Stone Cold

by Devon Monk

  “Sure we do?”

  “Who?” Dash asked.

  “Eli Collins.”

  “Eli Collins ain’t no Closer,” Hayden said.

  “I know,” Cody said happily. Yes, happily. The jerk was enjoying this. “That’s our break. That’s what we’re going to use to our advantage. Because I know his signature and could forge it blindfolded.”

  “This,” Cody said, applying pressure on the back of my hand to raise my fingers level with Terric’s forehead, “is our beginning. Let’s take it to the end.”

  Chapter 24

  SHAME

  It took an hour, with Cody’s fingers guiding mine, Hayden’s occasional interruption to tell us to angle the glyph one way or another, and my keeping my mind as clear and clean and focused as I could manage.

  Holding Death away from every beating heart in the room was exhausting.

  I was breathing hard after the first fifteen minutes. By the hour mark, I was covered in sweat, shaking, and so hungry I’d pulled Eleanor and Sunny up on such a tight leash they were almost standing in the same space with me. Only Hayden’s arm around my waist was keeping me on my feet.

  Terric seemed to be doing pretty well so far. But then it wasn’t the prep for this spell that was going to knock his teeth out. It was when I poured magic into it.

  “Almost done,” Cody said. “Just tie that line into the diagonal arc. Yes, that one.” He paused. “Okay, Shame, I think you have it, his UnClosing. Hayden, do you see anything we missed?”

  He took his time looking through the glyph I had carved, a glyph that hovered in a milky white light in front of me like the flight paths of air traffic control over La Guardia.

  “It’s good,” he said. “For what it is. Eli is no Closer. I wouldn’t know how to make it better.”

  “So, cast?” I asked through my teeth. I was glad they were being extra careful, but I was counting down the seconds of consciousness here.

  Terric was the one who answered. “Cast it, Shame.”

  I held his gaze with my own. Saw the trust implicit there and the feelings he had for me: friendship, caring, maybe hope. God, had we ever been that innocent?

  “See you on the other side, mate,” I whispered.

  I drew on magic from beneath the inn, opened my hand wide, and let the magic fill the lines of the spell. It caught like a lit fuse, hot red liquid flowing through the glyph so quickly I barely had time to register that the spell was charged before it whipped out and wrapped Terric from head to boot.

  He yelled, stiffened. Davy caught him as he fell, slowing his descent to the floor as he eased him down.

  Terric was still yelling.

  I had done it wrong. Cast wrong. Drawn it wrong. Somehow I’d connected the spell to me, as I had connected it to him.

  I could feel his mind breaking open, dull teeth tearing at my body, my mind. I could see his memories. Not just the torture, not just the last few years, but all of his past. All of the things he’d been through with me, without me. All the things he’d endured because of me.

  Jesus. How did anyone go on living after that?

  “Shame?” Someone was shouting, their voice muffled and distant. “Shame!”

  A hard slap, maybe two, landed across my face. Got my attention.

  Hayden was looking down at me. Not worried. Angry. “Are you in there? Are you listening to me, Shamus?”

  Eleanor was looking down at me too. That must have been the second slap.

  “I’m here.” My voice sounded so far away and strange, the very weirdness of it pulled me up to full awareness, sweating.

  I was in the middle of Terric’s head. Got the full double-vision thing of looking out of his eyes—he was currently staring at Dash, who looked worried for Terric—and out of mine, where Hayden still had on his ass-whupping glare.

  Story of my life: Something goes down, everyone frets over Terric and blames me.

  Terric laughed, and I could feel it, feel his laugh on my brain walls. “You think you’re the one they blame?” he asked.

  “Stop listening to me.”

  “Stop whining in my head.”

  “Your—?” I swore, then turned to look at him. He was sitting on the floor, Dash on one side, Cody on the other. Hayden was standing next to me, and Eleanor was at my left, kneeling beside me.

