Hell Bent

Chapter 2

Terric did the driving. I did what I did best: nothing. Just slouched in the front seat, eyes closed behind dark sunglasses, coat collar flipped up to my cheekbones, head pounding. It took a lot to get me drunk, double that to push me into hangover land. Three days and nights in a bar just about did it every time.

Except I usually got a day or so of sleep afterward. The half hour of shut-eye I’d managed only sharpened my headache.

“Shit,” Terric said, slowing the car. “That’s Hamilton. Stay here. I’ll be right back.” He parked the car, opened the door, and was out of it in the same amount of time it took me to open my eyes.

Narrow street, old warehouses, MLK Boulevard. Whatever, whoever Hamilton was, it must be serious. Not only was Terric running down the street all long-legged and action-heroed, but he had also double-parked on the wrong side of the street.

I thought about calling the cops to ticket him for it. Imagined how angry he would be. Smiled. Closed my eyes again.

Eleanor poked me in the shoulder.

Thing about ghosts—they are dead cold. And stubborn. She poked my arm a second time, gentle as a dull ice pick chipping at my bones.

“What?” I said. “He’s fine.”

Poke.

Opened my eyes. Again. “I am not running out there after him.”

She pointed at my heart.

“Nothing there, love,” I said. “Empty as a shadow.”

A man slipped out one of the warehouse doors and walked quickly in the opposite direction that Terric had gone. He looked over his shoulder, then caught sight of me sitting in the car. Light hair cut short and clean, thin, tanned face with eyes set just too wide on either side of his nose. He wore black boots, dark jeans, and a button-down short-sleeve shirt he’d rolled the sleeves up on to show the tattoo of a stylized black feather.

He pulled one hand up, stuck his finger at me, thumb cocked like a gun. Even from this distance I could read his lips as he jerked his hand in a shooting motion: “dead.”

There was no spell attached to that action, and I’d never seen this joker before in my life. I flipped him off and mouthed, Bite me.

He scowled and moved off at a jog. Sure was in a hurry to be somewhere.

Then the back-of-the-head slap of magic being used, bent, and manhandled hit me hard enough I hissed. Terric was casting magic. More than that, Terric was trying to break magic.

Without me.

“Balls. What does he think he’s doing?”

Eleanor poked right in the middle of my forehead this time, the pain and cold of her finger mixing with all the rest of the hurt in me.

“Damn it, woman, stop touching me.”

She held up a finger and aimed it at my eye.

“Fine!” I shoved the door open and groaned. It was too damn sunny, too damn cold, and too damn early for me to be walking this damn street to save Terric’s damn magic-wielding skin.

New plan: find Terric, knock him out, no magic required. Then drive back to my room where I could sleep off the knife-wielding banshees screaming in my head.

I stormed down the street clenching and unclenching my fists, the rings scraping between my fingers. I hoped to hell there was going to be someone I could punch at the end of this.

Unfortunately, someone else had the same idea.

Just as I reached the corner of the alley, I saw a guy move out of the shadow. I ducked the fist aimed at my face. Took a shot at the guy’s ribs. Since the man was built like an ox, the only bones that cracked were my knuckles.

“Bloody hell!”

“Don’t kill him, Shame,” Terric said from somewhere farther down the alley where he was, apparently, holding his own against three guys.

“If I’d wanted him dead . . .” I jumped back out of the man’s reach. “I’d have already . . .” The heel of my boot hit something slick.

Fuck.

I went down hard, knocking the back of my head against the moss-covered brick wall.

I’ll take “concussion” for four hundred, Alex.

While I reacquainted myself with the inside of my eyelids, Terric got busy with the swearwords he saved for injuries, breakups, and soccer—excuse me—football. Since I didn’t hear any vuvuzelas, I didn’t know why he was cussing.

Sure, Terric was my partner—work, not bed—but half the time I had no idea what was going on in that head of his.

I opened my eyes just in time to see the ox swing a steel-toed boot the size of a Hummer at my gut. I rolled.

Not fast enough.

The boot clipped me in the low back. White, ragged pain shot down my butt and leg. It didn’t do a damn thing to improve my mood.

It did, however, shake loose my hunger.

Hunger to kill. Hunger to consume.

Death magic is never more than a thought away for me. I’ve been told that I look like the Grim Reaper himself when I spend too much time away from Terric, who has the same screwed-up overpowerful thing going with Life magic and therefore sort of cancels my Death magic thing. Yes, it’s more involved than that. No, I don’t like to go into the details.

But my point: Grim Reaper—with a hangover.

Bad news for the bastard beating me up.

“Changed my mind about the whole not-killing thing,” I said. “Too bad for you, mate.”

