Hell Bent

Chapter 9

Davy had a beat-down old pickup that had been left to him by a good friend. Allie once told me it was the truck Martin Pike used to drive. Pike had been a hell of a Hound, and a mentor to Davy.

I put on my sunglasses, even though it was still dark out, then made straight for the truck, glancing around to try to get my bearings. Lots of tall fir trees, some pine sprinkled in. The buzz of a busy road tickled the edge of my hearing, but none of these things were distinct enough to stand out from any other corner of the northwest.

“Where the hell?” I asked.

And that’s when it hit me. I was in St. Helens, northwest of Portland, somewhere off Highway 30. A dead zone. Back when magic was broken, but strong, there were only a few places off-grid that were naturally magicless. This was one of them.

“She really knows how to cover her bases,” I said.

“Get in,” Davy said as he walked around to the driver’s side of the truck. He didn’t give me hell for being drugged, trunked, and tied up by some strange woman, which is how I knew whatever he had come to tell me was not good news.

“Who’s hurt?” I asked.

He opened the door, got in.

I swung up into the passenger’s seat.

Davy started the engine and refused to say anything until we had tires on asphalt. Pretty soon the Highway 30 signs flashed by at the side of the road, white in the darkness.

“It’s Joshua Romero,” Davy said. “He’s dead.”

I leaned my head back against the headrest and took each emotion as it came: anger, sorrow, anger, loss, anger, acceptance and anger.

Joshua was a nice guy out of Seattle, a Closer who’d thrown his lot in with us Portlanders when we were trying to convince the Authority we weren’t crazy, while simultaneously saving the damn world.

“How?” I asked, dragging through my memories for him mentioning health issues.

“Murder.”

“The hell. How?”

“Magic.”

Okay. Maybe this wasn’t my call anymore, since I hadn’t really been the head guy in charge of anything magic related for more than a year, but there was too damn much murdering by magic going on lately. Especially since killing someone with magic simply should not be in ninety-nine percent of the population’s reach anyway.

“Do you, does anyone know who?” I asked. “Or when? Or how exactly? As in what kind of magic? Tell me they had Hounds on the scene. Tell me the police up there didn’t just think Hounding and tracking back a spell is some kind of Ouija board voodoo trick.”

“I don’t know yet. I just got the call.”

“How long has Terric had you tailing me?” I asked.

He glanced at me. “I’m not following you for Terric.”

“Who, then? Allie? Zayvion? Please tell me it isn’t my mother.”

“Shame. Joshua is dead. Can we put you and your problems on the back burner for a minute?”

Like I said, he wasn’t as young as he looked.

“Gladly. Where did it happen?”

“He was found in his car. In a parking garage on Burnside.”

“Whoa, hold on. He was in Portland?”

“Yes. And it looked like he’d gotten in his car and dropped dead behind the wheel before he ever had the chance to turn the key.”

“Where’s his family?”

“They were in Seattle. They’ve been taken in. They’re nowhere anyone can find them now.”

I nodded. So the Authority was still doing its part in trying to protect magic users and families of magic users. But Joshua wasn’t a Soul Complement to his wife—they didn’t use magic together and couldn’t break it to make it powerful.

So why was he targeted?

“What was Joshua doing?” Here’s where being out of touch was working against me. I didn’t even know if Joshua was still working a magic-related job, or if he’d washed his hands of it all and finally opened that restaurant he’d always dreamed of.

“I don’t know all the details, but he was still involved in magic. Rehab, I think. Finally put his counseling degree to use.”

“Rehabbing magic users?”

“Helping place people who used to use magic, or were harmed by magic, into magic-free or low-magic jobs. Most of those people still live here in Portland since this is where magic went bad. You know how it is for us all. To have that kind of power fade away. Hard adjustment.”

“Last time I was paying attention, it took a hell of a lot of work, and a hell of a lot of people, like a hundred or more, to pull on enough magic to do anything harmful to someone,” I said.

