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  I spit the waffle into the napkin. “If I don’t?”

  Terric raised an eyebrow. “You need me to threaten you?”

  “Might be amusing.”

  “I can promise you the follow-through would not be.”

  Had some fire behind those words. Man could deal out the hurt when he wanted to. Apparently my not going to see Allie and Zay would make him want to.

  “What the hell kind of meeting is it, anyway? You and I are no longer employed by the Authority.”

  “We aren’t the head of the Authority,” he corrected. “It doesn’t mean we aren’t a part of it.”

  The killer at the booth had finished his coffee and small bowl of oatmeal. He tossed cash on the table, pushed up on his feet, glanced over at me when he thought I wasn’t looking, and walked out the door.

  Damn it. He knew I was tailing him.

  I could kill him from here. Without even standing up. Without even laying a finger on him. I could reach out, let the Death magic inside me pop his heart, blow his brain, drain his lungs.

  Just the thought of it made my heart race.

  Eleanor glared at me and shook her head, then pointed at Terric as if she was going to tell him what I was thinking.

  I still hadn’t quite figured out why she was so concerned about me. I was, after all, the bloke who had killed her and then hog-tied her spirit to my mortal coil. Another bad life choice.

  I took a couple even breaths and shouldered into the death hunger, pushing it away. Terric was saying something, but I was a little busy, thank you, trying not to blow a kill zone a block wide.

  Finally the hunger released and my heart came back down to human rhythms. It was painful and heady and I was still starving.

  “. . . drunk?” Terric asked.

  “Yes.” I had no idea what he was talking about. Hoped it was that we should get a pint or two.

  While I’d been wrestling with my inner death, Killer Guy had strolled out of my reach.

  Great. There went two weeks of hunting down the drain hole, thanks to Mr. We-had-a-date.

  “Still drunk or already drunk?”

  “What? Neither. Cover that for me, will you?” I said. “I left my cash in my other coat.” I stood, wavered a little. I really needed to consume something, or someone, real soon now.

  Eleanor pointed at Terric. Life, she mouthed.

  I ignored her.

  Why not? she mouthed.

  “Reasons,” I said to her.

  “What?” Terric asked. He’d dug a bill out of his wallet and slipped it between the salt and pepper shakers.

  “For the meeting,” I said. “Why are we going? Is it about Davy Silvers?” I strolled toward the door and he followed. March meant rain, and today was no exception. I stepped out into the downpour.

  Terric flipped his collar before taking the plunge to the sidewalk. “Weren’t you listening?” he said. “Never mind. Don’t answer that. No. Nothing new there. We still haven’t found Davy, Eli, or where the government has them stashed.”

  “So, what is it about?”

  We strode down a block or so to his car—double-parked. Every heartbeat from the people around us was a finger plucking rhythm against my spine. Forty-seven lives in the office building, twelve in the coffee shop, eight in the bank.

  He didn’t say anything more until we got into the car.

  “How’s Eleanor?” He couldn’t see her unless he drew on magic to do so, but lately he made it a point to ask about her. Which she loved.

  Women.

  She smiled, then made pointy motions toward him again.

  “Still dead,” I said.

  She slapped me in the back of the head. Ow. Brain freeze.

  “Also, angry.”

  “What about?”

  “Who can tell? Female things?”

  She took another swing at me, but I leaned forward out of her reach, fake-checking my bootlaces.

  Terric glanced over. “What is wrong with you today?”

  Time to change the subject. “I could ask you the same thing, mate.” I straightened, checking to make sure Eleanor was done with the smacking. She crossed her arms over her chest and stuck her tongue out at me.

  I gave her a wink and a grin.

  Terric started the engine. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re avoiding my question. You didn’t get in until five this morning. You paced until six. It’s what, nine o’clock?”

  “Ten thirty.”

  “You’ve had three hours of sleep, which is the most I’ve seen you get all week. It’s not like you to miss your beauty shut-eye.”

  He locked his jaw. Uncomfortable subject. I should probably just leave it alone.

  So of course, I didn’t.

  “Come on, now, Ter. Gotta new guy working your night shift?”

  He stopped for a light. Pedestrians without umbrellas took their time crossing the street.

  “I’ve been . . . keeping busy,” he hedged. “Looking into things.”

  “Do these things have names? Social Security numbers? Memory foam mattresses?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Look at you,” I said. “All mysterious and secretfying. Please tell me it is both a deep and shamefully dark secret you’re hiding from me.”

  “I’m not hiding anything. Nothing you need to know, in any case.”

  “Those are not quite the same thing, are they?”

  “Close enough.”

  I glanced out the side window. As I did so the blur of light surrounding him flared. Huh. Maybe it wasn’t a new boyfriend on his mind.

  Maybe it was magic. He had too much Life magic in him just as I had too much Death magic. And neither of us had much control over those magics.

  There was a solution for this. We needed to use magic together, let the two magics cancel each other out. Of course, we both hated that because every time we used magic together, we lost a little more of our humanity.

