It struck him. He didn’t jerk or show any sign of being hit. It didn’t look like it hurt as it sank into his head until it was gone.
Terric didn’t move, though he was breathing a little hard, enduring pain.
Shame shifted to stand closer to him, and Terric’s breathing evened out some as Shame shared some of his pain.
The magic still coursed between them, from earth to hand to hand to earth. Then they simultaneously placed their right fingers on their left shoulders and drew their hands down in a slash to the right. The magic they both used crackled and broke, a flash of white, a flash of black, and then just wisps of smoke rising into the air.
I blinked, realizing I’d been mesmerized. Without the magic they had been casting, the night felt cold.
Soul Complements. They could make magic break its own rules. And they could do it beautifully.
Shame swayed and took a step backward to steady himself, his eyes wide as he stared at Terric, who was looking a little shell-shocked himself.
That was when I knew it for sure. They had never really cast magic together before. They’d cast it at the same time, but this was different. Just here, just now, they had been connected, a part of the other, just like Zay and I were connected. Well, maybe not exactly the same, but similar.
“Walk,” Shame said, doing so. “Now.”
Terric took in a deep breath, then exhaled. “Oh,” he said, staring at Shame’s quickly retreating back.
“Walk,” Shame said again.
We did so. I glanced back. The officer put the car in drive and started down the street away from us.
“What did you do to the police officer?” I asked Terric.
“Influence,” he said a little distractedly.
Since he hadn’t taken the time to cast a Disbursement spell, magic snapped off him like hundreds of electric shocks. I didn’t know how long he’d have to pay that price, but I winced in sympathy.
I hated when I forgot to set Disbursements.
“You Closed him too, didn’t you?” I asked.
“Just his memory of us. He’ll remember stopping to check the bushes and street with his flashlight. He won’t remember us.”
“You used magic. In St. Johns,” I said. “People are going to notice. And they’ll see your signature. Shame’s signature too.”
“No,” Shame said.
I glanced back at where we’d been standing.
There were no magical ashes left behind, no mark of a spell. I knew I could see magic with my bare eyes, and I didn’t sense a hint that there had been any magic worked there at all.
“How?” I said.
“Death magic,” Shame answered. “Transference. I gave back as much, traded for what we used. And then I threw a Cleanup spell after us.”
“You gave what? Traded what?”
“My own energy. Mine. Me. Just me.” But he sounded less and less certain of that with each word.
“You gave up your energy, your life energy, for that? For an encounter with a police officer? How much? How many years? Days?”
“Allie,” Terric said softly.
“No. We could have found a different way. You didn’t have to give up your life, Shame.” Yes, I was a little panicky. That crystal in Shame’s chest was constantly eating away at him. It also could be fed by the life energy of other things, but it didn’t draw in as much energy as it took from Shame.
And now, to have him losing even more of his life for this? For one police officer?
“It wasn’t just him,” Terric said.
“Great. So you gave up some of your life too? It’s not bad enough that one of my friends is making stupid decisions, but now it’s two?”
Terric placed his hand on my arm.
I stopped, even though Shame was walking forward like a man determined to make it to the finish line.
“We used magic,” Terric said. “Shame and I used magic. Together. Each gave a little energy. Each took a little energy, from magic. From each other.”
“And? I’ve seen you cast spells together before.”
“Not that way,” Terric said. “Not as Soul Complements.”
“Oh.” I knew that. I just didn’t know how that figured into it all. “Are you… Is he okay?” I finally managed.
He looked over at Shame, and even at this distance, I could see Shame tug his shoulders back as if he could feel the brush of Terric’s gaze and was trying to rid himself of it.
“We’re good. Just… I didn’t expect… I don’t think he expected it to be…” He shrugged.
“To be what?” I asked.
“Nice.” He shook his head and smiled down at his shoe. “So nice,” he said quietly.
“Was it… sexual?”
He looked back up at me, met my gaze. “No. It was… intimate. But not in a sexual way.”
