The Realm Read online

  The Realm

  A Newton’s Gate Story

  A Q Owen

  C J Clemens

  Contents

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Thank You

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  1

  Atlanta, 2050

  Tears streamed down Blake’s face, mixing with the splattering rain in the mud. He hadn’t stopped crying for the last five days. Today, however, had thrust through his heart.

  He stared down at the small coffin framed by AstroTurf and propped up by brass cylinders that would lower the casket into the ground. Forever.

  Blake winced at the thought. His face twisted in agony anew, and he cocked his head to the right for a second, still wishing this wasn’t real, that this wasn’t the last time he would see her in this life.

  The events of the last week were a blur, but he could still hear, still see the seconds when the waning goodness of his life was ripped away from him.

  The tires screeched in his ears. The sirens blared. The screams of terror.

  He looked down at his hands. The rain soaked them, but it didn’t feel like water. It felt like blood, the blood that covered his fingers and palms as he sat there on the asphalt holding her, yelling for someone to help.

  Everything happened so fast.

  One second, she was there in the yard, kicking a ball around like she always did. It wasn’t like they lived on a busy street. Most of the time there were no cars in sight; one of the reasons Blake had chosen that particular house. The quiet neighborhood skewed a little older, so most of the people drove safer, slower.

  Not that day.

  Blake raised his eyes again to the little coffin. He felt the water dripping from his fingertips as the priest continued offering his prayers in Latin.

  Blake wasn’t Catholic, but he’d received few answers from the pastors of his Protestant church.

  “God works in mysterious ways,” one said.

  “God has a plan,” said another.

  “Sometimes, God says yes to prayers, and sometimes He says no” was what one pastor offered—despite the fact that quote was nowhere in the Bible.

  That wasn’t good enough. Not when you were screaming to an unseen deity to heal your three-year-old daughter. Not when she was lying there in your arms, bleeding all over you after being struck by a car that was driving too fast through a suburban neighborhood.

  No. None of those answers were good enough.

  He’d kicked them all out of the hospital waiting room, yelling obscenities like a raving lunatic. The men probably thought they understood his pain. They walked out of the room as if he would eventually come to his senses. They’d probably been through some kind of grief training in college or wherever preachers went to be sanctified to do their jobs.

  One or two called him over the course of the week to check on him, but he didn’t answer, instead letting the calls go straight to voicemail. He only saw the transcription on his phone before deleting the messages. Blake had no intention of listening. The sounds of their voices grated on his few remaining nerves.

  This priest was probably the same, but Blake felt like he was more of a hired gun than anything else, much like the paid mourners of old when families would shell out some coin to make the memorial services seem less empty. He didn’t know the older man in the rain-soaked cassock. And the priest didn’t know anything about him, either. Blake preferred the anonymity at this point. The fewer people he had to talk to, the better.

  Sure, there were a few friends at the funeral to grieve and mourn his loss, but he’d done his best to avoid prolonged amounts of time with them. Blake knew they meant well. Right now it was just too much to bear.

  His ex-wife, Jen, stood off to the side with her new man, if he could be called that. He was an adult-film director. If he didn’t know better, Blake would have said she was hopped up on prescription drugs and vodka at that very moment.

  He was disgusted by her, but he didn’t blame her. Not for this. If anything, Jen being out of their lives had been a blessing in disguise. It wasn’t a disguise for Blake, but for Sara it had been.

  Jen hadn’t been around much in the last year anyway. Sara barely asked about her.

  A vengeful part of Blake wanted to lash out at her for being a bad person and an even worse mother. He didn’t, though, instead keeping his thoughts to himself. Letting that kind of anger take over at the funeral would have only made things worse and caused him to look like the problem.

  Jen had done a good enough job of ruining what little reputation she had left when she ditched Blake and Sara to move west. He didn’t need to do or say anything else. Not that it would do any good anyway.

  The priest finished his ritual and crossed himself before turning to shuffle around the casket and shake hands with Blake and then a few other close friends and family. The majority of the crowd began to slip away, returning to their cars and their ordinary, painless lives.

  That wasn’t fair to think. Their lives certainly had pain. Just not like what he was experiencing.

  None of them had been through anything like that.

  Several minutes passed. Blake never moved save for the occasional wobble as he lost his balance. When he finally turned around to look behind him, everyone was gone. Even Jen had disappeared. It was just him, the priest, and the two men who started turning the winches to lower the coffin into the ground.

  The blade of pain in his chest twisted anew as he watched the casket sink down toward the concrete vault embedded in the ground. Fresh tears burst from his eyes, and he sobbed uncontrollably. The finality of it all struck him like a cannonball. All week, he’d been in disbelief. It seemed unreal, impossible even.