“That hasn’t changed.”

I was silent. So was he. We were close to Portland now, traveling on well-lit roads.

Davy had probably already come to the conclusion I’d been trying very hard to ignore. The only person strong enough to use magic to kill someone with it was a Breaker. A Soul Complement.

“We’re looking for two people, aren’t we?” I said.

Davy nodded.

“Balls.”

“At least it will be a short list,” Davy said.

That was the upside of Soul Complements being rare.

“Unless there’s a pair out there we don’t know about,” I said.

He nodded. “That’s what we were thinking.”

From the tone, I knew Davy wasn’t telling me everything. “We? Who are you working for, Davy, my boy? Police? Overseer? Perhaps a little freelancing with government black ops?”

“Right now? The Overseer. He has a Hound on every known Soul Complement.”

“And how long have you really been following me? Come on now, tell Uncle Shame.”

That got a quick smile out of him and he looked my way. “About a week. Do you know that you talk to yourself a lot?”

“Yes.”

“What’s that all about?”

“It’s an Irish thing.”

“It sounds more like a crazy-guy thing. I mean, it’s practically full conversations. Arguments. You go on and on, Shame.”

“It’s a pity we’ll never get to the bottom of this mystery,” I said.

Davy smiled. “Never say never to a Hound. Also never say mystery, come to think of it.”

“How about drop it? Or where are we going?”

“Or how about you tell me about your date back there?”

“Nothing to say, mate,” I said.

“Nothing? You staggered out of the bar like you’d drained half their stock, but I only saw you go through two beers and four shots over six hours. With lunch.”

“So?”

“That’s not enough to get you drunk.”

“So?”

“So either you were faking it or she dropped something in your drink.”

“By the way, do you know who she is?” I asked.

“I know she had a rifle trained on you. On more than one occasion.”

“Jesus, Silvers. You didn’t want to tell a man he was in some sniper’s crosshairs?”

“Like you didn’t know. I’m curious as to why you haven’t told Terric about her.”

“Who says I haven’t?”

He gave me a look, then turned his gaze back to the road.

“I’ve seen that man he’s dating,” he said a little more quietly.

Didn’t have to fill in the blanks. I knew he was talking about Terric’s bruiser.

“Dash mentioned he didn’t approve of the situation,” I said. “You have any information on Jeremy I should know about?”

“He’s tied into an old family of Blood magic users. Used to deal spell-laced drugs. They have connections in the region. Some say Black Crane. Powerful people who made a lot of money while magic was hot.”

“And now that it’s cold?”

“They still have connections. Power. Deals in place.”

“Do they have anything on Terric?”

Davy didn’t say anything for a minute. Slowed for a light, then turned left. “Not that we can find.”

So he had been checking in on Jeremy. Nice of him. “There’s that ‘we’ again. Who asked you to check in on Terric’s love life?”

“Allie and Zay. Plus, Terric’s my friend too, you know? I keep an eye on my friends. And he’s been . . . different since he’s been with Jeremy.”

I didn’t say anything so he just kept on talking.

“You want to know what I think, Shame?”

“I really don’t.”

“I think Terric wouldn’t be trying to keep Jeremy alive if you were around. I think he’d instead use that Life magic to damp down the Death magic that’s killing you.”

“Killed,” I said. “Not killing. Other than the whole breathing thing, I’m not much alive, mate.”

“Sure,” he said. “You’re as dead as I am. Magic changed us. Made us into . . . something else. You don’t see me whining about it.”

“You know what you don’t see me doing?” I said. “Being a prick.”

“Or admitting I’m right and you don’t like it.”

“There must be someone else’s business you can dick around in,” I muttered.

“Oh, there is. Plenty of people’s. None quite as fun as yours.”

“I’m so pleased you find me amusing. Also, you do realize that Terric put Jeremy’s cancer into remission? That means something to him. To both of them.”

