Magic to the Bone

Chapter Fifteen

Betrayal sucks.

My heart felt like someone was in my chest kicking it with steel-toed boots—and that someone was me. How could I have I trusted him? How could I have liked him? Stupid, stupid heart. When I got out of here—and I was so going to get out of this so I could see Zay’s ass in jail—I swore I would never fall for, never trust, and never care for anyone again.

It was going to be all about me from now on. I was going to look after myself alone, and the rest of the world and all the people in it could go to hell for all I cared.

Who needed this kind of grief? Who needed to find out, again, that someone they loved was just a back-stabbing bastard who played me for all he could get?

He had used me.

And I let him.

I didn’t know which made me angrier.

Bonnie shoved me through the glyphs and the door. I felt a hot ribbon of blood pour from my nose. I wiped at it with the back of my left hand. Thunder rolled, still quiet, but coming closer.

“So how’s this going to work?” I asked.

Zay stayed right where he was, the far side of a room that was some sort of storage behind the kitchen. Wooden shelves were stocked with cans, boxes, and bags of things you’d expect to see in a restaurant. The doorway, where Zay was standing, opened to a narrow view of a chopping block and countertop. I was pretty sure that was the kitchen behind him.

James strolled over to me, took my right wrist, and pushed up my coat sleeve. He whistled. “Zayvion told me you survived the visit from my business associate this morning. I’m sorry how that turned out.”

I bet he was. I was, after all, still alive.

“Zayvion also told me you had been burned and could no longer use magic, but I didn’t believe him.” He grinned, showing me all of his dental work. His breath smelled overwhelmingly sweet, like cherry candy. Blood magic. Probably mixed with something else, maybe cocaine or speed. Great. The man was raging.

“My apologies,” he said to Zayvion.

Zay shrugged.

Okay, so if Zay told him I couldn’t use magic, maybe he wasn’t completely on their side either. He knew in intimate ways just exactly how well I could use magic, and how well we used it together. Soul Complements, and all that. Maybe he was working another angle. One all his own.

I tugged my wrist out of James’ hold. Fact one: my arm hurt. It was quickly going from ache to throb. Fact two: I refused to let anyone get handsy with me. Fact three: despite the ache, my arm was also starting to itch, which meant I might still have some sort of chance of drawing on magic if I needed it. One look at James’ happy, glassy eyes and sweat-covered face and I was pretty sure I’d need it soon.

Thunder rolled somewhere over the city, and James pointed toward the door to the kitchen.

“Why don’t we step inside. Maybe I can get you a drink?” he offered.

“Water would be fine,” I said. I walked across the room, James in front of me, Bonnie and her gun behind me. Zay just watched with a neutral expression, pulling the Zen act.

“Bastard,” I said as I walked past him.

“I told you to stay there,” he said, plenty loud enough for James and Bonnie to hear. “You could be in a nice holding cell right now, telling the police a story about people who disappear into thin air and plot to overthrow your father’s fortune, and that you have no alibis for your whereabouts when he was killed. And you know why you aren’t? Because you are too damn stubborn to do anything anyone tells you to do.”

My mind went blank. Then it filled with fury. I leaned back and punched him in the face with everything I had.

Zay’s head snapped back and hit the wall behind him. He yelled and grabbed at his nose and slid down the wall. I stepped up to swing at him again, but Bonnie caught my arm and shoved the gun so hard against my spine I could feel a bruise spreading. My fist hurt too—I was pretty sure I had broken my pinky, but that pain, I had to admit, was way worth it.

“Funny,” she said, “but stupid. Do that again and I’ll shoot you.”

Zay got on his feet and those tiger eyes of his were really burning now. If I weren’t deeply in hate with him, I might think he didn’t look all that angry. I might even say he looked pleased. That he was happy I’d done that. That maybe he was trying to tell me something else with that look, something secret.

“Bitch,” he said.

Well, that was no secret.

“Fuck you, Jones.”

Bonnie shoved me toward the kitchen. I couldn’t tell if Zay followed, because he was too damn quiet for me to hear and the thunder was close enough that it had gone from an intermittent rumble to a deep growl. Besides that, Zay was only a small part of this surprise party. My heart sank as I saw Mama’s other Boys, four of them in total, leaning against the kitchen counters, and over there, rocking on the floor in front of the refrigerator, was Cody. Mama herself stood in the middle of the room, looking angry and worried.