  When I looked at Terric, I got that mirror-in-a-mirror sensation. I was looking at him while he was looking at me, while I was looking at me from him, looking at me from me.

  “How the hell do Allie and Z do this shit?” I asked.

  Terric bit his bottom lip, which I realized was bloody and swelling from all the screaming and whatnot that had just gone on.

  “For one thing, they want to be connected this close,” he said. “But for us . . .”

  “This is a bad idea,” I agreed. “I’ll step back if you step back. And no nicking the valuables, on the way out, mate.”

  He smiled and I got a weird wash of him thinking I was adorable when I assed around and pretended not to be terrified.

  Way too much information for me. I wasn’t built to know what a real human heart felt. Pretty sure if I ever had to deal with real emotion any real person should experience, I’d snap in half.

  “Please,” he said. “And I always thought I was the drama queen.”

  “Done being your brain buddy. Just shush up and step back.”

  No one else in the room seemed to have anything to add to the conversation.

  I didn’t know how much of what we were saying was going on in our minds, and how much was actually coming out as words.

  I had cast magic, UnClosed Terric . . . I hoped . . . and we’d ended up sunk knee-deep in the mud of each other’s minds.

  “This might hurt,” he said.

  “I’d be surprised if it didn’t.”

  There was a one-two-three countdown, a holding of breath and gritting of teeth, and then we both jumped back into our own thought space.

  “Son of a bitch,” I panted. Terric just groaned.

  “. . . coming, Shame,” someone was saying. I blinked, looked around. Dash was hanging up his phone. “Here. We have to get moving.”

  “Where? Who? What?” I said. Hayden was already hauling me up to my feet. After a couple steps I finally got the hang of feet and legs and walking.

  There were too many people in the room doing too many things: Hayden, Terric, Cody, Dash, Mum, Davy.

  We were headed to the door.

  The air sizzled and popped. I knew that sound—had last heard it in my kitchen before Eli had killed us.

  “Gate,” I yelled.

  And then there was chaos.

  Three men—drones—stepped out of nowhere, a flash of light pouring through the room. They stood with their hands extended, fingers and thumbs together, focusing magic.

  “Down! Down,” I shouted.

  Magic pounded through the air in a blast of heat. I lifted my hands in a Block spell, but I was too unfocused to cast, or even begin to pull a spell together.

  Time stopped for a moment, my heart, all the people in the room, the magic, stopped.

  I saw my mom falling, the spell the drones had cast—Impact—burning a fire through her. Hayden was midstep, trying to reach her, trying to block the magic with his own body.

  Too late.

  Terric was just closing off the line of a Cancel spell, impressive since he had to be at least as rattled as I was, and both Eleanor and Sunny were blank-eyed and frozen in place.

  Davy was nowhere to be seen, maybe already out the front door.

  Dash was halfway through firing his gun, not at the drones, but at the man I saw behind them, the man standing in the hole in space.

  Eli. He waited for me to make eye contact. When I did, he nodded and held up something in his hand. A disk.
<
br />   “Come and get me, dead man,” he said. Behind him was a house. A manor. I knew that place.

  He flipped the disk and caught it in his fist.

  Hammer and steel cracked like a broken gong as he canceled the Time spell he had cast. Time cranked up again; the hole in space burned into itself, closing Eli away and leaving the drones behind.

  Magic sizzled through the air toward Mum, completing the spell the drones had cast.

  She fell.

  Dash’s bullets hit one drone in the chest, the next in the neck. Terric’s spell ignited and sucked down all the magic in the room.

  I busted the chains on Death inside me and let it have its due.

  Death drank down the lives of all three drones, who screamed, and fell, and died.

  I turned. Mum was on the floor, Hayden calling her name. She wasn’t breathing.

  Cody ran to her and started CPR.

  I stood there, numb, frozen. I watched her spirit, her soul, lift up out of her body. She looked around, confused.

  “God, no.” I couldn’t lose her. She couldn’t be dead, hit by a spell that wasn’t meant for her. This wasn’t how it ended for her. Not like this.

