Paranoid mage, p.1
Paranoid Mage, page 1
part #1 of Paranoid Mage Series
Table of Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1 - Revelation
Chapter 2 - Reality
Chapter 3 - Escape
Chapter 4 – Learning
Chapter 5 – Trouble
Chapter 6 – Violence
Chapter 7 – Consequences
Chapter 8 – Tension
Chapter 9 – Reaction
Chapter 10 - Frustration
Chapter 11 – Offer
Chapter 12 – Preparation
Chapter 13 – Execution
Chapter 14 – Payment
Chapter 15 – Refinement
Chapter 16 – Advancement
Chapter 17 – Introspection
Chapter 18 – Surgery
Chapter 19 - Mistakes
Chapter 20 – Defiance
Paranoid Mage
Callum had seen things all his life. There are monsters and beasts living among people, but he learned very early not to admit such things, not if he didn’t want people to think him crazy.
It turns out that the supernatural is real, but at thirty Callum has no desire to be part of that secret. Not that he has a choice when it turns out he is a mage, albeit one that hasn’t cast any spells in all his life. There are requirements, duties, and education that the powers that be insist he be subject to.
To hell with that.
Foreword
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Paranoid Mage Copyright © 2022 by InadvisablyCompelled
Chapter 1 – Revelation
For some reason, there was one of them at the funeral.
Ever since Callum Wells was young he’d seen things. People. Things that were people, or people that were things. The not-quite-human. They were not very common, but not so vanishingly rare that he could write it off as imagination. He’d mentioned it, once, as a child, and the doctors had prescribed pills. Callum Sr., paranoid soul that he was, had stopped his son from taking them after a week when they did no more than make him fuzzy and stupid.
Callum didn’t mention what he saw again. But that didn’t mean he stopped seeing them. Mostly, it was people with the wrong color skin, the wrong ears, the wrong eyes. The wrong proportions. Sometimes it was just people that nobody else seemed to notice, walking as if they were invisible.
It was one of the invisible people who had come by, walking around the edges of the small crowd. The person in question was a short man, looking entirely human but dressed in bright blue and wearing a beret, which was one reason Callum knew he was neither a mourner nor even visible. At least some people should have glanced at the flamboyant man but nobody did. Nor did the man really seem to pay attention to the mourners, instead wandering between them and the coffins and kneeling down to inspect something on one of the nearby gravestones. He glanced up and made eye contact with Callum. Immediately Callum relaxed his gaze, looking past the not-person.
It was a skill he’d had to learn in lieu of the drugs. People stared off into space a lot, but they didn’t focus on things that weren’t there. The invisible man frowned at Callum, leaned to one side, and when Callum’s eyes didn’t track him, shrugged and continued onward. Irrational anger kindled in Callum’s gut at the man’s disrespect. Even if he was invisible to everyone else, he could have at least waited half an hour for the funeral to be over. He was lucky Callum was not in as dark a mood as he might have been at his parent’s graves.
In a way the funeral was a mere formality. There was pain, yes, but it was a dull ache rather than anything sharp. His parents had been pushing ninety and he’d visited them in hospice for years before they’d finally passed away. It hadn’t been a surprise, and he’d done most of his mourning before medical science caught up with what was already certain.
He was aware, and had been since he was young enough to count, that their relative ages meant that his parents had either flouted biological law or were taking care of a grandchild. Considering how much he looked like Callum, Sr., adoption was not a possibility. His birth certificate claimed Callum Sr. and Mary as his parents, and he’d decided he was fine with that.
In the end, it wasn’t important. He didn’t feel the need to muse on such unweighty matters, especially not during the funeral. Especially when he was distracted by carefully not looking at the invisible man snooping around the graveyard.
“Callum?” He blinked, and looked at Miss Mosley, one of his parent’s friends who was practically an aunt and an octogenarian herself. She reached out to take his hand and patted it soothingly. “It’s okay, dear.”
“Thank you, Miss Mosley,” Callum said, properly going back to ignoring the man crashing the funeral. “We all knew it was coming, but now that it’s here…”
“Yes, I know. When you get to my age, you go to so many funerals.” Miss Mosely said, a little sadly.
“Don’t be maudlin,” Callum said. “I know they’re better off now.” He wasn’t sure how devout he really was, but at the very least he was a consistent churchgoer. The wisdom of the faith was at least some comfort. “Come on, we’ll go to that breakfast place you like.”
“Oh, you spoil me, dearie,” Miss Mosley said, but didn’t turn down the invitation. She did, however, stand respectfully and quietly to one side as he set one of the flower arrangements on a different grave. It was one somewhat older, grave and grief both worn and weathered by time.
Selene Wells had died when they’d been married just three years, of one of those terrible incidents of fate. A brain aneurysm, completely undetectable before the event, had dropped her in her tracks at a restaurant one day. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, there was nobody to blame, not even himself, but even half a decade later he still felt rather hollow when he thought about her.