Oh. Hells. I was so screwed.

I quickly went through my options. Trying to get out of this alive was priority one. Trying to get out of this alive with Cody was priority two. If they wanted to negotiate, I’d negotiate.

I pushed panic down, and grabbed hold of my confidence. I could handle this. I was a Beckstrom, and if there was one thing we were good at, it was Influencing people to get our way. If ever there were a time for me to give in and act like my father, this was it.

James was at the sink and strangely true to his word, filling a plastic cup with water for me.

“Hello, Mama,” I said. She looked away and would not make eye contact. Wasn’t that interesting? Maybe she wasn’t the center of this affair after all.

I gave each of the Boys a look. Like matching statues of didn’t-give-a-damn, they looked back at me, and made no other move.

James walked over and handed me the cup of water. “Here you are.” He strolled back to the sink and leaned against it, his arms crossed over his chest.

I was glad he hadn’t filled it all the way to the top, because my hand shook and my pinky was so swollen it made it hard to keep the cup steady. I did my best to cover all that, and took a sip. I was thirsty enough I could drain the river. Both of them. But I wanted to have something in my hand I could use to delay my responses—it was an old board-meeting trick I’d learned from my dad—so I resigned myself to the fact that I might need to make this cup of water last a very long time.

The lights flickered, a blink of darkness. The storm was coming.

“The situation is fairly simple, Ms. Beckstrom—may I call you Allie?” James asked.

“No.”

He smiled. “Good. As I was saying, Allie, there is only a small thing I need from you, something Zayvion has assured me you will have no quarrel with.”

“Really? I don’t recall hiring Zayvion to speak for me. Is this a legal matter? If so, we should both have lawyers present to protect our interests.” I tried putting some Influence behind my words, but was too shaken to do much good.

“Soon,” he said. “But first I thought you and I could talk. Come to an understanding. An agreement. Like family.”

Okay, that got me. I blinked and looked harder at him. He didn’t look much like any of the women my father had married, or at least none whom I could remember. And he was the polar opposite to my dad—shorter, darker, thinner. The person he most resembled was Mama.

“Family? How exactly does that work?”

His smile flashed into a grin. He looked like an animal about to strike, something hungry and quick.

“Snake man, Snake man, bake a cake man,” Cody whimpered.

Oh, hells no.

Snake man. The man who killed my father. The man who somehow made Cody forge my signature. The man who threw a spell strong enough to kill someone and had apparently not paid the price for it. Holy shit.

Cold sweat spread over my skin. I took a drink of water, hiding my reaction as best as I could. If he could kill my dad at a distance and still be alive, I figured he could kill me close-up. I glanced around the room, looking for an escape, a weapon. But gun-happy Bonnie was still behind me. I assumed Zay was too, since I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t see a knife, a fork, or a heavy pan within reach. For a working kitchen it was painfully clean of any dangerous implements.

“You and I are kindred spirits,” James continued. “You hated your father. I hated your father. You wanted him dead. I wanted him dead. You wanted his business to stop taking advantage of the poor and the innocent, like my poor little brother, and I wanted his business to recognize the original creator of the Beckstrom Storm Rods and pay back the money he has made off the technology he stole.”

I put two and two together and came up empty. “You wanted my father to pay Perry Hoskil for the storm rods? Perry Hoskil has been dead for ten years.”

“I know,” James said. “Perry Hoskil was my father.”

Which meant Mama had slept with Perry Hoskil. I glanced at her. “Mama?”

She looked up, pressed her lips together, and nodded.

It didn’t make sense. Why would Mama go along with James in this crazy scheme? But at least I was finally able to see all the holes in the puzzle. James was the bastard child of Perry Hoskil. There had been a fierce court battle years ago over who had proprietary ownership of the patents and production of the Storm Rods—the technology that had allowed magic to be harvested not only from the rare magic-charged storms, but also from the reserves of magic that pooled deep in the earth. The two men who claimed they had the rights to the rods were partners in the invention of the technology. Those men were Perry Hoskil and my father. But my father had gone behind Hoskil’s back and filed the patent in his name alone, claiming proprietary ownership of the technology.

