The New Magic - The Revelation of Jonah McAllister, Landon Wark [10 best novels of all time .TXT] 📗

coat around his shoulders. While it was not terribly cold outside the lateness of the night, the lonesomeness of the street and the general unhomelike atmosphere of the motel added in their own piercing cold.

He fumbled excitedly through his pockets for the keycard for his door while still several rooms distant. If he paused silently he could have sworn that he could hear the tarp flapping in the hole where his apartment was located some blocks away. Despite the memory of standing before that very hole, in frightened awe of whatever power he had just unleashed, a rising mania gripped him. He slowly balled up his fists in an attempt to quell some of the excitement as he dug into his pocket.

He could feed all those people in the alley. He could feed any damned person he wanted.

As he passed by the soda machine sitting in the space between two of the rooms and unbuttoned his heavy coat in an attempt to get easier access to his pockets he did not notice the two men rush up the parking lot behind him, quickly weaving past the soda machine. He was just pulling the keycard gently into the light of the yellowish bulb from the streetlamp when a huge shadow loomed up behind him and a pair of hands were placed on his back, slamming him into the door.

"Open it up," someone hissed into his ear.

Panic gripped him, the card dropping from his fingers. It was scooped up immediately by a second man who slipped it gently into the old card reader slot alongside the entrance to the room. The door was shoved open and Jonah stumbled over the threshold, landing on the gritty carpet within the small entrance.

"I—wha?" he managed, certain he was being mugged by the two men.

The smaller of the men stepped into the tiny, dark and cold room around him. The larger man wedged first one shoulder and then the other through the frame on his way inside.

Jonah tried to scramble to his feet, only to have the hands of the massive stranger behind him grab him by the scruff of his neck and half pull, half throw him onto the bed while the shorter one began tugging on a pair of thin leather gloves. He pulled out two drawers from the tiny dresser underneath the tiny television, dumping their contents onto the floor. He was young, maybe less than a decade older than Jonah; hair slicked back, face unmarked, thin. He had more the look of a businessman than someone who would be rummaging through a hotel room, but as he bent over to reach the lower drawers of the dressers his suit jacket flicked aside and Jonah got a glimpse of a badge shining in the light spearing through the still open doorway.

Mind spluttering, trying to get a grip on exactly what was happening, Jonah tried to stand up from the bed as the man turned to his backpack sitting on the chair. He was held in place by the massive hands of the other. Sweat flowed freely under his arms and down the side of his face as he squirmed against the comforter on the bed.

A few papers and pens were followed by the thump of the linguistic textbook falling at the feet of the man with the badge. His lips pursed and kicked at the book, turning over a few pages with his foot.

"W-what are you doing?" Jonah stammered.

Jonah felt his skin crawl as the man responded.

"All right, kid," he said with a voice that seemed oddly at ease doing what it was he was doing, "what exactly were you doing in that apartment?"

Jonah opened his mouth to reply when the huge shape behind him shifted, circling around the bed. His eyes went wide as the second figure joined the first next to the tiny folding table in the corner. This one was older, maybe close to forty and had to nearly bow his head to fit in the room. His bald head was covered with scars, likely from the times he forgot to do just that, but as they covered his face as well Jonah had to think there was another, more sinister cause all together. His fists were nearly as large as the other man’s head, bristling with scabs and sores. He leaned up against the wall silently and stared, not speaking a word; just staring with a pair of eyes so dark they were almost black.

"I-I-I wasn't doing... I didn't do anything." His brain stumbled over the words.

The man laughed. "I gotta tell you, just between you and me? That was a real shit hole of a place, man. The hole in the wall was almost an improvement. What, uh, what exactly is the rent on a little hole in the wall like that? I haven't rented since I started out with my courses."

Taken aback by the shift in the man's mannerisms, Jonah had trouble keeping up. He sputtered for an answer as his eyes darted over to where the larger of the pair was cracking his knuckles.

"Still gotta be pretty pricey for a kid like you. All day long in classes."

“Yeah, I mean, not really. I’m uh, a botanist. Well, a student at the university really. I work part time at a botany lab.”

“It must be very part time,” the first man said, still thumbing through the nightstand next to the bed, uncomfortably close to where Jonah sat. “We managed to get a hold of your supervisor, Doctor Merrin? and he told us that you haven’t been in to work for almost two weeks.”

The eyes of the giant glared clean into him, judged and convicted him of being a liar right there.

His mind had already begun crafting stories, about what had happened to his apartment wall and about the reasons behind his unusual behaviour over the past