Back Lash Page 2

  “Surrender and Pain do fit the Sunday school motif.”

  The corner of Dash’s mouth twitched up. “No, I mean they looked like they were cast by someone who had never practiced magic before.”

  Terric made a hm sound and leaned forward. Dash turned the screen so he could study the picture.

  “He’s right,” Terric said. “I don’t know why I didn’t notice it before.”

  “You were too busy outlining how you were going to kick Shame’s ass.”

  “Aw. Nice to know you care, Ter,” I said. “Let’s see.”

  Dash turned the phone my way. This dead guy was thinner, younger, lighter hair. Slightly familiar.

  “Do we know him?” I asked.

  Terric shook his head. “I don’t. You?”

  I shrugged. Slid my phone across the table for him. “When did you find him?”

  “Day before last,” Dash said. “Out off of Lombard.”

  “And you waited this long to accuse me?” I finished my coffee. “Going soft, boys?”

  “Giving you a chance to come clean.” Terric frowned down at my phone. “Have you ever seen this man before?”

  “No.”

  “Was there any ID on him?”

  “Nope.”

  “Same with ours.” Terric leaned back and steepled his fingers. It was the pose our mentor, Victor, had often assumed when he was trying to think through a tough question. I hadn’t realized Terric had picked it up.

  “Was he inked?” I asked.

  “I didn’t notice,” Terric said.

  Dash shook his head. “Was yours?”

  “Yes. Under the glyph for Binding on his chest. A reptile or fish of some kind.”

  Dash thumbed through the pictures on his phone again, zooming in on them. “Nothing I can see.”

  “So that’s a dead end,” I said. “Where do we go from here?”

  “Davy and Sunny?” Dash offered into the silence.

  Davy and Sunny were friends of ours who had stood beside us even though that meant Davy had been kidnapped and very nearly beaten to death when we’d taken on the people who wanted to use magic—and people who could use magic—for very bad things.

  The two were in love, and used to be Hounds—people who could track illegal magic use back to the user. But since magic had been locked up for a year now, the Hounding business had pretty much dried up. Last I’d heard, they’d decided to get married and get out of the magical private detecting business altogether.

  “Rather not drag them into it,” I said. “They’ve paid enough prices.”

  “Agreed,” Terric said. “And I’m not certain they’d have anything to offer us in the way of tracking this down.”

  “They’d have records,” Dash suggested.

  “We have records,” I said. “You didn’t just burn all the info we had on every magic user in the Pacific Northwest when we got fired, did you, Dash? Maybe you kept a file? A flash drive or two?”

  Dash inhaled and narrowed his eyes while he considered that. I gave him an innocent look. I expected Dash had indeed done the right thing and deleted all the files we used to have access to back when we were running the no-longer-secret Authority.

  But the thing is, with great knowledge comes great cover-ups. And the Authority was excellent at cover-ups.

  Like, say, when someone found out a little too much about the secret side of magic. The Authority’s response was to wipe their memories, take away their ability to use magic, and give them a new life.

  Witness protection program with a twist—you didn’t know you were in a witness protection program because you couldn’t remember who you used to be.

  Nasty business that.

  Nastier now that everyone—and I mean every lovely, horrible, brutal vengeful person—had gotten their memories back.

  “I’m going to bet you kept a little something just in case of emergencies, eh, mate?” I said. “For protection?”

  “I don’t need protection,” Dash said.

  “No. But you knew Terric might, right?”

  Dash shot me an angry look and I was reminded that the man knew how to fight. Might even want to show me some pointers over the kitchen table.

  What had I said to piss him off?

  “You know I couldn’t save any of the records,” Dash snarled. “Not even if I wanted to. Not even for Terric.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  The silence stretched a moment. Dash was not the short-tempered sort. That was the biggest outburst I’d ever seen from him.

  I couldn’t help but smile. Something was under his skin and I was pretty sure it wasn’t me.

  “Dash,” Terric asked, “what did you keep?”

  “I just told you. Nothing.”

  I nodded, pulled my phone back into my palm, then pocket. “So, you’re lying. Obvious. Do I need to point that out or are we just going to let it go until old records we didn’t know still existed suddenly appear on our doorstep?”

  “If it’s not records,” Terric said, throwing me a warning scowl, “what are you worried about?”

  “Nothing. It’s...nothing.” Now it was Dash’s turn to glare at me. “Why do you have to make everything harder than it is?”

  “Daddy issues?” I offered. “Poor boundaries as a child? Death magic eating my soul?”

  “Not. Funny.” Dash stood. “As a matter of fact, I don’t think you’ve ever been funny, Shame. I need some air.”

  With that, he walked out of the kitchen, grabbed his coat off the hook by the door and left, slamming the door behind him.

  I stared after him a minute. I could count on zero fingers exactly how many times I’d seen Dash storm out like that.

  “Wow,” I said again. “Is it the sex? You two fighting over who gets to be the little spoon?”

  “He got a job offer.” Terric rubbed his eyes.

  “For sex? Shouldn’t you get a cut of that?”

