Stone Cold

by Devon Monk

  Cody turned and looked at me. “Shamus. How much money would you bet that Allie and Zayvion are hiding at Kevin’s house?”

  “Damn it. Call them,” I said. “Dash, call Zay or Dr. Fischer and find out where they are. Now.”

  Dash pulled out his phone, dialed.

  But driving wouldn’t get us there fast enough. We might already be too late to stop Eli’s attack.

  “Can you open a Gate?” I asked Terric.

  You would have thought I’d asked him to fly to the moon and back.

  “No,” he said. “Shame, I haven’t been a Faith magic user for years. You broke that in me, remember? Closings, opening gates . . . that’s all Faith magic.”

  “All right. Fine,” I said. “Can we open a Gate? Together. If we break magic?”

  He shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t know. Maybe. Do you want to test our control over magic by tearing a hole through the fabric of reality?”

  “I vote no,” Cody said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because I don’t want to be at ground zero of a nuclear explosion,” he said. “But hey, I like being alive.”

  Dash hung up. “You were right,” he said. “They’re at Kevin’s. But they haven’t seen any sign of Eli or the drones.”

  “He was at Kevin’s house,” I said. “I’m sure of it. With that gate thing of his, Allie and Zay won’t know they’re surrounded by drones until they are right up their asses.”

  “I sent Stone to keep an eye on Allie,” Cody said. “For a magical gargoyle made of rock, he’s . . . sensitive to such things, fluctuations in magic. He’ll warn them.”

  Not fast enough. Not good enough. Not enough for them to kill Eli.

  I was already striding out to the parking lot. “Warning isn’t the same as stopping,” I said. “Or killing.”

  “I can do it,” a low voice said. I glanced over at the cover of trees.

  “Davy?” Sunny said.

  “Davy?” I echoed. “What are you doing out here?”

  “Watching you.”

  “Easy,” Dash said. “Just take it easy, Davy.” His tone made me do a double check for guns in Davy’s hands.

  No guns, but from the look in his eyes, I was pretty sure ol’ Davy Silvers would rather kill me with his bare hands.

  Looked like Cody should be worried about two nuclear reactors in the area.

  What’s wrong with Davy? Mum asked me.

  He’s angry about Shame killing me, Sunny said.

  Oh, Shamus, Mum said.

  “I didn’t mean to,” I said.

  He’s going to kill you, Sunny said. And I’m going to enjoy every minute of it.

  Sunny! Mum used her teacher voice, and Sunny shut up. I understand you’re angry he killed you. Fine. He killed me too.

  “God,” I groaned. Just what I needed. Arguing ghosts.

  But, she continued, we are not in hell yet. And as long as we are on this earth, alive or in spirit, we do our job. Take care of magic, keep it out of the hands of people who would use it to harm others, and save the innocent.

  Your own son is one of the people who harmed others with magic, Sunny said. He killed Eleanor too.

  It’s more complicated than that, Eleanor said.

  We should be keeping magic out of his hands, Sunny said. We should be stopping him.

  Death magic demands many sacrifices, Mum said. It’s what you do with those sacrifices that makes them worthy of the price. I trust you, Shamus.

  Dash was still talking too, but I had sort of lost that side of the conversation. The ghosts were arguing pretty loudly for beings that had no lungs.

  “Shame?” Terric’s hand on my shoulder shot an electric pulse through me again, and once again I felt grounded, connected. Life magic flared and died in his eyes, and he knew the cool darkness of Death magic rolled through me.

  Like lightning and thunder, we were a storm rising.

  The clash of our magics wasn’t unpleasant. It wasn’t even that uncomfortable resistance of one magic tearing against the other. Something had changed between us again. Life magic set me straight and clear, and Death magic, apparently, returned the favor for him.

  Soul Complements. Maybe we didn’t have to be living in each other’s heads like Allie and Zay. Maybe we didn’t have to go insane. Dying had brought us closer to each other. I was having a hard time finding something wrong with that.

