The Paragon Element (Book 1) Read online

  Then one night that all changed. I had been out with Derek, better known as The Black Dog like the ghosts of legend, and we had gotten busted. He was the one who had taken me under his wing, taught me how to survive on the streets and had become like a brother to me. But while the cops were putting the beat down on us, they had killed him.

  I snapped. Something inside was just burning to get out, like previous times in my life, but that time I couldn’t hold it in, and I had let it loose. I hadn’t known at the time where the flames had come from, but I burned one of those officers alive. I hadn’t meant to do it, and even now I still feel bad about it. His screams still haunt my nightmares occasionally. He’d just been doing his job and been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes I wondered what kind of bullshit story his family had had to swallow after the incident. The cops hadn’t known what happened, but after patting me down for weapons, they’d found my leaky Zippo and the extra lighter fluid I carried, and they had just chalked it up to those.

  Someone else had been there, someone that knew otherwise. He worked for some group called MAGE, and he’d made everything about what happened disappear. He had brought me to the MAGE branch in Las Vegas and there I was trained in how to hone and channel my magic, primarily as a way to affect myself and make myself a deadly close combat fighter.

  Those early days with MAGE were a blur. Between coming down off the drugs and all the information they forced into my brain magically, I didn’t remember much else except being continually exhausted. But the end result was the knowledge of many forms of martial arts, as well as school classes up to and including college level. A lifetime’s worth of training in less than two years. Since then I had done four, no make that five, missions for them counting Hector Spence.

  I stepped into my apartment and closed and locked the door behind me. I still stank like the smoke from that sphinx-thing and I needed a shower badly. I glanced around the apartment, noting that everything was just as I had left it. As if it’d be any other way. The apartment was a new acquisition. A gift from MAGE since I had decided to liquidate all the things I had owned previously, including the houses that I had inherited when my parents died. Too many painful memories of both my parents and… Serena.

  I shook my head, clearing it. This was home now, with little to remind me of my past. The apartment was small and spartan, and maybe a little run down, just like the whole complex. There was a tiny kitchen, if it could be called that, just off the right of the entry, with a dinky refrigerator, a sink, an oven, and just enough counter space to hold a small microwave and coffeemaker. There was no dishwasher, but hell, I only had maybe three sets of dishes anyway. Straight ahead was the combined living room/bedroom, with my futon, a nineteen inch television and an old Playstation console, and a coffee table with a chess set halfway through a game that I was playing against myself.

  My boombox stereo sat on an end table by the futon, all of my CDs meticulously put away on their rack by the TV. I liked the place spotless, and in truth, there just wasn’t much to make a mess with. I pulled clean clothes out of the wooden dresser on the far wall and straightened one of the model airplanes on the shelf above it. I had acquired the hobby from my dad when he was still alive. I didn’t have time for posters or pictures, though I wished I did. MAGE paid well, but my lifestyle just didn’t reflect that. I rarely had much time to myself, so I never bothered to go out and buy anything. What would be the point?

  The only things that I had that were newer were my cell phone, which MAGE provided for me and used to get a hold of me, and a state of the art laptop that had all of their programs on it. Things like magical instructional programs, and tracking programs for when I was on the job and even the most recent Civilization game that I snuck on there to play from time to time.

  I flipped the switch on the tall halogen lamp in the corner for more light, then headed for the bathroom, which was opposite the front door on the far side of the main room. It was just as small as the rest of the place, a toilet, sink and shower all crammed into a twenty square foot space. I put the clean clothes on the back of the toilet, where they wouldn’t get wet from the shower spray, then stripped out of my dirty ones and dropped them into the laundry bag hanging from the back of the door. I stared at myself in the mirror for a moment, not surprised that I looked tired and dirty, but mainly to make sure that I still looked like me. I was still learning what other sorcerers could do, and after some of the things I’d seen and heard about, I had a paranoia that one of them might turn me into something… else. Reassured, I turned the knob for the water. It didn’t take long to get hot and I climbed into the shower, leaned forward against the wall so the water could run over my head and back, and finally started to relax.