“Shame,” Terric warned. I heard footsteps running away. Was he letting those men go?

Didn’t have time to look.

I flicked my fingers, rings sparking as I carved a glyph in the air between me and the ox. Binding spell, not death. I wanted him to hurt before I snapped his neck.

The Binding, a net of black and silver magic sharp as razor blades, lashed out to hover in the air in front of me.

Magic might be kinder and gentler for most people. But it wasn’t kinder or gentler for me. Nor was it was invisible.

The ox held up his hands, maybe to cast a Block spell or maybe just surprised to see such a huge, violent spell snarling inches in front of his flattened nose.

Only a handful of people can temporarily break magic into light and dark. Like splitting an atom, when you break magic, it is a power untamed. The only Breakers I knew of were Soul Complements, and there weren’t many in the world.

You want to know how I know God has a twisted sense of humor? I’m one of the people who can break magic. Power at the snap of my fingers. Well, if Terric and I snap our fingers at the same time.

Casting magic on my own delivered a harder hit than a non-Breaker could ever hope for. After all, Death magic coiled inside me and raged through any spell I cast.

But casting magic didn’t come without a bit of a price to pay. That headache of mine was ramping up to ride me for a day at least.

“Shamus Flynn, do not. Do. Not,” Terric was saying.

Another price I paid for casting magic? Terric’s nagging.

“Bind,” I said, using that word to push the spell at the ox. The spell wrapped him from knee to throat and squeezed tight, dipping razor tips into his skin just deep enough to draw blood.

The ox yelled.

Now for a little Shamus happy fun time.

“This is how it’s going to work, my friend.” I braced my hand on the wall and tested my vertical capabilities. Knees held, back straightened, world steady as a drunken hobo.

I hurt from the kick, concussion, whiskey overdose, and magic price. But more than that, the fingers-down-the-pants need to consume the man’s life and every living thing around me set my heart kicking it junkie-style.

I wanted life. I wanted to drink it down and lap out the bottom of the bottle.

The moss under my fingertips was wet, spongy, and very, very alive. A tip-of-the-tongue honey-sweet burn of life filled my mouth as the moss turned brown and died. Consumed. Dead.

And I was just getting started.

I glanced over at Eleanor, who stood at the opening of the alley. She looked afraid.

“If you touch him.” Terric strode my way, his pace hampered by a slight limp. “I will kick your scrawny Irish ass. And then I will tell your mother what you did.”

“You’re going to tell on me to my mum? What are you, six?”

That got half a smile out of him. But it did not soften the look in his eyes. The one that said Shame’s happy fun time was over.

“I called Detective Stotts.” Terric held up his phone like I’d be impressed he had a cop on speed dial.

“Why Stotts?” Hungry now. Done talking now. Not paying attention.

“Because the police handle murder cases. We just handle magic users.”

“Paperwork. All we handle is paperwork.”

“You don’t even do that. Why did you follow me? I told you to stay in the car. Do you enjoy getting the crap beat out of you? Don’t you know how dangerous . . .”

That’s when I completely tuned him out because I’d heard this lecture so many times I could sing along without the bouncing ball.

Also, the need for life and the consuming of it wasn’t getting any less. The ox was still standing there, wrapped in that Binding spell I’d cast. Hurting. Ripe. Alive.

Bleeding.

Since he liked to beat up perfect strangers in dirty alleys, I presumed he was not a nice person. Therefore I would feel less horrible about killing him.

“...just deal, you idiot.” Terric slammed his hand into the middle of my chest. Hard enough both my shoulders hit the bricks behind me.

I blinked, swallowed. Focused on him.

“So, Terric,” I said. “When I’m breaking your fingers do you want me to start or finish with your thumbs?”

Terric completely tuned me out and was whispering to himself. So rude.

That’s when I noticed he’d pulled off his Void stone necklace and dropped it somewhere at our feet where it would do exactly zip to dampen the magic coursing through him.

Life magic.

“No,” I said. “Not happening. Not here. I told you to keep your hands off—”

Terric called on Life magic.

Here’s what happens when he does that—he goes all white-light angelic looking, which the chicks, and I guess some of the dudes, really like. Then the magic inside him devours his humanity. His eyes go silver, no pupils, no white. Any shred of heart, soul, or mind of that man is wiped away. Replaced with a cold, alien thing that looks out from behind his eyes. Life magic. It was not human. It was not Terric.

And one of these days when he called on it, Life magic was going to take over for good and Terric wasn’t going to come back to being Terric.

Every time he lost control of Life magic, it changed him. Sure, it had been subtle for the first year or so. How he’d forget to laugh or to carry on a conversation without long pauses. How he’d stare out a window and whisper to himself for hours and not remember doing it.

