Chapter 5

It was just before Halloween when I heard from Pat again. He had never bothered to tell me what the Council investigator had found, or even what the investigator had been looking for in the first place! It must have been because I was thinking of him, because the next thing I knew, I could feel him calling, scratching against my shields. I opened up a bit and...

‘Hey kid, Hank, you there? Hank?‘ he was blasting loud today, making my ears ring. Well, not, um, not ears, but whatever took their place when communicating like this!

‘Right here, Pat, but could you lower the volume? Sheesh, you could hurt a kid like that!‘

‘Where the hell have you been? I haven’t been able to locate you for days! I thought, maybe, your family went on vacation or something, so I didn’t bother, but even now, I can’t detect you.‘ Pat asked, his volume lower but his agitation was clearly still pretty high.

‘Nope, I haven’t been anywhere unless you count going to the next town five miles away. Might be my shields. Something about them interfering with each other, maybe? I have ... um ... five? Yeah, five I keep up all the time. I guess if one had an instability or a flaw, I could see the others reinforcing the flaw, maybe enhancing some... ‘ I said thoughtfully, my mind going over how I created the shields, trying to see if there was any crossover.

‘You have five shields active. Right now? You have these shields all active? And what is this about keeping them up all the time, that isn’t ... that shouldn’t be possible!‘ Pat sounded incredulous. It was obvious he thought I might be lying to him.

‘I know the book says to drop one before you try to raise a different kind, but I thought it would be cool to just, you know, layer them. My magic shield that keeps my spells from bugging me is the biggest. It extends, um, about fifty feet, I guess. The next one is much smaller, that is one I call my ‘intent’ shield. No one with evil intent can come within arm’s length of me. Then there are the elemental shields, one for fire, water, and electricity, and another one for magic energy without intent and, of course, the spirit shield for possession and stuff.’ I explained, ticking them off on my mental fingers.

‘And you keep them up all the time? Five?’ Pat asked, sounding faint now, as though this had really shocked him.

‘I live near a ley line, and I have enough power stored in myself and in my gems to easily handle the shields for a week or so, as long as I don’t do anything too strenuous in the meantime. Since I live so close, I charge my gems up just about every day. I have four, um, batteries too,’ I added, a bit embarrassed about calling the girls ‘batteries‘.

There was a long silence, followed by a mental sigh from Pat.

“Kid, look ... no, Hank. Hank, when I fuck up, I do it by the numbers. As your master, or mentor, really, I hate that Master slash Apprentice bullshit. As your mentor, I have some responsibilities to make sure that you know the rules, that you have access to teaching materials commensurate with your abilities and power level, and making sure that I guide you into acceptable use of your magic. These are things the Council demands of anyone who accepts a new Mage as an apprentice.‘

He paused for a moment, and I could almost sense him gathering his thoughts.

‘In return, I get to put you to work, doing things I just don’t want to do. I get credit for things you do, including monetary if I rent out your labor. The biggest bonus for me is that you will owe me a favor. The only way you can refuse to honor that, is if the favor is against Council laws; would expose our existence to mortals; or would break the Covenant and interfere with the free exercise of will on behalf of mundane society ... like rigging an election or something.

‘This is no small thing, Hank. If you become a powerful Mage, that favor can worth a king’s ransom!‘ he stressed, making sure I understood.

‘Most of that was in the Magic for Dummies book you gave me, ‘ I reminded him, wondering what he was stressing over.

‘Okay, true, but a lot of stuff wasn’t there because you really didn’t need to know yet, except, you did. See, there are levels of magic users. An Emergent is a brand-new Mage, just finding out that magic is real. You know what an apprentice is, but the next level is journeyman, for a Mage that has finished his apprenticeship. After that are Senior and Master levels, and those are mostly, honorary and are assigned by the Council.

‘The thing that was not in the book, and something that most Mages never even hear about until they are at Journeyman level, is there are not only levels, there are different types of Mages.’

‘Different types? Like what?‘

‘I am a Mage, a Senior Mage. I have been out of apprenticeship and through my journeyman state for a decade now. Someday, I may make Master level. Mages are magic users. Users, Hank, not creators.’

‘Why is that? I mean, why can’t you, for instance, create a new spell?’

‘No idea. It is a common block with Mages. I mean, why are some people able to sing pitch perfect notes while most people shouldn’t even sing in the shower? Mages, as a rule, are not innovators, or inventors, or developers even, but magic users. Mages who do the research, who create new types of magic or discover new ways to do things, they are Wizards. Wizards are rare and are very valuable to the Mage way of life. They have different rules than run-of-the-mill Mages and you, Hank, are a fledgling Wizard.‘

How about that?