  Being drawn closer together wasn’t exactly how we wanted things to go, but right this minute, it wasn’t so bad.

  “So you killed Sunny?” Terric asked quietly.

  I couldn’t lie to him. He’d know if I did. “Yes.”

  “Is she tied to you?” Terric asked.

  “What?”

  “Sunny. Do you have her soul?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.” He turned and once again stood between me and the man who wanted to see my guts on the floor. “We’ll find a way to make this right, Davy. But right now Allie and Zay are in danger. We stop Eli; we kill him, kill Krogher, stop the drones. Once that’s done, we’ll make amends. Even if what you want is our deaths.”

  “Whoa, wait,” I said. “Our deaths? You didn’t have anything to do with me killing anyone, Terric. This is on me. I clean up my own messes. Do you understand me, Davy? This is on me.”

  He nodded but was looking at Terric, not me. “I understand you. If you want Eli, I can get you there.”

  “How?” Dash asked.

  Davy unbuttoned his shirt, revealing the spells carved into his skin.

  Oh, mercy, no, my mum whispered. The poor thing.

  There were so many spells carved into the meat of him that I couldn’t even see his skin. His entire chest was just a crossing and recrossing of black lines that pulsed with that strange blue neon.

  “He left me his calling card,” Davy said calmly. “And a few other things.”

  “Other things?” Terric asked.

  “Ah, crap,” Cody said. “I think this is going to hurt.”

  And then Davy pressed his palms together, blue magic surging up the lines of his arms to the tips of his fingers, completing an overarcing spell carved through him. When he pulled his hands apart, the air around us sizzled and burned.

  No, not just the air. Magic. Davy had opened a Gate.

  Then he said one word, and we all fell through.

  Chapter 25

  SHAME

  I hated gates. Zay and other people who could open the damn things seemed to love jumping through them. But whenever I stumbled through one, it felt as if someone inserted hot peppers up my nose, into every other orifice, and kicked me off a cliff into the salty deep.

  Unpleasant, and I almost always ended up puking.

  The magic Davy shouldn’t have been able to access landed us in the driveway in front of Kevin’s house.

  Every inch of me burned, but at least I wasn’t going to lose my lunch. I had no time for it.

  Eli was walking up the front steps. Eli was almost at the door. Eli was almost close enough to hurt two of the people left in this world whom I most wanted to be safe.

  “Hey!” I yelled.

  He looked surprised as hell that we were right behind him. I thought for just the barest second that he glanced at Davy and gave him a nod. What? Were they in this together? But then I didn’t have any time to pick out the subtleties of what the fuck was going on.

  Half a ton of rock tumbled out of the sky, all wings, claws, and fangs.

  Stone the gargoyle.

  He had probably been roof-side and noticed both Eli and our arrival at the same moment. He tore down out of the sky aiming straight at Eli.

  Good boy, Stoney.

  Two things happened at once: I unleashed Death magic. Terric reached out with Life magic.

  Okay, three thi
ngs happened.

  Eli opened a gate in the ground behind him and stepped back into it just as Stone lunged for his throat. He and Stone fell through it and were gone.

  “Son of a bitch.”I was running to where Eli and Stone had just been on the porch. I was also yarding back on Death magic so it wouldn’t consume everything living in its path. Terric, I assumed was doing the same with Life magic.

  Dash and Cody were a couple steps ahead of us, but they pulled up short when the door opened.

  “Stop right there.” Kevin stood just inside the expansive entryway, a semiautomatic rifle in his hands. Correction, a semiautomatic rifle in his hands pointed at us. “What the hell are all of you doing here?”

  Kevin was the kind of guy you might miss in a crowd—thinning hairline, sad eyes, and average in most every other way. But when he was holding a gun, he was riveting.

  “Eli was outside,” Terric said. “Stone tackled him. They gated out. Could be gating back at any minute. Are Allie and Zayvion all right?”

  “No one comes into the house,” Kevin said. “Not even you.”

