Alien Arcana by Glynn Stewart

Author:Glynn Stewart
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Magic, Science Fiction, Space Opera, Fiction, Fantasy, Military & War
ISBN: 9781988035611
Publisher: Faolan's Pen Publishing Incorporated
Published: 2016-09-13T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

Mage-Captain Denis Romanov scanned the apartment building hallways as he made his calm, implacable way toward Roslyn Chambers’s thirteenth floor apartment. He didn’t spot any sign of whatever agents had dropped the girl off—assuming the creepy old man Montgomery had sadly not been able to choke to death had actually kept his word and returned her.

The place the young Mage had found was on par with where Denis had grown up. Cheap but well maintained, with residents and owners who clearly cared. While the apartment building was only thirty stories to the three-hundred-story building in Ireland his mother had lived in, it had the same feel of “poor but decent”.

The kind of place that smart people on Mage-stipends or other social assistance lived in. The pension of a Marine Mage-Lieutenant killed in the line of duty wasn’t nothing, but health had stopped his mother working.

It was only when he’d been about to sign up himself that Denis had realized that the massive friendly man at the end of the hall who’d always had candy or advice for him, whichever he’d needed, was a vet—and a Marine who’d served under his father. No one had been willing to tangle with the Sarge to harass Mrs. Romanov.

He smiled at the thought as he exited the stairwell onto the thirteenth floor. The last letter he’d got from his mother was that their delicate, decades-old dance had finally resolved with ex-Sergeant Wil Harrison asking Jessica Romanov to marry him. Time and past time, in her son’s opinion. Harrison had always been his second father, their wedding just made it official.

The hallway outside Chambers’s apartment brought back less-pleasant memories. There was a still in the air, an absence of traffic and a smell like a storm about to break. A human storm. The smell was nervous sweat.

Denis paused right outside the apartment door and listened.

“Come out,” he finally ordered aloud. “I can smell you, I can hear you, I may as well be able to see you.”

Three young men, two in torn old T-shirts and jeans and one in much nicer clothes, a local designer label from the looks of it, emerged from around the corner. All three were carrying, the two minions with cheap revolvers that might have arrived on Tau Ceti with the colonists, and the boss with a neat little concealable auto-pistol that was completely illegal on Tau Ceti, even with a license.

“I don’t know what you twinkles think you’re up on,” the leader told Denis, “but this is my vixen’s hole, and the comings and goings are making me witchy. What up?”

Twinkles, as Denis understood current Tau Ceti slang, covered anyone in a suit or uniform that looked out of place or done up. Vixen he could guess. Apparently O’Kane, if the boy was who Denis thought he was, wasn’t actually aware he was Chambers’s ex-boyfriend.

Keeping his hands where the idiots could see them, he turned so that his uniform—including the Mage medallion at his throat, though the likelihood they knew what the swords meant was low—was fully visible.

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