“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.
Chapter 28
“Get out of the car, Terric, Shame, and it’s Dessa, isn’t it?” Eli said distractedly. “There are guns aimed at you that could blow you apart before you blink.”
Terric and I opened our doors and stepped out. I brought the baseball bat with me. Yes, I still had the gun too. Dessa got out a moment after us, probably loading the weapons on her body.
Eleanor drifted at a distance from me, which was just short of the warehouse. She was bound to me and couldn’t move into the warehouse to look around unless I moved toward Eli.
“I gave you time,” Eli said. “A full day! And I gave you clues. So many clues. But have you found her? No! You have failed me. You have failed us all. She’ll die because of you, Shame.”
Dessa stepped to one side of me, pulled her gun, and fired several rounds at Eli.
He didn’t even flinch. The bullets hit the air about three feet in front of him, slowed, stopped, and fell to the ground.
“Just put it away, Ms. Leeds,” he said. “This isn’t a place for childish toys.”
“You killed Victor,” Terric said.
“What?” Eli looked genuinely surprised. “Of course I did. Did you think I would miss my chance to pay him back for the living hell he made of my life? Twenty years he toyed with me. And I had less than two minutes with him. Not enough time to kill him the way I wanted. Not nearly enough time to do to him what he deserved. It hardly seems fair.”
“He was our teacher,” Terric went on. “He was our family.”
“It’s nothing personal,” Eli said. “It’s. Just. Business.” He smiled and spread his hands. “But our business isn’t finished, gentlemen. Is it? This business between you and me. You still owe me.”
I lifted the bat over my shoulder. “You know what, Eli?” I strode toward him, the ground beneath my feet turning from grass to dust, the brush on either side of the road withering, cracking, falling, as I passed. “I’m here to pay.”
I drank all the living things down. Filling up with life. Feeding my anger. My rage.
So I could use it to beat him to a bloody pulp.
Trees groaned and went ash white in the night. Ferns, vine maple, and brush blackened and died.
Eli’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not afraid of you, Shamus.”
“It’s mutual.” I was almost in front of the protective barrier now. “Tell me if you change your mind when I’m breaking you.”
Eli didn’t move.
Terric was at my side, Dessa behind us, her gun still out, scanning the shadows.
“You think you can hit me with a bat?” Eli said. “Did you not see the bullets that couldn’t penetrate that wall?”
The barrier was powered by tech, not magic.
Too bad for him.
I swung for the bastard’s head.
Damn straight he jumped back.
The barrier snapped to life and poured insane amounts of wattage across the open space.
Electricity was energy. Energy was life. I absorbed it. Hot enough it blistered the inside of my mouth. Electricity snapped and arced across my arms and down my back.
I yanked the bat away, turned my head to spit blood. I pulled off my rings and let them drop into the ground. Then I smiled at Eli.
No rings to block my reach to magic. No rings to block my power.
I swung again. Hard.
The barrier sparked, flared, and shattered.
Eli ran.
Emergency lights caught to life inside the structure.
It was a huge, three-story warehouse with arched metal ceiling and steel beams splayed out to the metal walls. Concrete floor, repair stalls to the left separated by more steel beams. The rest of the place was broken up by industrial shelves filled with boxes and things that might belong to a hospital or a machine shop.
The whole place looked like a military silo tipped on its side and nailed into the hill.
I put one foot inside and I knew why Eli had chosen this warehouse. The structure was built like a bunker. There was nothing alive in it, and thick metal and stone made it much more difficult for me to draw on the environment—life and magic—outside the structure.