Free Blood & Magic by George Barlow Page B

the streetlamp only illuminating a few feet into the house. There was no reply.
    “Alex, we should get backup,” Drew said.
    “You go get backup, I'll stay here to make sure nobody disturbs the scene.”
    He must have known she would go inside, but Alex guessed he didn't care. He probably wanted to use the fact she had broken protocol against her at a later date.
    The stairs creaked as wisps of sawdust glossed from where she stepped, blood shimmering on the steps where her torch light hit it. On the landing, the bannister rail had buckled outward, more blood marking the metal posts. The trail was obvious, but the decision to follow it alone was not so easy to make.
    Alex took a deep breath and continued into the front room, the street lamp outside casting long shadows that kept the floor concealed. The chair in the corner had toppled over and a small coffee table lay broken, the result of something or
someone
landing on it. Alex bent to examine it when her phone light flickered and went out. In the same instant, with a burst of sparks, the bulb of the streetlamp blew, leaving Alex in complete darkness.
    Shadows are nothing to be afraid of, only children fear shadows. She shouldn’t fear the dark. But what if the dark wasn't what she should be scared of? There was a noise, the creaking of a floorboard. It was an old house and old houses creak a lot. As long as she didn’t think about the fact someone had potentially been kept hostage here, then tortured to the verge of death, only to momentarily escape before having their throat slit and a knife plunged into their heart, Alex would be fine.
    Something brushed against her and Alex backed the wall hard enough to drive out the air from her lungs. Alex closed her eyes and held her breath, pursuing a childish comfort: if I can't see you, then you can't see me. It
was
childish, but she clung to that hope. With a creak, the floorboard she was standing on sinked beneath her feet, forced down by the weight of someone standing next to her.

- Chapter 11 -
Pathways
    “Hang on, I'm lost. So Inquisitors are changers, which are alternates, which are like humans, but...”
    “No, for God’s sake listen,” Gabriel said.
    The cafe was odd to say the least, reminding Henry of the Hookah bars he had visited while in Turkey. An aromatic scent clung to the air, sickly sweet and heady. Light poured from coloured glass oil lamps, hung from the ceiling in no discernible pattern. Blocks of pink, green and blue shone out, the colours falling across Gabriel's face as Henry listened to him. The pair were huddled around a small metal table at the side of the shop, each nursing a glass of an electric green liquid Gabriel claimed to be tea. It didn't taste like any tea Henry had ever tried.
    “There is the universe, made of 5% matter and energy Humans can measure and 95% stuff science can’t explain, we call the energy part of that
magus
,” Gabriel said.
    “With you so far.”
    “Magus can interact with matter in untraditional ways, it can do funny stuff with some elements to create certain effects, like the distraction field from earlier. The distraction field is just one of results of the five magus infused elements. Magus also interacts with living tissue, creating a new species from
homo sapien
that we call
alternate
, or
altur sapien
if you like your Latin. We have five types of alternate, each with different abilities. I'm not gonna try to teach you them now, because you'll get a headache and we still have a long night ahead of us.”
    “What kind of abilities?”
    “Take the Physicalist power, some people have this and don't even know. Look at Usain Bolt - mid level physicalist and has no idea, how does he think he can move so quick? Stephen Hawking, high-level Mentalist, although I heard he does understand magus, guessing he'd have to keep quiet about it.”
    “Steven Hawking is a-” Henry said, but Gabriel interrupted him.
    “Take a look at this,” Gabriel said, taking a napkin