Suicide Kings by Stephen Blackmoore

Author:Stephen Blackmoore [Blackmoore, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Astra Publishing House
Published: 2022-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Mages and normals don’t mix. It never goes well.

Everything I said about understanding Letitia marrying one? Yeah, forget that. She’s an idiot. I don’t even understand how she managed to keep her wife from knowing magic existed for their entire relationship. I let the cat out of the bag when she asked who I was, and being a smartass, I told her.

She didn’t believe me, but she believed Letitia, who finally realized that all the years of lying to her wife was going to get her killed. And almost did. As relationships go, I’d call theirs “rocky.”

A lot of normals know about us. Some more than others. The best interactions are strictly business. Sometimes they become friends. But like everyone else, friends die, and normals are more fragile.

Even the word we use looks down on them. We’re a bunch of bigoted assholes who should be looking up at them as the paradigm of humanity, not the other way around. It’s not that they’re normal, it’s that we’re monsters.

I don’t even understand why I care so much. So what? The pastor’s a mage. We don’t go advertising what we are even to each other most times. And she’s actually doing some good, right?

Or is she? Why did I have to be the one to deal with that toxin spirit? Why didn’t she have someone she knew deal with it? If she knew who the fuck I was, why not tell me and save me a ton of trouble going in and out of the fucking Zone?

I suppose none of that matters. She didn’t cause my predicament, I did. I started to care about these people. I thought I could help, after the shit I brought down on them when Quetzalcoatl burned the city.

They’re as tight a community as any I’ve seen. They share childcare, take turns cooking, getting groceries, pooling resources. Quite a little sixties hippie commune they got going there. I just wanted to help.

Or maybe I just want what they have. Mage communities are a fucking joke. We’re a bunch of backstabbing narcissists who measure everything by how much magic we can use. That’s like measuring self-worth based on who can piss the farthest. Amanda’s family might sound like an extreme case, but they’re not. They’ve just got some added wrinkles.

The pastor’s making her community work. She’s part of it. She’s not creating a cult of personality, which automatically makes me not trust her. There’s something pretty fucked up when you don’t trust somebody because they might be trustworthy.

I head into Inglewood not far from the church or the Toxic Zone. Peeling billboards that haven’t been replaced in years tell me about the magic of Disneyland, warn me about the dangers of syphilis, beckon me to gamble in Las Vegas.

I stole a beater car decades ago, ugly as fuck. An old Honda with a weird aqua-puke blueish-green paintjob. Couldn’t recall ever seeing one like it. Didn’t really think about until I got on the road. All of a sudden they’re everywhere.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.