Stone Cold

Chapter 11

TERRIC

There must have been a time when I was not in pain. Certainly I’d had a childhood. I’d been born, loved, cared for. I’d spent years running with Zayvion and Chase and Greyson. Those had been good years. Even with Shame.

And that’s where my thoughts always stopped: Shame.

Surely there’d been some time in my life when I hadn’t hurt since I met him. If life was pain—and it was—Shame had to be something else, right?

But all I could remember from my time with him was the pain.

He’d nearly killed me when we were twenty and the creature we had been hunting got past him and almost tore me apart. That had broken my ability to use certain magics: Faith magic, Blood magic. His mistake had changed me, changed my life. But it had been a mistake.

Yes, I’d forgiven. Because what he’d done to me had broken him more than me. He had never forgiven himself. He had spent years with the guilt, the regret. It was like watching a man slowly cut his way through his own throat. For years.

Years.

Shame’s life had changed because of what he’d done to me. Shame had changed.

“Are you awake, Terric?” Eli asked.

I couldn’t track time anymore, had given up trying.

Time was stretching out toward eternity. It had been days, weeks since Eli had tapped in to the magic I carried and used it to power up those people. Days of dead bodies scattered around my cage, eyes empty, staring at me, at their killer.

Faces I would see for the rest of my life, however long that was.

Then the dead were dragged away, blood and fluids mopped up by men with surgical masks who could not hear my screaming.

And always there was Eli, more torture, more pain.

And now there was now.

“I want you awake for this,” Eli said.

I was strapped down again. Hadn’t I just been standing?

Sitting now. A chair. Shackled by feet, arms, chest. The drugs they’d kept me pumped full of left the taste of burnt plastic and hot concrete in the back of my throat.

“You might be wondering what our endgame is.” Eli sat in front of me now. There was a table between us. He took off his glasses and polished them with a yellow cloth that looked like a square of sunlight in shadows. Surrounded by gray and black as I was, it had been too long since I’d seen a color other than red.

“I’d want to know what this all adds up to if I were, well . . .” He pointed at me with his glasses. “If I were on the other side of the table.”

I didn’t say anything. Not because the back of my throat was numb. Because there was power in silence. Right now it was all the power I had.

Eli placed his glasses back on his face like a man who had been working too many hours. “Have you guessed? Do you know what this”—he gestured to the cage and warehouse around us—“is all about?”

I waited.

“You know this wasn’t my idea, don’t you?” he said. “I asked you and Shame to save me. To save her. I begged.” His hand clenched into a fist and he was silent until his fist stopped shaking, until the color faded from his face, until the hatred in his eyes slipped back into madness.

His Soul Complement, Brandy, the other half of his soul, was dead. Yeah, well, so was mine. He and I had something in common. We each wanted to see the other person planted six feet under.

“If it were my idea,” he went on, “I’d have left him alive, Shame. So he could feel what I’ve done to you. So he could suffer every. Last. Cut.” He smiled. “It would have been . . . poetic.”

My heart beat harder. Life magic flickered somewhere within me, responding to my need, but was so drained and far from my reach, I couldn’t get at it. Yet.

Keep talking, Eli.

“But they . . .” He leaned back. “They wanted what you had. And they knew only I could get it for them. Life magic. I got to it, didn’t I? I always deliver. I’m a genius, you know. And yet you aren’t dead. That’s impressive. Any other man . . .” His voice faded and he frowned. “Funny how it all works out. You and I, on the same side, serving the same cause. Maybe not willingly, but serving. Good little soldiers.

“It’s the difficulties that make strong bonds, isn’t it, Terric? And you and I, well, we’ve had our difficulties, haven’t we? Now here we are. Each a half of nothing.”

He stopped talking and just sat there, his eyes going distant, hollow. As if all the fire in him had been snuffed.

“It’s not how I wanted things to go,” he whispered. “At all. We really were on the same side once.” He smiled, just slightly.