“Do you think it’s going to be a problem?” I asked.
Terric started walking again. “You know how Shame is.”
“So, you’re saying, yes, it’s going to be a problem?”
“Absolutely.” Terric smiled. Satisfied. Curious. Content. I’d never seen any of those expressions on his face when he was talking about Shame. “And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Chapter Twenty-three
Zayvion was still sitting in front of Cody, the alive Cody, who still leaned on Stone. And Stone was still a statue.
But the spell that Paul had cast around them was gone, which made sense. No one in the group was using magic, so nothing they were doing needed to be hidden.
I didn’t see the ghost Cody anywhere. And if Zayvion had done his job right, I never would again. Cody wasn’t two people, wasn’t dead and living, wasn’t broken anymore. Cody was just Cody.
The sirens grew distant, heading out of St. Johns, heading, I thought, toward Get Mugged.
That didn’t mean there weren’t police in the area. But at least now there were fewer units, and a reason to believe I was not in the vicinity. That was something.
If we kept things quiet, tried not to use too much magic too obviously, we might just get Stone unlocked enough that he was mobile. Mobile would be good. We could get him out of the middle of the open park and somewhere out of sight.
And then Cody could unlock him, and we could see if putting that magic in him wasn’t just a waste of time. See if he had some kind of filtration device worked into his inner gears and spells.
Hopefully we could separate the poison from the magic and provide enough data to better minds, scientific minds. I didn’t know what we’d need to do after that. Take it to the hospitals? Throw it in the wells? Tap the main network lines? Whatever it was, we’d see that it got done.
The electric lamps flickered. Shame glanced up, then turned on his heel so he could look down the line of streetlamps to the city.
“That’s… not good,” he said.
And then the lights all went out.
Zayvion stood. So did Davy. Everyone else, Maeve, Victor, Paul, Hayden, was already on their feet. Shame shifted to look south, away from the area where we had parked.
Rising out of the thick blackness, coming from the other parking lot, was a group of people. An army. Walking our way, easy as you please. As if they owned this park. As if they owned this city. As if they owned us.
“Now we have a problem,” Terric said quietly.
I didn’t need electricity to know who was coming our way. Just enough moonlight off the clouds showed me their faces.
It was the Authority, people I knew. People I didn’t know. Marching toward us. Marching to take us down.
“Damn it to hell,” Hayden breathed.
My thoughts exactly. We had two choices. Stand here against them, or run and leave Stone for them to use.
And lose our chance to cleanse magic.
“If you want to retreat, do it now,” I said. “I’m not going to let them take Stone. We need to get Cody out of here.”
“No,” Cody said. He stood and placed one hand on top of
Stone’s head. “I won’t go. I need to…” He paused, and then, in what sounded like a much younger, frightened voice, “Monster?” He picked up the quilt and draped it over Stone’s back, trying to tuck it around his wings.
It took time to sort through the changes of being Unclosed. I was surprised Cody could even talk.
“Nola,” I said, “get him out of here. Paul, get her out of here.”
“Cody,” Nola said. “We need to go now. Come with me.”
Cody looked over at her, shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said in a much older voice. “I can’t. I need you to hold my hand.”
Nola walked over to him and took his hand. “It’s going to be okay,” she said.
“I know.” And then Cody pulled on magic. So much magic.
It leaped to him, dancing, bright. Down from the sky. Up through the ground. A shattering of color that surrounded him and Stone like a glass cathedral, a holy fortress. A spinning, dizzy rush of magic, that twirled and slipped and melted like pieces of the heavens falling into a great design to create a wall, a barrier of magic.
Then the magic went black and flickered with opal fire.
Thunder roared, so loud, my ears cracked with pain. I put my hands over my ears, until the thunder faded.
And when I pulled my hands away, only the softest chime of bells in the wind remained.
