Stone Cold

  She took my arm, and together, we walked through the door.

  Death and a ghost walk into a bar in heaven . . .

  Inside was all wood and brass, two walls of booze, and a shelf that ran round the top of the room, bottles shining like jewels caught in a halo up above our heads.

  Heaven indeed.

  A couple dozen tables filled the floor; a few candlelit corner booths rounded the edges of the place.

  “My God,” I breathed. Because the room wasn’t empty. No, not at all. There were plenty of people here. People I’d known. People I’d loved. People I’d lost.

  This wasn’t heaven. I’d finally come home.

  “Shame!” Chase called, waving me over to her table where she sat with Greyson.

  “Go,” Eleanor said. “But you aren’t getting out of this place without buying me a drink, hotshot.” She gave me a little shove, and I smiled again and headed over to Chase.

  “So the rumors are true,” Chase said. “They’ll let anyone into this place.”

  Sight for sore heart, Chase was lovely. Hair pulled back in one long ponytail just the way she used to wear it when she, Zayvion, Terric, Greyson, and I were training in the Authority. Learning to use magic, learning to hunt the Hungers that used to cross through gates and give us hell.

  We were brothers in arms. Maybe more than that. Chase had been all set up to exchange vows with Zay before her Soul Complement, Greyson, rolled onto the scene. Their breakup had been hard on Zay. Then Greyson had been taken, experimented upon, and eventually he and Chase had been used and killed by a couple of crazy Soul Complements who wanted to destroy the world.

  Proving once again that there was no happily ever after for Soul Complements.

  Well, except maybe in death.

  “Chase, darlin’,” I said as I pulled up a chair and plunked down. “Aren’t you looking fine?”

  “For a dead chick, you mean?”

  “Hey, now,” Greyson, who was sitting next to her, said. “For any kind of chick.” He looked like his original human self, brown hair, square face, football player good looks, and eyes that didn’t reflect the hell he’d been through in life. He wrapped his arm across the back of her chair and gave me a warm smile. “Don’t make moves on my girl, Shamus. I can still kick your ass.”

  “Still? Obviously death has addled your memory. You couldn’t kick a baby duck’s ass.”

  “Still ninety-nine percent bullshit and one percent pitiful, aren’t you?” he said. “I didn’t think we’d see you so soon. Did you drunk it down a flight of stairs or something?”

  Images flashed across my vision, brighter, stronger than the bar, more real than the table, than my friends.

  Bullets tearing holes through me. Terric falling . . . a knife.

  I blinked, and they were gone.

  “Shame?” Chase said. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” I said. It wasn’t a lie. I felt good, better than I think I had in years. Not a single inch of my body hurt, and the grinding fear and hatred of the Death magic eating away inside me was gone. I felt free, light. And strangely, more alive than I ever had before.

  “So, you two?” I asked. “I know things didn’t go so well for you dirt-side. Despite your attitude,” I said to Greyson, “it’s good to see you both. Really good. I’m sorry we couldn’t have done more to help you. That we didn’t catch Leander before he . . .” I pulled my finger across my throat.

  “Shame,” Chase said, lifting her bottle of beer. “We’re in heaven. There’s nothing to apologize for. It’s not your job to try to keep everyone safe. And besides. This? Not such a bad way to pass the time.”

  Greyson nodded. “Seconded. If you want to get technical, we have a lot to apologize for too.”

  “But the Soul Complement thing between you two?” I said. “That’s good now, although I guess ultimately it’s what got you killed.”

  “Well,” Greyson said, “that is what got me possessed, turned into a half-beast killer, then killed.”

  “But now?” I asked. “Happy all around?”

  “Happy all around,” Chase said. “It wasn’t being Soul Complements that got us killed.That just made us targets. Leander and Isabelle got us killed. Whack jobs.”

  “Note to the wise, Shamus. There is no crazier, wounded, desperate creature than a Broken Soul Complement,” Greyson said.

