Pick A Card: The Lombard Alchemist Tales, #6

By J. Daniel Sawyer

On a trip to visit his ailing grandfather, seventeen-year-old Peter meets a magician who claims to know how to grant Peter's dearest wish: to perform impossible illusions.
But dearest wishes come with costs, and new opportunities come with each turn of the cards in a hospital room at the edge of nowhere.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AWP Fantasy
• Release date: Mar 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386471776

J. Daniel Sawyer

WHILE STAR WARS and STAR TREK seeded J. Daniel Sawyer's passion for the unknown, his childhood in academia gave him a deep love of history and an obsession with how the future emerges from the past. This obsession led him through adventures in the film industry, the music industry, venture capital firms in the startup culture of Silicon Valley, and a career creating novels and audiobooks exploring the worlds that assemble themselves in his head. His travels with bohemians, burners, historians, theologians, and inventors led him eventually to a rural exile where he uses the quiet to write, walk on the beach, and manage a pair of production companies that bring innovative stories to the ears of audiences across the world. For stories, contact info, podcasts, and more, visit his home page at http://www.jdsawyer.net

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Pick A Card

A Lombard Alchemist Tale

by J. Daniel Sawyer

AWP Fantasy

A division of ArtisticWhispers Productions, Inc.

© 2016 J. Daniel Sawyer

All Rights Reserved

Book Design by ArtisticWhispers

Digial Painting Dealing In © 2016 Kitty Niciaian

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, and locations are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.

This file is licensed for private individual entertainment only. The book contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photographic, audio recording, or otherwise) for any reason (excepting the uses permitted to the licensee by copyright law under terms of fair use) without the specific written permission of the author.

The Lombard Alchemist Tales

The casinos still glitter in between the moutains out west, up where the ground still throbs from the nuclear test detonations. People come here to try their luck, to take a chance, to have the adventures they wouldn't write home about.

When they run out of luck, with nowhere left to turn, with no money, no options, no hope, no clue? Sometimes, when you fall that low, you need that one special thing that might change everything.

And, for a price, I can provide what they need. They find me in the old pawn shop in the hot zone in this broken-down gambling town at the edge of nowhere.

Sometimes they buy.

Sometimes they sell.

Sometimes, they stay.

Pick A Card

A Lombard Alchemist Tale

J. Daniel Sawyer

Pick A Card

Pick a card. Any card you like. Don't let anyone else see it. The street performer's carnival-barker-style presentation drew Peter, backpack and all, from the well-worn rut in the concrete that stretched from Rock Island High School to the Hot Zone Convalescent Hospital at the far end of town.

Peters feet had worn that rut all by themselves. Every day, they got a little heavier.

A small colony had gathered around the performer—a magician—on the cold crumbling concrete. The crowd was thick enough that Peter—despite his height—couldn't see well enough to follow the unusual act.

It was a gambler's town. Card games and magicians came with the territory, but normally both things stayed behind the mirrored plate glass of one of the city's aging casinos. The town's pride and sin out here on the sidewalk for everyone else to see? Not normal. Maybe even abnormal. The cops usually busted these scenes up. Peter was never sure if the shows were actually illegal, or if the casino owners—who owned the police department, too—just didn't like the competition.