The New Magic - The Revelation of Jonah McAllister Landon Wark (free e books to read .txt) 📖

"Why did you bring him here?!" he asked of two of the other Adepts who had come in with them.

"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