Heartless

Thank you for downloading this e-book! It is a novelization of a 5 part web series by the same name (plus some bonus material – whoo!).

The original story of Heartless was created by Dorothy Booraem, Chad Haufschild and Mike Johnson. Visit www.heartlessseries.com to watch the web series.

EPISODE 1 / CHAPTER 1

The morning sun rose over the city, casting red light across snow banks, bare trees, potholed roads, railroad tracks, insurance company high rises, banks, strip clubs, bars and churches. It was Sunday but too early for church bells. The city was still and sleeping.

A noise pierced the quiet. Far off at first, then stitching its way through the sleeping downtown, crisscrossing the alphabetized residential streets, the high-pitched whine left innocent citizens dreaming of dentist drills and mosquitos as it passed.

Speeding through intersection after intersection, the source of the sound came into focus. A beat up motorcycle, small engine being pushed to the limit by its rider, was boring into the heart of this small city on the edge of the plains.

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The engine on the bike was running in the red, and Alex didn’t care. It wasn't his. He’d stolen it and the original owner's helmet on his way out of Kansas City. If he'd thought about it, he would have been surprised the bike had held up this long. He didn’t think about it.

Instead, he thought about the last thing Mesculto had said to him.

All I can give you is your father's last known location.

Your father's last known location. The words still echoed in his head.

It had been ten years since his father disappeared. Alex had spent the first five locked away in the Oklahoma State Home for Wayward Boys. When he turned eighteen, the psychiatrists said he was still a danger to others and that his powerful hallucinations about magical beings trying to kill him were unresolved. They were right about everything except the hallucinations part. But the state needed fewer runts on the welfare teat, so in the end, despite the doctors’ warnings, they released him.

He spent the next five years looking for any trace of his old man. Doing whatever needed to be done to get from place to place, be it beg, borrow or steal although mostly it was steal.

Five years of visiting every trailer park, revival tent and wrong side of the tracks neighborhood. Talking to the gypsies, the homeless and the people no one could see. If you hadn't been born into one of the four tribes, you wouldn't know how to find half these people, half these places. Alex had that birthright, but blood didn't matter without the power to back it up. No matter how many people he had questioned (or threatened), he could find no trace of his father.

It was as if the man had ceased to exist. Alex had learned not to think about the last night he had seen his father with any detail. It was better if he stuck to a simple list:

A) His father had taken his heart leaving him powerless and

B) had then left town with everything else Alex had loved.

Of course, without a heart, a normal person would die. For a magical like Alex, it was a little more complicated. Being born into magic meant that his meat heart had a twin, a shadow nestled next to it, beating in sync. A sort of energy siphon, a shadow heart allowed magicals to tap into the cosmic energy within all things. Energy flowed through the siphon, and then into channels that intertwined with the meat body's nervous system. At points called chakras, the energy was compressed, harnessed and used to bend reality.

Unlike a meat heart, a shadow heart could be separated from the body and transferred to someone else. Meat and magic were tightly intertwined, so hearts could only be given, never taken. A magical could live without a shadow heart, but it was a risky spell. If the receiver didn't return the heart, either by choice or death, the giver was doomed to live without magic. Severed from their connection to the energy within all things, chakras forever empty and barren, the heartless often chose death. Those that didn't die went mad.

Ten years ago, Alex's father had tricked him into giving up his shadow heart then left and never returned. But unlike other heartless magicals, Alex neither died nor went insane.

To other magicals, he was a beast, an aberration. His very existence went against their belief in the superiority of their kind. No self-respecting magical should want to live without his shadow heart, his true heart. The honorable thing would have been to take his own life, and many of them were willing to help him do it.

Mesculto was the only magical Alex had met who didn't seem to care that he was heartless. Granted, the old magician didn't seem to care about anything except money. His pawn shop in Kansas City fleeced normals daily and provided the perfect cover for magicals who wanted to buy, sell or trade artifacts and information. If you wanted to know the whereabouts of someone who seemed to have fallen off the face of this earth, Mesculto was the magician to see.

Six months ago, Alex had gone to Kansas City with an artifact that he planned to trade for information on his father's whereabouts. It was a black plastic Seiko digital wristwatch that had the power to stop time for thirty seconds once a day. Getting it hadn't been easy. But he needed something powerful to trade.

Mesculto was interested in the watch but told Alex it would take some time to get the information, pun intended. Stay here, he had said, work for me while I work for you.

What could Alex do? Mesculto held all the cards. So he had stayed, running errands between the two halves of the city, back and forth across the Missouri River over and over again. Six whole months. It was the longest Alex had been in one place since Oklahoma.

Last night, Mesculto had called him into the back office. Your father is a resourceful bastard. I'll give him that. My network had to dig deeper than usual. Unfortunately, we couldn't find his present whereabouts; all I can give you is his last known location. He threw a scrap of paper on the cluttered surface of his desk.

Alex had forced himself to slowly reach for the scrap of paper and put it in a pocket without reading it. On his way out, he handed the watch to Stefanie, Mesculto's right hand man. It hurt a little to give up such a powerful artifact but that faded when he reached the street and looked at the note. There were only two handwritten lines, six words on the paper: 1642 South 1st Street and Lincoln, Nebraska. If he'd had a heart and if that heart could sing, it would have been blowing arias through his chakras. Finally, he had a lead.

Now, here he was in Nebraska. For the first time in a long time, Alex felt something close to joy. On the drive up from Kansas, he had started a new list:

A) Find his father,

B) get his heart back, and

C) kill his father.