  Fifteen minutes later, clean and feeling a lot better, I finally settled down on the futon to actually watch TV. Then I realized I still had to write my report for MAGE and finish my writing assignment for school on a sailor’s life during the seventeen-hundreds.

  Dammit.

  Well, welcome to my life.

  TWO

  The alarm went off the next morning and I rolled to turn it off, misjudging how close I was to the edge of the futon and hitting the floor between it and the coffee table. I lay there, blinking up at the ceiling and the dim light coming in the one window, then sighed and reached up to smash my hand down on the top of the clock, then search the coffee table for my pack of smokes. I found them and lit a cigarette, exhaling smoke up into the air. Had to have my morning nicotine if I was going to be even remotely civil, that and my coffee. Let me say this now, I am not a morning person. At least it was Friday.

  I got ready as the coffeemaker gurgled too happily, then poured some into one of the Styrofoam cups in the stack next to the machine. Coffee in hand, I headed out the door, double-checking to make sure it was locked. Though the apartment complex was in a nicer part of town, towards the Summerlin area, the complex itself had a couple of unsavory types. I was the only one that lived in the apartment, and I didn’t have much, but I didn’t want any of what I did have to go missing. Never hurts to be safe, right?

  Luckily for me school was within walking distance, and I usually enjoyed my morning walk there. It was relaxing and refreshing, especially in late fall, like it was now. The October air was chilly, but not too cold. Yeah, it got cold in Vegas during the fall and winter, dropping as low as thirty degrees. Okay, I know that’s not really cold in some parts, but it is here.

  When I got to the school, I stopped for a moment, downed the rest of the coffee and tossed the cup into a nearby trashcan. The school grounds were neat and tidy, the landscaping done in sand and rock and trees. I lit up another cigarette. I had a lot of memories locked up in that school, some good, some not so much. I had finished my MAGE training earlier in the year and MAGE felt that I should re-enroll in school when the school year started up again as part of my cover, to make me seem more ‘normal’.

  I’d been back for a month and half now, but that first day back had felt like I hadn’t been in high school for what had seemed to be a lifetime ago. Then again, it had been two years since I had last attended before that, and for some people, two years could be a lifetime.

  That first day back to school was a cool September morning. It was still early, and the sun had yet to unleash its full potential heat on the city. I took a deep breath and started my walk to school, settling my thoughts and preparing myself for the day ahead.

  I hadn’t seen most of my friends during the two years I had been absent from school and I had to wonder how things were going to go that day. There were two in particular that I was extremely nervous about seeing. Dave and Nina. I had managed to keep in loose contact with them during my time away, enough that they knew I wasn’t dead or in jail, but it had been sporadic at best. I just hoped that Nina could forgive me for leaving the way I had.

  As I approached the school, I took a detour to the ‘Wall’, as the stoners and smokers called it. It was where all the smokers h
ung out so they could smoke cigarettes and still be on time for class since smoking wasn’t allowed on campus. The Wall was right across the street from the school and was actually one of the four walls that surrounded a small power station.

  The Wall and the school were in an upscale part of town, well, just outside of it really, and both were built within the last fifteen years. The paint still looked new on every building around here, though there were some older neighborhoods as well, but they were kept in decent condition.

  The school itself looked like a prison. All walls and bars. The inside and outside paint schemes were grey, and that didn’t help any, though it had a crimson trim to it. That same color adorned the bars and gates into the school. The silhouette of a Spartan’s head was on the side of the gym that faced the parking lot.

  Once I got there, I waved as I approached Dave and Nina, hoping to come off as casual and indifferent, despite my tightly wound nerves.