Each time he used Life magic, it took him a little longer to come back to being the Terric I knew and sometimes, such as around repentance holidays, liked.

He’d told me I was just making shit up about him going inhuman.

He was right to think so. I made shit up all the time. But not that shit.

Terric, who still looked mostly human, drew a glyph with his free hand, tracing white magic that glowed green at the edges into the air.

Something brushed my boot.

Plants sprang to life. Vines and flowers and those tropical leafy things that always look plastic in hotel lobbies wriggled up out of the cracks in the concrete and bricks, growing at time-lapse speeds.

“No. Just. Don’t,” I said.

“Shut up and eat your vegetables,” Terric snarled.

Annoying—that was still the Terric I knew.

The plants were elbow high, vibrating with life. Terric showed no sign of backing down.

I hated him for not backing down. I hated him for being right. I needed life. And he could give it to me without it killing him.

Much.

I couldn’t endure the hunger a second more. I cussed and threw my hands out to both sides, palms down. I gave in to the hunger and devoured the plants, greedily consuming, killing. Without moving a single inch, I sucked the sweet life out of every stalk and frond he called up out of the world.

I was pulling on the life around me so hard the concrete under my feet cracked and shifted as I dug down looking for more.

As fast as I could consume life, Terric could call upon it faster. Life magic poured out of him in that alien white light, green and growing, smothering me, drowning me in life.

Somewhere in the back of my head a reasonable part of me was counting down from ten. When I hit one, I’d punch Terric in the face if that’s what it took to get his hands off me and break his magic spree.

We’d both done stupid things when we lost control of magic. Stupider things when we’d lost it at the same time, together.

I’d sort of made it my life’s goal not to use magic with him. Not to let him use magic with me. Because when I did, when we did, Terric wasn’t Terric anymore. He wasn’t human. And one of these days he wasn’t going to recover from that.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

Two and a haaalf.

I curled my right hand into a fist. Time to stop this. Time to stop him.

Before I lost him.

“Terric,” Detective Stotts said from somewhere to my right, completely blowing my concentration. “What is going on?”

Detective Paul Stotts was a decent human being with Hispanic heritage and an unflappable moral code. Today, he was wearing a blue scarf tucked into the collar of his jacket, dark slacks, and a frown. They used to say he was cursed, but that wasn’t true. An awful lot of cover-ups and deaths in this city were caused by magic people didn’t know about, and it was Stotts’s job to investigate those deaths.

It had also been the job of the Authority to keep people, and especially detectives like Stotts, from discovering how deadly magic could be back then. The Authority did that by taking away people’s memories.

Weird stuff used to happen a lot around Detective Stotts. There had been no explanation for it because we made sure there wouldn’t be.

Now everyone had their memories back. Including him. It was a problem.

“About time you got here,” I said. I shoved Terric’s hand off me and stepped to one side to make sure I was out of his reach. I stuffed my hands in my coat pockets to keep from touching him again.

Terric took a step back, blinking hard like he wasn’t quite seeing the real world yet. Not a lot of human in that angelic face of his. Not a lot of my friend.

Had I let it go on too long?

I bent, scooped up the Void stone buried in the plant ashes, and dropped the stone into his hand. He shuddered at the contact of the magic-canceling stone.

“Shamus,” Stotts said. “I haven’t seen you out of a bar for the last month.”

“You’ve been keeping an eye on me? You’re a sweetheart. This”—I pointed at the ox—“is something Terric seemed worried about.”

Stotts glanced at the man. His eyebrows went up a bit. That Bind spell I’d cast was standard back in the day, but much rarer to see now.

“Did you do this?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“He wasn’t using his inside voice.”

Stotts slid me a scowl.

I so didn’t care.

“Terric?” he asked.

Terric didn’t say anything.

His eyes were closed, hands curled around the stone, pressing it against his chest as if hoping it would fill a hole inside him. His lips were moving so slightly I couldn’t tell what he might be whispering.

He swallowed hard, then opened his eyes.

A lot of light coming out of those blues. Cold, silver light.

“Terric?” Stotts said in his put-the-gun-down voice.

“We got a lead,” Terric said like he was reading someone else’s lines from a note card. “This man, Hamilton, Stan Hamilton, has information on the girl who showed up dead out in Forest Park yesterday.”

By the end of the sentence, he sounded more like Terric. Looked more like him too. Blue eyes blue, white glow gone. Life magic was pushed back somewhere inside him where most people wouldn’t look.

He crossed his arms and made a point of not looking at me. I wasn’t most people.

“I called as soon as I saw him,” he said. “Then Shame got involved. Started a fight.”