Perry Hoskil had lost the case. Most say he was bribed out of pursuing further litigation. Most also said he took to drinking and drugs, and he was found years later, dead of an overdose in some garbage heap on the worst side of town. Maybe on this side of town. Maybe even right here where I was standing.

I didn’t think anyone knew he had a son. But then, I wouldn’t expect Mama to share that information with the world.

She had shared it with at least one person though—James.

“Okay,” I hedged. “You want to sue Beckstrom Enterprises for royalties due. I still think you need a lawyer for that.”

He was no longer smiling. “I’ve talked to dozens of lawyers. I’ve talked to judges. They won’t do shit for me.” He paced over to where Mama stood and back to the sink. “They say there is no winning back that money. No getting the money due me. No getting back the technology that is rightfully mine. Beckstrom has had the law tied around his filthy fingers for years, and there isn’t a lawyer he can’t buy off.” He paused and smiled at me. “Couldn’t buy off. Things are different now, aren’t they? Now that Daniel Beckstrom is dead.”

If he was waiting for a reaction out of me, he didn’t get it.

The lights flickered again, three quick times, and I only had to count to ten before I heard the answer of thunder. My arm was really starting to ache, and the ache was spreading. The closer the storm came, the more I felt like I was coming down with the flu.

“But now that you’re here,” James said, “you can see that a little justice is finally served.”

“I’ll do what I can,” I said, trying to sound reasonable. “But I’m under suspicion for killing him, and until my name is cleared, you may not want to do business with me.”

“It will be a very short business relationship,” he said. “You sign over your shares of Beckstrom Enterprise to Mama, and you can go your own way and live your life.”

The lights flickered again, throwing the kitchen into darkness long enough that the other Boys were looking a little worried.

I counted to eight. Thunder.

“You’ll still have to convince Violet’s lawyers that I didn’t sign my shares over under duress,” I said. I was stalling, looking for an out. Waiting for a good bolt of lightning to really knock the power out for more than a second. “People think I killed my father. They are not going to honor a contract I sign when I’m not in my right mind.”

“You’ll convince them that you’ve snapped out of your killing passion. That you regret your hasty, terrible actions. You’ll turn yourself in to the police and declare you want to pay back your father’s debt to the Hoskils. Then you’ll live a nice long, unpleasant life behind bars.”

“And if I talk?” I knew there had to be an “or else” in there somewhere. I didn’t really care what it was. But I needed time. The itch and ache in my arm were growing worse, like needles of fire stabbing through every pore. I didn’t know what kind of tricks James had up his sleeve, but I could hold magic within me. A lot of it now. And I was banking James didn’t expect me to be able to use it here.

He walked toward me, stopped just out of arm’s reach. “This isn’t a game,” he snarled. “There are a lot of lives on the line, a lot of people tired of Beckstrom’s stranglehold on magic. Tired of hard-and-holy Beckstrom saying who can use magic and how and why and when.

“No more. We will wage war, bring it to the streets if we have to. You are nothing but an inconvenience to these people, and to me. You will sign your rights over to Mama. Zayvion will turn you in to the police. And I will hold a gun at that young man’s head until I hear you are safely locked away. Your other option is to say no to me. Instead of killing you with magic, like I killed your father, I will kill you right here with my bare hands, for fun.”

The lights flickered and went out.

I swung for James in the darkness, missed, and heard Bonnie swear. I ducked and made a blind run for Cody. Thunder roared, so close, so loud, that I did not hear the gunfire that threw the room in staccato light.

Someone hit me from behind and I fell to the floor, slamming my head and shoulder against the cupboards. I knew who it was—could recognize the pine scent of him no matter how dark the room was, knew his body intimately. I pushed him away. He felt like deadweight.

Lightning flashed, pouring through the single window of the room. In one moment I saw Zayvion, face-down on the floor, unmoving, a dark pool spreading out from under him. He had thrown himself at me and gotten a bullet in the back of the head. Panic threatened to freeze me.

No. No. No.

I caught a glimpse of Cody pressed against the refrigerator, curled in a ball, his hands over his ears, before darkness fell again. I rolled away from Zay’s unmoving form and threw my body over Cody’s. The spark of gunfire lit Bonnie’s face. Her laughter, and the sound of bullets, were swallowed again by thunder.