Pat was coming to visit. At first, he insisted that I was the apprentice and had to come to him, but he really couldn’t push too hard since I was, you know, fifteen! He wanted to spend some time examining me up close, checking the extent of my abilities and seeing how I work in person.

He seemed especially interested in both my shields and how I healed cuts and stuff. The healing got him excited, let me tell you, stuttering and sputtering. I would have laughed if I thought I could get away with it.

He was going to time the visit for the week before Thanksgiving, but that plan went out the window right quick! He contacted me the following morning, telling me he would be down the next day and see me after school let out! He said I would know if he was here; he would be traveling in a big motor home.

When I asked about the sudden change, he just told me to keep my eyes peeled and my shields up.

I had Carrie, Lynn, and Bernie stay at their own homes and sleep in their own beds. Alicia hadn’t committed, and I was pretty sure it was the ‘no other guys’ stricture; she was holding a torch for her brother. She still came and played with the girls and was very talented at blowjobs, but that was all we did, no other intimacies.

Of course, Maggie stayed at home with me and slept in my bed. Every other Mage out there would know or assume that she was my battery anyway, so there was no hiding it. The next day though, I made everyone keep their distance and get rides home, or take the bus, as I wanted them safe from whatever was coming. Pat’s sudden change of plans and his warning about my shields had me worried.

It turned out that I was mostly worried for nothing, but my fears weren’t completely misplaced. When I got off the bus at the end of the block and started the short walk home, I could feel something ... off.

I was still not all that good at walking the Astral Plane and couldn’t easily drop into the right frame of mind while awake, much less walking, so I did the next best thing. I opened a one-way port in my shields, each shield opening a different spot so that anything trying to use that port would not have a straight shot. Through those ports, I sent out my own magic, feeling, sensing, and letting the impressions wash over me.

I could see a big motor coach parked in front of our house, and I could even feel Pat and three others inside. The other three were women and they had the ‘feel’ of companions, like my girls. I couldn’t pinpoint anyone else, but I knew he, and it was a he, was out there somewhere close. Even if I could not locate him exactly, I could feel his presence.

I slowed to a stop, a couple of houses away, and set my backpack down. Feeling a little foolish, I moved to the center of the street, away from the houses and the trees and parked cars, out where I could at least feel as though I was unobstructed.

You know that feeling you get before a big thunderstorm? You smell it, the hair on your arms and the back of your neck rises and quivers and deep inside, you feel a vibration from distant thunder. I felt like that now, without a cloud in the sky.

Then, in a cascade that left me a bit breathless and seeing spots, my shields were hit again and again. First from the rear, a wash of flame. Then came a blow from above, a massive, immaterial fist tried to flatten me. From the other side and the front came a whirlwind of stones and branches, trashcan lids, and a child’s tricycle.

Next was a flash of lightning that would have struck me right over the heart, if it had not fizzled out inches from my skin. It did raise every hair on my body though and scared the heck out of me!

This all happened in seconds, all so quickly that it was all I could do not to curl up in a ball under the onslaught! But I wasn’t helpless, not inside my shields. I had dreamed up the very worst scenarios and then designed my shields to combat them.

My shields were set to absorb incoming energy. They were sponges that were soaking up the power being used against me, turning that power back into maintaining the shields, making them even stronger. With just a mental touch I turned the outer two into mirrors that reflected the attacks, sending back to the attacker everything he threw at me!

A rumble under my feet warned me of an attack from that direction, but I think it was an attempt to distract me from the fireball that hit the front of my shield while a trio of lightning bolts hit the rear ... and bounced.

There was a choked-sounding scream, and I could see a shape on the ground at the rear of the mobile home, smoke curling up from it as if it was recently on fire. The heavy feeling of the storm had dissipated, and I was pretty sure that the smoking thing had been the source of the attacks.

As I approached, the shape resolved itself into a small man, slim and well dressed ... well, except for the scorch and burn marks. Oh, and the smoke coming from his jacket.

His eyes were open, and he was breathing, but he was holding his chest as though he were in serious pain.

‘It might be worthwhile to save him. I don’t know what he thought he was doing, but he’s a Council investigator, Hank.‘ Pat said, his voice barely a whisper.

Without answering I reached out and put my hand over the small man’s hand and looked. His heart was doing something odd, beating erratically. Not like the normal lub-dub, but more like a lub-lub-lu-dub sort of thing. I hadn’t any clue about the effect of electricity, especially a lightning bolt, on the human body, not really, but I could tell that wasn’t a good thing.

I pushed some energy into his chest, first matching the erratic rhythm of his heart and then trying to slow it, to push it into the normal rhythm we all use. Lub-dub, lub-dub, it was slowly responding, and my eyes, my real ones, could see the pain on his face easing up a bit, and the man relaxing.

