Death Magic Rules

by Sharon Stevenson

  “Are you okay?” His glass was empty when he put it down but the glass it was still glowing pink.

  “I think I need to lie down.”

  His lips quirked. “Really?”

  I frowned at him. “My head feels strange.”

  “Shit,” he muttered, placing his hands palm down on the table. The pink glow started to fade from the food. I glanced back down at my hands. It was gone. By the time I blinked again the only trace of pink I could see was around Nick’s hands.

  “You’re a User. What’s that like?”

  He looked up slowly, a less friendly expression on his face. “What?”

  “It’s not like that bitch Britt was up for talking about it,” I said with a shrug as I picked up my champagne glass.

  “It’s… okay,” he said, tone even.

  What did I really need to know about Users anyway? I shrugged and took a sip of the sparkling alcohol.

  He didn’t quite relax, the tension in his shoulders jumping to his jaw as he ground his teeth. He forced a smile a few seconds later. “So… do you want the tour?”

  I raised an eyebrow as I put down my glass. “The tour?”

  “Of our magical island getaway,” he said, gesturing to the open patio doors of the cabin.

  “Okay,” I said, shivering slightly as I got up.

  He put my drink back in my hand. “You should keep drinking.”

  I probably should. My head started to ache as I took the glass and did as I was told.

  He grabbed my free hand and led me into the candle-lit cabin. It was spacious and pretty with a huge L-shaped sofa I let myself sink into when he let me go. He picked up a remote control and music came from somewhere, some kind of mellow yet angst-spiked rock band. I’d never heard them before, I was fairly sure. I watched Nick take off his jacket. I could almost imagine he was someone else, someone more clean-cut and successful. He didn’t look much like a grungy guitar-player right now. He looked good.

  He smiled at me, hands going to his hips as he stood in front of me. “So?”

  I sipped at my drink before I answered, not quite sure what the question meant but knowing from his behaviour that there was a right answer and a wrong one. I didn’t want to give him the wrong one. Biting at my lip, I looked up at him. “You look good.”

  “I knew I could do this,” he said, quietly, his smile widening as he sat down next to me. “I’ve got a confession to make.”

  “A confession?” That sounded ominous. I put the drink down on the floor next to me and sat up straight. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ve fancied you for a while, Kit. It’s that feisty attitude of yours,” he said. “I knew you liked me, I just fucking knew. There’s a fine line between love and hate. A very fine line. I hated the way you looked at me, but I loved knowing it meant you cared.”

  I shook my head, getting up. “I…”

  “Shh,” he said, locking eyes with me. I got lost in those dark orbs, sinking into his sudden embrace as he wrapped his arms around me. I closed my eyes and his lips fell on mine. They were warm and soft and so damned inviting. It had been so long. All those years waiting on the perfect guy, starving myself of love for that one perfect… I broke away but he pulled me back in. Wait. Am I kissing Nick? Oh… it’s not so bad… Wait, what? How the hell did this happen? I jumped as his arms wrapped around me and he pulled me closer into his embrace. It wasn’t enough to pull his ravenous lips from mine. He was into this, really into this. I shivered. He smiled; I felt his lips move against mine. How could he not tell I wasn’t kissing him back? I dropped my arms and pulled back, staring at him in shock.

  He let me go, a weirdly satisfied look on his flushed face.

  “What the hell…” I couldn’t even finish, my voice had abandoned me. I felt wrong; my head hurt so much the room was starting to spin. I backed away from him slowly, too shaken to think about getting up but needing to put some distance between us. Whatever I’d just been doing hadn’t been my choice. The sick feeling that thought gave me wasn’t helping anything. Oh, god, what was I doing here? Where were we? What had he done to me?

  “Mmm,” he said, eyes rolling up in his head. “That was even better than previously imagined.”

  My memory came back in a flickering show-reel of disconnected images. “The cake,” I finally managed to spit out as he unbuttoned his shirt. “You dozed the fucking cake.”

  He smiled languorously as he threw his shirt to the floor. “My confession, there you have it.”