Standing there staring at the gravestone, he realized he was out of family. Selene had moved down to be with him, and her family hadn’t been thrilled. When she died, they’d cut contact completely. He didn’t have any brothers or sisters, and whatever cousins were around were scattered across the country.
After the breakfast, after the mourners had dispersed, Callum set his jaw and went back to work. It might not have been the best reaction, but at least he had a current client and could lose himself in the process for a while. As an architectural consultant, he could more or less make his own hours, but more and more often he found those hours were pretty long. Longer than most self-made thirty-year-olds might choose.
Despite his preoccupation, he made the time in the following weeks to go to the gym or go biking or shooting on a regular basis. Not that he much felt like it, but in addition to the general caution he’d inherited from Callum, Sr., Selene’s death had made Callum paranoid about his health. Considering the complaints of some of his clients, who were no older than he was, at the very least staying in shape was doing him favors.
“Hey!” The owner of the gym waved as Callum headed toward the equipment. Though he’d introduced himself as Shahey, Callum was pretty sure that wasn’t his name. Shahey was maybe five feet tall, but completely covered in red-orange scales and had a reptilian head rather than a humanoid one. Despite that, his ability to pronounce English was fairly good, though if he listened clearly he could hear the oddness of the different mouth shape creeping in.
“Mister Shahey,” Callum greeted him, extending his hand and pretending the massive claws the not-human had didn’t bother him, no matter how delicately they were used.
“Haven’t been in for a while,” Shahey observed, not quite asking a question.
“Been doing some stuff,” he said, not quite answering.
“It happens,” Shahey agreed. “So, could you do me a favor?”
“Maybe,” Callum answered cautiously.
“Marie there just started coming in,” Shahey said, tilting his head in the direction of a young woman who wasn’t out of shape but clearly didn’t have much muscle tone. “Thought maybe you could help her out.”
Callum gave him a look, but he couldn’t read whatever expression was on the reptilian face. It was probably something appropriately innocent on whatever human face most people saw, but that was just a guess. He wasn’t sure if Shahey really needed help, or was trying to set him up with a prospective gym bunny, but it wasn’t that great an imposition. He headed over to where Marie was fiddling with a hammer lift machine and lifted his hand in greeting.
“Hey, the gym owner said you could use a bit of orientation?”
“I could!” Marie flashed him a smile, which he took with good grace. He still wasn’t entirely comfortable with flirting, even so many years later. Maybe someday he would be, but it wouldn’t be that day.
He was actually a little surprised by the attention Marie paid him, since he considered himself solidly average, though fit. Callum certainly didn’t have the muscles of some of the regulars. It was more than a little flattering, and he had to admit it buoyed his mood, at least until Marie crumpled in the middle of a set.
“Marie!” He grabbed her on the way down, wincing as he banged himself on the side of the machine, and looked around to ask for help when three people burst through the front door of the gym. West Virginia was, for all the jokes, a quiet state, and he lived in a quiet town, one that had shifted from mining to biotechnology without much changing size. Gyms were not generally considered prime target
He hurled himself behind the equipment, dimly registering that the gunmen weren’t entirely human. Nor was their target. Their pistols cracked as they aimed at Shahey, but the bullets just seemed to bounce off his scales. The lizard-man rounded to face them and opened his jaws, and an instant migraine slammed Callum backward, stars dancing in front of his eyes as there was a sudden thunder.
Heat scorched his face and when he blinked his vision clear, Shahey was gone. So were the gunmen. There was only a curtain of fire on that side of the gym, hot enough that the glass slumped and ran in little puddles. Callum stared for a moment, then coughed as acrid smoke rolled in. The sprinklers went off, to no effect, and he realized that everyone had to get out. He had to get everyone out. A quick glance around found that everyone was unconscious save for him, and for no apparent reason. The fire was hot, but not that hot.
Since there were no more gunmen or guns, Callum dashed to the free weights and simply threw a barbell through the front window. Despite hurling the thing as hard as he could, the safety glass didn’t shatter dramatically, but it was good enough. He used a smaller one to sweep the shards before starting to haul bodies, starting with Marie.
The fire was clearly not a normal blaze, since it spread faster and was far hotter than any normal fire should be. By the time he got the second person out he was having to crawl under the smoke. It had only been a few seconds, and the wall of fire was licking along the ceiling and the floor both.
Callum knew he should call it in, but there were only five other people in the gym. Four of them were close enough to the windows that he could pull them outside easily, it was just the last one who was slumped on an elliptical machine in the back. But the air was hot, too hot, searing his lungs and making him lightheaded as he crawled toward the unconscious woman, but he thought he could handle it.
Until the too-fast fire brought down the roof. Or rather, the massive fans and rows of televisions and electrical wiring, plummeting down with a horrendous noise. The collapse sent a shower of liquid sparks over the ground. And over him.
