“Zayvion?” I said a little softer. “Are you okay?”
He swallowed. “Fine. The spell…”
And that was all he had to say. The cost of casting a spell that damn huge was crazy. “Pretty dramatic,” I said, trying to keep him talking and conscious. “Think you could have maybe pulled on more magic to Ground them? I think most of Washington still has power.”
“Could have,” he managed. “But we were in a hurry.”
He shifted, and pressed his hand against the dash to push himself more upright in his seat. He left a thick smear of blood behind. He had been injured. Injured by the Veiled.
“Zayvion,” I said. “You’re bleeding.”
He shook his head, though his eyes still weren’t open. “No, I’m fine. Fine.”
And then he passed out.
Chapter Twelve
Shame was pacing in the garage area of the warehouse smoking a cigarette. He didn’t even wait for me to get out of the car before he started in on me.
“Where the hell were you? It’s been hours.”
“We got hit by the Veiled.”
“Jesus, Beckstrom. You leave to call in one little gargoyle and end up tangling with the undead?”
“Zay’s hurt.”
That shut Shame up, which was what I had hoped it would do. He circled the car with me. I opened the passenger-side door, and Zayvion opened his eyes.
Relief washed over me. At least he was conscious.
He was sweating, his face covered in finger burns and bruises, blood flowing from his forehead and nose. His eyes were slits of molten gold. I don’t think he saw either of us.
“We’re going to get you inside,” I said, calm and matter-of-fact. “Shame’s here to help. Can you stand up out of the car, or do you want me to drag you out on a gurney?”
Zay closed his eyes. Swallowed. I could feel the mustering of energy he pulled inward. Not magic, just a steeling of will before the effort.
And then he swung both feet out of the car, held on to the doorframe, and pushed up on his own two feet.
“Bravo, hero,” Shame said around the cigarette in his mouth. “If you put one arm over my shoulder and don’t fall down before we get inside, I’ll give you a cookie.”
I put my arm around his waist on one side, and Shame did the same on the other. I didn’t expect Shame to actually be much help, but I was wrong. Shame might not be up to full power, but he was plenty strong enough, or at least stubborn enough, to help me get Zayvion inside.
Lucky for us, the door was unlocked.
“Where’s Stone?” Shame asked as we navigated the first room.
“Backseat. He’s not moving very well.”
By the time we’d hit the arched doorway to the next room, I could hear people moving.
“Let me trade places with you, Allie,” Hayden said. And even though I was doing just fine, I slipped out from beside Zay. “What happened to him?” he asked.
“Fought the Veiled,” I said. “Grounded everything in a ten-mile radius.”
“Good lord, boy,” Hayden said. “You should know better.”
“Go get Stone,” Shame said. “We got him.”
“I could use some help,” I said.
Terric walked over. “Let me.”
I nodded.
Terric looked good. No bruises, burns, or blood. “What did you find out?” I asked.
“I sent a message to Zay,” he said.
“We missed part of it. Who’s the head of the Authority?”
“Jingo Jingo.”
“Hells,” I said. “Just what I didn’t want to hear. Does he know about you defecting? Or are you a double agent now?”
Terric shrugged. “He has a small group of people he trusts. I’m not one of them. Neither is Violet, if that helps any.”
“It does. Did you see Violet? Is she okay?”
“I didn’t see her. But Victor said he contacted Kevin. He’ll keep her safe.”
“I hope so,” I said. “She can be strong willed sometimes.”
“Stubbornness seems to run in Beckstrom women,” he said.
We were at the car now. Terric bent down and looked through the window at Stone. “Is he moving at all?”
“Some. But the Veiled sucked the magic out of him. They piled up on him. Hundreds. I couldn’t get them off him. I couldn’t do a damn thing to help.”
“Well, he’s here now,” Terric said. “If we have to, we can try transferring magic into him. Maybe give him a jump start. I don’t know if it will work, but if he’s not moving, it might be worth a try.”
I opened the car door. “Hey, Stone. You awake?”
Since he always slept with his eyes open, it was sort of hard to tell if he was even conscious.
Stone tipped his head to one side, slowly, but faster than he’d been moving before. Maybe the rest had helped. Maybe the warehouse would help too. Collins said it was built to channel magic, to focus. And Stone looked like he could use a little of both.
“Good boy,” I said. “Time to go inside. We have stuff for you to stack in there, buddy.” I stepped back and waited. For a moment, I didn’t think he was going to follow. Then he lifted one hand and one foot, and eased out of the car.
“This way.” I put my hand on his back and walked with him, slowly, into the building.
“How did it go out at the Life well?” Terric asked.
“Didn’t Shame tell you?”
He gave me a look. “You know how he is.”
“There were men waiting for us there,” I said. “They tried to kill us. We killed them back.”
“Zay didn’t Close them?” he asked.
“He took their memories. Then he killed them.”
Terric nodded. He didn’t seem surprised. “Did he get any information out of them?”
I stopped walking. “Enough to know they were Bartholomew’s men. I didn’t ask about anything else. He can do that?”
“Sometimes. It’s like standing under a waterfall with your mouth open. The memories hit so hard and fast, it isn’t easy to focus on any of them. But Zayvion’s always been good at it. Better than most.”
