Hell Bent

Chapter 27

Concrete, wood, metal roared down around us, slammed into us.

Terric and I were on our feet, hands raised, standing back to back. I pulled Dessa up against me.

“Hold on,” I said.

I reached down below the building’s foundations to the magic flowing there as Terric did the same.

We didn’t just draw on magic, we ripped it out of the ground. Forced it to sever, to scream and break.

I didn’t have to talk to Terric about what we were doing. We each knew what the other was thinking, knew what we had to do: Shield.

We cut that protection into the air with wide strokes and left a burning, dripping trail of magic behind. Shield snapped into a barrier around us, like an unbreakable bubble.

Just in time. The ceiling beams shoveled down, bounced off the Shield, and fell to either side.

Terric was chanting.

I was concentrating on pulling on enough magic to feed the spell and keep it strong.

The other thing about magic—doesn’t matter how powerful you are. If you lose your concentration, you lose the spell.

We could try walking, but if we stumbled, the Shield would break and we’d be crushed. So we waited.

Turns out it doesn’t take long for half a building to collapse.

Felt like an eternity.

We didn’t wait for the dust to clear. We pushed and climbed our way out of the rubble, before the other half of the building came tumbling down too.

Made it out by the car.

There was no one around us. Yet.

“That man did that?” Dessa asked. “One man?” She was a little louder than necessary, maybe a little panicked. I didn’t blame her.

“Yes,” Terric said, striding as quickly as he could around scattered debris to the car. “Go,” I said, grabbing Dessa’s arm and following Terric.

“H-how?” she asked. “He said one word and blew up a building.”

“I was there,” I said. “I don’t know how he did it.”

“Can you find him? Did you see where he went?” Dessa got into the car and so did I, in a hurry to get away from the very loud falling-building noises that had undoubtedly woken everyone in a square mile.

Terric peeled out fast, took a side street, slowed, and crept along a normal speed until we were a good mile away. Then he put on the speed. Heading south.

“Shame?” Dessa said. “Can you find that man?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve got nothing to go on. If he’s around, he’s just another heartbeat in the crowd. But Eli planted an address in the afterburn of the Direction glyph I triggered. Did you see it?”

“I was shielding my eyes,” she said.

“Terric?”

“I saw it. The hospital.”

The address burned in that spell pointed straight at OHSU, a medical complex and teaching hospital built beneath, on top of, and into a hillside south of downtown.

“Hospital?” Dessa asked. “Why?”

“Davy has a theory,” I said. “That Eli was using the labs, or operating out of the hospital.”

“Again, why? What does he need a hospital for?”

“People,” Terric said.

“Test subjects,” I clarified.

“Testing what?”

I could tell from Terric’s body language that he didn’t want me to say anything. But as far as I was concerned, she was in this just as deep as we were. Wanted him dead. Would do bad things to make sure that happened.

“Testing people,” I said. “People who were poisoned by tainted magic three years ago.”

“Tainted magic? Is that even a thing?”

“It was,” Terric said.

“How do you taint magic?”

“It helps if you decide you want to change magic into a weapon,” I said. “It helps if you are Breakers who are crazy and come back from the dead.”

“Like you and Terric.”

Damn. I hadn’t drawn those parallels. From the look Terric shot me, he hadn’t thought of us that way either: Breakers who had come back from the dead. But she was right.

“No,” Terric said. “We aren’t nearly evil enough to poison magic. To destroy the world for our pleasure.”

She was silent. I could see her reflection in the rearview mirror. She had that reality-upside-down look on her face like when I’d told her her brother had gone around stealing people’s memories with magic.

She caught my gaze. I waited. Would she see the man in me or the monster? I gave her a soft smile.

“All right,” she said. “Do you know why? Not why Breakers tainted magic. Do you know what results Eli is looking for in the tests?”

“Maybe men who can blow up buildings with a single syllable,” I said.

“Jesus,” she whispered. Then she nodded. “Okay, what’s the plan?”

Neither Terric nor I said anything.

“At least give me an idea of what weapons he has at his disposal.”

“If that man is any indication, magic,” Terric said. “As strong as Shame and me. Maybe technology that enhances magic, which would make it stronger. We don’t know anything else.”

“Do you know anything else?” I asked her.

“No.”

“Dessa,” I said, catching her gaze in the rearview mirror again. “Do you know anything that will help us?”

Come on, baby. Don’t leave us in the cold.

“I know what my brother told me. But that’s all secondhand information. I can’t prove anything.”

“Don’t care,” Terric said. “Tell us.”

