Read Murder by Magic for Free Online Page B

cat-suited and masked ninja men might look if stripped of their shiny black skins.
    The glimpse was enough to convince him that this was no derelict hired double, but something far less ordinary.
    “You’re a genie,” he guessed, “like in a lamp, only in a mirror. And she found you somehow and you gave her a wish, her resurrection as a youthful woman and a magician, only she had to promise you . . . something.”
    “Not very much.” The tone implied the creature had been studying him and found him wanting. “I did require a soul that had squeezed itself bare of attachments to this world, that had shriveled enough that there would be room for me to expand.”
    “You can’t just . . . take me over!”
    “Ah, but I can. That is my sole talent. I can replicate any being, any body. I got into trouble about that millennia ago, and some wicked magician—a real one—sentenced me to my lonely mirror.”
    “What kind of demon are you?”
    “Explaining that would take too long. Although time is endless for me, I see by the spinning of my senses that we are expected to make our appearances upon the stage. I will warn you about one thing: my gift of replication responds only to the genuine. I can’t control that. So it is and so shall you be and so shall I be when I become you. But freedom is worth the price.”
    “Freedom! And you would imprison me in your place? For eternity? No mortal soul deserves that.”
    “You are right.” The creature’s gray aura faded as it appeared to think.
    Marlon knew a moment’s relief and a sudden surge of hope for a new life, a better life, a kinder, gentler life. It was not too late . . .
    “I will not abandon you to the dark,” the croaking voice whispered, very near now, but no more visible. “I will not deprive you of your beloved limelight. I am a master of transformations, and I can manage that. Watch and believe.”
    Marlon . . . Merlin the Magnificent . . . found himself blinking like a tourist under a bank of gel-covered spotlights. Red, blue, green they blazed, Technicolor stars in an artificial sky.
    He was . . . himself. Standing on a stage as he did almost every night, and Majika was lifting one graceful arm to indicate his presence. His reappearance from the box. His deliverance. His rebirth.
I will be good, I will, I will. Well, better.
    He took the stage, spread his arms and cape, rejoiced in the magic of his vanishing and recovery.
    Applause.
    And then more applause, accompanied by fevered whispers and then shouts of wonder.
    Majika had thrust her left arm out to introduce the second half of the illusion, the other Merlin the Magnificent standing on her other side.
    Marlon turned his eyes uneasily, expecting to see the gray, shriveled, scrofulous thing from the dark.
    Instead, he saw a tall, white-haired man in fanciful evening dress . . . a man whose snowy mane had dwindled to a few threadbare strands . . . whose lumpy frame slumped like an overstuffed sack of extra-large baking potatoes . . . whose neck had become a jowly wattle, whose eyes were sunk in ridges of suet flesh.
    For the first time he truly felt the horror in the story of Dorian Gray.
Gray!
    And before he could do or say anything, or even make a few more frantic mental promises to what or whom he couldn’t say, before he could even take in the enormity of it all and the loss that loomed before him, the foul thing moved toward him—the man he was before he had changed his own mirror image—and sank into him like fog, or like an exiled part of himself.
    Marlon drowned in the engulfing presence of Merlin, a Merlin cursed to live and die looking exactly as Marlon had not allowed himself to look, and happy for that.
    Where Marlon went he couldn’t say. It was dark. And narrow. And he heard and felt nothing and knew he’d go mad if he was kept here.
    And then . . . slap! Snap! A sharp small sound and the world exploded again with light and applause. He gulped a deep, anxious breath of light-heated