So I pushed them away. Pushed everything away. I knew how to make the world go away. I knew how to be silent, detached, dead.
That’s what I did.
And from the middle of that silence, I drew the glyph for Illusion. I wrapped it with Fade so the unavoidable flare of magic wouldn’t be as strong or bright, and so I might have a chance of not giving us away while I was trying to hide us.
The spell rolled out from the center point of the glyph I sketched in the air in front of me. As quickly as it glowed yellow with magic, it faded out, a pale connection of threads that soaked into the floor and wafted out to cover the walls around us. It surrounded the house, the car, and made it look like there was nothing but landscape left behind.
Cody sighed. “I miss it,” he said. “Have I told you that?” He was next to me now, holding a glass of water out for me. “Using magic. Making things happen. Changing the world with a flick of fingers and thought.”
“You can’t tap it at all?”
He shook his head. “I can fix it if it’s broken, I think. The big break, light, dark. But otherwise, it’s as insubstantial as air to me.”
“That’s what you get for saving the world, mate,” I said. “A big fat nothing.” I took the water. “How’s Terric?”
“I think he has a few hours. At most. But I’m not a doctor.”
I drank the water mechanically. It didn’t do anything to ease my thirst. What I wanted, what the hollow emptiness inside me yearned for was right over there on that bed. Dying.
Don’t do it, Shame, Eleanor warned.
No, Sunny interrupted. Do. Kill your damn Soul Complement. I want to see your face when he breathes his last breath.
That won’t help anything, Eleanor said. Shame, just be calm about this. Think it through. Make a good choice.
“How many voices you got in that head of yours?” Cody asked.
“What?”
“I know what you did to Eleanor. I know what you did to Sunny. They’re both still with you, aren’t they?”
Tell him, Sunny said.
“No,” I said.
“Really?” Cody said. “If I happened to have the goods to pull on a Sight spell, I wouldn’t see two women chained to you?”
“Get the goods. Then you can tell me.”
That’s constructive, Shame, Sunny said.
“You know you can’t lie to me,” Cody said quietly. “I know your tells.”
“Yeah, sure. I’m an open book.” I took a few steps away from him, then a few back, trying not to pace toward Terric. “They’re both still with me,” I said quietly. “I don’t know how to let them go. If I break the tie holding them to me, the magic, they’ll be dead for good.”
“So why break it?” he asked.
“Other than they both hate me for killing them? There’s a natural order, isn’t there?” I said. “Life. Death. A way to sort chaos. The way things should be?”
“I think,” he said, “you, and maybe Terric, get to have some say over that. Life. Death. But the rest of us—including Eleanor and Sunny? If there was a way to break the rules of death, you’d know it.”
Which brought me back to the thing I was trying not to think about.
“You think if I kill Terric, he’ll . . . just come back to life somehow?”
“You and Terric . . . you aren’t like most of us. Death in you, Life in him. Positive, negative. You push him far enough, that magic in him is going to push you right back. Life always finds a way to survive.”
In theory.
“You don’t know that, don’t know this”—I pointed at my head—“won’t kill him.”
He shrugged. “I was the Focal—the vessel for dark and light magic joining, Shame. Held all the magic in the world together until it healed and became what it is now. And while I wouldn’t say it was exactly a comfortable experience, it did leave me with a pretty good blueprint on how magic does and doesn’t work. Or perhaps more correctly, how it can and can’t work.”
“Cut to the big reveal.”
“Okay. Two choices. Wait for a doctor to come here and tell us all of Terric’s organs are failing and it’s time to say our good-byes, or step in and take that natural conclusion away from him.”
“Natural conclusion?”
“Death. I mean death, Shame. How hard did you get hit back there?”
“I wasn’t hit.”
He paused and gave me that thousand-yard stare while looking straight at me. I set my shoulders so I didn’t squirm under it. I hated his forever-judgment look.
“You were shot,” he finally said. “Multiple times. Trained gunmen don’t miss.”
I looked down at my chest. He was right. There were holes in my shirt I hadn’t started the morning with.
Jesus.
“I can’t take death away from someone,” I said.
“Why not? You’re death, aren’t you?”
He says you can undo this, Shame, Sunny said. You can undo death.
“I can’t. I’ve tried.”
Sunny threw her hands up in exasperation.
Cody didn’t say anything. We’d gotten to the point in our relationship where we didn’t have to use our words to tell the other person that we knew he was fooling himself.
“If you can kill people,” Cody said, “it makes sense you can unkill them. You can remove the death that’s devouring him. Draw it to you, tie it to you. Just like you took Terric’s pain. Some of it anyway. Enough to give Life a foothold in him again. A chance to thrive.”
“You saw that?”
“I see everything.”
“If I touch him, his heart stops beating.”
“It’s not his heart you have to fix, Shame. It’s his soul. Your soul and his, tied together, are stronger than either of you alone. That’s the beauty of being a Soul Complement.”
“Save it for the greeting card,” I said.
“I’m telling you how I see it. You know I’m not wrong. You know you can’t kill him. Even if you tried.”
I wasn’t specifically worried about me killing him. I could have the best intentions in the world. But if I lost an inch to Death magic, he’d be dead in a second. Death magic had been looking for the edge on killing him for the last three years.
Dash walked back into the room. Yes, he glanced at Terric first to see if he was still alive.
“Where’s the trust, mate?” I asked.
He gave me a warning look. “Don’t touch him. We have a doctor on the way.”
I hooked my thumbs in my belt and leaned against the wall. “Don’t think a doctor can do anything for him.”
“He was shot, Shame. Doctors can do something for that. That’s what doctors do.”
He was right. He was making sense.
“How long?” I asked.
“Thirty minutes.” He paced over to the bed, pulled a chair up next to it. “I don’t care if you stay in the room, but I’m not going anywhere. You want Terric, you go through me.”
Something dark inside me shivered with the idea of that.
You’re sick, Sunny whispered.
I gave her half a nod.
Cody sucked air in through his teeth. “So we wait. Awesome. I’ll go see if there’s something to eat.”
He walked out.
I pushed away from the wall, not knowing where to go, but not wanting to stay here either.
“Thirty minutes, Shame,” Dash said. “Give me that. You owe him that. At least.”
“I know, I know, Spade. Give it a rest,” I said. I knew the debts between us. They were carved into my soul. “Have you heard from Zay and Allie?”
“I called. She’s in labor again.”
“Again? Does it usually go this way?”
“No.”
Is the baby okay? Eleanor asked.