  Dave was about two inches shorter than me, with blonde hair that reached to his lower back and brown eyes, and was slender to the point of being almost too skinny. He was dressed in what was considered normal for him: black jeans, black t-shirt, usually with a rude logo on the front. Today it was ‘Practice Safe Sex’ with a subscripting that read, ‘Go fuck yourself’.

  Nina was about five foot five, and extremely fit. She had the tone to her muscles of someone who worked out, but not so much that it was unattractive. Her blue and teal green hair fell to her shoulders, and she glanced my way out of light blue eyes.

  Today she almost looked like a common hooker, and I knew she did it to piss her teachers off. We had a dress code after all. She was wearing a tight, and very short, leather mini-skirt, knee high vinyl platforms, and a see-through top with only her bra on underneath. Even she considered what she was wearing as slutty, but she wore it anyway. It got her attention after all, and Nina loved attention.

  With this particular outfit, it was evident that her belly-button was pierced, and, because the bra was thin, that her right nipple was pierced as well. I also knew of other areas that she had pierced, outside of her tongue, lip, nose and multiples in her ears, but I won’t go there… much as there were times in the past I would have liked to.

  Believe me, if she wasn’t one of my best friends, and dating my other best friend I would consider… never mind, best not dwell on such things.

  I walked up to them, gave a perfunctory greeting, and took a seat next to them on the lower portion of the wall as I lit a cigarette to hide my anxiety. The primary wall had a lower terrace that held small trees and plants. Probably one of the many efforts to ‘beautify’ the city. Both of them just stood and stared at me.

  “What the fuck?! Aerick?! Where the hell have you been?!” Nina asked, surprise and amazement clearly etched across her face as she engulfed me in a hug that squeezed the wind out of me. Within seconds I found it hard to take in air yet again as she punched me in the stomach, hard, making me drop the cigarette.

  Dave gave me a once over like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, and then gave me a back-slapping bear hug of his own, before putting me into a brief headlock that I managed to squirm out of.

  “I told you last time I called you. Didn’t I?” I wheezed, trying to get air into my lungs.

  “Well. You said you were calling from rehab,” Nina replied slowly, shaking her hand. “I didn’t think you’d be out so soon, considering that the last I saw of you, you were so strung out you didn’t know who you were.”

  “Well, I guess I recovered quickly.” I shrugged, rubbing at my abdomen. She still knew how to throw a punch.

  “What happened to you?” She was still in shock. “You never did tell me. Why did you leave?”

  I glanced down at the smoldering cigarette on the concrete, then crushed it out with the toe of my boot as I lit up another. It still hurt even to think of Serena, but I owed them some sort of explanation. “I just couldn’t handle it, I guess. I didn’t want to think about it, I didn’t want to deal with it. I just wanted to…” I exhaled smoke through my nose, “I don’t know, forget everything. Maybe I went out there to die,” I said in a low voice. I was telling her the truth. I had left because I didn’t want to think about, or deal with all the shit that had happened.

  “I know you’ve been through a lot, but dammit, Rick, that’s what we’re supposed to be here for!” Nina exclaimed, throwing her arms around me in another tight hug. “I’m just glad to see you alive, and better. I never want to see you like that again. You got me?”

  I just nodded. I hadn’t even realized that she had seen me, but apparently, from what she had just said, I wouldn’t remember it anyway. When I had ended up with Derek and his gang on the streets, I tried just about every drug I could get my hands on to forget Serena and numb the pain. Nothing ever worked, at least not in the long run. I always woke up the next day remembering her even more clearly, and worse, knowing how she would feel about what I was doing to myself. So the cycle would continue. Until things changed so drastically that there was no way I could have ever seen it coming.

  “So how’ve things been around here?” I asked, attempting to rebury those memories while trying to sound casual.

  “Well, your favorite people in the whole world still didn’t leave us alone over the two years you were gone, and if anything, they’ve gotten worse,” Dave said, referring to Terrance Cross and his friends. Dave was dropping into conversation as though my absence had already been forgiven and forgotten about, and it probably was. I was back, I was safe, that was all that mattered to him, or to Nina for that matter.