“Started? You mean ended a fight,” I corrected. “Like usual.”

“You should know better,” Stotts said.

“Excuse me?”

“There are procedures for using magic on other citizens, Mr. Flynn. Rules that every person in this city must follow now, whether they are Authority or non-Authority.”

“Hello? Choir here you’re singing to.”

“I’m assuming Terric told you to stay out of this matter with Hamilton?”

“Yes, but—”

“Procedure. You will make some effort to follow it from now on.”

I bit down on a smile. My bad habit of arguing with police officers had never once worked in my favor. “We called you, didn’t we?”

“Terric called me.”

“And?”

“This town doesn’t need a vigilante,” he said.

“Vigilante? You got me wrong, mate. I’m too lazy for that kind of thing. Spent a month in a bar, remember?”

“I’ve seen the things you’ve done in the past.”

“Yeah, well, that was the past.”

Right about then another police car pulled up.

“Let’s keep it that way,” Stotts said. “Just to be clear, you’ll let the police do our job and you’ll stay out of it. If you want a fight, do me a favor to take it outside my jurisdiction so I don’t have to explain to Allie or Nola why I threw you in jail. Better yet, go on vacation, get a girlfriend.”

“I’ll get right on that,” I said.

Stotts headed to the ox with a pair of handcuffs. Yes, my spell had held. Because I’m that good.

I didn’t think he really worried about telling his wife, Nola, or her best friend, Allie, that he’d thrown me in jail. It wouldn’t surprise them, anyway. More likely he just didn’t want to deal with the paperwork.

I sympathized.

I turned and made for the street.

“Shame?” Stotts said. “The spell?”

I waved my hand over my shoulder and broke the spell. It pattered to the ground and hissed out like wet coals.

Eleanor floated along at my right, keeping her distance. Smart ghost. Not that there was anything more horrible I could do to her. I hoped.

Terric fell into step on my left.

“Are you going to tell me what the hell I just got in the middle of?” I asked.

“A murder. They think. Ten-year-old. Forest Park.”

“I thought you said we didn’t deal with murderers.”

“We don’t,” he said. “Unless they use magic to do it.”

Fuck. That sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen anymore. People weren’t supposed to be able to use magic to kill.

I dug in my coat pocket, pulled out a cigarette, and lit up. The ache to consume was satisfied for the moment, thanks to Terric, but I was still twitchy.

“Let’s just get to the damn meeting,” I said.

“You don’t care about any of this, do you?”

“Been saying that for months, mate.”

“Shame.” He grabbed my arm.

I stopped, turned, and looked at him.

“Someone is murdering people with magic,” he said.

“I heard you. Let go of my arm.”

“And you don’t care.”

“I don’t anything.” I shoved his shoulder. He took half a step back but didn’t let go of my sleeve. “I haven’t been involved in this shit for a year,” I snapped. “Why should I change that now?”

“Because a little girl is dead.”

I nodded and sucked on my cigarette, doing what I could to hide how that really made me feel—angry and sick. And, yeah, helpless. The world was a fucked-up place. There was jack all I could do about it.

“And?” I asked with no tone.

“Jesus.” He exhaled. “What happened to you, Shame?”

“Not everyone wants to be a hero.”

“How about being a decent human being?”

“This is as decent as I get.”

He stared at me a little longer. I had nothing left to say. He let go of my coat. Let go of me. Stormed off to the car.

Didn’t blame him.

I threw the cig on the ground. It was ashes already. Consumed.

I tipped my head and sunglasses down so I could get a good look at the redheaded chick with the sniper rifle on the roof of the building across the street. She had a hell of a view of the alley from up there, an unobstructed shot, and had been following me since yesterday morning, or maybe the day before that.

I hadn’t told Terric about her yet. Thought for sure she’d have taken the shot at him or me when she had the chance, but she hadn’t. So, rule out our imminent death by sniper rifle.

That was good, right?

She was also packing up, so that meant the cops weren’t her target either, and neither was the ox, Hamilton. Huh.

“Haul it, Flynn,” Terric yelled. “We’re late.”

“Like normal?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. Yep. He was angry. How human of him.

“Maybe you should take a vacation,” I said as I neared the car.

“Oh, every day’s a vacation when I’m around you, Flynn.”

“Right. I know. But I’m serious. You could take your boyfriend. Is it still Mike? No. Greg? Wait. That was last year’s model. You’ve traded him in for someone shiny and new, haven’t you?”

I ducked into the car and Eleanor passed through the closed door to sit in the backseat.

“Shut up, Shame,” he said.

And just because we were sometimes friends, and that redheaded sniper not killing us had oddly put me in a better mood, I did.