Stone Cold Read online

  Dash wiped at his face with his arm, as if trying to scrub off blood. But when I took a life, when Death magic drained a life down, there were no marks left behind on the living.

  He hadn’t pulled the gun on me yet. Idiot. This was his chance, might be his only chance to put me down.

  “If you walk out on him right now,” Dash said, “I will spend my life making you pay for that choice. Every damn second.”

  I didn’t know what it was. Maybe just the tone of his voice. The fear and frustration. He knew Terric was slipping away. He knew I was about to lose him. He knew he was about to lose him too.

  Dash wasn’t the kind of guy who harbored revenge fantasies. Just hearing that desperate promise—and there was no doubt in my mind he meant every word—brought everything into focus.

  I got an upper hand on the magic in me—not just a Bind spell, I regained clarity—and shoved it down, down inside me, and threw the locks.

  I broke out in a cold sweat. It was like coming up out of a swamp, sucking for air and sunlight. I was mostly just me again, no more puppet man, even though Death magic still twisted in my bones.

  Shame? Eleanor said. Is that you in there?

  “Yes,” I said. “Mostly me.”

  Then while you are here, and sane, I want you to release us. Release Sunny and me. Now.

  I glanced at Sunny, who had on her killing eyes.

  If I released her soul to go back into that dead body, she’d be dead.

  Everything suddenly looked clearer now that I had control over Death magic, so: win. But that didn’t mean things looked good.

  We were holed up in a house with one dying man, a dead woman, and a spelled-up man who was not quite real and maybe not sane. We’d broken into a government holding cell, taken Davy and Terric out of it. We had killed. I’d killed.

  We’d taken down their spell-carved drones.

  There was no way Krogher was going to let us go. Ever. As a matter of fact, the ease of us getting into and out of that warehouse made no sense. Even if they hadn’t seen us coming, even with me walking around in my bubonic boots, we shouldn’t have pulled that off that easily.

  I didn’t know why we weren’t currently being shot at.

  “You need me to make my point a little sharper?” Dash asked.

  Right, Dash. We’d been talking. Or arguing.

  “No, I heard you,” I said. “Right now, this minute, I’m listening. Tell me what we need to do.”

  He held one hand up, wiped his face again. “I don’t know, Shame. We got away, but if Krogher is as powerful as you say he is and has Eli under his thumb with those gate devices, we could have an entire damn army up our ass any minute.”

  “Then why aren’t we running?” I asked.

  “You wanted us to stop.”

  “And you listened to me? I wasn’t exactly thinking straight.”

  “What the hell, Flynn? Yes, of course I listened to you. Terric’s dying.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “Hold on. Can we call someone to heal him? A doctor. A doctor who can use spells?”

  “He can’t be healed,” Cody said from where he was standing next to Terric’s bed. I had forgotten he was in the room.

  “We have to do something,” Dash said. “Take him to a hospital so they can put him on life support, pain medications.”

  I was listening to Dash but watching Cody, who held my gaze.

  Cody shook his head. “You can do something to help him, Shame,” he said. “It won’t be easy. You won’t want to do it.”

  Cody always had an angle. He’d saved my ass plenty of times when we were running cons. He’d selflessly saved all our asses back when magic had almost ended our world and he’d stepped up to be the vessel in which dark and light magic could join and heal. I’d developed a pretty hefty trust in the kook.

  “Will it save Terric?” I asked.

  He inhaled and lifted his eyebrows. “I don’t know. This trip took some unexpected turns. What you’ve done, how you’ve killed. Sunny.”

  So he knew about Sunny.

  He knows you killed me, Sunny said. He’ll tell someone. And they’ll put you down. You are on borrowed time.

  I’d been born on borrowed time, but I didn’t tell her that. We needed solutions to our problems.

  “Tell me what to do,” I said to Cody. “Tell me what I can do to fix this. Fix Terric.”

  “You have to kill him.”

  Chapter 19

  SHAME

  “What the—? No,” Dash said. “Shame, don’t listen to him.”

  “Killing Terric seems to be what we’re trying to avoid here, Cody,” I said quietly.

  “You died,” he said. “You came back.”

  “I have Death magic riding shotgun in my noggin.”

  “And Terric has Life magic,” Cody said. “Dying shouldn’t be more than a pause in living for him.”

  “No,” Dash said again. “No one kills Terric. I can’t even believe I have to say that. Listen, Shame, here’s what we’re going to do. You are going to cast Illusion on the house and car. We’ll get a doctor out here. For Terric and Davy. Understand me? We’ll get them stable. No more killing.”

  “Stable,” I said, still looking at Cody. “Then what, Dash?”

  “We’ll build that bridge when we get to it. Can you access enough magic to cast Illusion?”

  Cody clearly wasn’t a fan of Dash’s plan. But he shrugged, letting me make the decision.

  What I decided was to placate Dash. A deathless plan sounded like a good, reasonable starting point.

  “I can access the magic,” I said.

  Even though the Soul Complement bond between us didn’t seem to be working, Terric wasn’t dead yet. That meant I still had superior abilities with magic. But if he kicked off . . . well, when . . . I’d be of no use to anyone except as a killing thing.