  Eli with a knife in one hand and gun in the other, hatred twisting his features as he fired again and again . . .

  I pushed that image away. Didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want that pain in my heaven.

  “Isabelle and Leander aren’t here, are they?” I asked.

  Chase shrugged. “This is your heaven, Shame. Do you want them here?”

  “Never.”

  She lifted her beer in a toast. “To your heaven. Go get yourself a beer. You know you want it.”

  I glanced at the bar, then back. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  “Take your time,” she said. “You might want to say hello to a few people.” She pointed off to my right to a table where two men were sitting.

  “Victor?” I said.

  He saw me looking his way and held up his glass. And the man who sat across the table from him, with his back toward me, turned.

  Dark hair, sharp features, dark eyes, and a wide smile—a smile I hadn’t seen in over a decade.

  “Dad?”

  Chapter 9

  TERRIC

  Days, maybe weeks passed. I’d lost count of how long I’d been caged. There was no day or night, nothing to signal the passage of time except for pain. And the pain? Once it became constant, the hands of time were meaningless.

  Eli was with me sometimes, just standing above me, silent, staring. Other times he was much more involved in my pain. Flaying skin from my bones, carving apart muscles, casting spells.

  Hundreds of spells, hundreds of modifications to the magic I held inside me. Making it follow the routes he wanted it to follow. Making it into something it was not meant to be.

  He’d done this to Davy all those years ago. Davy had never fully recovered, trapped between being a man and being whatever the magic that coursed through the spells set in his flesh by Collins the Cutter forced him to be.

  I couldn’t keep track of all the spells. I lost count of which he began, which he canceled, as often as I lost consciousness.

  Eli held all the cards. He was slowly, surely digging into the walls I held around the magic inside me. He was slowly breaking through the walls I held around the things that made me me. He was tunneling into my soul.

  I’d killed people in my time. I’d Closed them—dug around in their heads and made them forget what they were, who they were. I was good at it—very good—and could surgically break anyone’s ability to use magic.

  But Eli Collins was waltzing the bloody ballroom around me. He was deeply, frighteningly good at tearing a mind, a body, and magic to shreds.

  This was why Victor had wanted Eli Closed. Broken. Dead. This was why he’d made Shame promise to kill him.

  And I knew it was why, no matter what we’d done to otherwise shut Eli down, he had found a way to glue himself back together.

  Because he was a monster.

  He killed Shame.

  No, I couldn’t think that now, couldn’t deal with that. He was killing me. That was the only thing to focus on. That, and getting as much information as I could out of him about Krogher’s plan.

  “Terric,” Eli said. “Are you awake?”

  Showtime. I knew he saw my reaction to his voice, the change in my breathing. Since I was currently sitting on the floor with my wrists chained to the cell bars above me and I was blindfolded, I did what I could to manage myself. Stayed still, tried to keep my breathing soft, my mind calm.

  I wanted to hear him coming. Please, God, let me he
ar him coming this time.

  “Let’s take that off, shall we?”

  The rustle of fabric shifting against his skin as he bent toward me was loud as an ocean roar. He was just to my left. If I kicked, I’d hit him. And whatever weapon he had in his hand would be my reward.

  I’d lost a pinkie knuckle last time I’d hit him.

  Two for two?

  I waited until I could feel the heat off his body, smell the sweat and vodka of his skin.

  “We don’t need this, do we, now?” he asked, his fingers fumbling at the blindfold over my eyes.

  Low would be useless, ankles if I was lucky. I wanted meat. I wanted blood. Solar plexus, stomach, groin. A connection to any of those would make my day.

  Fingers brushed over my eyes, every muscle in my body tensed for the blade, for the needle, for the pain.

  Fingers stroked back along my temple. I felt his knuckles at the back of my neck.

  My breathing was too hard. Too fast.

  The blindfold fell away, revealing the needle that hovered in front of my eye.

  He was extended, arm stretched away from his body. Unguarded. Vulnerable.

  I kicked him as hard as I could.

