“Then why aren’t we running?” I asked.
“You wanted us to stop.”
“And you listened to me? I wasn’t exactly thinking straight.”
“What the hell, Flynn? Yes, of course I listened to you. Terric’s dying.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “Hold on. Can we call someone to heal him? A doctor. A doctor who can use spells?”
“He can’t be healed,” Cody said from where he was standing next to Terric’s bed. I had forgotten he was in the room.
“We have to do something,” Dash said. “Take him to a hospital so they can put him on life support, pain medications.”
I was listening to Dash but watching Cody, who held my gaze.
Cody shook his head. “You can do something to help him, Shame,” he said. “It won’t be easy. You won’t want to do it.”
Cody always had an angle. He’d saved my ass plenty of times when we were running cons. He’d selflessly saved all our asses back when magic had almost ended our world and he’d stepped up to be the vessel in which dark and light magic could join and heal. I’d developed a pretty hefty trust in the kook.
“Will it save Terric?” I asked.
He inhaled and lifted his eyebrows. “I don’t know. This trip took some unexpected turns. What you’ve done, how you’ve killed. Sunny.”
So he knew about Sunny.
He knows you killed me, Sunny said. He’ll tell someone. And they’ll put you down. You are on borrowed time.
I’d been born on borrowed time, but I didn’t tell her that. We needed solutions to our problems.
“Tell me what to do,” I said to Cody. “Tell me what I can do to fix this. Fix Terric.”
“You have to kill him.”
Chapter 19
SHAME
“What the—? No,” Dash said. “Shame, don’t listen to him.”
“Killing Terric seems to be what we’re trying to avoid here, Cody,” I said quietly.
“You died,” he said. “You came back.”
“I have Death magic riding shotgun in my noggin.”
“And Terric has Life magic,” Cody said. “Dying shouldn’t be more than a pause in living for him.”
“No,” Dash said again. “No one kills Terric. I can’t even believe I have to say that. Listen, Shame, here’s what we’re going to do. You are going to cast Illusion on the house and car. We’ll get a doctor out here. For Terric and Davy. Understand me? We’ll get them stable. No more killing.”
“Stable,” I said, still looking at Cody. “Then what, Dash?”
“We’ll build that bridge when we get to it. Can you access enough magic to cast Illusion?”
Cody clearly wasn’t a fan of Dash’s plan. But he shrugged, letting me make the decision.
What I decided was to placate Dash. A deathless plan sounded like a good, reasonable starting point.
“I can access the magic,” I said.
Even though the Soul Complement bond between us didn’t seem to be working, Terric wasn’t dead yet. That meant I still had superior abilities with magic. But if he kicked off . . . well, when . . . I’d be of no use to anyone except as a killing thing.
I was pretty sure if Terric died, I’d go completely, gloriously insane.
So basically, they’d want to end me pretty quick.
“Good,” Dash said, sounding a little more comfortable with the conversation now that it wasn’t about dumping Terric in an early grave. “Cast it. I’m going out this door to talk to Davy. I will be right back in. And if you lay a hand on him, Shame . . .”
“You’ll spend your life making me regret it, second by second.” I gave him a small smile. “I heard you, mate. I’m still in here.”
He glanced over at Cody, at Terric, then walked past me and down the hall.
“I’m not wrong,” Cody said. “About Terric.”
“About me turning him off and then on again?” I shook my head. “I don’t think so, Cody. I can’t bring him back, and I don’t know that he’ll want to leave death for me.”
“You left it for him, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” And if I did kill him, and did it wrong, I most certainly didn’t want the ghost of him tied to me. I wasn’t dealing well with the two ghosts I was currently failing.
“Soul Complements,” Cody said as if that explained everything. “If you kill him, he’ll come back. Should come back.”
“You don’t know that. You can’t guarantee that. You’re guessing your way through this just like the rest of us.”
“Sure, but it’s a good guess. A strong bet.” He took a few steps away from the bed and sat on the dresser. “I carried magic for a while, remember? I have a good feel for these things.”
“Terric and me, the magic we carry, isn’t a part of what you did with magic.”
“Now, that’s not true. Magic is magic is magic. But I understand why you’re doing Dash’s thing first. It’s the safe move. You have never been much for the big gambles.”
“Hello? Do you know me, mate?”
He held up one finger. “International art couriers.”
“They wanted us to be drug mules.”
Another finger. “Wilderness guides.”
“Hit men for the mob.”
“Investing in Apple.”
I stopped pacing. “I don’t remember that one.”
He frowned, and then a smile crossed his face. “Huh. Must not have been you. Well, you really missed out on that one.”
“Ass.”
“So, are you going to get with the Illusioning or what?” he asked.
Eleanor and Sunny were in the room, close together and talking to each other with their backs turned to me. So apparently the dead girls were conspiring against me.
Great.
As for the state of Flynn, I was worried, exhausted. The adrenaline of fighting Death magic and the kick of energy I got from the lives I’d consumed were already wearing off. If I was going to access magic for a spell with any kind of control, it would need to happen now.
“Here?” I asked.
“Outside won’t put any of us out of your reach, Shame,” he said. “Not really.”
“Still, you might not want to stick around for this.”
“And miss the show?”
“They say I have a suicidal personality,” I muttered. I closed my eyes and cleared my mind.
Not Death magic, not the magic I carried. I wanted the magic that flowed beneath the earth, magic anyone could tap in to. Magic that in my hands would be powerful enough to make this house and about fifty feet around it disappear. Or at least fade into the surrounding flora.
It wasn’t hard to tap in to the magic. Even here where it wasn’t channeled and networked through man-made conduits and lines, even here where there was no well where it naturally pooled, I could feel it.
Easy to reach. Difficult to control.
To use magic, glyphs must be drawn. To draw a glyph correctly, you gotta be calm, centered, focused.
I was about as far away from any of those things as I’d ever been.
Terric was dying.
Everything inside me was dying with him.
I’d trapped Eleanor. I’d let Death magic kill Sunny with cold, brutal efficiency.
Krogher was on our tail, probably Eli too. Davy was grieving—rightfully so—and was screwed up in ways that made me think we might want to book him a rubber room.
Dash and Cody were hurt—those bullets hadn’t all missed. Soul Complements out in the world were walking targets. It was only a matter of time before they’d be dead.
The world needed saving. Maybe, if we made it through the night, we could come up with an idea on how to do that.
But none of those thoughts churning through my head were going to help me cast magic.