... I had no idea what I was. I had no idea who I was.
That was terrifying.
Panic shot ice through my veins.
“Okay,” I said, talking myself through this. “Okay. Names. Records. Something. Look for answers. There must be something here.”
I knelt, gasped at the pain that squeezed my ribs. Broken ribs, judging from the bandages wrapped around my chest. And from the gauze packed around my left hand, I was pretty sure I was missing a pinkie.
Bars, bandages, missing digits. That painted a new picture. Not so much a medical facility as a place of interrogation. Torture?
A memory cracked open and spilled through my mind: knives in the hand of that man who was unconscious on the floor. Knives cutting into me.
Eli. His name was Eli, and he’d used more than knives to cause me pain.
He’d used magic.
Then the memory was gone and I grunted at the snarling headache that replaced it. I didn’t even know who I was, couldn’t remember why I was here, but I knew that I should not have been able to access that memory.
Maybe the hallucination had been right. I needed to get out of here before the man on the floor woke up.
I stepped over Eli.
Every motion hurt. Breathing hurt. It felt as if someone had taken a hammer to all the things inside me and left me shattered and bleeding.
Even so, I made it to the table covered with blades, saws, and other hardware.
If even half of those things were used on me, it was no wonder I was in pain.
No key for the door. I took one of the knives, walked to the bars, which were painted with designs or maybe a language. Nothing I could read. The lock was electronic.
“Terric.” The hallucination man appeared on the other side of the bars. “You have to follow me. We need to get the hell out of here before they get the cameras back online. The blocking spell I cast won’t last for long.”
“Who are you? Where are we?”
“You’ve been Closed. Or at least partially Closed. He took away your memories. We’re in a warehouse in Washington and we don’t have much time before they find out I’m not dead, and you’re not catatonic.”
“Closed?” I managed.
“Magic.” He searched my face for understanding, and found none. “Okay, fine. You want out of here, you’ll just have to trust me on that. And if this knocks me out or . . . kills me, I want you to tell Sunny yes for me, okay?”
“Yes?”
“She asked me to marry her, then took off to Florida. Before I could call her, I got my ass handed to me by Eli and the rest of these fuckers. I never got a chance to give her my answer. It’s yes. Now stand back.”
He wrapped his hands on the bars and exhaled slowly. The symbols etched into the metal caught white fire, arcing from bar to bar to glow brighter, then run like hot oil down to the lock.
“Davy,” a voice said behind me. “How nice of you to join us. I’d thought you were gone from the world for good.”
I turned. Eli was no longer unconscious. He stood, his face covered in blood from that broken nose and sliced cheek.
He held a gun aimed at us.
“Shoot, you bastard,” Davy said. “I’m coming for you next.”
“You don’t have the strength,” Eli said. “And I should know.” He shifted the gun just a fraction.
“I wondered if you would find that little loophole I couldn’t plug,” he said. “Some of those spells in your flesh just refuse to be canceled out, no matter what I try. But you must understand there are plans in place. Plans,” he said to me as if I knew what he meant, “that would be the best for all of us to follow. While I would love to further my research on you, Davy, I will not let you get in the way of my plans.”
Eli squeezed the trigger.
“No!” I threw myself in front of Davy.
Just as the bars around me went white-fire supernova from Davy’s spell.
The first bullet burned through my chest, the second right behind it. I hit the bars behind me. Yelled as fire engulfed me. Tasted ash, oil, and blood.
I thought I heard Davy yell. And then everything went black.
Chapter 16
SHAME
By the time I’d pulled on a pair of jeans and laced up my boots, I was so tired, I wanted to weep. Nothing in me was working. My lungs stuck shut with every breath, my vision went black if I moved too fast, and my heart tripped like a three-legged bull in a china shop.
Eleanor refused to acknowledge me and made it a point to stay as far away as possible.
I eased down and sat at the foot of the bed. Didn’t think I’d be getting up under my own power anytime soon. I’d never felt so broken. It wasn’t just my body. It wasn’t just magic. Deep down, in the core of me, where maybe my soul should be was a gaping wound. I was torn, empty, shattered.
Terric was gone.
Jesus. I didn’t love living with him, but being without him was worse.
Dash stepped into the room with a cup of coffee. “You look worse,” he noted as I accepted the cup he offered and took a small sip.
Coffee Mack-trucked my senses: hot, bitter, sweet, thick. I held on as it took the corner down to my stomach, where it crashed in a burn that rolled out across my nerves.
C’mon, caffeine. Shamus needs to go out and play.
I looked up. Expected Dash to be saying something I wasn’t listening to. But he was standing there, waiting. He’d brushed his hair back, found his glasses, shrugged on a gray jean jacket. It was startling how very alive, whole, and well he was.
Compared to the pale imitation of a human I’d seen staring back at me from the mirror, he was a beacon of life.
“Before we go,” he said, “I need to know a couple of things. Can you tell if Terric is alive?”
“No. But . . .” I shook my head. “What we had, our connection. That’s gone.”
“Right,” he said softly as he put two and two together and carried the conclusion. We were Soul Complements who had used magic together more than once. It meant we were tied. Soul to soul. If Terric were alive, I’d know it.
Wouldn’t I?
Dash cleared his throat, but his voice shook just a little. “You think Eli took him?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, can you access magic at all?”
Even the idea of it made me nauseated. And hungry. I licked my lips, tasting the old blood from cuts there. “I don’t know.”
“Let’s find out.”
“Really? Dash, I’m just . . . I think that’s a bad idea.”
“Before we get in the car. Before we go hunting Davy. Before we look for Terric, alive or dead. Before we run into Eli. I want to know, right now, what shape you’re really in. I know this is hard—”
“Stow the sympathy,” I said.
“Not sympathy, Shame. Let me lay this out for you. Sunny is too invested in finding Davy to think any of this through. Cody’s in his own world, like he always is. I’m here to make sure you’re going to make it through the night.”
“Listen. It’s sweet of you to worry,” I said.
“No. It’s practical. Sunny thinks you’re the gun she can wave to get Davy back. But you’re my friend, Shame. You died.” He paused, letting that statement linger in the silence. Then, a little quieter, “I’m not going to let you walk into battle and die again. So prove to me you’ve got the legs to survive a rescue mission against the same people who kicked your ass to hell and back.”
I glanced up at him. Saw maybe for the first time someone other than my ex-assistant and general nice guy. Sometime over the last three years, Dash had stepped into his own. He was keeping a clear head under ridiculous circumstances. Taking charge.
Man might make a fine head of the Authority one day.