  He let his hand drop and just stared at the table, ignoring me.

  Ah. So this was serious.

  “Okay,” I said. “What’s the problem with the job?”

  “It’s in Canada.”

  “Did you tell him not to take it?” I stood. Magic in me was sharp and hungry and I needed to move a bit to take my focus off it.

  Death magic wasn’t hungry for food. I needed to kill something or someone. Soon.

  “No,” Terric said, as I poured coffee that instantly went cold. “I told him he should take it. He should go.”

  I set the pot back on the warmer and turned, leaning against the counter behind me.

  Sunlight swung in through the window, washing Terric’s face in a watercolor of light. Shadows of wind-stirred leaves slid down his eyes, his hands.

  He was holding himself very, very still. I couldn’t feel anything through our connection except silence.

  But I knew behind his silence was pain.

  “Is he leaving?” I asked quietly.

  “He’s angry.”

  “I can see that. Because you told him to take the job?”

  He shrugged one shoulder. “Because I told him to go.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  The silence between us churned. So much pain behind it. And heartache. Jesus. Terric loved that man.

  “You know,” I said, “I was pretty sure we’d agreed I was the stupid one in this,” I waved a hand between us, “bond we have here, not you. You love him, Terric. Go to Canada and be with him.”

  A sour smile twisted his mouth. “I can’t.”

  He looked up, blue eyes icy with that truth. “This,” he mimicked, waving his hand between us, “bond we have here won’t let me.”

  “Bullshit. We’re tied together by magic. Doesn’t mean we have to breathe each other’s air. It’s never meant that.”

  “Except that it has.”

 
“We don’t know that it still works that way.”

  “We don’t know that it doesn’t.”

  “That’s because one of us won’t move out of my house. Seriously, Terric. Time to spread your wings and get out of my goddamn nest. We’ll never know if we can be apart if you don’t leave.”

  He stood, walked over to me until he was standing less than six inches away. “Maybe I don’t want to find out what happens when we don’t have each other around.”

  He wrapped his left hand around my coffee cup, which had already gone from cold to ice cold. The cup warmed, grew hot.

  Terric didn’t let go, didn’t stop pouring Life magic in the coffee and cup.

  Damn him.

  “How long has it been since you killed, Shame?” he asked evenly. “How long since you sated that hollow pit inside you?”

  “What year is it? Divide by a decade, carry the forever....”

  The cup was too hot to hold. Burning my palm. Terric knew it, and just kept pouring heat into it—but it was more than heat.

  It was life.

  The plants along the window sill shivered and stretched fronds and leaves toward him.

  Blisters on my palm broke, and instantly healed.

  My heart was beating too fast.

  So was his.

  Magic wasn’t a blessing with drawbacks, it was a curse with upsides.

  And the upside to being connected to the only other guy who could use magic?

  This.

  I chewed on my bottom lip, fighting the hunger, which was a stupid old habit.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Terric said. Life magic filled the kitchen, so thick, I could taste the wash of green and sweetness of it.

  “I’m not stupid.”

  Terric smiled, and, yeah, I watched his eyes. It still worried me that I might see there the alien coldness, the full possession of Life magic that made Terric into something glossy and perfect and not-human.

  It had happened before.

  But that wasn’t there. That hadn’t been there for a year. I still hadn’t gotten used to the idea that using Life magic wouldn’t hurt him.

  He twitched one eyebrow up, a spark of either humor or determination burning there. “Prove you’ve got brains, Death boy.”

  He stuck his other hand on my chest and pushed hard enough I exhaled.

  I hated a dare.He knew that.

  I also couldn’t resist one. He knew that too.

  Bastard.

  “Screw you,” I said.

  “Shut up, and get on with it. I have a client today.”

  I almost said no. This had been our fallback, our solution to the need of magic that pushed us. A year ago, if either of us let go and used Life or Death magic too much—like this—it pretty quickly turned us into something very different than human.

  I became a vessel for death and destruction—an endless, hungry, killing maw. He became a burning, calculating, cold vessel for life, which turned out to be just as destructive as death. So instead we portioned and cheated. I had my hit list I was making my way through, and Terric did an awful lot of “volunteering” down at the cancer ward and hospitals.

  We cheated to get by. But right here, in this damn kitchen, was the kind of honesty I rarely accepted in my life. Right here, was us admitting that we really couldn’t be apart from each other, even if we wanted to.

  That being together was actually a good thing.

  It scared the hell out of me. People who were around me for too long ended up dead, and even though I liked to give him crap, I didn’t hate Terric. Didn’t want to see him dead.

  Far from it.

  “Jesus, Terric,” I said. “This....”

  “We’ll worry about it later. I want your head clear. Someone out there is using magic to kill people. Magic , Shame. That shouldn’t be possible. We made sure...we gave up a hell of a lot—the world gave up a hell of a lot—to make sure that wasn’t possible. We are not going to let some crazy person break into magic and use it for murder.”

  I didn’t bring up the fact that I was using magic to kill people too—a horror I justified knowing that the people I killed were criminals who had committed unspeakable magical crimes and would do so again.