  Connected.

  Turned my head just enough the needle plunged into my cheek.

  Eli screamed, skittered away from me. And then there were hands—the others under Krogher’s employ who saw to it I was bound, gagged, beaten. Then there were kicks, and a Taser just to round out the layers of pain.

  Agony, for minutes, for hours. Worth it. Worth seeing the hate and the fear on Eli’s face. Maybe I wasn’t breaking as easily as all the others he’d carved up with spells. Maybe I was going to be his worst nightmare when all this was said and done.

  It was a brutal hope. And one I held tightly to.

  Another fist hit my face, took the lights out.

  When I woke, I was strapped down. My left hand was stretched out, tied at the wrist, the elbow, the shoulder.

  “That,” Eli said, “was a very bad choice, Terric. I thought we talked about good choices. Choices you should make. But you’re not going to listen to me, I see that now. So now we do this the hard way.”

  I took in the details I could while pulling mental walls around me, digging in, and holding against what I knew he was going to do to me. Again.

  “Perhaps a pinkie wasn’t enough punishment for your indiscretion. Perhaps we need to dig a little deeper.”

  The knife edge dragged down my neck, along the carotid artery. One slice and I’d bleed out in minutes, then down my armpit, axillary artery sliced, and I’d bleed out in minutes, and down and down, following the line of my veins all the way to my thumb.

  “Let’s have a little fun, shall we?” Eli said.

  He leaned on the blade, pressing it just below my thumb knuckle, breaking the skin, deep enough I felt the familiar gush of blood and heard my own whimpering.

  Left hand. It was only my left hand. I’d still have one thumb. I’d still have one hand. I repeated those words over and over again. Holding to them, using them as a shield against the strangling proof that Eli was fucking insane and by the end of this, I would be damaged beyond repair.

  But not dead. As long as I breathed, I would have a chance to break free and kill him.

  The knife released its bite. He hadn’t chopped off my thumb. Hadn’t gone through with the threat. But he could. Any second. Anytime he wanted. He had done worse.

  “Do I have your attention, Terric?” He was still bent over me.

  I looked up at him. “Why?” I rasped. “Are you lonely?”

  He pounded a fist in my face. I spit blood. Eli wasn’t shy about getting his hands dirty, or his fists bloody. He was also easy to rile up. It was good information to have, but I had no idea how to leverage it.

  “What I am is generous,” Eli said. “You are lucky to be breathing, Conley.”

  Lucky, my ass. He’d have killed me the second he stepped into my kitchen if he wanted me dead. And all the blood he’d drained, all the flesh he’d carved, all the spells he’d stitched into me weren’t just for his amusement, weren’t to kill me. He was aiming for an outcome.

  I just didn’t know what it was yet.

  “But not as lucky as some,” he said. He held the knife in front of my face, waiting for me to track it. I tried not to. Tried not to watch as the knife once again scraped cold against my cheek, pressed into the soft flesh under my jawbone, then throat.

  I was breathing hard. Already running from the pain I couldn’t escape.

  Stay calm. Stay focused.

  The knife moved away. And then the pain hit, a hard, fast slice across my pinkie. Second knuckle on what was left of that ruined digit.

  I clamped my teeth together and yelled, pulling against the binding, pulling on Life magic.

  Life magic that flared in me, filled me. Life magic that could not heal me, because Eli had taken care of that with the spells he’d carved into me.

  “Good,” he said. “Good.”

  This was what he wanted. I could hear it in his voice. He wanted Life magic. The Life magic in me. And it was right there for the taking.

  Stay calm. Stay focused. Hold the walls.

  Eli dragged something toward him with his free hand. Sounded like wires skittering across the floor. He attached them to the bindings at my wrists, then ankles.

  “Are you ready, Mr. Collins?”

  I jerked at Krogher’s voice. Turned my head to see him, standing outside the bars of my cage, holding something that looked like one of the Beckstrom disks glued to a cell phone.

