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

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