“You’re not my boss.” I shoved up on my feet. “Not even my friend.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Then close the blinds.” I crossed the floor to the bathroom and shut the door behind me. “And don’t touch my stuff.”
I stripped, pissed, then got in the shower. Turned the water on as hot as my skin could stand it. I let it pound down over my back while I washed my hair. The inside of my mouth tasted like gutter runoff, so I stepped out of the shower and dripped on the floor while I grabbed my toothbrush and toothpaste.
Took those with me into the shower and scrubbed until I could feel my teeth. Then I applied soap and a washrag. Got that done, got out, even though both me and my headache wanted to linger awhile.
I didn’t bother to shave.
Took all of three minutes from start to finish; then I wrapped a towel around my hips and barefooted it to the bedroom.
Terric was standing there, a mug from the restaurant downstairs in one hand. “Coffee.”
“Apology coffee?” I asked as I stepped over a week’s worth of dirty clothes on the way to my dresser.
“No, just coffee.”
I pulled on boxers, blue jeans, black T-shirt. Then I added a black sweater and dug for socks of similar color.
“Have you eaten at all this week?” Terric asked. I could practically feel his gaze scraping over my ribs, spine, and shoulder blades.
“Yes. Also? None of your business.”
There were four heavy rings on my dresser. Made of metal and Void stones, they looked like brushed steel with stones inset in their flat, square surfaces. I slipped them on each finger of my right hand, the red stone, the black stone, the amber, and the white, and shivered at the slight ease from the push of Death magic they gave me.
I curled my fingers into a fist, the rings lining up like brass knuckles.
“How about you drink this?” Terric said.
I turned. He held the coffee out.
“Why? Did you poison it?”
That, finally, got a dazzler of a smile out of him. Yep. Leading man material. “And ruin a good dark roast? Please.”
I took the cup, which meant he and I were standing pretty close together. I could feel the Life magic coiled around him like a second skin. Just as Death magic had changed me, Life magic had changed him. He carried it inside his body, just like I carried Death. This close, I could feel Life magic reaching out to me like a cool breeze. It made my mouth water.
I took the cup. We both ignored how bad my hand was shaking.
“We could solve this,” Terric said. “Use magic together, you and I. Cast a spell. Life, Shame.”
“No.”
“I don’t understand why you won’t.” He lifted a hand but didn’t touch me. “I’ve respected that you want space and time. An entire year and a half. We’re still Soul Complements. We can use magic like no one else, break it so that it’s just as strong as it used to be. Why fight that?”
He was right about magic. It didn’t have the delightfully dangerous “use it hard and it will use you back harder” kick like the days before the apocalypse. We’d forced dark and light magic to join and mingle together, diluting the strength of both. Magic had gone soft. Limp. Light spells were a dim glow, Illusions were thin as glass, and a knock-you-senseless Impact spell was no worse than a polite pat. The price to pay for those spells had lessened too. No more weeks of pain and agony in exchange for powerful spells. The best you could hope for was a barely discernible spell that might give you a case of gas.
And while I found it hilarious that people who used to do very bad things with magic were now raging to find the magical equivalent to Viagra, I was simultaneously just a little terrified about what magic could do in my hands.
Well, in my hands and Terric’s hands. Magic might be neutered, or “healed” as Terric likes to remind me, for other magic users . . . but not for us. Soul Complements, or Breakers, as some people like to call us, could make magic do all those powerful things.
As long as we used it together.
I could have told him all that. But he had heard it before. He knew why I didn’t want to cast magic with him.
I took a drink of the coffee. Whatever snappy comeback I was working out died on my lips at about the same moment the coffee came alive on my taste buds. I didn’t care that it was hot enough to scorch. I gulped it down all in one go.
“You know you need it,” Terric said. “Need me. Need Life magic. Just like that coffee.”
I tipped the cup down. Was going to ask what the hell he was talking about. But then I got it. He’d put something, a spell of some kind, in the coffee.
“You spiked my coffee.”
“I spelled your coffee.”
“With what?”
“Health. A little Life will do you good, Shame. Nothing you say will change my opinion on that.”
I dragged my tongue over the roof of my mouth a couple times. “Gritty.” Truth was, I felt a hell of a lot better. Sure, I was still hungry, sure, I was still hungover, but at least there was something—coffee and magic—in my belly. Something to stave off the death growing in me.
I hated to admit that Terric could do something to make my hunger and need go away.
Because every time he cast magic with me, every time I admitted I needed him, magic tied us closer together. I’d watched it happen with other people like us, other Soul Complements.
I knew what my future held. Either I would become a killing monstrosity like Jingo Jingo and other Death magic users before me, or I would die, consumed by my own hunger. Since the whole monstrosity thing was just too cliché and would make my mum cry, I’d made my choice.
There was no need to drag Terric down with me.
“There’s a meeting today?” I asked.
He nodded slowly. “The Overseer called. He’s flying into Portland. Says it’s urgent?”
“I knew this?” I kicked pants, shirts, and half a dozen random cheeseburger wrappers out of the way, looking for my shoes. My room was a mess of clothes and broken things—a pile of burnt matches on the dresser, the phone book I’d compulsively shredded page by page for six hours straight that overflowed the wastebasket, and six dead potted plants that had been alive the day before yesterday.
I could draw life out of almost anything. And I did. The furniture in my room wasn’t antique; it had gone frail beneath the incessant picking of Death magic. My jeans weren’t faded and shredded at the edges for fashion’s sake.
“Yes,” I realized Terric was saying, “I told you on the phone yesterday. I told you at the bar the day before. And I told you by e-mail the day before that. You’re not listening to me, are you?”
“What?”
He sighed. “Your boots are in the bathroom.”
“Right.” I pulled my coat off the bottom of the bed and shrugged into it. “Where’s the meeting?”
“St. Johns.”
“Again?”
I walked into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bathtub to tie my boots. Ever since the four wells of magic under Portland had turned out to be five—the hidden fifth well crystallized beneath St. Johns—a lot of magic users saw it as some kind of sacred ground. Neutral territory, peaceful land of blessed magic users mumbo-in-the-jumbo.
Not that magic users had much in the way of fighting one another anymore, other than traditional guns and violence. Which, sure, could be handy, but lacked the particularly satisfying backstab–double-cross–kill-you-dead-without-anyone-knowing that magic used to offer.
Since healing magic had included restoring people’s memories that those of us in the magic-oversight business had worked hard to take away, well, both the government and law enforcement agencies and the magic-ruling Authority were pretty twitchy about the role magic played on all levels now.
Or at least that’s how it had been the last time I was paying attention a year ago.