  Now, the reality of it crushed him and ripped at any sense of normality left in his soul.

  He couldn’t even force the words in his mind to escape through his lips, no matter how hard he tried.

  Goodbye, my daughter. Daddy loves you.

  2

  Atlanta, 2051

  Orion sat at the bar, hunched over with two empty shot glasses in front of his right shoulder and three full ones in front of his left. He was only vaguely paying attention to the baseball game on the television screen hanging over the racks of liquor.

  The bartender, a guy named Jimmy, kept himself busy scrubbing glasses with a towel. From the looks of it, the rag needed a good cleaning, too.

  Orion stared at the surface of the counter, unmoving for several minutes. He heard the door to the bar open and reached for one of the shot glasses to his left. He raised the little glass to his lips, tipped it back, and let the liquid course across his tongue and down his throat. The burn that came with the first few sips of whiskey was long gone. Now all he got was the smooth taste of caramel, oak, and a hint of charcoal that was the signature of the whiskey distilled in Lynchburg.

  A cha
ir at the other end of the bar scraped the floor as the new patron dragged it back. Orion didn’t look to see who it was, not at first. He didn’t care. Not about who was coming in for a drink, or anything else in life for that matter.

  In the last six months since his daughter's death, he’d put the muzzle of his pistol in his mouth twice, to his temple three times, and even to the back of his skull once just to mix things up.

  He never pulled the trigger, though he didn’t know why.

  He couldn’t explain it, but it felt like something was telling him not to.

  Orion shrugged off the thoughts and memories and dumped another drink down his throat.

  Jimmy gave an upward nod to the new visitor and wandered down to the other end of the bar. “What’ll ya have, Steve?”

  Orion sighed. Great. Steve Branson.

  Steve was a guy Orion had gone to high school with over ten years ago. They’d never gotten along, instead becoming rivals in almost everything they did. Most of the time, Orion got the better of Steve, which only served to make things worse. Steve’s hatred of Orion had reached its zenith when Orion married Jen. Steve had wanted her for a long time, apparently, and his jealousy seemed to know no bounds, even showing up at the wedding to protest before being hauled away.

  Jimmy poured a drink for Steve and then returned to his grinding task of wiping down the glasses with his dingy cloth.

  Orion looked down at his last remaining shot and flapped his lips. He could feel the buzz muddling his senses. That was exactly what he wanted. He welcomed the numbness that came with being drunk. Most people tended to get more depressed the more they drank. Orion figured he was already at rock bottom. There was no such thing as more depressed in his book. He was there.

  He pinched the tiny glass between his forefinger and thumb and started to raise it to his lips. Then a familiar and agitating voice interrupted him.

  “Blake Cunningham,” Steve said. From the sound of it, the guy was no longer at the other end of the bar, but much closer.

  Orion sensed him approaching but didn’t move, didn’t react, simply continued staring at the amber liquid in his glass.

  “I thought that was you.” Steve sidled up next to his rival and helped himself to a stool.

  “What do you want, Steve?” Orion asked, still gazing straight ahead. He wasn’t in the mood—for anything, much less for whatever this asshole wanted.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Steve nodding. The other thing Orion was watching for was an attack. The only time Orion got in trouble in high school was for fighting with Steve during an English class. The incident cost him five days of out-of-school suspension.

  Steve rested his elbows on the counter and looked up at the television. After watching a few seconds of the baseball game, he turned his head and stared at Orion. “I heard what happened, Blake. And I wanted to tell you I’m sorry.”

  Surprised, Orion wasn’t sure what to say at first. He’d never heard anything nice out of this guy’s mouth before. They’d been enemies as long as he could remember. Now he was offering consolation?

  “I don’t go by that name anymore. I use my middle name now. Blake…Blake Cunningham is dead.”

  “I see. Your middle name, huh? Seems like you had a really interesting middle name. What was it?”

  “Orion. Now if you don’t mind, I’m trying to kill myself nice and slow, so you fucking off would be helpful in helping me get back to that.”

  The uninvited guest ignored the barb. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through,” Steve continued.

  “No. You can’t. No one can.” Orion tossed back the drink, emptying it in one go. He let out an “ah” and then planted his feet on the floor to get up.

  Steve’s fingers wrapped around his arm and gripped it tight. “Listen, man. I know you and I didn’t always get along. But that was years ago. I know I was a douchebag to you. Showing up at your wedding…that was a mistake. I’ve changed, though. I’m not the same guy I used to be.”

  “Good for you.”