  “Are you freaking serious?” I was ready to smash his stupid face inside out. I jumped up, moving away from him.

  “Hey, what’s with the pissed face? I took the spell away, didn’t I? It served its purpose. Now I know you like me…” He may have gone on like that for a while. I stopped listening to his delusional one-sided conversation sometime before he undid his trousers.

  The thought of having to ask him to take me home only made me angrier. How the hell was I going to get out of here? I made my way out to where I’d left my bag. Not giving a shit how much it was going to cost me, I sent a text to Mickey, demanding he get his User boyfriend to come and pick me up. I tossed my phone back in my bag and headed back inside to face a now nude Nick and give him a sharp and bloody piece of my mind.

  Twenty-Eight – Mickey

  “Pete, calm down,” I said, trying to think while he blasted orders at me.

  He growled and pawed at my jeans.

  “Get off, get off,” I complained, trying not to giggle at the weirdly ticklish way he was groping me.

  He yanked my phone out of my pocket and fingered it roughly. “Right. Pick up, Piss-Face.” He put the phone to his ear, staring at me like he wanted to kill someone. Probably not me, but it gave me the shivers all the same.

  “You’re calling Tim? He might be working.”

  “I don’t give a shit,” Pete said, walking away when I tried to grab the phone.

  I sank back down onto the couch. “What’s going on?”

  The new guy was standing in the doorframe behind my cousin. I shrugged at him. He seemed to get that I didn’t know what had riled Pete up so bad. “Oh, uh, I told him Nick was going out with a girl.”

  Like that wasn’t some kind of obvious. I’d never seen the weirdo dressed so well and a job interview just seemed highly unlikely. “And that made Pete go crazy why?”

  The guy shrugged. Pete was pacing with the phone. “Pick up, goddamn it!”

  I tried to untangle the orders he’d barged into the room shouting while I was trying to concentrate on the TV. Nope, nothing. He’d just been nagging at me to call Tim, and now he was growling and glaring at my phone in annoyance. “Pick up!” He actually screamed it at the phone. Then he dropped it and ran out of the room, pushing his new room-mate out of his way.

  “What’s going on?” I got up and grabbed my phone from the carpet. As I shoved my trainers back on I heard the front door slam; Pete had officially left the flat and most likely the building. “Where the hell is he going?” I glanced at the new guy. What was his name again? “Hey, that can’t be all you told him. It doesn’t make sense. What exactly did you tell him?”

  He frowned and folded his arms. “That Nick said he was going out with some girl called Kit. You know, like the car from…”

  “Shit!” I darted past him, a fairly good idea of where Pete was going now that the new guy had revealed the most important part of his story. The trek to the pub was a short one and I found my cousin sullenly beating on the back door, shouting his undead head off.

  “I don’t think she’s home,” I told him.

  He growled at me, relenting from battering the door like a maniac. He stepped back and kicked it hard. “Fuck!”

  My phone buzzed and I checked it, biting my lip at the new information. Balls. This really wasn’t going to calm Pete down any. “I’m calling Tim.” I dialled his number, feeling vaguely guilty that I kept calling him for favours.

  “He’d better bloody well a
nswer,” Pete said.

  The letterbox rattled suddenly. Pete took a step closer and poked at it.

  “Master Pete!” Kit’s A.I. owl flew out of the space when Pete held the letterbox open. He flapped about frantically in front of Pete’s face. “What’s the matter, Master Pete?”

  “You tell me,” Pete said, frowning at the bird.

  It was no use. Tim wasn’t answering his phone. He had to be at work. I sent him a message marked urgent and put my phone in my pocket. Kit could handle Nick. She’d just have to hold tight and try not to actually kill the idiot before Tim got back to me.

  “I’m worried about Miss Chase,” the bird admitted. “She’s been acting awfully strangely. I don’t like that man she went out with.”

  “Do you know where they went?”

  “I suspect they were transported by the man. He smelled like magic and something else I don’t like.”

