“My first attempt was to use a Beckstrom disk. A very few still hold magic. Those that do are oddly well designed for activating magic, or for deactivating it. Think of it as a magnifying glass. Whatever spell you press into this metal, which is laced with the crystals of the well in St. Johns, will be strong enough to trigger a corresponding spell once.
“My theory was, if used correctly, it might even be possible for one disk to cancel every spell I’ve ever cast. Although the magic required for that is beyond you and me now.”
He paused, and his eyebrows ticked just slightly upward, as if he were asking me if I understood what he was saying.
Why would he tell me how to cancel his spells?
“A failed experiment. The disks were a dead end.” Again the look. Again the wink. “But then, one can’t advance on success alone.” He turned back to the table. “After a few adjustments, it was clear that control over the drones and spells would be achieved through technology rather than magic. So this . . .” He turned around again. This time he was holding one of the controllers I’d seen in Krogher’s hands.
Hell.
“Wireless. Elegant. Useful.” Eli took a step toward me with each word. “It controls every action of every spell-holding drone. Hold still, Terric. This is going to hurt quite a bit.”
He pressed something on the plastic in his hand and I felt magic stir in the room. No, I felt the magic in the boy and in the woman open to his command as if he’d just unlocked windows in a storm.
Eli didn’t even trace a spell in the air. He didn’t have to. He triggered the spell the woman carried. It rushed out of her, straight from her hands into the bars of the cage, and followed the lines Eli had carved and cast in the floor. Magic hit my feet with the force and heat of lightning.
I grabbed for that magic, to turn it around, to stop it, to use it, to control it.
But the moment it touched me, the moment it ran the course of spells carved into my flesh, burned into my blood, I lost control of it, lost the ability to use it, couldn’t even remember what it did or how it worked.
Closed. Magic was Closed from me.
And no matter how hard I tried to pull on it, to hold it, to use it, magic was locked away, walled away, removed from my reach.
Chapter 12
SHAME
Eleanor strolled over to our table. “What’s going on here?”
“Eleanor?” Victor said. “It’s so good to see you.”
She smiled, surprised. “I still can’t get used to people actually seeing me. Hi, Victor. How are you?”
“I’m wonderful, thank you. I’m so sorry for your death. You left the world far too young.”
“No, don’t worry about it,” she said. “We’d gotten bad information, and were doing what we thought was right. But it was wrong.”
Funny how hearing her say that unknotted something in my chest. I wouldn’t have been fighting her, and consequently lost control of Death magic and killed her, if she hadn’t been trying to kill me first.
I didn’t blame her, though. It’s hard to keep the communication lines clear in an apocalypse.
“And you must be some relation to Shame.” She held out her hand for my dad.
He shook her hand. “Hugh Flynn. I’m his father. Pleased to meet you, Eleanor, is it?”
“Roth. Eleanor Roth. I work for the Authority in Seattle. Well, did.”
“How’d you end up with this piece of work?” he asked, pointing at me.
“He chickened out at the last minute and didn’t kill me enough,” she said. “Then there was that binding thing. How did you do that, Shame?”
“It’s a Death magic Bind.” I looked away from her as I said it. “Souls are energy, life that can be stored and drained later. High-level, illegal, dark magic stuff.”
“Which is why you owe me a drink,” she said. “To celebrate my freedom from all those days tied to your angst.”
“Please,” I said. “I don’t angst. I brood like a manly man.”
Victor snorted and I threw him a grin.
“Celebrate,” she said again. “Drink. You owe me one. Time to pay up.”
She planted her hands on her hips, waiting.
“Well, gents,” I said, “you heard the lady. Your nefarious plans will just have to wait.”
I thought my dad might try to stop us, but he smiled. “Go on. If she’s put up with you for this long, she’s earned that drink.”
Eleanor took the arm I offered her, and we walked toward the bar.
Behind me, I heard Dad and Victor start up a conversation about death and life and how to break the barriers between them.
“Why are you arguing with your father?” she asked. “This is supposed to be heaven, Shame. Weapons left at the door.”
“A little tussle with the old man? Sounds like heaven to me.”
She chuckled softly. Here, where she was real, and soft, and smelled like sweet cinnamon, I found myself liking that I could make her smile.
“How is this for you?” I asked. “You’re untied from me, aren’t you?”
“I think so. It doesn’t feel the same.” She took a stool and I sat next to her and flagged the bartender.
“Good,” I said. “Good. Say, I wanted to ask. Did it hurt?”
“Dying?”
“No. Being tied to me.”
“At first, yes. As time went on, it wasn’t so bad. I just wish you wouldn’t have spent every second of your life racing toward the grave.”
The bartender came over, set two drinks in front of us. Mine: whiskey. Hers: chocolate martini.
“I never raced toward anything a day of my life.”
“So I just imagined you wishing for death every waking moment, is that it?”
“Well, I might have been considering the grave. . . .”
“Please.” She picked up her drink. “You couldn’t get here fast enough.” She lifted her glass. “Here’s to the end. May it be just the beginning.”
“Hear, hear!” I tapped my glass to hers and took a drink, watching her.
She pressed her lips against the glass, tipped it back, and closed her eyes as she held the drink in her mouth. She’d been not quite dead for years now. No eating, no drinking. This had to be the first thing she’d tasted in forever.
“Good?” I asked.
“Mmmmm.” She opened her eyes. “Heaven.”
“To heaven,” I said.
“What about earth?”
“What about it?”
“I heard what your dad and Victor said.”
“Look at you? Once a stalker, always a stalker.”
She made a face at me. “So you’re going to stop the end of the world?”
“That’s the idea.”
She leaned her elbow on the bar and twisted to face me. “I’ve been tied to you for what, over three years now?”
“Yes.”
“And you couldn’t hear what I said for almost the entire time, right?”
“Not since the first few months.” I took another sip.
“Then listen to me now. You have a good heart.”
“This old thing—”
She held up one finger. “It’s still my turn. You have a good heart. I don’t care what you show other people or what you want them to think you are. I lived with you.”
At my look she rocked her head side to side. “Existed. Whatever. But I was there, Shame. Right next to you twenty-four-seven for almost four years. I’ve seen your bad days and your really bad days. But despite all the shit that’s happened, you are a kind man. Sometimes I suspect you’re even a hopeful man.”