He smiled. “Boom.”
“Mr. Collins,” Krogher said. “Move this along.”
“If I were you,” Eli said, near my ear, “I’d buckle up.”
He straightened. Took three steps away from me. Checked on the wires, which I realized were clamped to the bars of the cage around me.
A cage that had Transfer spells carved into each bar.
Holy shit.
“No,” I said. “Eli, no. You don’t know this will work. You could kill these people.”
“True,” he said as Kroger pressed buttons on the device in his hand and each person stepped forward as if pulled by the same chain. “If they die, I’ll just find some more. Hundreds of people were infected with tainted magic, scarred by magic. We have the records and can kidnap anyone we choose. We have reach, Terric. We have money, we have power. Now all we need is magic. So we have you.”
The people surrounded the cage. I was sure they couldn’t hear what he was saying, couldn’t understand what was about to be done to them. Eli had carved enough spells into them; they no longer had free will. Each wrapped a hand around a bar.
“Don’t,” I said, scrambling for a way out of this, for a way to keep Life magic behind the crumbling wall I’d built in my mind.
“Too late.” Eli flipped a switch.
Electricity hit like a hammer strike.
The cell bars flared with electricity and magic. A chemical stink burned my lungs as the spells Eli had been carving in my cage and the spells he’d been carving in me came alive, fueled by the Life magic I could not control.
Magic gushed out of me like blood from a severed vein and blasted into the people surrounding the cage. Each of them was carved with one spell. Each of them became a battery, a vessel for the magic to fuel that one spell. Walking bombs.
They screamed. But not all of them died. Death would be too easy, a kindness out of this hell.
I was Life magic, and life meant only one thing: suffering.
Chapter 10
SHAME
“Shamus,” Dad said, “come on and sit down, son. We need to talk.”
If he hadn’t said anything I probably would have just stood there staring at him for days.
I cleared my throat. “Sure.” I crossed over to him. “Well, it’s . . . it’s good to see you, Da.”
I paused there next to his chair not knowing what to do next. We hadn’t exactly left on speaking terms before he’d been killed. If he was as stubborn as I remember him being, he’d probably carried those grudges all the way up here to heaven and was ready to unpack them on me.
Dad pushed his chair away from the table and stood. He was younger than I remember him being, maybe in his late twenties, but he was still my dad. “Son.”
And then he was hugging me, something I hadn’t experienced since I was ten. I was surprised to realize I was about an inch taller than him, though he still had nearly twenty pounds of muscle on me.
“It is so good to see you, lad,” he said as he gave my back a fond pat.
I swallowed, inhaled the scent of him, cigarettes and Old Spice. “You too, Da.”
Then he pulled back, one hand on my shoulder while he gave me a long, long look.
Funny how even when you’re dead you hope that your parents will be proud of what they see in you.
“You really gave them hell, didn’t you, boy?”
“I got my hits in,” I said.
He shook his head. “I knew you could handle it. Told your mother from the day you were born, you’d be the man who would stop Jingo Jingo. And the apocalypse too.” He pointed at the empty chair between him and Victor and took his seat.
“Well, I had help,” I started. But before I sat down, there was another father I had to say hello to.
I walked over to Victor. “I am so sorry. We tried. We couldn’t get to you fast enough.”
“When?”
“When you died. When Eli killed you.”
“Ah yes.” Victor gave me a look that was not unkind. His hair didn’t have any gray in it now. I’d put him in his early forties. I guess those had been his glory years.
“I didn’t expect you to save me, Shame. The struggle between Eli and me was a battle I chose. I knew what the outcome could be. I have no regrets.”
He stood.
“But if we had been faster, just a little faster—”
“It is done,” he said. “Let it be done. I am not unhappy with my life, nor with what I left behind. I’m not unhappy with who I’ve left behind: you, Terric, Zayvion. You’re sons to me. In that, you’ve never failed me.”
He rested his hand on my shoulder and then pulled me into a hug.
“We miss you,” I said.
“Everything has an ending. It is the order in chaos.” Those were words I’d heard him say more times than I could count.
He released me with another pat and pointed at the chair for me to sit.
“We’re both very happy to see you here, Shame,” he said. “But we think you might have jumped the gun. There is so much more for you to do.”
Bullets flying out of nowhere, tearing through me, searing hot. Eli must have started firing even before he opened that hole in space behind Terric. . . .
“That,” Dad said, “is what we’re talking about.”
I blinked, and the memory went back to being a memory instead of a picture show.
“Don’t follow you.” I picked up the pint in front of me and took a long, hard pull. Good God. It was amazing.
“The Death magic that took housing in you, claiming you, is a very unusual thing,” Da said. “In all of history, we don’t think anyone has ever carried a piece of magic within them.”
“It wasn’t like I planned it,” I said.
“You didn’t plan it,” Da said. “But you did stumble into the way it could be done. Soul Complements joining on the battlefield, using magic to die for each other, and to live for each other. When you screw with the rules of magic, it will screw you back. And what you and Terric did on the battlefield, that was a top-notch screwup.”
“Yeah. Sure,” I said. “We had a shot to kill Jingo Jingo and we took it, consequences be damned.”
“And living with Death magic trying to eat you alive is the price to pay,” he said.
“Was,” I said. “It was the price to pay. Paid up. Everything has an end, right?” I lifted the beer. “Worth it.”
Victor shifted in his chair and folded his fingers together while laying his hands on the table. I knew that glint in his eye. He was planning something.
“You know Terric is still alive down there,” he said quietly.
Nice of him to sledgehammer my moment of happy.
“I . . . wondered. When I didn’t see him here. . . .” I swigged beer, which, while delicious, wasn’t really cutting it for me. I was in a whiskey mood.
As soon as that thought crossed my mind, the beer wasn’t beer anymore. It was a glass of whiskey.
I took a sip. Correction, it was angel song in a tumbler, liquid heavenly voices raised in pure heat and pleasure.
I set the glass down, did a reality—well, a heaven—check. The bar was the same. The people there the same. Only my drink had changed.
Dad and Victor, however, were watching me as if they were working out exactly how to tackle a particularly difficult problem.
I leaned back. “So Terric’s alive. That’s a good thing, right?”
Victor raised an eyebrow, nodded. “It is. But it would be a better thing if you were alive with him.”
“We’re better apart,” I said. “I know that. We’ve tried being together and . . .” I shook my head. “This is my heaven. I belong here.”
“This is all of our heavens,” Dad said. “Changing for each of us, as we meet, rejoin, or part. But you carry Death magic, Shamus, and there is no place death can’t be.”