shut securely against any more cats desperate for freedom.

  “Yeah, Revival Tech got super pissed about the whole ‘giving away their evil schemes’ thing… you know, when I looked at your locked file,” Mickey said. “So hey, thanks for that.”

  “I didn’t want…” I began to say.

  “Oh gosh, I was just kidding about that,” she said. “Could you tell I was kidding? I was kidding.”

  “Miss?” Michael said, struggling to get a word in edgewise. “We’re here to talk to you about…”

  Mickey held a hand up to stop him, staring at an empty plastic bag on the counter, and then said loudly, “Jolly? Jolly, did you eat the last of my Doritos?”

  There was a moment’s pause before Jolly’s muffled voice came from the next room. “No.”

  “You know I can read your mind.”

  There was another pause. “Yes. Sorry.”

  “He’s so bad with snacks,” Mickey said, shaking her head.

  “Jolly?” I asked. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Oh! They let him out. They said he needed to get registered, though, and…”

  “No, I know that part. I mean, what is he doing here, in your apartment?”

  “He needed a place to stay,” Mickey said with a shrug. “He doesn’t know anyone in this city, so I said he could crash here for a while until he figures it all out. Did you know he heals people for like, no money? It’s unreal. He fixed the arthritis in my dad’s knees, which has been killing him for forever, and all he wanted in return was for my mom to make him some of her dumplings.”

  I had to smile. She was a part of the team already, and she didn’t even know it. If you had asked her three days ago if she’d take in an ex-con as a roommate, she’d have spit out whatever drink she was sipping on.

  But after all we’d been through together, she’d taken in Jolly without a second thought. Unit integrity. The bond I was constantly striving to build and reinforce in my team. It was already there; in Mickey, in Jolly, and now that I thought about it, in all of us.

  “We’re going after Kel, Mickey,” I said. “Me, Dread, Lysette… all of us. I want you to help.”

  “Me?” Mickey said, her shoulders slumping. “I… I don’t know, Cass. I mean, I’m not…”

  “You’re the badass who took her out,” I said. “That was you. Not me, not Dread. You.”

  She thought about that for a second, then smiled a little and hugged her cat closer. “That was kind of badass, I guess.”

  “Kel presents the greatest domestic threat to security that this country…” Michael began to say, but I cut off his pitch. He wasn’t a bad guy, but he really didn’t know how to talk to Mickey.

  “I need you, Mickey. We all need you.”

  Mickey seemed unconvinced. “Chasing after scary, dangerous people… that’s really not who I am.”

  “That’s really not who you were. After what happened in that prison, none of us are the same. You don’t have to be who you were yesterday. You can be someone who is more.”

  She thought about that for a second, stroking her cat, and then her eyes lit up. “Will I get to carry a badge?”

  And that was it. She was in.

  I thought about what I said to her. You don’t have to be who you were yesterday. It was high time I took my own advice.

  I’d been a cop, and that had been taken away from me. I’d been a prisoner, rotting in that cell, filled with hate and anger and despair over the prospect of eventually losing my mind, and then that was gone as well. My rage at the betrayal by Revival Tech sent me into a dark place where I didn’t care who I hurt or what I became, as long as I got my revenge on Adjani and anyone else involved.

  But now, now that it was all over, I had a chance to start again… maybe not a clean slate, but definitely a second chance. After what had happened with Polonius, after being deceived into thinking that I had no future, I’d stopped believing that there was such a thing as second chances.

  Every now and again, though, if you’re lucky, Life allows you the opportunity to start again. To get back on your feet. To redefine yourself on your own terms.

  Kel called what she did at the prison “Resurrection Day”… a lie to get the prisoners to follow along with her plans. For me, though, and Dread, and the rest of us, it created a chance to start all over again, with a whole new life, and leave the past behind us.

  It really was our Resurrection Day. And I wasn’t going to waste it.

  Author Notes

  Thank you, Gentle Reader, for allowing me to share my dayd
reams with you. I hope you found the time well spent.

  If you enjoyed this story, there are a number of ways you can support it. US readers can leave a review on Amazon by clicking here, and let me know what you liked about it. UK readers can use this link. That’s a big help.

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  Know that any support you choose to offer, and any feedback you choose to give, is greatly appreciated.

  So… they’re back! Cass and Dread, not so dead and Revived as we (and they) were led to believe. This novel posed a bit of a challenge, considering the fact that the first story of the Mage Hunters series, “Shards of Glass”, was originally intended as a stand-alone work only, and not as the first of a series. But, I kept coming back to that world in my mind, and those characters, and enough of my readers pestered me about a follow up to “Shards” that I decided, what the hell.

  It was clear to me pretty quickly that it was going to be set in a prison. After all, that’s the logical extension of where Cass and Dread were going to end up, if they weren’t actually able to follow through with their plans to blow themselves to bits along with the headquarters of Revival Technologies. This meant that I started putting a lot of thought into prisons, and which prison would be a good model to work off of for the setting for the second novel in the series.

  Luckily, there’s a really weird, interesting prison in the middle of Philadelphia which has always piqued my curiosity. It sits right smack dab in the middle of the city; which may seem ridiculous, but when you put its construction into historical context (circa 1820s), you realize that the sprawl of the city of Philadelphia hadn’t reached so far out into the countryside just yet. At the time of its construction, Eastern State Penitentiary was located on a hill on the outskirts overlooking the city.

  It looks like a castle. Four big, thirty foot stone walls, round towers on the corners, even arrow slits (fake, by the way) to complete the image of a fortress overlooking the city… to serve as a reminder to the population to fly right and be good boys and girls.