We were all looking at Cody. Well, we were all looking at where he had been. Now there was nothing but a spinning curtain of black, cut through with crystal shards of rainbow. That was a lot of magic—a hell of a lot of magic to pull here in magicless St. Johns.
Paul was reaching for Nola. “Nola, no!”
“Wait!” I said. “Don’t.”
Too late. Paul could not reach her. He slammed into the magic, now as solid as granite, no longer spinning, no longer shot with color. Nothing but a black obsidian obelisk stood in the dark of night, sober as a grave marker.
“Nola!” Paul yelled again.
I stepped up and pressed my hand against the wall. Solid, smooth as silk over steel. And warm.
She is alive, Dad said in my head. So is Cody. This is a very old spell of Guardianship. Nothing will break those walls until the user has finished his spells.
“She’s okay,” I told Paul. “Cody’s okay too. When he finishes the spell, when he unlocks Stone, this will come down. And I want you right here waiting to catch them. Can you do that for me? Grab them—take them and Stone away as soon as this wall goes down?”
He nodded. “You couldn’t drag me off this field.”
“Good.”
I turned back to the crowd approaching us. Holy hells, there had to be sixty people. “Who’s staying?” I asked.
“We’re all staying,” Zayvion said. He strode over to me, a looming tower of muscle, anger, and grace. Not a shred of fear on his face, not a fleck of worry in his burning gold eyes.
His lips curved in a grim smile as he turned to me. “We’ve got a world to save, remember. None of us is doing that alone.”
He kissed me, and I kissed him back. Hot, deep. Wanting so much more. Promising we’d have more. Promising we’d have tomorrow.
Then he pulled away and took his place beside me at my right.
Shame stood at my left, Terric beside him. Maeve and Hayden stood next to them. On my other side, beyond Zayvion, were Victor, Collins, Davy, and, near the wall at our back, Paul.
We were ten strong. Ten standing against the world.
No. We were ten standing for the world. Standing to protect the world. Standing to uphold our vows and protect the innocent.
“Do we have a plan?” Victor asked.
“Paul’s going to watch for that spell to come down and take Cody and Nola somewhere safe,” I said. “We’re going to make sure Cody has time to unlock Stone.”
“Not much of a plan,” Shame said. “I like it.”
The crowd stopped walking about a hundred yards from us, the line of trees and bridge at their back. They spread out to stand shoulder to shoulder, at least twenty wide, and spaced far enough apart that everyone had room to cast magic.
Movement at the farthest edge of the group caught my eye.
Three women—the Georgia sisters, out of Seattle—pulled magic across the deadline of St. Johns. A punch of air made my ears pop. The sisters cast a bubble of Illusion around the park.
Just as they had done when we had stood in this park while the wild magic storm raged around us. No one would look twice at what was going on down here. No one would step through that wall of Illusion. No one would see the magic we were about to cast, the war we were about to wage.
We were on our own. Completely.
“Allison Beckstrom,” a familiar low voice called out from the crowd. “Are you still standing in our way, child?”
The crowd parted, making way for a huge mass of a man to pass through them.
Jingo Jingo.
He was leaning on his cane, but other than a slight limp, he looked as strong—no, stronger than I’d ever seen him.
And no wonder. Where once I had seen the ghosts of children covering him like a robe, now I saw the Veiled.
Hungry, angry, black holes where eyes should be, the Veiled were watercolored visions of dead magic users, swarming around Jingo like his own personal entourage, like a cloud of serrated teeth in mouths that moaned in agony.
Maybe that was where all the Veiled in St. Johns had gone. Haunting Jingo Jingo.
Or maybe Jingo Jingo was keeping these Veiled close to him for a reason. He was a Death magic user. Maybe the plague suited his plans just fine.
He stopped on a slight rise in the middle of the crowd.
Not just a crowd. Those were members of the Authority. People I had fought with, people I had fought for.