  I took a step, held out my hand toward her. A smoky black rope shot out from my hand so fast I couldn’t follow the path it took, couldn’t lower my hand in time to redirect it.

  Holy shit.

  Eleanor screamed, Shame, no!

  I jerked my hand away, trying to sever the stream of Death magic pouring out of me.

  Too late.

  The rope looped around my mom’s throat and cinched in tight.

  Her hands flew to her neck and she pulled against the tie between us.

  Death magic had taken her, claimed her spirit. I could already feel the heat of her energy feeding into the vein in my arm.

  “Oh God,” I breathed, not wanting to believe what I was seeing. Not wanting to face the horror of having just tied my mother’s ghost to me.

  Mum stopped struggling and seemed to see me—really see me. Shamus?

  She looked down at her body, where Hayden had gathered her in his arms, where Cody was slowly standing back up, the CPR having done no good.

  Ah, son, she said, her ghostly eyes closed. No.

  “I didn’t mean, I didn’t want . . .” I put my hand over my face and wished the world would go away. Wished I could be gone, dead. Wished I hadn’t done this to her, killed her. Worse: tied her to the monster inside me.

  Terric walked up from behind me, then stopped next to me, his hand gripping my upper arm.

  The contact was a shock of electricity. But instead of blowing me off my feet, it grounded me, cleared my head, steadied me.

  “I got you,” he said. There was Life magic in his touch and kindness in his tone. “Do you have your mother’s spirit?” he asked. “Did you tie her to you?”

  I nodded.

  “You did what?” Hayden bellowed.

  “How about the others?” Terric asked. “The drones? Do you have them?”

  “No,” I said. There was nothing inside them for me to take.”

  Hayden gently lowered Mom back to the floor, then stood.

  Man clocked in over six four and was half again as wide. “Did you kill your mother, Shame?”

  “I—”

  “He saved her.” Terric moved to stand between me and Hayden. Terric was a little taller than me but was still dwarfed by the size and muscle of the older man. If this came down to a physical fight, I had no doubt Hayden would mop the floor with both Terric and me.

  “What do you mean?” Dash asked. He still had the gun in his hand, probably to put me down if needed. Smart.

  “She’s tied to him, which means she isn’t dead,” Terric said. “He has her spirit. We have her. And we’ll find a way to heal her.”

  “Then find a way now,” Hayden yelled.

  A phone rang. It sounded like it was coming from Dash’s pocket. He finally set the safety and answered the phone.

  “I said now,” Hayden said again. “Or so help me, you two, I will make you wish you’d died with her.”

  “We didn’t kill her,” Terric said. “That Impact the drones threw killed her. Understand me, Hayden. Shame caught her when she fell. He may have saved her.”

  Hayden uncurled one massive fist and pointed at Mum. “Do something for her.”

  “All right.” Terric gave me a hesitant smile. “It’s going to be all right, Shame. Relax.”

  He so didn’t know that. “Don’t tell me what to do.”

  Mum, who still stood near her body, cleared her throat. Listen to him, son. This is all . . . all going to be fine.

  “No,” I said, the rise of tears choking back my voice. “I don’t think it’s going to be fine. You’re dead!”

  Terric pressed his palm on my shoulder. “Just trust me for once.”

  He walked over to Mum’s body and knelt. He breathed deeply and cleared his mind. Faith magic user. Terric had been one of the best many years ago. When he wanted to access his inner calm, it came snapping. With just a couple of breaths, he drew tranquility around him.

  It was a technique Victor taught all his students—this Zen state of mind. One I’d never really gotten the hang of.

  Terric stretched his hand out toward me and not knowing exactly what he wanted, I stepped over and clasped it.

  Then he closed his eyes and prayed.

  Great.

  Terric had a thing about praying when he cast magic. It wasn’t required, and the prayers he spoke were derived from very old texts. But in each syllable, between each word, he hung his faith, his belief and trust that the good in this world, and the worlds beyond our reach, would be there to support his actions, to guide his choices.

