Run the Day by Matthew C. Davis Read Free Book Online

like a mean, short Santa Claus what with that giant white prospector's beard.
    "Yeah, yeah I suppose I might owe you some answers. Make me some coffee, and I'll tell you everything," Hack said. It was kind of disturbing, looking him eye-to-eye. Something in those eyes pulled at the spark of light inside me.
    "I don't have any more coffee," I said and took a half-step back.
    "Well then make some, boy."
    Make some?
    After all these years and the old man was still testing me. My parents had raised me to study, to be a scholar and use my brain, to observe the hidden truths of reality. When they died and Hack took over as my caretaker and mentor, my life turned into boot camp. Every day we drilled on magical and esoteric quantum theories, and how to manipulate reality to the point of distorting it to achieve unbelievable things. Hack was the last of a dying breed, from the old-school spell slingers, from a time before reality had begun calcifying and paradigms were being wiped out whole-sale. He was a hard teacher, heavy-handed, and he didn't abide failure. Hack had outlived just about everyone he ever knew, and to him failure often equated to death.
    "Well?" Hack asked, waiting, watching me.
    "Whatever. Get in the kitchen, I'll do your little monkey dance. But then you're spilling your guts." I turned on my heel and headed for the kitchen.
    "Wouldn't be the first time today." Hack said.
    Chapter Six
    We met up in the kitchen after I'd gotten some things out of my bag and Hack found a pair of my sweats and an old flannel to wear. They were a bit small for him, he's quite a bit stockier than I am, but it was better than the sheet-toga. I cleared a spot off the dining table and set the coffee tin I'd dug out of the trash on it, then rooted through my bag for a trusty piece of chalk while Hack and Swift stood nearby watching.
    "You've really let this place go, boy. You ain't looking too good, either," Hack said.
    "Yeah well it hasn't been all sunshine and puppy dogs around here since you went walk-about," I spat back at Hack and began creating my workspace. "Hanford's getting...darker. Now would you shut up so I can work?"
    There were more than a few ways to bend reality, to work magic. The most obvious, blatant, vulgar, and stupidly dangerous way of it involved stepping all over the tenuous laws of physics and distorting them beyond recognition. Like the whole chalk-comet business earlier, accelerating a mundane item's natural velocity to launch it like a rail gun; super cool on film, and devastating, as the late Bugbrain could attest, but reality isn't a fan of getting pushed around like that. It comes back on the offending mage with a vengeance, and I got off damn lucky with a headache. Mucking about with forces like that could've blown my head clean off.
    Seriously.
    The far more sensible, and reliable, method was much preferred by the mortality-conscious mage, such as myself. It involved manipulating the flow of the universe's unifying force, that tricky little thing called magic, and paradigms through ritualistic formulae. It all sounds even stuffier and more ridiculous on paper. But it damn well works, and has a much higher survival rate. And that is why I busily and as accurately as possible chalked out the prerequisite magical shapes and non-Euclidean scribbles around the coffee tin that would allow me to focus the necessary energies.
    "What's with all the nutty math stuff?" Swift asked quietly as I worked.
    "The totally unexciting side of the business, now hush," I said.
    Hack grunted and shot a wary look across the table at Swift, turning his attention back to me. I could feel his eyes watching as if an actual weight pressed against me, but I shoved it and everything else from my mind and focused on my work. I shifted spectrums so that I could perceive the subtle fluctuations of energy all around me, the sleepy grey aura that hung around the house itself from generations of mages honing and practicing their craft. I held my