Stone Cold

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 wanted 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 point 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.”

He walked out.

I pushed away from the wall, not knowing where to go, but not wanting to stay here either.

“Thirty minutes, Shame,” Dash said. “Give me that. You owe him that. At least.”

“I know, I know, Spade. Give it a rest,” I said. I knew the debts between us. They were carved into my soul. “Have you heard from Zay and Allie?”

“I called. She’s in labor again.”

“Again? Does it usually go this way?”

“No.”

Is the baby okay? Eleanor asked.

“Is the baby okay?” I repeated for her. She gave me a faint smile.

“Dr. Fischer is there.”

That wasn’t a yes.

“And the baby is . . . ?” I asked again.

Dash rubbed at his forehead and I finally noticed he was bleeding from a cut near his hairline. His hand was shaking pretty badly too. He’d been hit and probably hadn’t done anything to take care of his wounds.

Since I was already pacing, I walked to the bathroom. Dug for bandages. I should have done this when we first arrived, but I hadn’t been thinking. Still wasn’t.

“The baby, Dash,” I said again, since talking about other things helped me ignore the things I didn’t want to talk about.

Found a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a clean towel. Took that back to the room and handed it to him. Didn’t look at Terric. Didn’t stand too close to the bed.

If I did, there wouldn’t be anything or anyone who could pull me away from his side.

“They aren’t sure.” Dash tipped the alcohol onto the towel. “Zay sounded worried.”

That wasn’t good. I’d stood side by side at the end of the world with that man and he’d barely worked up a sense of concern.

“That’s not all,” Dash went on. “Clyde called. Anthony was just found dead.”

“Son of a bitch,” I whispered. Anthony was another Soul Complement. “How about Holly?” I asked.

“Can’t find her. They are assuming the worst.”

The worst being that she was dead too. Krogher wasn’t wasting any time. That was the second Soul Complement pair in less than twenty-four hours.

How long before he had drones around Allie and Zay’s place? How long before he wiped out the only people who could break magic and stop him and his magic army?

“We need a new plan,” I said.

We had a plan? Sunny asked.

“You mean something other than walk straight in the front door, into live fire?” Dash asked.

“Worked for me,” I said.

“No so much for Sunny,” Dash said.

I pressed my palm over my eyes. “I know. If I could change that, I would.”

Killing Krogher seemed like a good idea. It wasn’t a smart idea. Probably wasn’t the thing Terric or Allie or Zay or . . . hell . . . anyone would get on board with. But seeing the light snuff out of Krogher’s eyes before any other Soul Complement died would do me worlds of good.

At least it would make Sunny’s death worth something.

I couldn’t think here so close to an almost-dead Terric. I needed air. I needed space.

“If you try to leave this house, I’ll knock you out cold.” Dash wasn’t even looking at me. Couldn’t have known I was walking out.

I glanced back at him. He pressed the towel against his temple, pulled it away, and stuck it over the blood on his thigh. His glasses hung loosely in his other hand. He hadn’t looked away from Terric. “If you try to leave, I’ll tell Davy to make sure you stay unconscious. I think he’d be on my side. He’s pretty sure you got Sunny killed.”

I peered down the hall to the living room where Davy sat in the chair next to Sunny’s dead body. He was staring at me. Angry. Unmoving. The neon magic that was dripping out of him like a torn artery leaking blood was just a smear of dull blue shining up the darkness of his T-shirt. Boy was a ticking time bomb.

I was his target.

“Do you think that?” I asked quietly.

“I think I’m not going to ask what happened back there yet. And I think you’re staying here, with us, until I say you can leave.”

“Who said I was going anywhere?”

Dash dug the towel into the hole in his jeans and sighed. “You’re angry.”

“So?”

“Have you looked in the mirror when you get angry?”

“No.”

He pointed toward the bathroom with the bloody bit of the towel. Then folded it to press a clean patch over his thigh wound again.

I walked back into the bathroom.

Stopped dead when I caught sight of myself in the mirror above the sink.

Too thin, eyes too black, skin too pale with dried blood at the corner of my eye and down the side of my face and neck. That was your basic bar-brawl chic and could have been me any given Friday night.

But a dark light surrounded me, as if every edge had been carved out of thick ice with a hard brightness shining behind it. I barely looked human. I was stone cold.

Death.

It wasn’t just inside me anymore. It was me. It made me. Every inch of me. From heel bone to brainpan.

So much for hiding the monster on the inside. The line between me and it had officially been destroyed. I wore it just as much as it wore me.

Looking in that mirror made a couple of things clear: The monster and I were not happy.

And the monster and I were not weak.

Good. We had work to do.

• • •

The doctor was a very nice, if extremely nervous woman with short, dark hair and thin-rimmed glasses. Dash promised she could be trusted with this sort of stuff.

Since this sort of stuff hadn’t happened before, I had no idea what she’d put on her résumé to land the job.