  Orion took his jacket off the back of the stool, tossed a few twenty-dollar bills on the counter, and slipped one arm through a sleeve.

  “You’re not driving, are you?” Steve asked, ignoring Orion’s barb.

  “Only one way to get home.”

  “Come on, man. Don’t do that. Let me get you a ride.” Steve jerked the phone out of his pocket and tapped on the ride share app.

  “Nope,” Orion said and started for the door.

  “You know you’re never going to get past the breathalyzer.” Steve stared at Orion as he stopped in mid-stride.

  The breathalyzer units were a new requirement, put into law just a few years ago. It was a boxy unit that hung next to every exit in every bar in the county. Politicians claimed that thousands of lives were being saved every single year. Orion doubted that was the case. They couldn’t stop people from drinking at their homes and then driving somewhere. On top of that, there were more than a few rumors going around about where the money from the units was funneled.

  Word on the street was that the manufacturers were connected to big political circles.

  Then there was the little matter of the ride sharing fees.

  If you blew into the opening in the center of the box and it dinged you as too drunk to drive, it instantly hailed a cab. Of course, the bartender could override the auto locking mechanism on the door, but most didn’t. Too many times, cops had shown up and taken bartenders away. Their drinking establishments closed and were replaced by another only weeks later.

  Orion was fairly certain that practice had grown. He figured the politicians were getting some money from local watering holes on both ends, from the breathalyzer companies, and from the bar owners themselves in the form of bribes and blackmail.

  The world had been a crooked, dangerous place before the Incident. The only thing that changed after was that corruption seemed to increase. Orion wasn’t sure why.

  He knew that technology had experienced sudden and rapid advancements decades before. Magic had come out of the closet long ago. He heard about it when he was young, but hadn’t really witnessed anything miraculous from magic until he was a teenager. He’d seen something on television one night on the news—he hated watching the news—where a young man had wielded some kind of magic fireball or something to defend himself in a fight. When the police arrived, they’d killed him on sight, claiming he was a threat to public safety. That was the official response to what happened. The truth was the cops were scared and overreacted.

  Viral videos had proved it was all a lie, that the police had done their best to cover things up and sweep them under the rug. The videos were quickly taken off every website and social media platform by the government, but not before the videos received millions of views.

  Now there were magic users everywhere, taking their rightful place in the world.

  Orion sighed. He wished he had some kind of magic right about now. He could shut down the breathalyzer and make Steve go away. Neither of those things was going to happen. He also knew Jimmy wasn’t going to bypass the system no matter how loyal a barkeep he was.

  Orion spun around. “What do you want, Steve?”

  Steve was standing just a few feet behind him. He wore a kind, sympathetic look on his face. His eyes were full of sincerity for the first time since…ever. His head swiveled around in a half nod, half shake.

  “I just want to give you a ride home.”

  Orion let out a long breath through his nose and glanced over at Jimmy. “You didn’t call him, did you?”

  Jimmy chuckled. “Nope.”

  Orion turned his gaze back to his high school rival. “Fine,” he said. “Saves me twenty bucks, I guess.”

  He followed Steve out to the parking lot and paused when he saw the car Steve was getting into. It was a beat-up old thing. The wheels hung on for dear life. There was a crack in the windshield that spiderwebbed its way across the entire sheet. The vehicle was at least
twenty years old. The rust spots and holes in the metal along the doors, hood, and trunk only served to underscore its age.

  Orion frowned and stole a sidelong glance over at his black ’69 Camaro. The thing was as pristine as the day it came out of the factory, complete with two white racing stripes down the middle. Then he turned back to Steve’s car. It was a total piece of crap in every sense of the word. Orion hoped it didn’t smell like it.

  He opened the passenger door with a loud creak, half expecting the thing to fall off onto the pavement.

  “Sorry, it’s a little messy,” Steve apologized as he climbed into the driver’s seat.

  “No worries,” Orion said. “I appreciate you giving me a ride.”

  He got into the car, shoving a few empty burger boxes out of the way at his feet, and slammed the door shut.

  The car struggled to start when Steve pressed the start button on the dash, but it eventually grumbled to life, the motor rattling so much that the chassis shook.

  Steve pulled the car out onto the road. The two didn’t say anything for the first minute until they reached an intersection with a red light.

  “Which way?” Steve asked.

  Orion half expected the guy to know exactly where he lived. There was a sense of relief that came with the question. It made Steve seem less like a stalker out for revenge.

  “Turn left here,” Orion said. He gave him the rest of the directions, which only consisted of two more turns and then the number of the house he’d lived in since he and Jen got married.

  Steve did as instructed and made the turn, continuing down the street in silence for a minute or two.