He gave me a soft smile. “Better than me, even before I lost the ability to use dark and light magic.” His smile turned wry. “And Blood magic. And Death magic.”
Not being able to use those disciplines had ended Terric’s chance to become Guardian of the gates, a job both he and Zayvion had vied for.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” I said. “A while ago when we were all at the Life well, fighting Leander and Isabelle. After the fight, Shame asked Mikhail to heal you so you could use all those magics again.”
“Mikhail said he couldn’t heal me, remember?” Terric said.
“I remember. I just wondered… what did he do when he touched you?”
Terric took in a breath and looked down at the floor. “He gave me this.” He tipped his right hand out toward me. In the center of his palm was a symbol—no, a glyph. It was just the faintest outline, and could be mistaken for the lines of his hand except for one thing. A very, very thin thread of magic pulled through it, like the finest stitches holding it to his skin.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “It looks like—what is it?”
“I think it’s a Renewal of some kind, a Binding. I’ve never seen the glyph before, and lately there hasn’t really been time to ask anyone—”
“There’s been some time,” I said. “Enough time. Why haven’t you asked Maeve or Victor or Hayden about it?”
“I just—” He shook his head. “It’s over my Lifeline.”
“So?”
“I’ve always had two breaks in my Lifeline, here”—he pointed to a skip in the line that arced down his palm closest to his thumb—“and here.” This break was a little farther down the line.
The glyph not only bridged those gaps; it also reached out with thin lines to wrap around other lines, and create the symbol in his palm.
“I’m not following you,?
?? I said.
“A friend once told me that if you have a break in your Lifeline, you’re going to die young.”
“You believe in palmistry?” I asked.
“No. Maybe. I don’t know.” He sighed. “It’s just strange that a powerful undead Death magic user decided to mark my Lifeline. To patch the break. And it’s annoying that it is all he gave me for Shame’s begging. For Shame almost dying. A useless scar.”
“There’s magic running through it.”
“What?”
“Not much. I mean I can see magic all the time now, and I can barely see it.”
He stared at his hand, then rubbed his thumb over it. “I don’t feel it.”
“Maybe it’s not in your body, Terric,” I said. “Maybe it’s just on your body.”
“Difference?”
“Only one of those things will kill you?”
“Okay.” He nodded and tipped his hand to better see it. “Still looks like a thin pink scar to me. Tell me what you were going to say.”
“About?”
“What it looks like,” he said. “To you.”
“Like an infinity symbol. A figure eight. Kind of. Or a knot. Or both maybe. A knotted figure eight. Might be a hell of a tie to life.”
“Infinity, huh? So you’re telling me Mikhail made me immortal?”
I grinned. That was one thing I liked about Terric. He recovered his footing quickly, no matter the situation.
“Maybe.” I started walking again. Stone had gotten a good way ahead of us. “I can think of worse people to let live forever.”
“Like?”
“My dad.”
Terric made a little hm sound. “Or Shame.”
I laughed. “Can you imagine him living forever?”
Terric grimaced. “Yes. All the world would be in ruin. But there’d be plenty of whiskey.”
“Did you get the sample from the Death well?” I asked.
“We did. Just cost us a little pain. We didn’t see anyone there guarding the well.”
As well they wouldn’t. Shame and Terric had closed that well. If anyone in the Authority was even paying attention to it in the last couple weeks, they would have thought it secure. I didn’t know if it took the same magic users who had shut a well down to uncap it, but even if not, there had been enough chaos going on that it was possible the well was being watched.
“Are you sure you weren’t followed?”
“Fairly certain.” He paused. “Strange, right?”
“No stranger than anything else lately.”
“I couldn’t tell if the well was tainted,” he said. “We were in and out so fast, uncapped it, unlocked it, stole the magic—that was a lot of no fun at all—then lock and cap. There wasn’t time to see if there was a taint. But there weren’t any Veiled coming out of it, which is something. Did you get a look at the Life well?”
I nodded. “We think it’s poisoned. We’re not sure. Stone has a sample from it. Maeve has a sample of the Blood well. I think Victor got a sample from the Faith well. And I hope all of it is enough to get a read on this problem.”
Terric glanced down at Stone. “Where is he holding it?”
“In a spell Shame cast—Passage—that he smashed down so Stone could hold it in his chest. Don’t ask me,” I said to his look. “I don’t understand it. It was Dad’s idea and Shame’s execution. Of the idea,” I amended. “Shame executed the idea, not Shame, you know.” I pulled my finger across my throat.
“So you’re going to test the magic samples?” he asked.
“If Collins has the equipment to do it like he says he does. Did Victor Unclose him?”
We’d made it inside the warehouse and halfway across the room by now. “He did. But I don’t think—” He shook his head.
“What?”
“I don’t think Collins was a good choice as an ally when he was less crazy. To put more information, more power, into his hands now is a bad idea. I think you should cut ties with him as soon as possible, Allie. We all should.”
“I don’t have anyone who can look after Davy,” I said. “Especially now.”
“Shame told me about what Collins did,” he said. “It’s not right. It’s against everything the Authority stands for.”