  Behind him stood fifty people. Men, women, children. Blank-faced, unmoving.

  “Just a moment, Mr. Krogher,” Eli said.

  He attached electrodes to plastic tabs pressed into my chest, five points set into the spells he had left there. If you drew a line between them, which Eli had done—in flesh and spell and whatever the hell he’d injected into me—it mapped a pentagram.

  “Now,” Eli said quietly, just to me. “I want you to know I’m not doing this for Krogher. I’m doing this for you. To make you pay for everything you’ve done to me, for the things Closers have done to me, for killing Brandy. Understand? See all those innocent people? Casualties of the war you lost three years ago when magic changed. Casualties you can’t save. You know why? Because you are going to be the one who kills them. Oh, they won’t take their last breath today, but this . . .” He dug his thumb into the ruins of my chest and I arched back in pain, screaming.

  “This isn’t just a pretty picture. This is a spell that will give us direct access to the magic you contain. I don’t know how you hold magic in your body. Sure, those people out there can be vessels for magic because it nearly killed them . . . tainted magic. Maybe you almost died too, maybe when you and Shame were killing Jingo Jingo back in the day, it changed you, turned you into this hollow shell for Life magic. I would love to have studied you back then, but, well. All things come to those who wait. And today, I’m going to use the magic in you to charge the spells I’ve carved into those poor, brainless people out there. And when we use those spells, use those people, one shot and . . .”

  He smiled. “Boom.”

  “Mr. Collins,” Krogher said. “Move this along.”

  “If I were you,” Eli said, near my ear, “I’d buckle up.”

  He straightened. Took three steps away from me. Checked on the wires, which I realized were clamped to the bars of the cage around me.

  A cage that had Transfer spells carved into each bar.

  Holy shit.

  “No,” I said. “Eli, no. You don’t know this will work. You could kill these people.”

  “True,” he said as Kroger pressed buttons on the device in his hand and each person stepped forward as if pulled by the same chain. “If they die, I’ll just f
ind some more. Hundreds of people were infected with tainted magic, scarred by magic. We have the records and can kidnap anyone we choose. We have reach, Terric. We have money, we have power. Now all we need is magic. So we have you.”

  The people surrounded the cage. I was sure they couldn’t hear what he was saying, couldn’t understand what was about to be done to them. Eli had carved enough spells into them; they no longer had free will. Each wrapped a hand around a bar.

  “Don’t,” I said, scrambling for a way out of this, for a way to keep Life magic behind the crumbling wall I’d built in my mind.

  “Too late.” Eli flipped a switch.

  Electricity hit like a hammer strike.

  The cell bars flared with electricity and magic. A chemical stink burned my lungs as the spells Eli had been carving in my cage and the spells he’d been carving in me came alive, fueled by the Life magic I could not control.

  Magic gushed out of me like blood from a severed vein and blasted into the people surrounding the cage. Each of them was carved with one spell. Each of them became a battery, a vessel for the magic to fuel that one spell. Walking bombs.

  They screamed. But not all of them died. Death would be too easy, a kindness out of this hell.

  I was Life magic, and life meant only one thing: suffering.

  Chapter 10

  SHAME

  “Shamus,” Dad said, “come on and sit down, son. We need to talk.”

  If he hadn’t said anything I probably would have just stood there staring at him for days.

  I cleared my throat. “Sure.” I crossed over to him. “Well, it’s . . . it’s good to see you, Da.”

  I paused there next to his chair not knowing what to do next. We hadn’t exactly left on speaking terms before he’d been killed. If he was as stubborn as I remember him being, he’d probably carried those grudges all the way up here to heaven and was ready to unpack them on me.

  Dad pushed his chair away from the table and stood. He was younger than I remember him being, maybe in his late twenties, but he was still my dad. “Son.”

  And then he was hugging me, something I hadn’t experienced since I was ten. I was surprised to realize I was about an inch taller than him, though he still had nearly twenty pounds of muscle on me.