  Lately, I’d begun to think that hate it or not, maybe we should just use magic together anyway. And, yes, that was the exact opposite of what I’d tried to do over the last two years. But in small enough doses, it might be safe enough for us to use magic with each other, for each other. The same way carcinogens are safe in small doses.

  And hey, humanity was overrated, right? So what if we lost a little more of our sanity, of our souls? We had people to kill, magic to feed, and meetings to attend. What was one more bad decision in my life anyway? I turned to Terric and decided to find out.

  Chapter 2

  SHAME

  “You could have asked me to help with all that Life magic climbing the curtains in your noggin,” I said quietly.

  “So you could laugh in my face?”

  “Harsh. Also, yes. Not like I haven’t before.”

  “Maybe I just didn’t want to deal with . . .” He shook his head.

  “Me?” I supplied.

  “Us,” he answered.

  “What about us?”

  The traffic light turned and he was quiet for several blocks. Finally, “I don’t know how to navigate this anymore, Shame.”

  “What’s there to navigate?” I slouched down against the side door trying not to show him how much I needed to consume, to use magic too. “You need an outlet for all that Life magic crowding you up. I need to consume life. If we don’t do it too often, if we don’t do it too much, there’s a slight chance we won’t go insane and kill each other. Besides, it’s not like we’re going to die old men.”

  “It’s an addiction. Us using magic together. When we don’t . . . the longer we go between using together, I can’t . . . I can’t think.”

  “Thinking’s overrated.”

  “I feel like a goddamn junkie.”

  I waited until the truth of that co
oled between us. He wasn’t wrong. And I should know. “I haven’t seen you in two weeks,” I said. “Two weeks is a long time.”

  “I know.”

  “You could just get your own place and we could go back to permanently ignoring each other.”

  Since Mum kicked me out of the inn—the only place I’d ever called home—while she and her new love, Hayden, did a beam-to-basement remodeling on the place, I’d moved into the house I’d won—fairly, I might add—from my buddy Cody Miller back in the day.

  And Terric? Well, he hadn’t gotten over the last crappy boyfriend who had beat him and forced him to use Life magic for whatever the Blood magic and drug syndicate, Black Crane, had wanted him to do.

  He had told me I owed him a couch for a few days. I’d probably been too drunk to say no. I didn’t know when or how he’d moved in with me exactly. Hell, it was a big house. There was more than enough room. I had just expected him to leave by now.

  “That wouldn’t change anything. Wouldn’t change us,” he said.

  “True. Pull over,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Just.” I pointed. “Pull over.”

  We were on the east side of the river now, a few miles out of St. Johns, where Allie and Zayvion lived, and where, I assumed, the meeting was being held.

  He did as I said, which just showed what state of mind he was in. Terric never listened to me.

  He put the car in park, then returned both his hands to the wheel. Stared straight ahead at the rain.

  “Do it,” I said. “Throw a little Life magic at me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t? Won’t. Sorry, Ter. If I have to deal with the monster inside me, then a little turnabout’s good for the gander.”

  That got a twitch of a smile out of him. “Your grasp of the English language is staggering.”

  “Shut up. Do it. Life it on up in here, and I’ll Death it on down.”

  He took in a deep breath, half turned toward me. “You think it’s that easy?”

  “Drawing on Life magic? For you, yes.”

  “And what about all those people out there?”

  I listened. I could count the heartbeats in the blocky apartment buildings on one side of us and in the beat-down row of nineteen forties cottages on the left. I knew Terric could do the same.

  Death magic in me was obvious about its killing nature. The Life magic in Terric was a little more subtle in its cruelty.

  Suffering a disease? Life magic might just side with the disease and accelerate it. Or it might decide that other latent things inside you should come alive.

  To hear Terric talk about it, which he didn’t often, it was an alien, calculating force that slipped through his fingers no matter how he tried to control it. To hear him talk about it, he never knew if it was going to heal or destroy.

  Other people might be surprised that Life magic wasn’t a blessing.

  It wasn’t news to me that life was synonymous with suffering.

  “The people are going to be fine,” I said. “We’ll make sure we keep it contained in the car. It’s why you came to pick me up, isn’t it? To draw on magic, feed the need?”

  “No,” he said quietly. “I came to take you to the party.”

  “Party?”

  He winced. “Meeting.”

  I did a quick check. It wasn’t my birthday. I didn’t keep track of other people’s birthdays, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t that either.

  “Party?” I repeated.

  “Baby shower. For Allie.”

  “Baby what? No.”

  “Shame.”

  “Hell no.” I laughed. “Did Allie send you out to drag me in for a baby party?”

  “No, Zay asked me for her. And I would have volunteered. You’re supposed to be an uncle to that kid, a godfather.”

  “When the kid gets here and can blow out the candles, I’ll be there to cheer,” I said. “Baby showers are for girls.”

  “I’ll be there. Zay will be there.”

  “Point stands.”