“What would the Authority have stood for, Terric? Letting Davy die?”
He pressed his lips together, then, “Yes. They would have let him die, rather than turn him into that… I don’t even know what to call it. Necromorph, I guess, since he’s half between life and death.”
“Isn’t that what they called Greyson?” I said. “But Greyson had been changed by one of my dad’s magic disks being implanted in his neck. He was very solid, either as a beast or a man.”
“Greyson was caught in a form of living and dying by the dark and Death magic worked through that disk implanted in him. It wasn’t the shape that made him a Necromorph. It was that his soul and body were caught between life and death. When magic changes someone to the point that he is only half alive, he’s a Necromorph. And Davy isn’t fully alive or dead.”
What Terric didn’t say, what he didn’t have to say, was what had happened to Greyson. He’d gone insane, tried to kill me, been caught, escaped, joined with Chase to try to kill us all, and then been imprisoned. And even in the prison where magical criminals are kept, he’d been possessed by Leander, who was looking for a body that was caught between life and death. Leander had forced Greyson to kill Chase, his own Soul Complement, with his own hands.
We killed Greyson, but Leander went free.
Not exactly the bright future I was hoping for Davy.
“Davy’s going to get better,” I said. “Once we get magic cleansed, we’ll find a way to heal him, undo the spells Collins put on him. We’ll find a way to heal everyone.”
“Allie.” Terric stopped and turned toward me. Stone just kept going in his slow-motion straight line toward the main room. “What if we can’t cleanse magic? What if there is no cure? No antidote? We need to make plans for that. Get better people with better minds working on this.”
“Which is why Roman went to talk to the Overseer,” I said. “If this is something that we can’t fix, then she’ll have to decide what to do.”
“Unless she decides the best thing to do isn’t letting us win,” he said.
“Why would she do that?” I asked.
“There’s only one sure way to guarantee magic won’t harm anyone,” he said. “Close off all access to magic in Portland, lock it down from the rest of the world, quarantine it, and make sure magic can’t be used until we find a cure.”
“One, we aren’t the ones who are going to make that decision. And two, if that’s what needs to happen to keep people alive, we’ll do it. But first we try to fix what’s gone wrong. And the only way to do that is to test the magic to see if we can find the source and cause of the poison.”
“I’m not saying I disagree with the steps we’re taking,” Terric said. “I just… don’t want you to get your hopes up. Even testing the magic may not give us the answers we need.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “My hopes have been pretty down most of my life.”
Shame walked through the doorway. “There you are. Get on with it, will you? We’re waiting for the sample. Plus, Zay’s asking for you, Allie.”
“Is he okay?” I asked.
“No, but he isn’t any worse than when you brought him here.”
“Does Collins have the tech set up?” I asked.
“As much as.” Shame paced over to Stone, who was still walking incredibly slowly. “Hey, Stone. How’s my buddy?”
Stone gurgled. It was a little louder than last time.
“Looks like you could use a recharge,” he said, scrubbing at Stone’s ears.
“Think you could do it?” Terric asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Give him a jump.”
Shame stared at Terric, then at Stone. “Don’t know. Ever since you sank this damn rock in my
chest, things haven’t rolled off my fingers in quite the same way. You thinking a Transference?”
“Maybe. Like back a few years ago, when we used to…”
Shame gave him a look.
“Okay, more than a few years ago,” Terric said. “You were pretty good arcing the storm rods and hacking Refresh spells. Do much of that in the last couple years?”
“Wait,” I said. “You found a way to hack the storm rods?”
“Just took a nip or two now and then,” Shame said.
“But that’s my dad’s tech—my company’s tech. And you’re hacking into it? I didn’t think they could be accessed like that.”
Shame doused his smile and gave me wide, innocent eyes. “They can’t. I have no idea what Terric’s talking about, the delinquent. Your da’s handiwork is above the genius of all other men and will never be soiled.”
I pointed at my face. “This is me not believing you. Think you can help Stone?”
Shame shrugged and stuffed his hands in his front pockets. “Or hurt him. Dunno. Want to risk it?”
I thought about it. This was a fairly safe place. Maybe the safest in town. For now.
“Not yet. Not until we get the sample out of him. That might be the thing that’s wrong with him.”
“Or it could be the undead that were trying to suck him dry,” Terric said.
“The hell you say,” Shame said.
“So Beckstrom tells me.”
“Is that what you two have been out here gabbing about?” Shame asked.
“Pretty much,” Terric said while closing his right hand and tucking it into the pocket of the jacket he was wearing. Hiding it. Hiding his hand from Shame.
He hadn’t told Shame that mark was all he’d gotten out of the hideous pain Mikhail had put Shame through when he’d possessed him. I’m sure Terric had let Shame believe Mikhail had given him some kind of blessing on a much larger scale.
Shame looked at Terric, then at me. “Either of you going to tell me what else you were talking about?”
“Swatches for my living room,” I said.
Terric’s eyes twinkled. “I think she should go for a strong maroon, but leaning toward fuchsia so she doesn’t overdo the masculine energy. Better than that drab rent-me-cheap and leave-me-dirty white walls you currently have.”