Her name was Mina, and even though she seemed nervous at first, as soon as she got one look at all of us with our various injuries, she was all business. Quick. Efficient. Capable.

Ordered people around.

She took care of Terric first.

Dash stayed with him while I paced the hall, occasionally glancing in through the open door.

Coward, Sunny said. She picked at her nails with the knife she’d somehow gotten back. Not exactly comforting to discover she could remanifest a weapon. I foresaw a lot of stabbings in my future. You aren’t even standing by his side. Afraid to see him die, Shame?

“Give it a rest. You’re angry at me. I get it. I’m angry at me too.”

I rounded the corner into the living room and almost ran into Davy, who was walking toward the hall. He tipped his head and looked past me. Right at Sunny.

Davy, she said. Can you hear me? Honey, can you see me?

He hesitated and I waited, wondering if I would have what it took to block whatever he might throw at me. Then his yellowed gaze ticked back to me.

“You should go,” he said.

“Where?”

“Home. While you still can.”

“And that didn’t sound like a threat.”

“Did you kill her?” he asked.

Might as well tell him, Sunny said.

No, Eleanor said. Not yet.

Why not? Sunny asked.

Do you really want Davy fighting Shame? Eleanor said. Who do you think would win?

Sunny narrowed her eyes, looked at me, looked at Davy.

It wouldn’t be Davy, Eleanor said. He’d kill him. And then you’d both be dead. Do you want that?

Cody strolled out of the kitchen and took in the situation. Me, standing in the hall, Davy standing just inside the living room. Neither of us moving. Neither of us talking.

“Hello, boys,” he said. “What did I miss?”

“Nothing,” I said. “There’s nothing here to see.”

This house was suddenly crowded with too many heartbeats, too many people, too many ghosts. Death magic pounded at the lid I’d locked it under.

It wouldn’t be long before it broke free.

Davy’s only answer was to walk back to where Sunny’s body lay, covered face to foot by a clean sheet.

Cody looked at me, back at Davy, then headed after Davy.

I didn’t know if I should be happy or worried that he thought Davy was the bigger issue to be dealt with here.

But I knew it was just a matter of time before Davy and I had it out over Sunny’s death. Only a matter of time before he tried to kill me.

Hell, maybe I’d let him. It wasn’t as if I didn’t deserve it.

I paced until I was back in the bedroom again, just inside the door. I leaned my shoulder against the edge and stared at Terric.

The doctor had removed the bullets and put Terric on an IV with pain meds and antibiotic. She hesitated over all the signs of torture he’d been through. Finally defaulted to a gel and clean bandages for the burns, brands, and cuts.

But the deeper wounds, the things they had done to his mind, his soul, and his magic, were beyond her care.

“How long has he been missing?” she asked.

“A week.” Dash hadn’t budged from his side. He stood there, steady on his feet, though he looked a couple heartbeats away from a drinking binge and self-administered unconsciousness.

“Was he wounded before that?” she asked.

Dash shook his head.

“The knife wound at his throat,” I said quietly from the shadows of the doorway. “That was the first.”

She startled and glanced over her shoulder at me. She must have forgotten I was lingering there, even though she’d made a point to nod at me when she first came into the room.

“All right,” she said. “The neck wound is nearly healed. It looks to be much older than a week. From the bruising, bleeding, and swelling, I’d guess his internal injuries are more than a few days old also. Weeks at least. And the cuts, the removed finger?” She nodded. “Those were done weeks ago, not days ago.”

“That can’t be right,” Dash said. “He was fine a week ago. He was with us, at Allie’s party. Healthy.”

“No physical wounds, anyway,” I said.

“Did he suffer from some other kind of wound?” the doctor asked.

“Withdrawal,” I said.

“Drugs? Alcohol?”

“Magic.”

She paused in taping the IV to his arm and waited for me to deliver the punch line.

I gave her a steady stare.

“Okay,” she said slowly. “Magic. Do you know what he was using? Which spells? Blood magic?”

“Life magic,” I said. “It’s complicated.”

She took a moment to study Terric. “I’m not sure I understand the consequences of that addiction. Do you think it caused any of these injuries?”

“No,” I said. “Those are from torture.”

She placed his arm carefully back at his side and then pulled the blanket up to his waist. “Does he have family?” she asked.

“Yes,” Dash said. “Brothers, sisters. His parents are still alive. He has a lot of family. Why?”

“We’ll want to contact them. They should know.”

Dash opened his mouth but closed it as soon as he put two and two together and realized what she was saying.

Terric’s family should know that he was going to be dead soon.

Death magic thumped on the lid in my head. A fist. A heartbeat. A demand.

“How much longer does he have?” I asked.

Dash closed his eyes and turned his back on the bed.

“Not much, I think,” she said. “Maybe a few hours.”

