Stone Cold

  “It is so good to see you, lad,” he said as he gave my back a fond pat.

  I swallowed, inhaled the scent of him, cigarettes and Old Spice. “You too, Da.”

  Then he pulled back, one hand on my shoulder while he gave me a long, long look.

  Funny how even when you’re dead you hope that your parents will be proud of what they see in you.

  “You really gave them hell, didn’t you, boy?”

  “I got my hits in,” I said.

  He shook his head. “I knew you could handle it. Told your mother from the day you were born, you’d be the man who would stop Jingo Jingo. And the apocalypse too.” He pointed at the empty chair between him and Victor and took his seat.

  “Well, I had help,” I started. But before I sat down, there was another father I had to say hello to.

  I walked over to Victor. “I am so sorry. We tried. We couldn’t get to you fast enough.”

  “When?”

  “When you died. When Eli killed you.”

  “Ah yes.” Victor gave me a look that was not unkind. His hair didn’t have any gray in it now. I’d put him in his early forties. I guess those had been his glory years.

  “I didn’t expect you to save me, Shame. The struggle between Eli and me was a battle I chose. I knew what the outcome could be. I have no regrets.”

  He stood.

  “But if we had been faster, just a little faster—”

  “It is done,” he said. “Let it be done. I am not unhappy with my life, nor with what I left behind. I’m not unhappy with who I’ve left behind: you, Terric, Zayvion. You’re sons to me. In that, you’ve never failed me.”

  He rested his hand on my shoulder and then pulled me into a hug.

  “We miss you,” I said.

  “Everything has an ending. It is the order in chaos.” Those were words I’d heard him say more times than I could count.

  He released me with another pat and pointed at the chair for me to sit.

  “We’re both very happy to see you here, Shame,” he said. “But we think you might have jumped the gun. There is so much more for you to do.”

  Bullets flying out of nowhere, tearing through me, searing hot. Eli must have started firing even before he opened that hole in space behind Terric. . . .

  “That,” Dad said, “is what we’re talking about.”

  I blinked, and the memory went back to being a memory instead of a picture show.

  “Don’t follow you.” I picked up the pint in front of me and took a long, hard pull. Good God. It was amazing.

  “The Death magic that took housing in you, claiming you, is a very unusual thing,” Da said. “In all of history, we don’t think anyone has ever carried a piece of magic within them.”

  “It wasn’t like I planned it,” I said.

  “You didn’t plan it,” Da said. “But you did stumble into the way it could be done. Soul Complements joining on the battlefield, using magic to die for each other, and to live for each other. When you screw with the rules of magic, it will screw you back. And what you and Terric did on the battlefield, that was a top-notch screwup.”

  “Yeah. Sure,” I said. “We had a shot to kill Jingo Jingo and we took it, consequences be damned.”

  “And living with Death magic trying to eat you alive is the price to pay,” he said.

  “Was,” I said. “It was the price to pay. Paid up. Everything has an end, right?” I lifted the beer. “Worth it.”

  Victor shifted in his chair and folded his fingers together while laying his hands on the table. I knew that glint in his eye. He was planning something.

  “You know Terric is still alive down there,” he said quietly.

  Nice of him to sledgehammer my moment of happy.

  “I . . . wondered. When I didn’t see him here. . . .” I swigged beer, which, while delicious, wasn’t really cutting it for me. I was in a whiskey mood.

  As soon as that thought crossed my mind, the beer wasn’t beer anymore. It was a glass of whiskey.

  I took a sip. Correction, it was angel song in a tumbler, liquid heavenly voices raised in pure heat and pleasure.

  I set the glass down, did a reality—well, a heaven—check. The bar was the same. The people there the same. Only my drink had changed.

  Dad and Victor, however, were watching me as if they were working out exactly how to tackle a particularly difficult problem.

  I leaned back. “So Terric’s alive. That’s a good thing, right?”

  Victor raised an eyebrow, nodded. “It is. But it would be a better thing if you were alive with him.”

  “We’re better apart,” I said. “I know that. We’ve tried being together and . . .” I shook my head. “This is my heaven. I belong here.”

  “This is all of our heavens,” Dad said. “Changing for each of us, as we meet, rejoin, or part. But you carry Death magic, Shamus, and there is no place death can’t be.”

  “Which means?”

  “We need you to go back,” Victor said. “There are things you could accomplish, things you and Terric could accomplish that will make a difference for so many. Magic is on the brink of being used as a global weapon. So many will die. Too many. If we do nothing to stop it, the world will enter a war that will never end.”

  “Still can’t let go of the old job, can you?”

  “It’s important, Shame. You left this fight far too early.”

  “I died, Old Man,” I said. “Let’s keep that clear. It’s not like I strolled up here on a lark.”

  “That aside,” Dad said, “Terric is still alive down there, half a soul without you, and soon to be only half-sane. You know how destructive Life magic can be. You know he was barely managing it when you were with him. And now, alone . . .”

  “He’s capable. He’ll find a way to cope,” I said.

  That was a lie. The broken tie of our Soul Complement was a punched ticket to insanity. If he still had access to the Life magic inside him, he would be capable of doing terrible things. I didn’t want to do that to anyone I cared for, to break him like that.

  “So you want me to go down there and stop him? Kill him?”

  “No,” Victor said. “We want you to go back and save him, before Eli Collins kills him.”

  Just the thought of Eli killing Terric made me want to hit something.

  “But if Terric dies, he comes here, doesn’t he?” I asked. “I’m not going to lie to you. I feel good here. I feel right here. Better than I have for”—I lifted my hands, trying to find the words—“for as long as I can remember. I finally feel good. Maybe this is the best for us, for me, for Terric. Maybe death is as good as it gets for Soul Complements.”

  Victor finished his drink, then gave my dad a look. I suddenly remembered that these two had known each other back in the day when they were the young rebels raising hell in the Authority.

  Shit.

  “Here’s the way of it, lad,” Da said. “You and Terric have a chance to stop what Eli and the government behind him want him to do. Things are a little fuzzy from this height, but we are pretty sure if you don’t, the world we knew, the one we all fought for, and died for, where magic isn’t used as a weapon against humanity, will be gone, erased. All the people you care for, all the people we care for will suffer. You have a chance to change that. We think you should take that chance.”

  “How many apocalypses does a man need to stand in front of, Da?” I asked. “There must be someone else who can take this on. Someone living.”

  “No one else is the embodiment of magic, Shame,” Victor said. “Not even Allie and Zayvion can do what you and Terric can do. Life. Death.”

  He was right.

  “I don’t even know that I can go back to living,” I said. “And if it’s a twelve-step program to zombiedom, I’m outs.”

  “We can help
with that,” Victor said. “Even if you’re not tied to Terric, there is a draw, an affinity. As long as he is alive, you should be able to reach him.”

  “That’s what started the last apocalypse, you know,” I said. “Soul Complements slipping out of death to be together in the living world.”

  “Which we consider the precedent that proves our theory,” Victor said.

  “And you, son”—Dad pointed at me with his beer—“aren’t returning to destroy the world. You’re returning to save it.”

  “I suppose the two of you have worked out a way for me to do this?”

  “We have ideas,” Victor said.

  “I knew you would,” I said. “What’s it going to take?”

  Dad leaned forward. “Magic.”

  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 yo
u’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?”