  If they could access magic.

  Which they shouldn’t be able to do. The price of using magic is directly proportional to what you want it to do. Want it to kill someone? Well, then someone—usually the magic user— pays the price by dying for that death.

  It was the one thing that had kept the magic killing business down to a minimum. But there had been ways around the rules back in the day.

  There were always ways around the rules.

  Apparently, some guy out there had just discovered a work-around and had used magic to kill.

  “Fuck.” I lifted my coffee cup away from Terric’s hand and took a drink.

  Life, pure and strong filled my mouth and hit me like a truck.

  I managed not to moan as I swallowed it down with my coffee. Terric did me the kindness of ignoring my reaction.

  He just stood there, his hand on my chest, and pulled out his phone. He stared at the screen while Death magic rose up in me and devoured the Life he offered. Every gulp of coffee was a little headier than the last. I burned my mouth in my haste to get it all down, and didn’t care that the burns instantly healed.

  When the coffee was gone, I stood there with my eyes closed, pulling in every last ounce of Life I could get.

  Terric grunted. “Shit. Okay. That should be enough.” He drew his hand away.

  But Death magic wanted more.

  My eyes snapped open and I grabbed his wrist.

  He pivoted, left fist cocked. He had a good swing at my face if he wanted it.

  I don’t know what he saw in my expression. I knew what I saw in his: caution and concern. But not fear. We’d pretty much been down to the end of Fear Road and back. We knew we could trust each other. Even at our worst.

  This was nowhere near my worst.

  I slowly released his wrist.

  “Really?” I said. “Violence?”

  “It’s not like I couldn’t have patched you up.” He relaxed his fist. “Next time, just ask me for this before you go feral.”

  “I have never asked you for this.”

  “And how has that made either of us better? We’ve been through worse when magic was out in the open. Seems like we can just give each other what we need and not get worked up about it now.”

  I put my empty cup back on the counter. “I get what I need without you just fine, thanks.”

  “By killing those people on Victor’s hit list?”

  He had never asked to see the list, something I was grateful for. I was cautious enough to make the deaths look natural, to space them out so it didn’t look suspicious. So far, I didn’t think anyone had figured out I was knocking off the worst of the worst of the magic criminals. So far, it was all in control.

  “And?” I asked.

  “And what are you going to do when that list runs out, Shame?”

  Yes, I’d thought about that. As a matter of fact that question was a re-occurring nightmare that woke me in the middle of the night. That question had forced me to slow down on the killing thing—way, way down—and to hold off between big kills with much, much smaller deaths. Plants, bugs, rodents—hell, anything organic.

  But those tiny, feeble deaths were too slight and exhausted quickly, leaving me hungry for more. They were a single drop of water in the desert of my thirst.

  “I’ll deal with that bridge when I need to burn it.”

  “It’s been a year.” He stepped back, poured himself a glass of water. The plants on the windowsill had wilted and shriveled, leaves gone brown and droopy. I wondered if he was going to fix them. Or if he, like me, parceled out how often he used the magic.

  Or, rather, parceled out how
often he let the magic use him.

  Connections go both ways. Especially magical ones.

  “We should have dealt with this months ago.”

  “It can wait,” I said.

  “No.”

  “But there are dead bodies out there. Magically dead bodies.”

  “I know. I want a promise from you, Shame.”

  “No more eating nachos in your bed while you’re at work?”

  “What?”

  “What?”

  He took a drink of water, and gave me that look that made me feel like I was nothing but windows from eyes to soul.

  “Promise me that you will let me, once a month, do this.”

  “Nag me? Can we throttle that back to once a year?”

  “Feed the hunger in you. The hunger in me.”

  “And you think that will do us any good? Really?”

  He shrugged one shoulder and finished the water. “I don’t know. But I’m done being in pain fighting this all the time, and you should be too. I’m calling an end to it. This is officially our thing now. Deal with it. I have an appointment. Check in on those bodies, will you?”

  “Pretty sure they’re still dead.”

  “Find out who they were. If we’re going to track down the person who did this, we need to know why these people were targeted.”

  “Who says we’re tracking down who did this?”

  “I did. Just now.” He walked down the hall to his bedroom, and came out pulling a suit jacket on over his dress shirt.

  “We’re not detectives, Terric.”

  “You want someone else dealing with a rogue magic user? The police? And how, exactly, are they supposed to defend themselves against magic that no one should even be able to access?”

  “Guns work.”

  “Not always.”

  “Please move to Canada.”

  He gave me a faint smile. “Find out who the victims were. We’ll go from there.”

  “You think I’m taking orders from you?”

  “See you in a few hours, Shame.” He glanced over his shoulder. “There’s a package coming today.”

  “For me?”

  “No. Don’t open it.”

  With that, he stepped out into the cool spring day.

  Chapter 3

  I sat in my car and stared at the building across the narrow street. There were a lot of people I could contact to ID the corpses. Davy and Sunny had records on every magic user who had been in the Authority, and every criminal who had not.