  So, I based Trubuilt 187 off of Eastern State Penitentiary. By the way, if you’re ever in Philly, I can highly recommend taking a tour of the prison. It’s maybe a two hour tour, and it’s a fascinating place from a historical context. You get to see how the prison was set up from the early days all the way up through the 1970s, when it was finally closed down.

  I had my setting; now I needed some characters to join Cass and Dread on their fun-filled romp through the prison riot from Hell. I knew that I could work Shifty, their trusty dusty Defense mage, back into the story, but we’d also need some new folks, some of whom would be inmates, and one of them, a bystander caught up in it all.

  Mickey didn’t start off as she finally turned out, not by a long shot. In fact, she was originally a male Internal Affairs cop, visiting the prison in order to investigate Cass and Dread’s case. However, once I started working through the scene in the little meeting room with Dread, where the prison guard comes back as a ghoul, I realized that I really wanted a character that would stand in significant contrast to Dread. If you’ve got a gigantic, six-foot-six ex-Marine mountain of muscle, what’s the opposite of that?

  Well, Mickey. At first, she was still a cop working for Internal Affairs, but as I worked through the plot, it became more interesting and useful for her to be an employee of Revival Tech, sent in to the prison to assess their “subjects”. That pulled her character together; a cat-loving, non-violent twenty-something who was completely, utterly out of her depth in this situation.

  Man, was she fun to write. Watching her try to navigate this crazy world of monsters and magic and machine-guns was a big treat for me. I hoped you enjoyed watching her struggle to figure her way out of the gigantic mess she found herself in. She’s pretty much how I figure I would respond to a crazed, violent situation like that; freak out, stick to people who seem like they know what they’re doing, and hold on for dear life.

  Then, there’s Lysette, who’s perfectly comfortable in violent situations. Early on, I knew I wanted to feature a new type of mage who focused their energies on enhancing their physical capabilities. She took shape pretty quickly from the ground up; her personality being a consequence of living a life in which you’ve been the most dangerous person in the room since you were a pre-teen. Aloof to the point of what might indeed be called sociopathy, Lysette is both a good friend to have and a dangerous friend to have. It’s kind of like being buddies with a Bengal Tiger. As long as the tiger’s happy, everything’s great.

  The team needed a Healer, and Jolly’s character came out of figuring out why a Healer mage might get tossed into prison. The idea of practicing without a license led to the concept of a guy leading a vagabond life in which he walked the Earth, doing good deeds, and asked nothing in return. Jolly is who I’d like to be if I were a mage. Flying through the air, shooting lightning bolts, that’s all well and good… but imagine how good it would feel to restore health to those beyond hope. Some things are beyond price.

  Of course, we needed some new bad guys, and I liked the idea of introducing a kind of magic considered so dangerous and so awful that all forms of it were prohibited without question. Death magic seemed to be a good choice, and a lot of Kel’s capabilities came out of imagining what one might want to do with dead bodies, if one were a wizard and into that weird sort of thing. Her co-conspirator, Fly, started out as a bit character, but he became fun enough to write that I expanded his role. I especially enjoyed watching how soft little Mickey handled this foul-mouthed street thug of a death mage.

  The theme that quickly took shape as the novel came together, was that of second chances and rebirth. Whereas “Shards Of Glass” is a cautionary tale about the dangers of always thinking there will be one more roll of the dice, “Resurrection Day” is an optimistic reminder that every now and again, Life does allow for a second chance… so you’d better not squander it on old grudges or outdated patterns of behavior.

  And now where does that leave us, at the end of the story? Cass has her new team, and Kel and Fly are still at large… with what amounts to a death magic weapon of mass destruction in their possession, no less. We’re not really sure what the fallout will be for Kel, after enduring Mickey’s all-out mental assault at the height of the prison battle, but I have a feeling we’re going to find out.

  And by “I have a feeling”, I mean, let’s dive right in to “The Intron Code”, shall we?

  The Intron Code

  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 © 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.

  ***

  The tall, thin death mage walked down the dark alley, searching for his broken master.

  He heard her before he saw her. Unseen voices floated to him through the cool night air; one male, one female.

  The death mage shook his head. Again. She was doing this more and more often lately, and every time, she left
behind more evidence that could be used to track them down and end them.

  They needed to be done with this. They needed to be out of this city, as far away as possible, maybe even out of the country. The smoke was practically still rising from the ashes of the prison they’d torn apart. They were all over the news. This city was the last place they needed to be.

  Kel didn’t seem to care about any of that, though. She kept stalking the side streets and alleys of the city at night, luring in half-drunk men who had struck out looking for love at one bar or another. She may have been evil incarnate, but Fly had to admit, Kel wasn’t terrible to look at, and she had little trouble finding what she was looking for.

  She would wait in the shadows like a predatory animal, watching for the weak member of the herd to split off and take down. It was always a man, always alone, always with just enough alcohol in him to make him not question the logic of an attractive woman suddenly approaching him at 2 a.m. on the street with seductive intent.

  They would follow her into a nearby alley, away from prying eyes, and she would do her terrible Trick to them. At first, Fly hid the bodies as best he could, but once the first few were found and reports of desiccated corpses filled the news, he stopped bothering.

  The voices became louder now, more distinct. Fly sighed and shook his head. He knew what was about to happen.

  “Come on, baby, let’s get back to my place, it’s much nicer than this dirty alleyway,” said the male voice.

  “Here,” she said. “Right here. You have to give me what I need right here.”

  “Okay! Damn, girl, you are all kinds of fired up, aren’t you…”

  The man’s voice cut off suddenly, replacing with a choking gasp. Fly could hear the huffing, gurgling sounds he was making, but couldn’t see a thing; this alley was far from the nearest street light and the darkness was practically palpable.