I saw the twins Carl and La with their scythes, my dad’s accountant, Ethan Katz, who had traded out his briefcase for a halberd. Dr. Fisher wasn’t carrying a weapon, but Sunny, who was Davy’s girlfriend, though they’d probably taken that memory away from her, had a long knife in each hand.
My heart sank when I saw Kevin, Violet’s bodyguard and Zayvion’s friend, at one side near the back of the group. I had hoped he could have stayed out of this, and instead been with Violet protecting her and my little brother.
Bartholomew’s Truth spell bitch, Melissa Whit, had a shotgun in one hand and an ax at her hip, and was staring straight at me and grinning. There were more unfamiliar faces from Portland, and probably Seattle.
I recognized Paige Iwamoto, the Blood magic user from Seattle, with her knife and a whip; the handsome Nik Pavloski, who carried a sword; the family-man Closer Joshua Romero, who had a gun tucked in his belt, but both his hands free.
Many of those standing against us were people I liked. People I did not want to hurt. People who had had their memories Closed by Bartholomew. People who believed that by following Jingo Jingo, and taking us down, they were doing the right thing.
“Magic has been poisoned,” I said, my voice plenty loud enough to carry across to where Jingo Jingo stood. “And it’s killing everyone in this city. We think we’ve found a way to purify it. Bartholomew wouldn’t listen to us; he didn’t care that people were dying or that the—the epidemic was spreading as more and more innocent people were poisoned by magic—”
“And so you shot him,” Jingo said. “Shot a man because he wasn’t doing things your way. Do you think you have the knowledge to be the head of the Authority? Do you think you can make the decisions that need to be made to keep magic safe in this town? Do you think you can kill a man just because he’s in your way?”
“If you stand between me and my goal tonight, I think we’re going to find out,” I said.
“Now, now, little angel,” Jingo said. “We’re not here to hurt you. We’ve been watching you all along—don’t think we haven’t. We saw you go to the Life well, then the warehouse. We saw you out Tracking, and we sure as much saw Zayvion Jones throw that Grounding spell that nearly broke a street. We’v
e been holding out hope that you’d turn yourself around and realize you’ve been used. There’s still time for your redemption, Allison. But that time’s running short.
“You can see you are outnumbered. But I am a reasonable man. I’m going to give you a chance to listen to reason. To listen to the things I know, things your daddy never wanted you to know. I’ve been watching him all your life, Allison. Watching you all your life. I know what he’s been using you for, know just how much he’s been using you. Your memories, your soul. Even your body, God have mercy.”
Don’t listen to him, Dad said in my mind. He sharpens his lies with an edge of truth so they cut deeper. He doesn’t know me, Allison. He doesn’t know what I’ve done, what I’ve sacrificed to see that you are safe. That magic is safe.
Jingo put one hand up to his ear. “Is that your daddy I hear talking to you now? Bet he’s saying as how I don’t know what he’s been doing to you all your life. Bet he’s saying I don’t know him, what he is. But I do. Oh, yes, I do, Daniel. I know you. Know what you’ve done to your little girl.”
Lies, Dad said. He only wants to stop you from doing what you know is right. From cleansing magic.
“What’s he done?” I asked. Frankly, I didn’t give a damn what Jingo Jingo thought my dad had done to me. Right now, it was the last thing I wanted to know. But if it would keep Jingo Jingo talking, and give Cody more time to unlock Stone, then we could chat about every crappy day of my crappy daughter-father relationship.
“When you were a child, it was terrible things,” Jingo said. “Things the law would have put him away for—things the Authority itself tried to put him away for. Things we might have had to kill him for. But he had his money and he had his Influence and he had no soul. No soul at all.”
People were shifting, spreading out to the sides of the Illusion barrier, while Jingo talked. There were so many of them. They could pull on so much more magic than we could. It would take them only one hard rush to bring us down.
“Keep an eye on the edges,” I said quietly.
“We got it,” Hayden said.
None of us had our weapons drawn. I didn’t see any indication that the Authority was going to make a move yet. But it was just a matter of time.