  “You are such an idiot. Fine,” he said. “Don’t. But I am. I am going to be around Allie, Shame. I am going to be around my friends, people I care for. Something I’ve avoided for almost a month now. This magic inside me . . . I need . . .” He clenched the steering wheel tighter. Then in a quieter voice, “I just want one damn normal day. You’re the last person I want to ask, but . . .”

  “You’ll break your no-magic rule with me for a baby shower? Is it a gay thing?”

  “It’s an Allie and Zayvion thing.” He turned toward me again. Blue eyes drenched in color, a depth that should reflect kindness, but instead gave the impression of fire. Madness wasn’t far behind.

  When Terric lost control of Life magic, he became a very alien thing. No emotions, no humanity. Just a calculating creature of power that twisted the world to his will.

  We didn’t need that. The world didn’t need that because then I’d have to kill him.

  “All right,” I said to Terric, and to the madness within him. “I’ll go to the party so you don’t hurt anyone. But first we use magic so we can put on our sane masks while we’re in public. We do a simple spell, here, in the car, nice and controlled, and take the overstock of Life down a notch.”

  He nodded once, stiffly. He hated this just as much as I did. Or, really, loved it as much as I did and hated that it was just one more step toward us losing our control of magic, or our humanity, for good.

  I stuck one finger in the air and traced a very simple glyph for Burn.

  It took Terric a second to notice which spell I’d chosen. “What? No,” he said. “No fire inside the car.”

  “It’s magic. It will flash so hot there won’t even be ashes.”

  “Shame, this is my car. I just paid it off. No fire.”

  “I don’t know, mate. I’ve already drawn most of the symbol. Too late to go back now.”

  “Just cancel it. There are a hundred better spells. Consume, Dampen, Flow . . .”

  “Flow?” I asked. “Do you see a river that needs rerouting? No. Plus, I like Burn. Easy and quick.”

  “No fire. Use Dampen.”

  “Screw you, Life Boy. I’ll cast what I want to cast. You best get busy calling up all the growing and thriving shit for me to knock down.”

  He licked his lips. “It’s been a while.”

  “This isn’t a confessional. Cast.”

  His left hand still gripped the steering wheel. The other clenched a fist next to him.

  He wasn’t moving. Wasn’t casting. He was not doing much for a guy who wanted to use magic.

  Fine. If talking wouldn’t work, action should.

  I didn’t draw a spell. I didn’t concentrate on pulling magic from beneath the ground to fill the spell. I just relaxed a little, took a deep breath, and called on the Death magic snarling behind my mental chain link fences.

  “Hey, Terric,” I said, thinking maybe the element of surprise would knock him into gear. “Think fast.”

  Death magic hit him like a ton of . . . well, death.

  Slammed him against the door. His head snapped so hard the glass cracked.

  Crap.

  Pain exploded through him, whipped back through our Soul Complement connection, riding the black fire of death coursing through me and into him.

  Jesus. I’d expected him to block. He was fast. Faster than me. He should have seen that coming.

  I grappled with the magic, trying to rein it in, but Death wanted its due. Heartbeat, blood, life. And Terric was right there for the picking.

  Sweat slicked my face, scratched at my neck as I tried to drag Death back to me, back inside me. I hadn’t meant to hurt him.

  “Ter?” I said. “Are you breathing?”

  Magic flared around him so bright it
blinded.

  I had one second to think that maybe we should have parked somewhere more private where people driving past wouldn’t see the ridiculous amount of magic filling the vehicle.

  I had another second to think that if I’d been smart, I would have cast a Block spell or an Illusion so no one would call the cops about the explosion about to go off in the car.

  And the third second? Well, that’s when I got busy fighting for my life.

  Life magic roared out of Terric, pouring so hot it was hard to breathe. Liquid white shattered through the raging darkness of Death I was losing control of, canceling it, breaking it, burning it.

  Light and darkness, life and death. Pretty even odds if you asked me.

  But I’d caught Terric off guard, angry. And hungry. That was a dangerous misstep, like poking a raging lion, lighting a match near gasoline, or pissing off an uncontrolled Life magic user.

  This was not going to end well for one of us. Probably me.

  The pain between us shifted, nauseatingly so, to a sort of pleasure as the magic he called on and the magic I called on fought for the edge, fought for the advantage over each other.

  I could feel Life creeping into me, filling dark hollows in me, firing across my nerves. Every muscle in my body clenched, just as I knew Death was biting off pieces of him.

  Fight? Flight? Break glass in case of emergency?

  Terric and I had done some stupid things with magic.

  So far, we’d avoided reaching into the core of all magic that flows through the world and actually snapping that core in two—which is exactly how a magical apocalypse kicks off. Right now we were just accessing the magic we carried in us—Life and Death—and that was not strong enough to start the end of the world.

  Still, I was pretty sure we’d just climbed to new heights of Mt. Dumb.

  “Terric,” I said. Or I think I said. I might have just thought it, since someone in the car was yelling, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t me. “Take it down a notch.”

  The only problem? That wasn’t Terric staring out of those brittle blues. That was Life magic, inhuman, calculating, brutal. Hungry.