"Simon Hawke - Wizards 08 - Wizard of Lovecraft Cafe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

name. Most adepts had by then dispensed with the tradition of using mage names, but Wyrdrune had
received his from his old teacher, none other than Merlin Ambrosius himself, and he preferred it to his
birth name. But legally, he could not lay claim to being an adept. He had been expelled from the College
of Sorcerers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for practicing magic without certification. He had returned to
his native New York City, where he lived in a railroad flat located on East Fourth Street, along with the
most unusual familiar Kira had ever seen—a straw broom that he had animated and that had become
impressed with the irascible personality of his late mother.

As an adept, Wyrdrune possessed great natural talent, but it was undisciplined and unrefined. With his
education interrupted, he had been casting about for some way to complete it on his own, but that
required money, and for some peculiar reason, he had also become fixated on the auction of the
Euphrates artifacts being held at Christie's.

They had both tried to steal the runestones at the same time and circumstances had forced them to team
up for the theft.

Thereafter, despite their initial dislike of one another, they had been unable to break up the team. Each
time they tried to fence the runestones, the gems had magically returned to them, which led to at least one
well-connected fence putting out a contract on them. With the police pursuing them as well, they had
been forced to turn for help to Wyrdrune's old professor, Merlin, who had been the first to realize the
true nature of the runestones. When they encountered Modred, who had been sent to kill them, the living
runestones had forged a link between the three of them, magically bonding with them, making them
avatars for the spirits of the mages whose life energies imbued the stones. From that point on, their lives
had changed irrevocably.

It was fate that they, the descendants of Gorlois, should have all been brought together to align
themselves against the threat posed by the Dark Ones. It was fate that after Merlin died, his spirit should
have possessed his sole surviving relative, a young English delinquent by the name of Billy Slade, and it
was fate that Morgan Le Fay's enchanted ring, which had held the spirit of her father, should have come
into Billy's hands, bringing the spirit of Gorlois to his descendant. Fate, magic, synchronicity, whatever it
was, thought Kira, they had all become caught up in it.

As she watched Billy sleep, Kira thought about all that they had gone through. She thought about what
they had risked, what they had won, and what they had lost. Billy had lost not only his individuality, but
he no longer even looked the same. He had become a completely different person. The Billy Slade who
came back with them from London had died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, killed by a necromancer. The
spirits of Gorlois and Merlin had fused their life energies with his as he lay dying and the result had been a
sorcerous mutation. Merlin was now gone, and Gorlois was gone. The Billy Slade she knew was gone,
as well. But elements of all three of them had been magically combined to give birth to the young man
whose head now rested on her shoulder. He looked about nineteen years old, but in a sense, he had lived
for thousands of years. And in another sense, he was a newborn. Spellborn. There had probably never
been anyone like him before. He was unique. Kira wondered what it felt like. And at the same time, she
didn't really want to know.

Wyrdrune and Modred had changed, too. The enchanted, living gems had wrought changes in their
molecular structure, changes that were, according to the laws of science, utterly impossible. When
Modred died, killed by a Dark One's acolyte in Tokyo, Japan, his runestone had absorbed his life force
and bonded with Wyrdrune, so that the integrity of the spell uniting them could be preserved. The two
men she had loved wound up sharing consciousness in the same body, a body that could shapechange.
Wyrdrune could physically manifest as Modred and both of them were present all the time. It had made