I grinned. “So we’re both dead. That, my dear, is worth celebrating.” I held my arm out for her. “Shall we see what’s behind door number one?”
“Why not? This is your heaven.”
“You taking bets we went up?”
“Trust me, Shame. If this was hell, we’d know by now.”
She took my arm, and together, we walked through the door.
Death and a ghost walk into a bar in heaven . . .
Inside was all wood and brass, two walls of booze, and a shelf that ran round the top of the room, bottles shining like jewels caught in a halo up above our heads.
Heaven indeed.
A couple dozen tables filled the floor; a few candlelit corner booths rounded the edges of the place.
“My God,” I breathed. Because the room wasn’t empty. No, not at all. There were plenty of people here. People I’d known. People I’d loved. People I’d lost.
This wasn’t heaven. I’d finally come home.
“Shame!” Chase called, waving me over to her table where she sat with Greyson.
“Go,” Eleanor said. “But you aren’t getting out of this place without buying me a drink, hotshot.” She gave me a little shove, and I smiled again and headed over to Chase.
“So the rumors are true,” Chase said. “They’ll let anyone into this place.”
Sight for sore heart, Chase was lovely. Hair pulled back in one long ponytail just the way she used to wear it when she, Zayvion, Terric, Greyson, and I were training in the Authority. Learning to use magic, learning to hunt the Hungers that used to cross through gates and give us hell.
We were brothers in arms. Maybe more than that. Chase had been all set up to exchange vows with Zay before her Soul Complement, Greyson, rolled onto the scene. Their breakup had been hard on Zay. Then Greyson had been taken, experimented upon, and eventually he and Chase had been used and killed by a couple of crazy Soul Complements who wanted to destroy the world.
Proving once again that there was no happily ever after for Soul Complements.
Well, except maybe in death.
“Chase, darlin’,” I said as I pulled up a chair and plunked down. “Aren’t you looking fine?”
“For a dead chick, you mean?”
“Hey, now,” Greyson, who was sitting next to her, said. “For any kind of chick.” He looked like his original human self, brown hair, square face, football player good looks, and eyes that didn’t reflect the hell he’d been through in life. He wrapped his arm across the back of her chair and gave me a warm smile. “Don’t make moves on my girl, Shamus. I can still kick your ass.”
“Still? Obviously death has addled your memory. You couldn’t kick a baby duck’s ass.”
“Still ninety-nine percent bullshit and one percent pitiful, aren’t you?” he said. “I didn’t think we’d see you so soon. Did you drunk it down a flight of stairs or something?”
Images flashed across my vision, brighter, stronger than the bar, more real than the table, than my friends.
Bullets tearing holes through me. Terric falling . . . a knife.
I blinked, and they were gone.
“Shame?” Chase said. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” I said. It wasn’t a lie. I felt good, better than I think I had in years. Not a single inch of my body hurt, and the grinding fear and hatred of the Death magic eating away inside me was gone. I felt free, light. And strangely, more alive than I ever had before.
“So, you two?” I asked. “I know things didn’t go so well for you dirt-side. Despite your attitude,” I said to Greyson, “it’s good to see you both. Really good. I’m sorry we couldn’t have done more to help you. That we didn’t catch Leander before he . . .” I pulled my finger across my throat.
“Shame,” Chase said, lifting her bottle of beer. “We’re in heaven. There’s nothing to apologize for. It’s not your job to try to keep everyone safe. And besides. This? Not such a bad way to pass the time.”
Greyson nodded. “Seconded. If you want to get technical, we have a lot to apologize for too.”
“But the Soul Complement thing between you two?” I said. “That’s good now, although I guess ultimately it’s what got you killed.”
“Well,” Greyson said, “that is what got me possessed, turned into a half-beast killer, then killed.”
“But now?” I asked. “Happy all around?”
“Happy all around,” Chase said. “It wasn’t being Soul Complements that got us killed.That just made us targets. Leander and Isabelle got us killed. Whack jobs.”
“Note to the wise, Shamus. There is no crazier, wounded, desperate creature than a Broken Soul Complement,” Greyson said.
Eli with a knife in one hand and gun in the other, hatred twisting his features as he fired again and again . . .
I pushed that image away. Didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want that pain in my heaven.
“Isabelle and Leander aren’t here, are they?” I asked.
Chase shrugged. “This is your heaven, Shame. Do you want them here?”
“Never.”
She lifted her beer in a toast. “To your heaven. Go get yourself a beer. You know you want it.”
I glanced at the bar, then back. “I’ll just be a minute.”
“Take your time,” she said. “You might want to say hello to a few people.” She pointed off to my right to a table where two men were sitting.
“Victor?” I said.
He saw me looking his way and held up his glass. And the man who sat across the table from him, with his back toward me, turned.
Dark hair, sharp features, dark eyes, and a wide smile—a smile I hadn’t seen in over a decade.
“Dad?”
Chapter 9
TERRIC
Days, maybe weeks passed. I’d lost count of how long I’d been caged. There was no day or night, nothing to signal the passage of time except for pain. And the pain? Once it became constant, the hands of time were meaningless.
Eli was with me sometimes, just standing above me, silent, staring. Other times he was much more involved in my pain. Flaying skin from my bones, carving apart muscles, casting spells.
Hundreds of spells, hundreds of modifications to the magic I held inside me. Making it follow the routes he wanted it to follow. Making it into something it was not meant to be.
He’d done this to Davy all those years ago. Davy had never fully recovered, trapped between being a man and being whatever the magic that coursed through the spells set in his flesh by Collins the Cutter forced him to be.
I couldn’t keep track of all the spells. I lost count of which he began, which he canceled, as often as I lost consciousness.
Eli held all the cards. He was slowly, surely digging into the walls I held around the magic inside me. He was slowly breaking through the walls I held around the things that made me me. He was tunneling into my soul.
I’d killed people in my time. I’d Closed them—dug around in their heads and made them forget what they were, who they were. I was good at it—very good—and could surgically break anyone’s ability to use magic.
But Eli Collins was waltzing the bloody ballroom around me. He was deeply, frighteningly good at tearing a mind, a body, and magic to shreds.
This was why Victor had wanted Eli Closed. Broken. Dead. This was why he’d made Shame promise to kill him.
And I knew it was why, no matter what we’d done to otherwise shut Eli down, he had found a way to glue himself back together.
Because he was a monster.