She stopped shooting. Probably to reload. I got on my knees and whispered a mantra. Magic lifted, painful, but clear and pure from deep within me.

I was incredibly aware of everyone in the room. Cody’s terror, all the Boys’ anger, Bonnie’s fury. James was halfway across the room and coming to kill me. I was also incredibly aware that Zayvion was not breathing.

There was one other person in the room—Mama. To my magic-filled eyes, she glowed with pure, untapped magic. North Portland magic. St. John’s magic. Here. Magic no one knew existed. Magic shielded by an elaborate Diversion glyph so old it mimicked the natural geology around it perfectly, hiding, cloaking the pure store of magic beneath this part of the city. Someone was maintaining that spell. And that someone was Mama.

Maybe James had threatened to expose the unharvested magic if Mama didn’t go along with his plan. No, if James knew about magic beneath St. John’s, he would have sold off rights to it to the highest bidder. The idiot was killing people for bits of silver and didn’t even know he was sitting on a gold mine.

Lightning and thunder rode each other’s backs, and I knew I had to make a choice—use magic to stop James, to stop Bonnie, to stop the Boys. Use magic to save Cody. Use magic to heal Zayvion.

I never was very good at making snap decisions. So why choose one thing? Why not do it all?

I pushed up to my feet.

Light, I thought, and magic rose to my command. The room flooded with a harsh white glow. A glow that radiated from my right hand, and made it feel like it was on fire. My left hand was already numb, and the lack of feeling pushed up to my elbow so that my whole arm hung useless at my side, but I didn’t care. I was determined to stop this mess once and for all.

Stop, I thought, and that worked too. Magic spooled out of me to wrap around everyone in the room and hold them still. Even Zayvion’s blood stopped flowing. I could feel the labored pressure of his heart trying to beat, the strain of his lungs trying to fill.

I was burning up, too raw and too hurt from the last time I used magic. But there was a pleasure in the pain, a siren desire to use the magic before it used me up. And I could. I could heal Zayvion. I could crush James’ throat, blind Bonnie, knock out the Boys, force Mama to tell me everything she knew. I could do anything. Anything I wanted.

And all I wanted was for this not to be happening. For Zayvion to be alive. Maybe for one last chance to tell him I really thought we were good together and wished we could have made it work. To tell him I had hoped he would be the one person in my life who wouldn’t betray me. To tell him I hoped he had an explanation for being here, being a part of James’ plan to take over Beckstrom Enterprises and kill my father, and that maybe he was still on my side.

I hesitated. Heard sirens between the explosions of thunder. Watched as Bonnie squeezed off the last bullet, watched as it sang true toward my heart.

Heal or kill?

I guess Zayvion had it right when we first met. I just didn’t have killing in me. No matter how much I wanted to.

Heal, I thought, and I poured magic into Zayvion, guiding the bullet out of the wound in his head, guiding the magic, like ribbons of thread, ribbons of energy, to knit flesh, to mend bone, to whisk away old blood and soothe swelling. Fast, faster, before the magic consumed me, consumed the last of my mind, my memories, my soul. Fast, faster, before the bullet reached me, piercing my flesh. Fast.

Lightning struck, so close I felt the heat of it lick beneath my skin, and shuddered with a heady mix of agony and pleasure. I was too hot, too cold. Then pain bulleted through my chest. I fell.

I couldn’t feel my hands. I couldn’t see the magic anymore. I couldn’t move. But I saw Zayvion open his eyes. Saw his lips form my name. Saw him push up from the floor and reach for me.

And I saw Mama turn to James and hold up a hand filled with the magic of St. John’s. Saw her wield a very complex, very strong Holding spell. Hopefully, she’d take James in to the police. Hopefully, she would make sure Cody got somewhere safe. Hopefully, she would do the right thing.

Zay reached me. He touched my face, though it looked like it hurt him to do so. I love you, his lips said.

And I knew he did. I loved him too, despite it all.

Don’t go, he said.

But I did not know how to stay. The storm was in me, taking me apart, pulling me away.

This, I decided, was a pretty good way to die.

Magic filled me and filled me, and like a dam filled too full, I broke. I was swept up and up until I rode the storm clouds, free and distant from all the world and pain below.