  The group Dave was referring to were all jocks and wannabe gangbangers with expensive, tricked out cars that mommy and daddy paid for. Yeah, that’s right, yuppie gangbangers. It was sickening. They acted the part, and I knew that a few of them had even brought knives and guns to school, and Terrance even sold weed out of his car, or used to, but ultimately they wouldn’t survive a day in the ghetto. I knew that now.

  “How have they gotten worse?” I asked.

  “Terry and Nick tried to attack me in the passage near the portables last year,” Nina said, her voice tinged with hatred and venom.

  “What?! I’ll…” I let the sentence drop, knowing that if I went further, my secret would be out. I couldn’t let them in on anything. Not yet, if ever. I wrangled with the thought for a moment. Maybe I could tell them. No, it was better this way. As far as Terrance went, it wasn’t like I would be able to do anything without repercussions anyway.

  “I told her to press charges, but, you know her, man, she’d rather just deal with it herself,” Dave said, a dark look crossing his face.

  I nodded. Nina had been studying Shotokan Karate, as well as a few other forms of self-defense, and could take care of herself just fine. In fact she seemed to pick up martial art styles like a pocket picks up lint. It was like breathing to her and it always did strike me as odd, but maybe she was just a natural.

  “Hey, Nick did end up in the hospital when I was through with him. Great part was that I kicked his ass fair and square in front of half the school between classes. That was the best three days off I’ve ever had,” Nina beamed.

  “Just keep your head low, man, they don’t know you’re back yet. No need to give them an extra target quite yet,” Dave said as the bell rang.

  I stood and put out the cigarette, then I hugged Nina, and then Dave, getting a couple of hard slaps on my back from him. “See you guys later. Hopefully we’ll all have the same lunch period this year,” I said as I headed towards the building.

  “Yeah, it’d be about time,” Nina agreed. “Take care of yourself.” She gave me a look that was both reproachful and forgiving at the same time. “It’s good to have you back.”

  I went to the office, got my schedule and then went to each of my classes. As the day went on and each class passed by, I was loaded up with syllabuses and books, and everything else one gets on the first day of school. I found out that I didn’t have lunch wi
th Dave and Nina, but I did share a lunch period with a few other friends of mine.

  During my last class, First-Aid, I noticed Kelly Ferguson sitting next to me. Kelly was a cheerleader and one of the most popular girls in my class. She was also Terrance Cross’s girlfriend, or at least she had been.

  Kelly was short, around five foot three, and had dark brown hair that spilled down to her lower back, and bright blue eyes. She had one of those faces that made guys stop and look twice and back when we were freshmen, I knew she’d done some teen modeling. She had a lightly muscled body, and really, really nice legs. She was wearing tight white hotpants that were definitely not legal by the school dress code, and a white tank top that was probably several sizes too small.

  I had always had a huge crush on Kelly, and because of my confused feelings over Serena at the time, I had worked up the courage to ask Kelly out once during our freshman year. That ended in her trying to kick my testicles into my throat and me becoming the laughing stock of the school for the next several months over that one little incident.

  I glared at her as I took my seat, and noticed that she gave me a hurt look, which threw me for a complete loop. All through class I could swear that every time I looked in Kelly’s general direction she turned away from me suddenly, like she had been watching at me and didn’t want to be caught. I shook the suspicion away and continued to ignore her. It was probably just wishful thinking.

  After school I headed to the MAGE office. Now my real life began. School was nothing more than a cover. The work I did for my employers was my real calling, and it was that life that I had to hide from everyone, even my closest friends.

  I stubbed the butt of my cigarette out. I hated that I had to go to school. But it was the best cover for me and it wasn’t all bad. I had my friends here and they were why I really did this day in and day out. They kept me grounded, sane, and at least partially normal.