  “Shit,” Pete said, turning to me. “Well?”

  “He must be working. I sent him a message,” I said, grimacing at the thought of telling him the rest. “Kit texted me. She told me to get Tim to teleport her back her asap. Nick took her to the Maldives.”

  “Let me see the message.” He sounded unbelievably threatening about it.

  I passed him my phone hesitantly. “It means she’s okay, though. She’s not in danger if she’s texting me.”

  “If she doesn’t feel threatened then why is she texting you instead of just asking Nick to bring her home?” He clearly wasn’t convinced by my logic. “I’ll kill him if he hurts her.”

  “You think he would?” As soon as I’d said it I knew the answer.

  Pete scowled at me. “He won’t think he’s hurting her. He’s fucking deluded. We need to get her away from him, now.”

  If only we could figure out a way to manage that without Tim’s help. I looked at my phone in Pete’s tense grip. Tim had to get back to us. He was our only hope.

  Twenty-Nine – Tim

  I awoke in a strange room next to a half-naked woman, and I just about cracked my head open on the bedside table stumbling to get out of the goddamned bed. I was drunk. The room spun as I hauled myself up, rubbing at the sore but intact skin where I’d hit the bedside table. My trousers were still on, thank the heavens. Britt’s clone hadn’t sunk low enough to try to seduce me out of them. She’d probably just teleported me into the bed when I passed out on the couch. The room stopped spinning after my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. I was going to need painkillers and a bucket of ice-cold water to properly take away my brain-fuzz, but right now I was just glad I could walk in a relatively straight line.

  I found my shirt on the couch, a purplish stain on the front. I’d spilled wine, apparently. I picked it up and shrugged it on quickly. It wouldn’t do me too much harm to ‘port back to my room at the castle topless, but there was always the chance I’d be called on instantly and it was better to look like a lush than a stripper if that were to happen.

  I shoved my tie in my pocket and looked around for my suit jacket. The dark lump on the bar reminded me I’d taken it off when it was my ‘turn’ to pour the round. A clattering caught my attention as I picked it up. The sudden noise made me grimace. My phone had bounced and hit the floor near the coffee table, the back snapping off. Groaning, I bent and picked it up. It was time to get the hell home with those damned contracts.

  I glanced back at the opened door to Nine’s bedroom. The King would probably insist on coming to collect his new Animate army personally. My creepy dream had better not be about to come true. Nine would just have to be good enough. I had to believe she was. Sighing, I teleported back to my room at the castle.

  I put my phone back together and switched it on. Nothing happened. I zapped it since there was no use scrambling around to find the charger if it was actually broken. Fixing broken machinery was somewhat beyond my magical ability. Recharging a battery was much simpler. The screen lit up, and I breathed a quiet sigh of relief. It was one less thing to have to deal with.

  I tossed the phone on my bed, looking forward to joining it in just a second. I took my jacket off and unbuttoned my ruined shirt. The headache I was cultivating would be soothed by a nice relaxing eight-hour nap. I quite fancied a kebab, but I knew that would be taking the piss. Even if I could manage to magic something up in my inebriated state, I’d likely wake up with destroyed sheets. I swear the sauce actually burned a hole in them the last time. I shook off my drunken craving and sank onto the bed in my boxer shorts. My phone started vibrating relentlessly as I lay down. I didn’t care. I was too tired to give a shit who was trying to call me right now. My brain was calling for oblivion, and my body was listening intently to it.

  Thirty – Pete

  There had to be something we could do. There just had to be. I tried to clear my head. I needed to be able to think straight, and right now all I could think about was how badly I wanted to wrap my hands around Nick’s neck and squeeze. I kept flashing back to the disgusting shit he’d pulled at the bar. He hadn’t thought what he was doing was wrong. I didn’t even want to think about what he was putting Kit through right now.

  “Give me your phone.” I held my hand out and Mickey passed it over. I went to Kit’s number and hit dial. It rang out so I tried again and again. Piss-face still hadn’t gotten back to my cousin, not that I was entirely surprised considering how much of a prick the guy was. “Shit.” Her phone was off… or she couldn’t get to it. I didn’t want to think like that. Shaking my head, I dialled again.