  I was pretty sure if Terric died, I’d go completely, gloriously insane.

  So basically, they’d want to end me pretty quick.

  “Good,” Dash said, sounding a little more comfortable with the conversation now that it wasn’t about dumping Terric in an early grave. “Cast it. I’m going out this door to talk to Davy. I will be right back in. And if you lay a hand on him, Shame . . .”

  “You’ll spend your life making me regret it, second by second.” I gave him a small smile. “I heard you, mate. I’m still in here.”

  He glanced over at Cody, at Terric, then walked past me and down the hall.

  “I’m not wrong,” Cody said. “About Terric.”

  “About me turning him off and then on again?” I shook my head. “I don’t think so, Cody. I can’t bring him back, and I don’t know that he’ll want to leave death for me.”

  “You left it for him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.” And if I did kill him, and did it wrong, I most certainly didn’t want the ghost of him tied to me. I wasn’t dealing well with the two ghosts I was currently failing.

  “Soul Complements,” Cody said as if that explained everything. “If you kill him, he’ll come back. Should come back.”

  “You don’t know that. You can’t guarantee that. You’re guessing your way through this just like the rest of us.”

  “Sure, but it’s a good guess. A strong bet.” He took a few steps away from the bed and sat on the dresser. “I carried magic for a while, remember? I have a good feel for these things.”

  “Terric and me, the magic we carry, isn’t a part of what you did with magic.”

  “Now, that’s not true. Magic is magic is magic. But I understand why you’re doing Dash’s thing first. It’s the safe move. You have never been much for the big gambles.”

  “Hello? Do you know me, mate?”

  He held up one finger. “International art couriers.”

  “They wa
nted us to be drug mules.”

  Another finger. “Wilderness guides.”

  “Hit men for the mob.”

  “Investing in Apple.”

  I stopped pacing. “I don’t remember that one.”

  He frowned, and then a smile crossed his face. “Huh. Must not have been you. Well, you really missed out on that one.”

  “Ass.”

  “So, are you going to get with the Illusioning or what?” he asked.

  Eleanor and Sunny were in the room, close together and talking to each other with their backs turned to me. So apparently the dead girls were conspiring against me.

  Great.

  As for the state of Flynn, I was worried, exhausted. The adrenaline of fighting Death magic and the kick of energy I got from the lives I’d consumed were already wearing off. If I was going to access magic for a spell with any kind of control, it would need to happen now.

  “Here?” I asked.

  “Outside won’t put any of us out of your reach, Shame,” he said. “Not really.”

  “Still, you might not want to stick around for this.”

  “And miss the show?”

  “They say I have a suicidal personality,” I muttered. I closed my eyes and cleared my mind.

  Not Death magic, not the magic I carried. I wanted the magic that flowed beneath the earth, magic anyone could tap in to. Magic that in my hands would be powerful enough to make this house and about fifty feet around it disappear. Or at least fade into the surrounding flora.

  It wasn’t hard to tap in to the magic. Even here where it wasn’t channeled and networked through man-made conduits and lines, even here where there was no well where it naturally pooled, I could feel it.

  Easy to reach. Difficult to control.

  To use magic, glyphs must be drawn. To draw a glyph correctly, you gotta be calm, centered, focused.

  I was about as far away from any of those things as I’d ever been.

  Terric was dying.

  Everything inside me was dying with him.

  I’d trapped Eleanor. I’d let Death magic kill Sunny with cold, brutal efficiency.

  Krogher was on our tail, probably Eli too. Davy was grieving—rightfully so—and was screwed up in ways that made me think we might want to book him a rubber room.

  Dash and Cody were hurt—those bullets hadn’t all missed. Soul Complements out in the world were walking targets. It was only a matter of time before they’d be dead.

  The world needed saving. Maybe, if we made it through the night, we could come up with an idea on how to do that.

  But none of those thoughts churning through my head were going to help me cast magic.

  So I pushed them away. Pushed everything away. I knew how to make the world go away. I knew how to be silent, detached, dead.

  That’s what I did.

  And from the middle of that silence, I drew the glyph for Illusion. I wrapped it with Fade so the unavoidable flare of magic wouldn’t be as strong or bright, and so I might have a chance of not giving us away while I was trying to hide us.

  The spell rolled out from the center point of the glyph I sketched in the air in front of me. As quickly as it glowed yellow with magic, it faded out, a pale connection of threads that soaked into the floor and wafted out to cover the walls around us. It surrounded the house, the car, and made it look like there was nothing but landscape left behind.

  Cody sighed. “I miss it,” he said. “Have I told you that?” He was next to me now, holding a glass of water out for me. “Using magic. Making things happen. Changing the world with a flick of fingers and thought.”

  “You can’t tap it at all?”

  He shook his head. “I can fix it if it’s broken, I think. The big break, light, dark. But otherwise, it’s as insubstantial as air to me.”

  “That’s what you get for saving the world, mate,” I said. “A big fat nothing.” I took the water. “How’s Terric?”

