Apocalypse to Go Read Online Free PDF Page B

what?”
    “Perhaps I should hold out for marriage. No more sex until you—”
    “You wouldn’t dare!”
    “No, actually, I wouldn’t.” He grinned at me. “But you sounded appalled at the very thought.”
    He was right, damn him, but I refused to admit it. When I started to get up, he caught my hands and pulled me back down. Before I could object, he kissed me again. I did my best to stay cold. Two can play at that game, I thought. Which is possibly true, but I wasn’t one of the two. At the next kiss I melted right into his arms.
    My research ended up waiting until the next morning. I logged onto the desktop first and brought up a page that described the original Austin Osman Spare. I even found a couple of pictures.
    “Huh, listen to this,” I told Ari. “The guy I know as A. O. Spare had a dad who was a London police officer. I wonder what he thought of his son turning into an artist and a magician?”
    “Rather a lot, I should think,” Ari said. “None of it favorable, at least as far as the magic’s concerned. I take it he didn’t join the force like his father.”
    “No. He seems to have had a really miserable life, poor guy. One of those great British misfits. His magical studies were what was important to him.”
    Ari rolled his eyes at that. I logged off and turned to my old notebook, which I’d filled with tiny writing in violet ink, a habit I’d dropped when I was nineteen. The sight took me back to my teens, a place I didn’t want to go. I concentrated hard on the matter in hand.
    Spare had started with Crowley’s concept of magic as a system of producing changes in consciousness. He took it several steps further by refusing to endorse any one system of magical or spiritual practices. By conflating various systems of ritual magic, meditation, and shamanistic techniques, he aimed to produce artificially what my Agency and I would call genetically determined psychic talents. Whether or not a practitioner could use this magical smorgasbord safely was another matter. I was glad I’d never tried it.
    The second notebook, written in sensible black ballpoint, dated from my years as a psychology major in college. As well as the usual lecture notes on the psychological system and therapy methods of Carl Jung, it held a wealth of material on the early Christian beliefs that scholars lumped together as Gnosticism. Along with alchemy and other magical beliefs, the Gnostics had fascinated Jung, who’d been far more open-minded than most medical doctors are.
    As I looked over my sketchy descriptions, they began to fascinate me as well. Although I didn’t know why, this material struck me hard as being important to the case at hand. The Collective Data Stream had prompted me to retrieve that notebook, but as usual it had omitted the reason why I needed it. That’s the trouble with having psychic talents: ambiguity is our way of life.
    “This all looks interesting,” I told Ari, “so it wasn’t a wasted trip.”
    “It’s never a wasted trip when your aunt offers us dinner.” He was hovering in the doorway into the hall. “I want to go to the gym. Come with me. Working out’s much better for you than starving yourself.”
    “Thanks to you I get plenty of exercise in bed.”
    “That’s not enough. Sex doesn’t elevate your heart rate for a long enough period of time.”
    I stared. “You mean someone
measured
?”
    “They must have.” Ari quirked both eyebrows. “Hadn’t thought of it that way before.”
    “Health nuts have no shame. I hate gyms! I don’t want to go today. Maybe next time.”
    “There never will be a next time at this rate.”
    “That’s the idea, yeah.”
    “Besides,” he went on, “I don’t want to leave you here alone, not after our prowler last night. We know now that someone wants a look at our flat. I don’t want you alone in it if he comes back.”
    There he had a point.
    “I wonder if he was searching for Belial,” I said. “It’s a good thing I keep