  “I don’t think she’s picking up,” Mickey said, pulling a face. “Tim might be trying to get through…”

  I flipped through his phone book, intending on calling his unresponsive boyfriend until he picked his damn phone up. I didn’t give a shit if he got in trouble with his boss. I was going to harass him until he answered me. Kit was in serious trouble, and we had no other way of getting to her.

  I stood there, feeling my anger rise by the minute with the phone at my ear ringing out. There had to be something I could do. There had to be…

  Mickey was frowning at me when I finally snapped out of it. “What?”

  I suppose it was weird that I’d started to grin. “I’ve just thought of something.” I didn’t think I’d be reminiscing fondly on the grisly incident at the cinema anytime soon but right now it was giving me hope that we might not need a User to rescue Kit.

  “Well what is it?” Mickey sounded halfway between suspicious and hopeful.

  “We need a ghost.”

  “Eh, what for?”

  “Nick’s going to see what possession feels like,” I told him, wondering who I could call on for this. I doubted Angie would like doing me a favour, but then she didn’t have to like it, she just had to do it. I wasn’t exactly going to ask nicely. I hesitated. Was forcing her to help me any different than what Nick was doing? It wasn’t the same thing, but the thought made me feel slightly uneasy all the same.

  “Ah,” Mickey said, nodding. “I’m sure psycho Dave will enjoy getting out of the kitchen. Maybe you can even let him keep Nick! He could actually move out…”

  “Dave.” How did I not think of that? I wondered if the weird curse that kept him in our flat would be overridden by my commands. I could only try. I focussed on what he’d used to look like as I called on him using his full name. “David Alan McNamara, I summon you.”

  My eyes widened as a transparent blue form appeared in front of me. My old room-mate’s jaw was slack as he looked down at himself. His hands moved over his chunky upper body as he gasped. “I’m back!”

  “Sort of,” I muttered, glancing at Mickey. My cousin clearly couldn’t see him, which came as no surprise considering Mickey was a living human. “I need your help, Dave,” I told him, catching his attention only after clearing my throat.

  “Oh, Pete. Hey.” He glanced back down at himself once more before he met my eyes. “What’s up?”

  “Kit’s in trouble, but there’s something you can do to help.�
�

  “Kit? Oh, right, Kit. From the bar.” He nodded as he glanced about, seeming to realise where he was.

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “I’ve been kicked out the back door of the pub before, yeah,” he said, shrugging.

  “Okay, so I kind of need to command you to do this for it to work I think,” I explained. “It needs to be now.”

  Dave nodded slowly. “What do you need me to do?”

  “I need you to possess someone. Ready?” I didn’t wait for his answer. “David Alan McNamara, I command you to possess Nicolas Parker and teleport back here with Catherine Chase.”

  Dave disappeared in the blink of an eye. I glanced at Mickey. “I really hope this works.”

  Thirty-One – Kit

  Nick refused to argue with me. He just laughed at my angry outbursts and then my weird headache came back on, stronger than before. I stumbled back, falling onto the couch as the room started to spin around me. He was staring down at me as my eyelids got heavier. I blinked, trying to keep my eyes open but they closed again quickly and refused to open when I tried to demand it. My body wasn’t obeying any of my demands. I couldn’t move, and I had no idea what the creep was doing to me right now.

  ‘Move! Wake up!’ I screamed inside my own head, but it didn’t work.

  I drifted into a deep sleep, sinking into dreams with a sense of the horrors I’d left behind stalking me. My confused dreams were a mish-mash of old memories and fresh fears of what might be happening back in that cabin.

  I was trapped inside my own body, anger burning through me as Britt threatened to kill me. The room was the cabin instead of a fancy suite in the MGM Grand. I was going to die staring at my best friend’s idiot cousin. He was fighting the magic that animated him to try and break her hold on him. It was bleeding out of him slowly, killing him.