OLD MAGIC - a modern urban fantasy western mystery thriller excerpt

 

OLD MAGIC - a modern urban fantasy western mystery thriller

Chapter

“This world is built for domesticated men,” I tried not to slur.

I think I might have even succeeded for a bit.

Except the old bear couldn’t be fooled. Not by many, and certainly not by me.

We had known each other for too  long for me to pull any sort of wool over his obsidian eyes.

I watched the firelight flicker in their dark depths as he stared past the flames and into the black night.

He had a ring of gold around the iris, caused by the fire or the magic inside him and I wondered for a moment if he was searching.

Using that magic to seek out what was in the dark and hidden from us.

“Your world is,” he finally said and sipped on the warm whisky toddy we had boiled next to the same fire that kept the night away from us.

“Yours too.”

His head might have moved a fragment of an inch.

“Once it was not, but it is now.”

“I don’t know,” I told him and I didn’t, not for sure. “I think the way we’re going, they’re going to push all the wildness right out of us. Civilization came along and tried to make us seem right, but some of us, we’re not right.  Not inside, were it counts.”

“You are feeling what I have felt, what thousands of my people have felt for a very long time, Ben.”

Those black eyes turned to me and I could for sure see the burning ring of fire outlined around the iris, the pupil as large as a quarter.

They were all dark and bright fire circles that glowed as the magic stirred inside him.

“We roamed this land that no one owned and you came along and said we were wrong to be free.”

He tossed the toddy into the edge of the fire.

“You sent your priests and technology and worst of all your words against our medicine and convinced our people it was wrong and make believe. You boxed us in and put us behind fences and then they sent men like you to keep us here, to hold our magic in check.”

I held up both hands to show him mine were empty.

“I was born here too.”

“Not you,” he waved me off and smiled a big wolf’s smile. “You are one of the good ones.”

The ring of fire in his eyes dimmed a little then, the laughter bleeding off four generations of rage.

Magic was fueled by will power and feeling and one of the best to use for destruction is rage and anger.

It made me think about the Chairman, how much anger seethed off him every time I was around.

How I could read it in the words he was quoted as saying in the newspaper, how the rage couldn’t be contained when he spoke at news conferences.

That kind of mad makes a man do things.

Things to contain it, things to let it out before it burns him up from the inside.

“I am a wild man at heart,” I reminded him.

“More than heart,” Matos said.

He reached for the blue tin pot and poured another dollop of whiskey and honey and butter into my matching blue cup.

I took a sip and let it burn all the way down, and relished the warmth spreading from my stomach out.

“Your medicine is strong too, my oldest friend.”

“I’m only half magic,” I said. “Little more than extra lucky.”

“Luck is a strong magic. But there is more to you than that kind of medicine. As now, your words calmed the wolf inside of me. So it is done with others.”

“I thought you had a bear inside you.”

Big white teeth flashed in the firelight.

“Words,” he said. “Your words stole the magic from my people, but your own words give my people that which was stolen back.”

He meant the old US government did the stealing, not me.

“Dignity is a strength,” his voice was soft. “It lends belief to the soul of a man, and that belief is a power. Strong words.”

He stared at his empty cup and turned it over to drizzle the last few drops into the fire again.

“I think this toddy has made me sleepy,” he said.

“That was the point,” I told him. “Nothing helps a man relax under the stars better than a couple of shots.”

“It helps make the hard ground softer as well,” said Matos.”

“There’s that too.”

“I believe I will turn in,” he used a bandana to wipe out the inside of the cup, and tucked it away in the lined wood box we sealed the rest of the food in.

“Bear with a bear box,” I snorted.

“Do not make too much noise when you come into the tent and wake me,” he said by way of good night and disappeared into the nylon enclosure that was our domicile until morning.

I watched the tent for a few moments and listened to the dry wood crackle inside the fire circle.

Smoke curled up, appearing for only a moment just above the flames before it wisped and twirled up into the night sky, caught by the wind and carried across the dark land beyond the light.

A millions stars winked over my head, a reminder of just how small and fragile we were in a universe that stretched just as far as forever.

That was one of the things technology and civilization forced on us, I thought as I sipped.

Space was something we viewed through a lens or a television screen now.

A hundred years ago, man would go outside to stare up at a sky so full of stars he used them like candles.

Now city lights, even from several hundred miles away blocked them out.

The same thing with the magic, I considered.

There were worlds next to ours, existing right beside the civilization and we didn’t even bother to notice.

Those worlds were erased from our history books like city lights overpowering the stars.

It made me shiver and I finished my toddy, cleaned my cup and went into the tent on quiet cat’s feet so I wouldn’t wake the sleeping Matos.

Just because we couldn’t see the wild world beside us did not mean it wasn’t there.