Stone Cold

Chapter 15

TERRIC

A hand tapped the side of my face. “Wake up, Terric. We need to go.”

I wasn’t sleeping. I was just sitting here, wherever here was. Prison. There were bars all around me, so it must be prison.

“Terric?”

The man in front of me was maybe in his twenties, blond hair. He was sweating and breathing as if he’d been running a marathon. His nose was bleeding.

I shook my head. Where was I? Why was I here?

“Let’s go. Eli won’t be out for long, and I can’t hold this—”

The man flickered, disappeared.

Holy shit.

I scrambled up onto my feet. There was another man bleeding on the floor, a broken coffee cup shattered at my feet. I was in hospital clothes, and there was enough medical equipment in the room that it wasn’t a big leap to think I was sick.

The bars didn’t make any sense. What kind of hospital kept people behind bars?

Was I insane? That man who had just been here and disappeared could have been a hallucination.

Okay, so insane was looking like a probability. That would mean the man on the floor was a doctor or an orderly, and I was . . .

... I had no idea what I was. I had no idea who I was.

That was terrifying.

Panic shot ice through my veins.

“Okay,” I said, talking myself through this. “Okay. Names. Records. Something. Look for answers. There must be something here.”

I knelt, gasped at the pain that squeezed my ribs. Broken ribs, judging from the bandages wrapped around my chest. And from the gauze packed around my left hand, I was pretty sure I was missing a pinkie.

Bars, bandages, missing digits. That painted a new picture. Not so much a medical facility as a place of interrogation. Torture?

A memory cracked open and spilled through my mind: knives in the hand of that man who was unconscious on the floor. Knives cutting into me.

Eli. His name was Eli, and he’d used more than knives to cause me pain.

He’d used magic.

Then the memory was gone and I grunted at the snarling headache that replaced it. I didn’t even know who I was, couldn’t remember why I was here, but I knew that I should not have been able to access that memory.

Maybe the hallucination had been right. I needed to get out of here before the man on the floor woke up.

I stepped over Eli.

Every motion hurt. Breathing hurt. It felt as if someone had taken a hammer to all the things inside me and left me shattered and bleeding.

Even so, I made it to the table covered with blades, saws, and other hardware.

If even half of those things were used on me, it was no wonder I was in pain.

No key for the door. I took one of the knives, walked to the bars, which were painted with designs or maybe a language. Nothing I could read. The lock was electronic.

“Terric.” The hallucination man appeared on the other side of the bars. “You have to follow me. We need to get the hell out of here before they get the cameras back online. The blocking spell I cast won’t last for long.”

“Who are you? Where are we?”

“You’ve been Closed. Or at least partially Closed. He took away your memories. We’re in a warehouse in Washington and we don’t have much time before they find out I’m not dead, and you’re not catatonic.”

“Closed?” I managed.

“Magic.” He searched my face for understanding, and found none. “Okay, fine. You want out of here, you’ll just have to trust me on that. And if this knocks me out or . . . kills me, I want you to tell Sunny yes for me, okay?”

“Yes?”

“She asked me to marry her, then took off to Florida. Before I could call her, I got my ass handed to me by Eli and the rest of these fuckers. I never got a chance to give her my answer. It’s yes. Now stand back.”

He wrapped his hands on the bars and exhaled slowly. The symbols etched into the metal caught white fire, arcing from bar to bar to glow brighter, then run like hot oil down to the lock.

“Davy,” a voice said behind me. “How nice of you to join us. I’d thought you were gone from the world for good.”

I turned. Eli was no longer unconscious. He stood, his face covered in blood from that broken nose and sliced cheek.

He held a gun aimed at us.

“Shoot, you bastard,” Davy said. “I’m coming for you next.”

“You don’t have the strength,” Eli said. “And I should know.” He shifted the gun just a fraction.

“I wondered if you would find that little loophole I couldn’t plug,” he said. “Some of those spells in your flesh just refuse to be canceled out, no matter what I try. But you must understand there are plans in place. Plans,” he said to me as if I knew what he meant, “that would be the best for all of us to follow. While I would love to further my research on you, Davy, I will not let you get in the way of my plans.”

Eli squeezed the trigger.

“No!” I threw myself in front of Davy.

Just as the bars around me went white-fire supernova from Davy’s spell.

The first bullet burned through my chest, the second right behind it. I hit the bars behind me. Yelled as fire engulfed me. Tasted ash, oil, and blood.

I thought I heard Davy yell. And then everything went black.