Tomorrow Wendell (White Dragon Black) Read Online Free PDF Page B

time you could always live wild, you know, since you’re not going to die for three days yet.”
    “Um . . . right. Thank you, Mr. Alvey.”
    Jonathan nodded and escorted his client out.

J onathan thought about what he would need to test the fortuneteller machine for a curse, or its like.
    He wouldn’t be able to use the methods he had for the Magic 8-Ball. He disliked drawing up and casting from the innate power within like he had before . . .
    That wasn’t true. The truth was he did like it—liked it too much. Anyway he could avoid triggering that craving was the wise man’s way to go, and Jonathan hated playing the fool.
    Performing magic, Riding the White Dragon, made your bones feel like they were sweating, and soaked your brain in colors that had no name. The comedown, Bitten by the Dragon Black, when you stopped using, would make a heroin addict look like a teetotaler.
    You couldn’t have one without the other, which is why the symbol to mark a practitioner was called the White Dragon Black. The Chinese called the symbol a taijitu , better known as a ying-yang symbol, but without the center dots. The symbol was far older than the Chinese use of it. Anthropologists had found the image in Etruscan art from the fourth century B.C. It had served as a way for practitioners to know each other and marked safe havens for centuries before that.
    Jonathan knew he was a functioning junkie. To remain so, he didn’t like to push his luck, not if he could avoid it.
    He tried using his own energy when there was no other choice. What he’d just done for Wendell’s magical ball had required a small amount of energy dispersal, but even that had still left him downing another glass of bourbon to counter the yearning and jittering deep within.
    Jonathan filled his glass, lit a smoke, and sat down.
    There was another reason he couldn’t use the same method on the fortuneteller machine—it wasn’t exactly subtle. Jonathan adhered to the unspoken rule to hide the truth of the world, from the world. He had to think of a substance to place on the machine that would perform the same test without overtly drawing attention
    It also had to be something that wouldn’t damage the machine, should it prove, like the Magic 8-Ball, to be magic free.
    If it did appear to be cursed, Jonathan would deal with that problem, even if it ended up being destructive and obvious. Some things were more important than the issues they caused.
    He leaned back in his chair, sipped from his glass, and drew long drags from his cigarette while staring at nothing.
    Had there been anyone there to observe him, they might have concluded that he couldn’t care less about his client’s problems. It would be easy to think, in fact, that he had lied to Wendell about doing anything for him. However, in his mind, Jonathan scrambled about like a rat in a maze made of cheese and garbage.
    He combined and recombined ingredients to find a way to test the fortune machine discreetly. Such mental exercise also helped distance himself from the effects the magic usage had wrought.
    Jonathan never tried to go dead, straight out, cold turkey, even when using magic was unnecessary, but he had a feeling his new client would make his chance of controlled usage a laughable effort.
    Jonathan focused on creating the perfect mixture: a substance that would require little expenditure of his own power. He needed a concoction that relied mostly on the active energies and magical properties of the ingredients themselves, but would still reveal any paranormal tampering.
    Slowly the right combination fit together in his mind. Knowing that he wouldn’t conceive of a mixture that would cover every possible application of esoteric influence, he had targeted the most logical spells and curses that a practitioner would employ.
    Jonathan had found, in his own history of interacting with this sort of thing, that there were just certain ways a practitioner did and did not make things