  “Kevin,” Dash said, “it’s all right. We’re here to help.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  “Davy opened a Gate,” I said.

  Kevin turned his gun on Davy.

  What we had here was a powder keg and a book of lit matches. Nothing but boom ahead.

  “We came to stop Eli,” I said. “We can leave. Terric and I can leave.”

  “It’s not Terric and you that I’m worried about,” Kevin said. “Step back, Davy. Way back. Now.”

  “Davy? Davy’s not the problem,” I said. Kevin wasn’t making any damn sense. “He brought us here to hunt for Eli. If Eli isn’t here, we’re gone.”

  “Sure he brought you here,” Kevin said. “Because he’s under Eli’s orders to do so.”

  “What?” I said.

  Bullshit, Sunny said. Davy’s not working for Eli. He was tortured by him. Held captive by him.

  “You sure about that?” Dash, who couldn’t hear Sunny, asked Kevin.

  “One hundred percent,” Kevin said. “Back off the property, Davy Silvers, or I will drop you where you stand.”

  Davy held up his hands. “Kevin. You’re wrong. I would never take orders from Eli.”

  He sounded like Davy. Looked like him—well, like a version of him who had recently been hammered through hell. The Davy I knew would rather slit his own throat than work for the man who had turned him into a monster.

  “Back up,” Kevin repeated.

  No, Sunny said. Shame. Don’t let him kill him. Don’t let him shoot.

  “Davy,” I said, “you’d better listen to him, mate. Just step outside and we’ll get this all sorted.”

  Davy didn’t move, didn’t say anything.

  “Davy?”

  That wasn’t Davy behind those dead eyes. Maybe hadn’t been Davy for a long time.

  Shit.

  Magic can do wonderful things. Back in the day it healed the sick, fed the poor, made the world an easier place to live in. Of course magic back then always came with a price: You used it, and it used you.

  The price for using magic was pain.

  Then Cody healed magic, turned it into its new extra-gentle form and made it so using magic didn’t cost much because it didn’t do much.

  Those spells carved into Davy were dark magic. Eli had carved spells from a time when magic was broken, raw, and extremely deadly.

  Spells that would kill a man. Spells that would change a man. Spells that destroyed anything they touched.

  And in those black hashed and looped designs were a few more spells. Things that would take care of Eli’s enemies. Things that would take care of Krogher’s problems.

  Davy wasn’t just a blueprint that Eli had used to carve the drones into bombs; Davy was his master weapon.

  His very first, very best, flesh-covered bomb.

  Right here, at Kevin’s house, where Allie and Zayvion and Terric and I had gathered. Two sets of powerful Soul Complements. Maybe even the most powerful Soul Complements. Maybe the only Soul Complements left in the world. The only people who could stop Krogher and his drones.

  And we’d brought Davy here—Eli’s walking weapon. We’d let him bring us here. All together now, cozy and easy to kill.

  Fuck. Me.

  I triggered Death magic, sent it straight for him, at the exact moment Davy threw his hands down and out to the side. He arched back, his entire body consumed by the blue flame of those spells.

  Magic called up from the wells beneath the city, magic called down out of the cloudless sky, a firestorm of hell. Magic Davy should not be able to access, if he were just human. Magic that was damn near impossible to pull on anymore.

  An ungodly immense amount of raw magic.

  There was no way I could block it.

  And then the world exploded.

  Chapter 26

  SHAME

  There is maybe one thing good about carrying Death: You can’t die. There are, however, a lot of bad things about carrying Death. Example? Sometimes dying is a kindness.

  In the middle of that explosion, as magic ripped through the walls of the house, as magic was set to do one thing—kill all the people in that house, especially the Soul Complements and their unborn baby—I decided there was one more thing Death magic was good for: absorbing energy.

  Even magic.

  I threw Death at Davy’s magic like a heavy blanket, swallowing down the force of it, devouring the heat of it, taking on the explosion as an energy I could drain and diffuse. Did it too.

  The blast rerouted to the middle of my head.