“I know. It means something to Jeremy’s doctors too. And his family. As a matter of fact, some members of his family, powerful people, are taking very close notice of what Terric can do with magic.”

And there it was. The angle I hadn’t seen. If Jeremy’s powerful family saw Terric as a way to hold off illness, cure diseases, or hell, put a new kick into the drug-of-the-week they were cooking up, then Terric was suddenly a valuable commodity. Someone worth controlling.

Maybe even someone worth hurting.

“Does this have anything to do with the government hunting down Soul Complements?” I asked.

“That’s . . . news. Want to fill me in?”

“Aren’t you working for the Overseer?”

“Working, yes. It’s not like he invites me into his bedroom to talk over his day.”

“I probably shouldn’t,” I said. So I did anyway. “The Overseer called a meeting. Hell, I guess it was this morning. What day is it?”

“Friday, but only by a few hours.”

“Okay, so yesterday late morning the Overseer fired Terric and me, put Clyde Turner in our place, and told all the Soul Complements in the room that the government had declared it Breaker season and was most likely hunting us down.”

“All the Soul Complements? How many were there?”

“Me and Ter, Zay and Allie, Doug and Nancy, and two other couples I don’t know.”

“What did they look like?”

I did a quick recap of the cougar and the younger man, and of the hipster pair.

“The cougar is Simone Latchly, and the man with her—he’s older than me, Shame—is Brian Welling. They’re out of San Diego. The other couple is from Arizona. Anthony Pardes and Holly Doyle. You should know that. You were Head of the Authority.”

“I left the details to my underlings.”

“Nice try. I know what you did your first year. I was there with you, remember?”

What I’d done was worked my ass off to keep the normal people in the world from killing every Authority member they found out about. There was a lot of anger, mistrust, and blatant hate in the first year of everyone getting their memories back.

If you looked at it right, I’d saved a lot of lives that first year. Well, Terric and I had.

Healing magic had proved that secrets, grudges, hurt feelings, and lawsuits do not die easily.

I just shrugged and rubbed my thumb over the edge of the ring on my finger. We were well out of the dead zone. Magic pooled naturally and flowed through the networks and pipelines far belowground.

Easy to access as it ever was.

My hunger, which must have been snuffed out by being around Terric, then poisoned, covered in Void stones, and dragged to a nonmagical zone, was gnawing on me again.

I needed to consume. Now.

Davy was, strangely, one of the only people who didn’t make me want to drain him. He was right about magic changing him. I could sense it in his heartbeat too. He still carried a trace of the tainted magic that had almost killed him. A lot of magic poured through his body, in his blood and bones. It didn’t give him the power to break magic, like Terric and me. It was simply keeping him alive and, therefore, not easily consumable.

Davy was not quite a real boy.

Eleanor was in the back of the truck, immune to wind or cold or rain.

I didn’t have the concentration to draw on the vegetation rolling past at seventy-five miles an hour. But the truck engine was burning. Working hard. Changing mass into energy. Fire, heat. I could work with that.

“Listen,” I said. “It’s been a long and weird night. I’m going to catch some z’s. I assume you’re taking me back to Portland, and maybe to Clyde or whoever is on top of the information coming in on Joshua’s death?”

“Something like that,” he said.

“Right. Wake me when we get there.”

I closed my eyes and very carefully drew on a thin burn from the engine. Not so much to kill it, but enough that Davy’s gas mileage was going to go to hell.

I didn’t really sleep, but I did my best to be still, to drink the heat and fire and destruction off the truck, and leave Davy and every living thing around me alone.

I’d gotten good at pushing the world away. At making people and anything even remotely resembling life, anything that I might care about, something that existed at a far distance from me.

Worked on doing that now. Closed out the world. Closed out the motion, the sounds. Made all the edges soft and far, far away.

And when I had finally done that, finally settled into that dark, padded place where me and my insanity could sit down for tea, all I saw was Dessa’s face, her laughter breathing over me so close it dug in like a sweet, sharp dream.