In another minute or so, I had his heart in a nice, calm, regular beat, and then I used almost all of the power from my luck stone, plus a bit from my pendant, to heal up a whole bunch of small strains and tears in the muscle of his heart. Unlike my cut, this was hard! It took every bit of my concentration.

When I opened my real eyes again, I had a bad habit of shutting them to shut out all distractions if I was using my magic for something, the man was scowling at me.

“Get your filthy hands off me, boy.” The man on the ground was snarling at me. Either he had no idea that I had saved him or he held it against me. I used the hand he was holding out to ward me off and helped him to his feet.

He was all of about five and a half feet tall and thin, spare even. He had thinning brown hair and round spectacles, a thin mustache and some serious smile lines around his eyes and mouth.

“I don’t know what kind of trick you are pulling, but no apprentice only weeks from emergence can do what you can do. You have made some pact with other Mages, or maybe the Fae! You may have found some way to hide the stigma of their magic, but I am certain you have betrayed your own kind and I will prove it, by god!” If looks could kill, his glare would have done what his spells failed to do.

“I don’t know what you thought you were doing, attacking me in a neighborhood of normal people? I thought you Council types were supposed to uphold the law, not break it! And if you had killed me with that attack, you incompetent idiot, what then? What would you have proved?” I asked, pissed that he would do something like that. What if there had been innocent people around?

“No one can hold multiple shields, everyone knows that isn’t possible. If I would have killed you, we would have one fewer charlatan around, now wouldn’t we?”

“How did that work out for you?” I asked, sarcastically.

“Look, you little shit, if I had really wanted to end you, I could have done it when you were dumb enough to give me your hand.” He snarked, scowling at me. ‘How dare I question him’ was written all over his face, if not said aloud.

“Oh? Care to try?” I asked, holding out my hand. Since my most powerful shield, the one that protected me against physical harm, was only a tiny fraction of an inch outside my skin, he probably hadn’t even noticed it was there before.

This time, he snarled and reached out, grasping my hand, and I could feel him trying to send a jolt of power down his arm into my own. I hadn’t returned my shields to sponge mode, they were still reflecting so if I hadn’t been quick to reset them, the repairs I had done to his heart might have been undone in an instant!

Instead, Mike Newell found himself on his butt, his back against the motorhome that was ten feet from where he had been standing.

“You done? If I hadn’t absorbed most of that, you could have killed yourself. I just repaired your heart after it stopped the last time, though now I am wondering why I bothered. You can thank my mentor for that.”

Pat chose that moment to come around the corner of the RV or, more accurately, to roll around the corner. Pat was in a wheelchair!

“Mike, I told you to go easy on him, you moron. Your Napoleon complex is going to get you killed someday, Council seal or not. In fact, despite that Council seal, you need to go. You are no longer welcome in my territory. Tell Reggie to send someone else next time, or I won’t ask Hank to hold back.” Pat laughed at the man, looking down where Mike was rubbing his hand over his chest and staring at me like I had two heads.

“Hey Pat. Nice chair.” I said, still a bit steamed about being attacked in my own neighborhood. What I said wasn’t nice, but Pat had never bothered to be personable around me, so I wasn’t all that concerned about his feelings at the moment.

“Yeah, well, it ain’t much kid, but I guess it is better than nothing,” Pat said wryly, then turned back to Mike Newell.

“Go back to Denver, tell Reggie that I need a Wizard, a senior one. I will be sending him my memories of the whole event here, along with the ... with Hank’s, so you might consider what your new job will be when he fires your ass.”

Mike Newell looked up with a sneer at Pat, but didn’t say anything as he got to his feet. Without another word, he simply turned sideways and ... disappeared!

“Whoa!”

“Cool, eh? I’ll show you how later, when I think you have the control needed. It is a fairly high-level spell. In the meantime, you can come in and tell me about how you, an untried apprentice, managed to defeat a battle-tested Council Warlock in a duel.”

The inside of the RV was pretty cool! It had a big table that Pat said could be transformed into a bed. There was a little kitchen with a refrigerator, a big bedroom in the rear, a bathroom, and even a shower! There was a TV and a stereo with CD player and a VHS machine in the area with the table, so you could kick back and relax in style. There was a second, smaller but still comfortable-looking bed in the nose of the RV, over the driver’s compartment.

Inside the RV were the three women I had sensed. One looked about thirty and was cute, but not anyone that would stand out in a crowd. She had a no-nonsense attitude, and for some reason, I didn’t think she was just a sleeping toy for Pat. Her name was Victoria, and I learned that she was his high-school girlfriend and a registered nurse with a secondary degree in physical therapy. Definitely not just a sex toy!

The other two were an adorable set of twins, Korean, they told me. They were young, eighteen or nineteen, and their names were Ttuah and Ttuji. They were most definitely Pat’s toys, but they appeared completely infatuated with him too.