“What about a hospital?” I asked calmly. “Better equipment? Would it buy us time? Would it buy him time?”

“Assuming he could survive the transport? His injuries are just too numerous. And many of them were inflicted with magic. There are spells carved into him. Spells I’ve never seen before. I’ve dealt with magical wounds for years now, but nothing like this. I’m sorry. I really am. Even if we take him to a hospital, we should still contact his next of kin.”

Terric’s next of kin. His family. Contact them and tell them he was dying.

I was having a hard time accepting those words.

Dash said something to her that I’m sure was appropriate and thoughtful. After a minute or two, he walked with her out of the room. There were other injuries, other people to take care of besides Terric.

The doctor could do some good for them.

But not Terric.

Spells carved into him. There was a reason she’d never seen those spells before. They weren’t spells any sane person would think of combining and inflicting on a person. I only knew one magic user twisted enough to create this kind of magical torture—Eli Collins.

I walked over to the bed and stared down at Terric.

Death magic growing, pounding, raging. Thump. Thump. Thump.

“You are a pain in the ass, Terric Conley,” I said quietly. “I’ve tried . . . tried to keep you out of the blast zone of my screwed-up life, but you just wouldn’t walk away. Not even when . . . when I gave you my life on the battlefield there years ago. Idiot. Why didn’t you just let me go then? None of this would have happened.”

The link of pain between us was gone—wiped out by the meds pushing happy-feel-good through his veins. He wasn’t hurting. He was resting peacefully.

This was the kind of exit everyone hoped for, right? Asleep. Quiet. Easy.

I pulled the chair up closer to his bed and sat. “If you had just let me die, I never would have done . . . the things Eli tortured you for. Killing Brandy. I really fucked that up, didn’t I? But I guess you and I are good at fucking things up. Carrying Life and Death magic inside us, mate? Who does that? No one. Maybe we should have just taken our beating back on the field with Jingo Jingo. Let the bastard win. Lain down and died.”

Terric didn’t say anything. His breathing didn’t change. I had no idea if he could even hear me. Probably not. His ghost wasn’t here, so he wasn’t dead. But he wasn’t all that alive either.

People could linger for years like this . . . comas. Maybe that’s what would happen to Terric. Maybe the life magic in him would do more than the doctor expected. Maybe it would hold him stable, and over time, he would heal.

Cody thought he’d heal a different way. By fighting against a quick, hard death.

A death I could give him. Darkness sparking light, magic snapping against magic, death closing the loop so life could begin again.

There was fire in that sort of thing. Maybe it was the fire Terric needed to survive.

Maybe it would kill him.

“Jesus, Ter,” I whispered, leaning my face into my hands. “What the fuck am I supposed to do?”

He didn’t answer. This one was all on me. This choice mine alone to make.

“This shouldn’t be in my hands, this choice,” I said, even though I knew he wasn’t listening. “That’s you. You’ve always been the reasonable one, the thoughtful man. You’ve always been right.”

I wiped at my face and the wetness there. “The right thing would be for me to leave. Let you heal, hope you heal.” I nodded, and blinked until my eyes cleared enough that I could see him.

“But I am a selfish bastard, mate. You know that. If there’s a chance you can be here, with me to track Eli down and drag him to hell, I want you here, beside me. I . . . can’t do this alone.”

It was probably a mistake, this decision I was making. Everything else I’d done in my life had been a mistake, so why would this be any different?

I sat on the edge of the bed. Watched as my proximity made his chest stop moving, his lungs pause.

I placed my hand in the center of his chest.

“I’m sorry, Ter,” I whispered. “But you were right. I can’t live without you.”

I didn’t know how, exactly, to do this. Cody had said all I had to do was take his death upon myself just as I’d taken his pain upon myself. That would give life some room to thrive in him.

Don’t leave me, Ter, I thought. Not yet.

I kicked free the lid on Death magic. It washed through me with its own pulse, humming in anticipation, feral.

If I did this wrong, Terric would die. Permanently.

Cold sweat drenched me. If I did this wrong, there would be no coming back. For either of us.

Careful, then.

I let Death magic pour out of my fingertips, cold and slow, sending it to cover his skin in that dark glass-edge light. Then I sent it deeper, into his body. Into his soul where Life magic flickered like a flame drowning in the wind.

He wasn’t breathing. He still wasn’t breathing.

Seconds ticked by, piling up into a minute. Two.

Undeath him, Cody had said. Take his death on as my burden.

Easy to say, but there was no spell for assuming someone else’s final end. There was no operating manual for the Death magic I carried.

It was like aiming a flamethrower to light a candle—messy and destructive.

“C’mon, Ter,” I said softly. “Let it go. Dying isn’t your thing—it’s mine. And I’ve got you now. You can just let go. And come back to me, mate. Please come back to me.”

Terric exhaled, long and slow, as I gently killed him.

And then he didn’t breathe again.