It didn’t make it impossible.
I reached out for Eli’s life. Ran into some kind of Diversion he’d cast. I could untangle that spell given time.
Or I could beat him to death with my bat.
I preferred the second option.
Terric, Dessa, and I ran, our boots striking in matched rhythm across the warehouse to the hall at the end where Eli had disappeared. Eleanor flew in front of me and pointed up to the catwalks at the edges of the building.
Eli had said there were guns trained on us. He had not lied.
A barrage of bullets rained down.
Terric drew magic up from the floor in a blinding white arc. I called magic up in crackling black flames.
We didn’t draw spells. We didn’t have to.
We could break magic and make it do anything we wanted it to do.
Stop bullets? Yes.
Stop hearts? Yes.
There were eight shooters. Before we made it to the other side of the warehouse, there were eight dead shooters.
Stop Eli?
That was the question, wasn’t it? Because he could make magic do what he wanted it to do too.
Even with the spells he’d cast and the magic he’d broken to protect himself, I could feel his heartbeat. Eli was running for his life.
It would be the last thing he ever did.
The hall was wide enough to drive a truck through. Pipes and wires snaked above our head, down the walls. The floor was metal grating. I heard the thrum of machines and rush of water somewhere far below.
That, I could reach. That, I could use.
“He’s slowing,” I said.
“How far ahead?” Dessa asked.
“Not far,” Terric answered.
Eleanor flashed into the walls, flew out, flashed through them again. Searching for Eli.
The hall ended at a massive metal wall and hatch, bolted together like something made to handle deep-sea pressure.
Eleanor darted toward it, struck the wall, and pulled back, screaming in pain.
Holy shit.
I hadn’t heard her voice in years.
“Don’t!” I said as Terric jogged to the door. “Something’s set here. A trap.”
He didn’t ask me how I knew.
“Do you see something?” Dessa asked.
I cleared my mind. Drew Sight. It was magic that surrounded the door. But no spell I’d ever seen before. It wasn’t formed in a shape, a glyph, an order of some sort. It was just a pulsing blob of magic.
“What?” Dessa asked.
Terric drew a spelclass="underline" Reveal. Different from Sight, it should show the true form of any physical object.
“What the hell is it?” he asked me.
“I don’t know. It made Eleanor scream.”
“Eleanor?” Dessa glanced around us as if expecting another person to be hiding in the shadows.
“What hurts her?” Terric asked.
“I have no idea.” I looked over at Eleanor. She stood at a distance from the door, her arms crossed over her chest. She was frightened and angry.
“Do you know what it is?” I asked her.
She shook her head.
“Who?” Dessa asked, but Terric was already talking.
“Three heartbeats on the other side of that door.”
“I noticed.”
“Is Eli one of them?” Dessa asked.
“Yes,” Terric and I said together.
“That’s enough for me.” She strode to the hatch, her hand out.
I stood in her way. “No.”
“Move, Shame.”
“No.”
She reached for her gun. “I’m not going to let him get away.”
I wrapped my arm around her waist, pulled her against me, and kissed her. She kissed me back, but her hand didn’t leave her gun.
I pulled away, looked down into those hard blues. “We do this smart, and we do this together,” I said, staring into her grief and pain and anger. “Because we are all making it out of this alive. Do you understand me?”
“Except Eli,” she said. “Eli dies.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Eli dies.”
Terric began a spell, probably Cancel to clear the door so we could go through.
“He’s the only one who dies today,” I said.
Terric reached out with magic. I let go of Dessa and turned to him.
He wasn’t casting Cancel. He was casting Explosion.
Shit.
I grabbed Dessa’s arm and tugged her back down the hall, even as I was supporting the spell Terric was casting. We carved a quick Shield spell into the air to block the explosion and Terric stepped back to join us.
Then we broke magic and sent the spells flying.
The door blew apart with a huge roar, smoke and molten metal shooting toward us and into the room beyond.
We waited a heartbeat, two. Dropped the Shield and strode through the smoke and rubble into the room.
“We didn’t think you would come this far,” a man’s voice said. “We hoped you might, but never thought you could.” I didn’t recognize the voice. It carried a soft burr, like the speaker was practiced at standing on a stage and reading Shakespeare. “But we underestimated both of you, didn’t we, Mr. Conley and Mr. Flynn?”
The room was a quarter the size of the warehouse, but would still take a jog to get across. It was lit to obscure the walls, ceiling, and the lumps of machinery it contained. I thought it might have originally been used as a generator room.
Eli stood about a third of the way across the room. He had something metal in his hand that looked like a controller of some sort. Chained to the wall at the far end of the room was Davy. He was naked and unconscious, held down by the neck, wrists, ankles.
The glyphs carved into his chest, down his stomach, and over his arms pumped with a sluggish light—magic—pushing and pooling there. I didn’t know what they were using Davy for. But I knew they were using him.
Above the room, on a walkway with metal railings that overlooked the space, stood the man who had greeted us.
His long gray coat covered most of his body, but his shoes shone, and a smudge of white at his neck told me he wore a white shirt and jacket. His features were obscured by the shadows and the fedora-like hat he wore.
“We don’t care what you’re doing here, Krogher,” Dessa said as she lifted her gun and aimed it at him. “All we want is Eli.”
“Why, Ms. Leeds,” the man—Krogher—said. “How disappointing to see you here. Apparently I’ve wasted my efforts trying to track you down in Canada.”
“You know him?” Terric asked.
“He was my boss.”
“You were useful to me, Ms. Leeds. But then you ran,” Krogher said. “This is the only mercy I will show you. If you put the gun down, stand aside, and let me take care of the business at hand, you will walk from here alive.”
“Give me Eli,” she said. “And we’ll walk out of here and leave you alive.”
Krogher chuckled. “It amuses me that you think you can bargain with me.”
“Well, it was worth a shot,” she said.
She took aim and fired six shots at Eli.
And all hell broke loose.
Eli blocked the bullets with another one of those electric barriers. Then the room filled with magic, hot as acid. Eli adjusted the controller in his hand. Davy gave a strangled yell.
No bullets on us this time. They’d tried that, and it hadn’t worked.
This time it was fire.
Terric and I ran. For Eli. We could save Davy by killing Eli. We could get the hell out of here when Eli was dead.
The man above us was using magic to call up the very real fire that burned over the metal walls and stone floor. Fire made by magic.
“How?” I said, or maybe thought, as Terric and I carved Cancel spells, absorbed and diverted the fire, the heat, the magic, like we had choreographed this dance and knew every move.