“Before . . . before the end of the world. But then all my memories came back. All those years taken away from me by Victor.” He shook his head. “I enjoyed killing him. Wished I had more time to do it properly. But they always had the upper hand, these people.” He gestured to the warehouse. “They had me, because they had her, Brandy. No matter what I did, no matter who I asked to help me, to save her, they’ve gotten what they wanted from me. And no matter what I’ve given them, she’s still dead. . . .”

He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, they were the eyes of a man broken. Defeated.

“Sometimes I think they wanted it. Wanted Shame to kill her. So I would stay with them, do what they asked. Revenge is a weakness of mine. Always has been. And while I dislike being predictable, being played . . .” He shrugged. “At least I’m the one who will see this to the end.

“Now, the endgame.” He sat forward. Not close enough for me to touch him, but close enough the camera that was on the cage wouldn’t see his face. I knew he did it on purpose. I just didn’t know why.

“Pretty simple, really. The government wasn’t happy to find out there were people who knew how to make magic strong again. People like you and me—Soul Complements. The only people in the world who can break the core of magic and unleash the power, the destruction. So yes, I threw my chits in with them. Made them an offer. Government assistance in getting my Soul Complement, Brandy, out of the loony bin. In exchange for a few tricks I’d learned. Tricks I played on Davy Silvers—carving spells into him, spells that changed him. You remember Davy, don’t you? How you tried to save him and how you failed?”

My breathing picked up.

He waited. Waited me out. “Ask me,” he whispered, a small smile on his face. “Ask me what I did to poor Davy.”

I swallowed, the burn sliding farther down my throat. Felt like I hadn’t had water in years. “Where is he?”

“Don’t want to give me time to brag about my exploits?” he asked. “Fine. Since you didn’t ask, I activated a few spells I carved into him all those years ago. And then I killed him.”

I tipped my head back, my breathing ragged now.

Eli winked. His hand, which was in front of him and out of the camera’s line of vision, lifted slightly and he crossed his fingers.

Lying? He was lying?

“I killed him because we got everything we needed to know from him. He was my blueprint, my plan for carving all those other people up with spells. Spells you’ve supercharged, thank you, Terric. Couldn’t have done it without you.

“The program is going forward, thanks to your cooperation. It will be easy to find the Soul Complements in the world since there are so few and the Authority’s records have long been accessed by the government. Then it will be even easier to take these magic-carved people, these drones, to each Soul Complement, trigger the magic they carry, and kill the Soul Complements. Of course it will also kill the drones, but magic has always come with a price, hasn’t it?

“Once the Soul Complements are out of the way, no one will have massively destructive capabilities with magic. Well, except Krogher and his warehouse of walking bombs. I do believe that will make covert operations and worldwide negotiations quite a different game. Our government will be the only one in the world that has a stockpile of destructive magic. It is a limited resource, but hey, if you’re the only kid with the toys everyone wants, the world is your sandbox.”

No more winking, no crossed fingers. He wasn’t lying about this.

“Why tell me?” I asked. “You know I’ll stop you. I’ll stop them.”

“With what, Terric? Magic? You don’t have that anymore. We drained you dry. To access magic again, to really access the power of it, you’d need someone who could use magic in perfect concert with you. What’s that person called? Something . . . oh yes, a Soul Complement. No luck there. Shame is dead, dead, dead. He is dead, isn’t he?”

I didn’t know why he asked me that. He knew the answer.

“Just like Brandy, I suppose,” he said. “Gone.”

Eli might be right about Shame, but he was wrong about me. I wasn’t empty. Magic still flickered in me. Close enough I could almost reach it. I just needed a little more time.

“They’ll stop you,” I said. “They’ll break magic and stop you all.”

“Who? The Soul Complements? I think you are grossly overestimating their abilities. After all, who is more dangerous than you and Shame? Who is more powerful than Life and Death? If we can kill him, if we can do all these things we have done to you, Terric, who do you think can stop us?”

I didn’t say it. I didn’t have to.