Callum screamed and then swore as a drop seared through his bicep, adrenaline damping the pain enough to keep him moving, coughing and crawling away from the mess. The woman toppled off the elliptical after a single pull, but he had no idea what to do with her. He could barely breathe, the smoke filling the air and obscuring the tangle of junk in the way. If that wasn’t bad enough, his headache was back, migraine lights flashing over his visual field.
Darkness closed in from the sides but Callum kept crawling. He could almost see the opening to the outside despite the detritus in the way, and lights flashed across his eyes as he reached out in that direction, envisioning himself there as if by hope alone he could get there. His vision flashed, and suddenly he was, sucking in fresh air and dropping the poor suffocating woman on the ground next to the other victims.
The rough concrete dug into his hands as he tried to lever himself upright, wheezing as he dug for his phone. Part of him found it strange there were no sirens already, but it wasn’t a movie set. In the real world emergency services took time to arrive. He was dialing when a voice startled him.
“What are you doing?”
Callum twisted around to see the same man who had crashed the funeral, still wearing blue, though a different blue. He just stared blankly for a moment, his brain still not functioning properly, and the man rolled his eyes and plucked the phone from Callum’s hand.
“Hey!” He scrambled to his feet, but a sudden blast of air knocked him over again.
“Wait there,” the man instructed, and turned to the burning building. He waved his hands at it and the fire simply went out. The smoke remained, pouring upward into the air, but the flames themselves were gone. Callum stared.
He wasn’t stupid. Callum was an avid reader of fiction, and he could use the internet just as well as anyone else. The guess he had never really articulated was that he was seeing the supernatural, but only crazy people claimed that. Plus, nothing he’d ever seen was doing anything particularly noteworthy. Sure, there were weird-looking people and sometimes they tramped through public places, but that was the extent of it, at least in his town. Why bother confronting a person about having scales instead of skin if all they were doing was getting groceries?
This was the first time he’d seen anything really impossible. The instant fire, the subsequent extinguishing. Maybe even the miraculous transportation from one side of the building to another, though at the moment he wasn’t entirely willing to rule out divine intervention. When impossible things were happening, anything might be true.
“So what are you?” The man in blue asked again, reaching out to take Callum’s right hand. He instinctively jerked back, but the man just frowned. “No classification?”
“I—” Callum coughed, and wheezed, his lungs burning. “I have no idea what you mean.” It absolutely shattered the rule he’d made to pretend that the things he saw didn’t happen, but it didn’t seem like an important rule at the moment.
“Really.” The man was skeptical, leaning over him. Callum levered himself to his feet, eyeing the stranger warily. His wits were catching up to him a little bit now that he had oxygen back, and he had some idea of how much trouble he was in. Whoever and whatever these people were and whatever they were doing, he’d never heard of them or seen any supernatural stuff on the news, so it was all supposed to be secret. There were at the very least state-level actors involved.
“Phone?” Callum said, holding out his hand. It wasn’t the most important thing, but he did not like other people having his property. Besides, it was easier to deal with than everything else.
“Hmm?” The man glanced down at where he still had Callum’s phone in his hand, and handed it back. “Don’t go anywhere or call anyone,” he warned, then turned back to the smoking building. Another gesture sucked out all the smoke, turning it into a solid ball above the man’s palm. Whereupon he just dropped it on the ground. Finally, he took out his own phone and dialed someone – not emergency services – giving Callum a skeptical eye before rattling off a report.
“Dragonfire at Shahey’s Fitness Center, I have a witness and five victims, but it looks like the perp sidestepped. Witness is unregistered. Yeah, I know. No, I’ll wait, but hurry it up. I don’t have the right focus to glamour something this big.” The man hung up and frowned at Callum. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in?”
Callum decided he’d either gone full on bonkers, or his suspicions were right and he’d somehow gotten involved in a supernatural crime scene. The weirdness of literally nobody from any of the neighboring buildings coming out to see why the gym was on fire, or now wasn’t on fire, drove it home more than seeing special effects happening in front of his face. Despite the tautness in his gut and the tremble in his hands, he still had enough brains to recognize he needed to decide on his approach and stick to it.
“Are you an officer?” He asked. “Where’s your badge?” Callum figured that playing up the ignorance angle not only wouldn’t be hard, but it’d also make them suspect him less. Or at least tell him more. The man frowned at him and held up his right hand, exposing a tattoo around his wrist, one that looked like a chain with three colored dots on the inside of the wrist.
“That isn’t a badge,” Callum said, though he had to guess the tattoo was supposed to mean something. He could act less disingenuous, but the nervousness helped him sell it. Callum had no idea what was going on, save that it was not something he was supposed to be involved in.
“Hmph,” the man said. “Who are your parents?” Callum blinked at the non-sequitor. He was very clearly old enough to speak for himself.
“Look, unless you have a badge or identification or something, I don’t see any reason I should answer any questions without a lawyer.” For the most part, he was simply channeling cop shows, though anyone knew that the best thing to do was to clam up. At least, when it came to US authorities. When it came to magical authorities, he sure didn’t know, but an ignorant American would certainly assume the same applied.