  “I think he has a few hours. At most. But I’m not a doctor.”

  I drank the water mechanically. It didn’t do anything to ease my thirst. What I wanted, what the hollow emptiness inside me yearned for was right over there on that bed. Dying.

  Don’t do it, Shame, Eleanor warned.

  No, Sunny interrupted. Do. Kill your damn Soul Complement. I want to see your face when he breathes his last breath.

  That won’t help anything, Eleanor said. Shame, just be calm about this. Think it through. Make a good choice.

  “How many voices you got in that head of yours?” Cody asked.

  “What?”

  “I know what you did to Eleanor. I know what you did to Sunny. They’re both still with you, aren’t they?”

  Tell him, Sunny said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Really?” Cody said. “If I happened to have the goods to pull on a Sight spell, I wouldn’t see two women chained to you?”

  “Get the goods. Then you can tell me.”

  That’s constructive, Shame, Sunny said.

  “You know you can’t lie to me,” Cody said quietly. “I know your tells.”

  “Yeah, sure. I’m an open book.” I took a few steps away from him, then a few back, trying not to pace toward Terric. “They’re both still with me,” I said quietly. “I don’t know how to let them go. If I break the tie holding them to me, the magic, they’ll be dead for good.”

  “So why break it?” he asked.

  “Other than they both hate me for killing them? There’s a natural order, isn’t there?” I said. “Life. Death. A way to sort chaos. The way things should be?”

  “I think,” he said, “you, and maybe Terric, get to have some say over that. Life. Death. But the rest of us—including Eleanor and Sunny? If there was a way to break the rules of death, you’d know it.”

  Which brought me back to the thing I was trying not to think about.

  “You think if I kill Terric, he’ll . . . just come back to life somehow?”

  “You and Terric . . . you aren’t like most of us. Death in you, Life in him. Positive, negative. You push him far enough, that magic in him is going to push you right back. Life always finds a way to survive.”

  In theory.

  “You don’t know that, don’t know this”—I pointed at my head—“won’t kill him.”

  He shrugged. “I was the Focal—the vessel for dark and light magic joining, Shame. Held all the magic in the world together until it healed and became what it is now. And while I wouldn’t say it was exactly a comfortable experience, it did leave me with a pretty good blueprint on how magic does and doesn’t work. Or perhaps more correctly, how it can and can’t work.”

  “Cut to the big reveal.”

  “Okay. Two choices. Wait for a doctor to come here and tell us all of Terric’s organs are failing and it’s time to say our good-byes, or step in and take that natural conclusion away from him.”

  “Natural conclusion?”

  “Death. I mean death, Shame. How hard did you get hit back there?”

  “I wasn’t hit.”

  He paused and gave me that thousand-yard stare while looking straight at me. I set my shoulders so I didn’t squirm under it. I hated his forever-judgment look.

  “You were shot,” he finally said. “Multiple times. Trained gunmen don’t miss.”

  I looked down at my chest. He was right. There were holes in my shirt I hadn’t started the morning with.

  Jesus.

  “I can’t take death away from someone,” I said.

  “Why not? You’re death, aren’t you?”

  He says you can undo this, Shame, Sunny said. You can undo death.

  “I can’t. I’ve tried.”

  Sunny threw her hands up in exasperation.

  Cody didn’t say anything. We’d gotten to the poi
nt in our relationship where we didn’t have to use our words to tell the other person that we knew he was fooling himself.

  “If you can kill people,” Cody said, “it makes sense you can unkill them. You can remove the death that’s devouring him. Draw it to you, tie it to you. Just like you took Terric’s pain. Some of it anyway. Enough to give Life a foothold in him again. A chance to thrive.”

  “You saw that?”

  “I see everything.”

  “If I touch him, his heart stops beating.”

  “It’s not his heart you have to fix, Shame. It’s his soul. Your soul and his, tied together, are stronger than either of you alone. That’s the beauty of being a Soul Complement.”

  “Save it for the greeting card,” I said.

  “I’m telling you how I see it. You know I’m not wrong. You know you can’t kill him. Even if you tried.”

  I wasn’t specifically worried about me killing him. I could have the best intentions in the world. But if I lost an inch to Death magic, he’d be dead in a second. Death magic had been looking for the edge on killing him for the last three years.

  Dash walked back into the room. Yes, he glanced at Terric first to see if he was still alive.

  “Where’s the trust, mate?” I asked.

  He gave me a warning look. “Don’t touch him. We have a doctor on the way.”

  I hooked my thumbs in my belt and leaned against the wall. “Don’t think a doctor can do anything for him.”

  “He was shot, Shame. Doctors can do something for that. That’s what doctors do.”

  He was right. He was making sense.

  “How long?” I asked.

  “Thirty minutes.” He paced over to the bed, pulled a chair up next to it. “I don’t care if you stay in the room, but I’m not going anywhere. You want Terric, you go through me.”

  Something dark inside me shivered with the idea of that.

  You’re sick, Sunny whispered.

  I gave her half a nod.

  Cody sucked air in through his teeth. “So we wait. Awesome. I’ll go see if there’s something to eat.”