  Pain.

  Heat.

  A riot of magic—the magic Davy had tapped—pulverized through my mind and body.

  Eli had done more than carve spells into him. He’d filled him with tainted magic. Just like the magic that filled the drones. Back in the warehouse when I’d drunk down the magic in the drones, it had made me sick.

  This? This might be my ticket out of here.

  I screamed and burned and bled and broke, tainted magic pouring over me, pumping through me. I didn’t know how Davy had held this so long, didn’t know how he was still alive.

  And then, in an instant, there was silence.

  That was just a different kind of pain.

  A hand lay cool against the back of my neck. He walked me into the house, took me to a bed, made me sit. The magic was gone. So was the porch, melted to slag and ash.

  Hell.

  The ringing in my ears was so loud, I couldn’t hear my own thoughts.

  Shuttering darkness and blasts of light still rolled through my brain, across my eyes, but I was pretty sure that was Terric at my side, Terric who had brought me here.

  “Rest,” he said maybe from somewhere in my head, his hands still on me, words carrying a soft yellow light. Life magic. Healing.

  The next time I woke up, I didn’t know where I was. This was not my bed, not my bedroom. I was alone. Well, just me and the ghosts of three women. I was on top of the covers, a light blanket over my torso.

  Go slowly, Mum said from where she sat on the bed next to me. That was a lot of magic to consume.

  Consume? I wondered if I said that out loud. From the look on Mum’s face, I hadn’t.

  I pulled my hands up to my sides, bent elbows, and pushed up to sitting.

  Bloody hell, that hurt.

  Sunny sat cross-legged on top of the dresser, her head resting against the mirror behind her. I didn’t know, she said.

  “Know?” Excellent. That was actual audible speech. My bell had been rung pretty damn hard, though. It had taken a lot to get that word out.

  The details of exactly what had happened were on the other side of the blast zone in my brain.

/>   About Davy, Sunny said. I didn’t know that he was carved up and triggered to kill you. Well, you and Allie and Zayvion and Terric.

  Ah, the details were coming back to me. “Did he? Kill?”

  I looked around the room expecting to see everyone I cared about dead and tied to me. But the only ghosts in the room were Mum, Sunny, and Eleanor, who shook her head.

  No one died, Eleanor said. But your mom’s right. That was a lot of magic to absorb. You’re kind of smoldering with death and darkness.

  “Yeah?” I asked. “Is it sexy?”

  She grinned. Oh yeah. Real sexy. That was the first time I’d seen her smile, really smile since I had bought her a drink in heaven.

  Hold on. Heaven? Images and memories flashed and burned through my mind. All that magic I’d absorbed must have rattled a few things loose.

  I’d died, gone to a bar in heaven. I’d seen Eleanor there, and Chase and Greyson, and Dessa. Dad and Victor too.

  Shamus? Mum said.

  “Hold on. Having a Dorothy moment.”

  Dad and Victor had thrown me out of heaven and cast me down here.

  They’d told me I didn’t have much time. That if I didn’t stop Krogher and Eli and the drones, the world would end. I searched those memories for exactly how the end might come, but came up empty.

  Undoubtedly it was something involving magic.

  “How long have I been here?” I asked. “How long since Davy bombed out on us?”

  It hasn’t been longer than an hour or two, Mum said.

  Felt like years.

  I got out of the bed, keeping one hand on the wall just in case walking was going to be an issue. Nope. I felt pretty good for a guy who’d just taken a nuclear blast to Oz and back. “Where’s Terric?” I asked. “Where’s Dash and Cody? I have to go. We have to go find Eli.”

  I was fully clothed, still had my shoes on.

  Like we’d know? Sunny said. We can’t get that far away from you.

  “Then let’s get moving.” I opened the door onto a nicely decorated hallway. Figured out where I was.

  I’d been to Kevin’s house a couple of times and recalled needing a map to navigate the place. It had been in his family for generations, a family of some wealth who liked living on the grand side of the scale.