EPISODE 1 / CHAPTER 2

1642 South 1st Street turned out to be the address of a business called Infinity Storage. It sat in the middle of a light industrial area that looked like it had been built in the 80's and gone downhill ever since. Although with railroad tracks just a couple of blocks away, a junkyard next door, and a rundown warehouse across the street, it was possible this neighborhood had never seen better days. An ugly cluster of low storage buildings, Infinity fit right in.

Alex sat on the bike in the warehouse parking lot across the street and scanned the area. The only way into Infinity for vehicles was through a security coded gate. There were no cameras. Each storage unit had a weathered roll up door with a lock, and the whole property was surrounded by a security fence with barbed wire on top.

Of all the things he had imagined he might find here, a storage facility had not been one of them. It didn't make sense. On the drive up, he had entertained fantasies of this place being the final location of both of his goals. But looking at this finite row of grey storage units, he couldn't get any sense that his father had ever been there. And probably not his heart either, although maybe that was still a possibility. A possibility getting smaller with every second that passed but.... He shook off the negative thoughts.

The important thing was to get inside and see what he could find. Even though it didn't look like much, it might be a trick. Magicals prided themselves on camouflage; inside that security gate, it could be a whole different place. He had to approach as if the place had full security.

Not having magic but knowing about the magical world sucked for a lot of reasons. The one that sucked the most right now was not being able to do any spell casting to see if there was any hidden, magical security waiting for him. It meant having to do it the long way, which was hard for a guy with as little patience as he possessed. But he could do it. If information on his father's whereabouts were at stake, he could do it.

The long way, the normal way, meant waiting and watching. Alex knew something most magicals didn't, that once a spell was left in place, it renewed itself on a regular basis shedding tiny but noticeable bits of magic. If a non-magical were patient and knew what to look for, a spell could be sensed and located through normal senses. Alex called it dowsing, like old- timers used to do to find water underground.

It was easier for him because of his history. In fact, he was pretty sure he was one of the few mages who knew this about spells. There weren’t a lot of people that had BEEN magical and now were just normal. In fact, there might be just about...one. Him. Lucky him.

So here he sat, watching, waiting, to see what kind of security or traps had been set around this clue to the location of his father and his heart.

The day passed. Morning turned into afternoon. No one noticed him tucked against the side of the rundown office building that backed up to the parking lot. Alex’s stomach growled. In his rush to get here, he hadn’t wanted to waste time on food. Now he was thinking better of it.

In the seven hours he’d been watching, he’d seen no spell residue and no other security. Several vehicles had come and gone through the gate, bringing junk in to store, rarely bringing anything out. He shook his head. All that crap, just sitting in there, rotting away while the owners went out and bought more cheap shit.

His stomach growled again.

Slipping behind the building, Alex went to the window he’d spotted while taking a leak earlier. Peering through it, he looked for security sensors or cameras. As he scanned the room, he found himself rolling the stick of chalk in his jacket pocket between his index finger and thumb. He pulled it out and looked at it. The chalk. It was the only thing he had brought with him from his time in Oklahoma. With the correct sigul, it could connect any door to any other door. He'd also found that it could lock or unlock most doors, which would make breaking in so much easier. The problem was that the more you used it the less there was of it. Reluctantly, he put the chalk away and broke the window with his helmet using his jacket to soften the sound.

It wasn’t the best meal he'd ever had. Stale donuts in an office break room and an off-brand soda from the mini-fridge. At least sugar and caffeine, the two most important food groups, were taken care of. He ransacked the desk in the biggest office and snagged a lighter and twenty bucks. Good enough.

Outside, the sun had dropped lower on the horizon. It was colder. Alex put on his jacket and turned up the collar, shivering a little. The sky was clear that sharp blue-grey it got in early spring.

Full dark. The security lights came on. Nothing was moving across the street. It was time to go in.

Alex kicked the bike to life and drove it out of the parking lot. He wanted to circle the place once to see if there was anything he’d missed.

The evening air was even colder moving through it. Better make this fast. Turning the corner of the street that ran behind the facility, he saw a dark section of fence. A security light was out.

Alex shook his head. He'd had a lot of time to think while watching cars drive in and out of Infinity. His father and this low-rent place just didn't make sense. It was more likely that his father had stolen something from this facility while passing through town but otherwise had no connection to the place. Mesculto's people had been misled.

But he couldn't be sure until he'd walked through the place. So he parked the bike behind a pile of rusting appliances that were making a glacial escape from the junkyard next door and checked out the security fence. The barbed wire at the top was gonna be a bitch.

Helmet in one hand, Alex took off his jacket and tossed it up to cover the barbed wire. The thick leather protected his more sensitive bits as he climbed up and over, but the way the wind cut through his t-shirt, he felt naked. His teeth were chattering by the time he jumped down on the other side, pulled the jacket down and put it back on.

Jumping up and down to bring some warmth back to his legs, he took stock of his situation. Rows of single-story sheds. Each one with about ten roll up garage doors to a side. He had no idea if there was a specific unit to look for, and he was surrounded by at least two hundred choices. If he couldn't sense any magical tracks, he might literally have to break into every single one of these units to find....whatever this place was hiding.

Better get started.

EPISODE 1 / CHAPTER 3

Alex walked through the rows of storage units aimlessly, waiting for something, anything, to grab his attention. Even if there was no security spell in place, it would be impossible for something related to his father to