“Thomas said that there was a man under observation. He was . . . creating new technology for defense abroad and for Homeland Security. But it was biotech. Thomas said that man was the most powerful man he’d seen use magic. And the most ruthless. Next to you, Shame.”

“Did he tell you about us? About Breakers?” Terric asked.

“Yes.”

So that might have been our leak into the government. Thomas, or maybe her.

“And you told your superiors?” Terric went on, pressing the point.

“It was my job to pass on information.” She tipped her chin up.

Jesus, she knew she was the reason her brother had been killed. No wonder she wanted Eli dead.

“Did they send you to bring in Shame and me?” Terric asked. “Was that a part of your job too?”

“No,” she said. “I left. As soon as I found out about Thomas. I gathered as much information as I could without triggering any traces, covered my trail, and I left. I made it look like I was going to South Dakota to visit family, and then into Canada to see friends. I don’t think they followed me. I don’t think I led them to you.” That last wavered with doubt. She was worried. Worried she’d get us killed.

“They already knew where we were,” I said calmly. “They’ve known since before we broke magic yesterday for Zay and Allie. And that building, Gillian’s injuries—nothing but a trap.”

“To kill you?” she asked.

“If Eli’s involved,” I said, “it wasn’t meant to kill us. It was meant to test us.”

“Which means the address will be another trap,” Terric said.

“He wanted us to find Brandy,” I said. “Maybe he’s leading us to her.”

“Maybe she’s the trap,” Terric said.

“Who is Brandy?” Dessa asked.

“She’s the other half of Eli, the person that makes him a Breaker,” I said.

“Like Terric and you.”

“Yeah, like Terric and me.”

“And you’re going to save her?” she asked. “If she’s half of what Eli is, how do you know she isn’t behind all this?”

“She’s insane,” Terric said quietly.

“Lots of powerful people are,” she said.

True.

We were silent as Terric took the turn to the hills.

“We kill Eli,” Terric said. “That’s what we do.”

The monster in me pushed. One death would be good, Eli’s death. But two deaths would be better.

“We kill Eli,” I said, “after we make him hurt.”

“After we make him hurt,” Terric agreed.

Dessa just turned and looked out the window. But I saw her nod. This was, I realized, going as she wanted it to. For a bare moment I wondered if she was playing us. If she was part of the government testing us to see what we could do together. If she had been sent out to bring us in at any price.

Maybe the cautious man would hold on to that idea and test it. But I knew her. She was here for revenge, a very personal revenge. She was not under orders.

“What are we looking for?” she asked. “A car? A sign?”

“Eli.” Terric pulled over on the shoulder. “Track?” he asked me.

“Yes.”

We’d already broken magic. If there were guns waiting for a signal, they were probably pointed at our heads. Didn’t care. They could bring all the world’s weapons at us.

I intended to see Eli breathe his last breath.

We traced Track, the ragged edges of the spell flicking like questing limbs that snapped out as if the entire glyph were floating on water. Pulled on magic. Filled the spell until it hummed a hot orange. Set it free with a push.

It lifted and passed through the windshield of the car, leaving a thin thread of the spell connected to the dash as it pulled ahead of the hood like a dog tugging a leash.

Terric followed it, the spell bobbing or leaning left or right, but never out of our sight. One of the advantages to Track was it would find a route that feet or wheels could follow, not just drift off over treetops or rivers like some of the other less specific Direction spells.

The spell led us up the hill and then shot left, hard.

Terric slowed.

“Is there a road over there?” I asked.

“Looks like a maintenance road.”

Track continued to pull that way. So we went that way. Up a steep hill and then twisting down it, trees and underbrush close enough they slapped the concrete dust off the car.

The road ended at a wide warehouse built into the hill, only the first couple feet of it visible before it was swallowed by darkness, stone, and foliage.

A set of three windows two stories up were dark, and in the car’s headlights, I could make out a triple-wide door.

“Storage?” Dessa asked.

“Maybe equipment repair,” Terric said.

The Track spell had drifted down and was now perched at the front of the car like a many-legged glowing hood ornament. It wasn’t doing anything because it didn’t need to track Eli anymore. It had found him.

“He’s in there,” I said.

“What are we going—” Dessa’s words were cut short. The warehouse door was opening, yawning up in one big slab to reveal the dimly lit interior.

I squinted to see through the darkness. The headlights weren’t doing much more than throwing shadows into shadows.

Then a man walked forward to the edge of the open doorway, strode into the headlights, and stared straight at us, shaking his head in disappointment.

Eli Collins.