  That was another part of Faith magic I’d never gotten the hang of—the faith part.

  Early on in my training, Victor had declared that if I couldn’t even manage patience, peace, and trust, I’d have zero chance surrendering myself to faith.

  He hadn’t been wrong.

  Terric kept praying, the same few verses over and over again in a voice just above a whisper.

  Mum moved to stand a little closer to Hayden and put her hand on his, not that he noticed. Oh, she said. I see. I see what he’s doing.

  I’m glad she could see something, because all I saw was her unbreathing body.

  Terric opened his eyes, the last word tumbling from his lips, a gentle light pouring from his hand into Mum’s body. The soft yellow glow of healing, of Life magic doing what Life magic does best—thriving—filled her.

  Mum glowed for a moment. Then the glow was gone.

  “Did you?” I asked. “Is she all right?”

  Hayden was on his way to her again, knelt on the opposite side of where Terric still knelt, Mum between them.

  “She’s breathing,” Hayden said. “By God, she’s breathing. Call an ambulance.”

  I think Cody or Dash called 911.

  Davy showed up with a blanket to cover her.

  I didn’t know what good an ambulance would do. Mum might be breathing, but she was still tied to me, her spirit, her soul, caught by the Death magic in me.

  Shamus, she said, can you break this tie between us and let me back into my body?

  The last time I’d tried that—with Mina—she had died.

  I just shook my head, not willing to risk that with my mom. “I can’t—”

  Maybe this time it will work, Eleanor said.

  “No.” The last time it hadn’t worked. The doctor’s spirit had stepped back into her body and died.

  I didn’t know how long I stood there. Long enough for Hayden to get Mum bundled in the blanket. Long enough for Terric to be standing next to me again. Long enough the ambulance pulled up to the place.

  What a mess they�
��d find. Three dead bodies, a burned room, and a woman in a coma.

  “. . . need to go now,” Dash was saying from somewhere ahead of me.

  Terric pulled on my arm, Cody pushed at my shoulder. We were moving, running.

  “Go, go,” Cody urged. Out the back hallway. Out the back door into the shaded afternoon light beneath the trees behind the inn.

  “Where are we going?” I asked. “Why are we leaving?”

  Sunny and Mum and Eleanor floated there next to me, looking just as confused as I felt.

  “Did you see where the drones came from?” Dash asked. “When the gate opened. Shame, did you see where they came from?”

  “Yes. Kevin Cooper’s manor. His house—the one out in the West Hills. I’m sure that’s where Eli was standing.”

  “Kevin Cooper?” Dash asked. “What does he have to do with the drones?”

  “Not him,” I said, “Eli. Eli was there. Right outside Kevin’s house. He told me to come and get him.”

  “Wait,” Terric said. “You saw Eli? In a flash of an instant, you knew where he was?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” I said. “Time stopped. You didn’t feel that? Hear that?”

  He shook his head but had gone very pale.

  “Eli stopped time. Long enough for me to notice him. Long enough for him to show me that he was holding a disk.”

  “Why?” Dash asked. “Why would he want you to see him? You want him dead.”

  “That’s why,” I said. “This confrontation. Our confrontation, he and I. Without Krogher in the middle of it pulling his strings. He wants us to come to him, me to come to him. And finish this fight.”

  “I hate to say it again, but why?” Dash asked. “He has the gates, he has fucking disks, apparently. He has the drop on us.”

  Terric shook his head. “Not now. Not if Shame and I use magic together. Break it. Break the core of it into dark and light so we can change the world if we so choose.” He was silent a moment, then, “Eli’s Soul Complement is dead. We have the upper hand now. He’s choosing the ground upon which we kill him.”

  “Kevin’s house,” Cody mused. “Dash, where are Allie and Zay holed up?”

  Dash shook his head. “They haven’t told me. Just said they’d be safe and that Dr. Fischer was with them.”