“I could see,” Pat said, tapping himself on the forehead to signal that he meant mentally, or maybe magically, “the huge amount of power he used to attack you out there. You have to be exhausted! I have to be honest here, I don’t know if I could have done what you did, not unless I was standing on a ley line or something.”

I looked at Pat, torn about what to say or do. This was another confirmation that Pat could teach me a lot, but that I had already surpassed him in some areas; that some of the things I could do were already far past Pat’s own abilities and talents.

The question in my mind was how much to tell him. Could I tell and not show? Show and not tell? With this attack, the whole thing had stopped being a fantastic game and started being as real as, well, as real as a heart attack.

“Pat, my shields absorb energy. They use any energy they soak up to strengthen the magic that created them. I don’t know what the limits of the shields are or if they even have one, but that jerk didn’t come close to overpowering them.” I told him, leaving out the reflective properties and, specifically, the ‘how’. When I came up with the idea, I also came up with a counter, so this much, at least, was safe to tell Pat.

“But how...” Pat started to ask, but held off when I waved my hand.

“Pat, what the fuck was that about, outside? Why was that man attacking me like that? He says you told him about me having multiple shields. Why would you do that?” I asked, wanting to figure out how far I could trust my mentor.

Pat looked embarrassed but nodded. “Yeah, I fucked up, Hank. I didn’t even realize it until after I had said something. See, he showed up asking about you. There is a formal complaint lodged with the Council that you, an apprentice, attacked a Senior Mage at the behest of another Senior Mage.”

I had no idea what he was talking about and I guess it showed.

“Abigail Analise Anders, The Cunt. She claims that she contacted you to welcome you to the family and that you attacked her. She said you specifically targeted her ability to communicate with other Mages as some part of a nefarious scheme by yours truly, one Patrick O’Malley, Mage in residence for the city of Augusta, Georgia. Evidently, I want to force her out of Georgia all together and take over.”

“I attacked her? With what? How? How was I supposed to, what was it, target her ability to communicate?” I asked, annoyed by this whole farce. Then I remembered.

“Shit.”

“What? You did something, didn’t you? I can see it on your face. What did you do?” Pat asked, seeming more amused than upset.

“When she contacted me, remember? I called you and you were annoyed that I interrupted something.”

Pat had the good graces to blush, obviously remembering the incident.

“Anyway, she was being completely whack-a-doodle, nuts, I mean, insulting and threatening me. I screamed at her to never talk to me again. Then I shredded her ribbon into a million pieces and ended the conversation.”

“Ribbons? Shredded?” Pat asked, a curious expression on his face.

“Yeah, well see, I picture in my mind the link between you and me as a big green ribbon. It flows from you to me and it just, I don’t know, hangs there. It is just how I picture it when I want to contact you. I look for the green ribbon and there you are. With her, it was a black ribbon, as black as night. When I got mad, I pictured her ribbon being shredded to bits so she couldn’t put it together again and contact me.”

“I see a thread. It is a thin, barely visible, and almost translucent thread. I have to be careful, but when it connects us, it become stronger and thicker, able to do more, hold more. When I send an image, or my impressions ... anything but just talk, it becomes even bigger. At best, we are talking a thick yarn though. I wonder if your ribbon was made up of, I don’t know, all the threads?”

“And when I shredded it, I cut all the threads? No way, I can still talk to you. And how would I even see all of her threads? I would have just cut her ability to talk to me, right? Did she say she couldn’t talk to anyone?”

“I guess. I know she sent an actual letter, using magic of course, to the Council head, Reginald Van Houten. I apprenticed under him when I was not much older than you are, so I can say I know him pretty well. He was strict but fair, and aside from magic, he was a nice guy.”

“Okay, so how did that guy showing up with a complaint about me lead you to telling him about my shields?” I asked, still not ready to let that go.

“Ah, well. I wondered out loud if she was really cut off or just couldn’t contact you, see, and mentioned I was your mentor and had a hard time myself, what with your shields and all. I admit, he was smooth about it, but before I knew it, I had told him about you saying you had five shields up at once and that was why.”

Pat looked embarrassed, and I was pretty sure he was telling the truth.

“So, he wanted to verify this for himself? Why would he attack me like that? Why not ask?”

“Mike’s got a chip on his shoulder. No one was surprised that he went for Warlock training. Warlock is basically a Mage with an offensive spell specialty. It takes time and training and a certain, um, moral flexibility that most Mages don’t have. They are investigators and enforcers for the Council, and it is a title as much as a classification. He is a little guy and has unresolved bully issues. Now, instead of being bullied, he is the bully. I think we could both see that. I will definitely be letting the Council know about his behavior,” Pat said, his voice fairly dripping with disgust.