“Allie and Zayvion. That’s who you’re thinking of, isn’t it?” His smile was a little less convincing. “Even they can’t stop this machine. Krogher will take out the Soul Complements, and then he will have the world in the palm of his hand. I’ve seen the things that he wants magic to do. I’ve seen how he wants the world to end. . . .” He stared down at his feet. “It is not a pretty picture. For anyone.

“Now,” he said, slapping both hands flat on the table. “Let’s get on with this. Today, Terric, I’m going to take a burden off your mind. I’m going to Close you so you can’t use magic anymore. No more responsibility, no more worrying if Life magic is doing harm to anyone. No more worrying about magic at all. You won’t even remember it existed, and if by some strange circumstance you do remember magic, you will have no idea how to use it.”

Cold terror clenched my gut. If I couldn’t use magic, there was no chance I’d break out of this place. Without magic, I had no cards to play. Without magic, I wouldn’t be worth keeping alive.

“Why don’t you just kill me?”

“Kill you? No, not yet. I need you.” He paused as if that were an important admission on his part. Then, in a lighter tone: “You are the liability insurance. Just in case we need to load a few more spells, you’ll be right here, easy for the taking. Oh, we know you’re drained of magic right now. But you might surprise us. I always plan for surprises. Always.

“So, let’s get on with this, shall we? It’s been a while since I’ve done anything old school, like Closing. I can only assume I’ll be a little rusty. We’ll just muddle through together, won’t we?”

He snapped his fingers.

I jerked.

Footsteps echoed in the warehouse, people walking this way. Two guards led a boy and an older woman toward us, both of them blank-eyed and filled with magic, one spell carved into their flesh. They walked up to the cage and wrapped their hands around the bars.

“There is a certain irony in your own magic being used against you, to keep you from using magic, isn’t there?” Eli stood, walked to the corner of the room where a table was spread with scalpels, hammers, wire, Void stones, mortar, pestle, and more. Things he had used on me. Things he had done to me.

He paused there, glanced over his shoulder to make sure I was watching what he was doing. “This,” he said, pulling out a circle of metal with glyphs carved into it, “was the beginning of the solution. The problem? If you can raise an army of walking, mindless spell holders, how then do you activate those spells? How then do you deactivate those spells? I began with this.” He turned and held the disk in the fingers of his right hand.

“My first attempt was to use a Beckstrom disk. A very few still hold magic. Those that do are oddly well designed for activating magic, or for deactivating it. Think of it as a magnifying glass. Whatever spell you press into this metal, which is laced with the crystals of the well in St. Johns, will be strong enough to trigger a corresponding spell once.

“My theory was, if used correctly, it might even be possible for one disk to cancel every spell I’ve ever cast. Although the magic required for that is beyond you and me now.”

He paused, and his eyebrows ticked just slightly upward, as if he were asking me if I understood what he was saying.

Why would he tell me how to cancel his spells?

“A failed experiment. The disks were a dead end.” Again the look. Again the wink. “But then, one can’t advance on success alone.” He turned back to the table. “After a few adjustments, it was clear that control over the drones and spells would be achieved through technology rather than magic. So this . . .” He turned around again. This time he was holding one of the controllers I’d seen in Krogher’s hands.

Hell.

“Wireless. Elegant. Useful.” Eli took a step toward me with each word. “It controls every action of every spell-holding drone. Hold still, Terric. This is going to hurt quite a bit.”

He pressed something on the plastic in his hand and I felt magic stir in the room. No, I felt the magic in the boy and in the woman open to his command as if he’d just unlocked windows in a storm.

Eli didn’t even trace a spell in the air. He didn’t have to. He triggered the spell the woman carried. It rushed out of her, straight from her hands into the bars of the cage, and followed the lines Eli had carved and cast in the floor. Magic hit my feet with the force and heat of lightning.

I grabbed for that magic, to turn it around, to stop it, to use it, to control it.

But the moment it touched me, the moment it ran the course of spells carved into my flesh, burned into my blood, I lost control of it, lost the ability to use it, couldn’t even remember what it did or how it worked.

Closed. Magic was Closed from me.

And no matter how hard I tried to pull on it, to hold it, to use it, magic was locked away, walled away, removed from my reach.