Half a ton of rock tumbled out of the sky, all wings, claws, and fangs.
Stone the gargoyle.
He had probably been roof-side and noticed both Eli and our arrival at the same moment. He tore down out of the sky aiming straight at Eli.
Good boy, Stoney.
Two things happened at once: I unleashed Death magic. Terric reached out with Life magic.
Okay, three things happened.
Eli opened a gate in the ground behind him and stepped back into it just as Stone lunged for his throat. He and Stone fell through it and were gone.
“Son of a bitch.”I was running to where Eli and Stone had just been on the porch. I was also yarding back on Death magic so it wouldn’t consume everything living in its path. Terric, I assumed was doing the same with Life magic.
Dash and Cody were a couple steps ahead of us, but they pulled up short when the door opened.
“Stop right there.” Kevin stood just inside the expansive entryway, a semiautomatic rifle in his hands. Correction, a semiautomatic rifle in his hands pointed at us. “What the hell are all of you doing here?”
Kevin was the kind of guy you might miss in a crowd—thinning hairline, sad eyes, and average in most every other way. But when he was holding a gun, he was riveting.
“Eli was outside,” Terric said. “Stone tackled him. They gated out. Could be gating back at any minute. Are Allie and Zayvion all right?”
“No one comes into the house,” Kevin said. “Not even you.”
“Kevin,” Dash said, “it’s all right. We’re here to help.”
“How’d you get here?”
“Davy opened a Gate,” I said.
Kevin turned his gun on Davy.
What we had here was a powder keg and a book of lit matches. Nothing but boom ahead.
“We came to stop Eli,” I said. “We can leave. Terric and I can leave.”
“It’s not Terric and you that I’m worried about,” Kevin said. “Step back, Davy. Way back. Now.”
“Davy? Davy’s not the problem,” I said. Kevin wasn’t making any damn sense. “He brought us here to hunt for Eli. If Eli isn’t here, we’re gone.”
“Sure he brought you here,” Kevin said. “Because he’s under Eli’s orders to do so.”
“What?” I said.
Bullshit, Sunny said. Davy’s not working for Eli. He was tortured by him. Held captive by him.
“You sure about that?” Dash, who couldn’t hear Sunny, asked Kevin.
“One hundred percent,” Kevin said. “Back off the property, Davy Silvers, or I will drop you where you stand.”
Davy held up his hands. “Kevin. You’re wrong. I would never take orders from Eli.”
He sounded like Davy. Looked like him—well, like a version of him who had recently been hammered through hell. The Davy I knew would rather slit his own throat than work for the man who had turned him into a monster.
“Back up,” Kevin repeated.
No, Sunny said. Shame. Don’t let him kill him. Don’t let him shoot.
“Davy,” I said, “you’d better listen to him, mate. Just step outside and we’ll get this all sorted.”
Davy didn’t move, didn’t say anything.
“Davy?”
That wasn’t Davy behind those dead eyes. Maybe hadn’t been Davy for a long time.
Shit.
Magic can do wonderful things. Back in the day it healed the sick, fed the poor, made the world an easier place to live in. Of course magic back then always came with a price: You used it, and it used you.
The price for using magic was pain.
Then Cody healed magic, turned it into its new extra-gentle form and made it so using magic didn’t cost much because it didn’t do much.
Those spells carved into Davy were dark magic. Eli had carved spells from a time when magic was broken, raw, and extremely deadly.
Spells that would kill a man. Spells that would change a man. Spells that destroyed anything they touched.
And in those black hashed and looped designs were a few more spells. Things that would take care of Eli’s enemies. Things that would take care of Krogher’s problems.
Davy wasn’t just a blueprint that Eli had used to carve the drones into bombs; Davy was his master weapon.
His very first, very best, flesh-covered bomb.
Right here, at Kevin’s house, where Allie and Zayvion and Terric and I had gathered. Two sets of powerful Soul Complements. Maybe even the most powerful Soul Complements. Maybe the only Soul Complements left in the world. The only people who could stop Krogher and his drones.
And we’d brought Davy here—Eli’s walking weapon. We’d let him bring us here. All together now, cozy and easy to kill.
Fuck. Me.
I triggered Death magic, sent it straight for him, at the exact moment Davy threw his hands down and out to the side. He arched back, his entire body consumed by the blue flame of those spells.
Magic called up from the wells beneath the city, magic called down out of the cloudless sky, a firestorm of hell. Magic Davy should not be able to access, if he were just human. Magic that was damn near impossible to pull on anymore.
An ungodly immense amount of raw magic.
There was no way I could block it.
And then the world exploded.
Chapter 26
SHAME
There is maybe one thing good about carrying Death: You can’t die. There are, however, a lot of bad things about carrying Death. Example? Sometimes dying is a kindness.
In the middle of that explosion, as magic ripped through the walls of the house, as magic was set to do one thing—kill all the people in that house, especially the Soul Complements and their unborn baby—I decided there was one more thing Death magic was good for: absorbing energy.
Even magic.
I threw Death at Davy’s magic like a heavy blanket, swallowing down the force of it, devouring the heat of it, taking on the explosion as an energy I could drain and diffuse. Did it too.
The blast rerouted to the middle of my head.
Pain.
Heat.
A riot of magic—the magic Davy had tapped—pulverized through my mind and body.
Eli had done more than carve spells into him. He’d filled him with tainted magic. Just like the magic that filled the drones. Back in the warehouse when I’d drunk down the magic in the drones, it had made me sick.
This? This might be my ticket out of here.
I screamed and burned and bled and broke, tainted magic pouring over me, pumping through me. I didn’t know how Davy had held this so long, didn’t know how he was still alive.
And then, in an instant, there was silence.
That was just a different kind of pain.
A hand lay cool against the back of my neck. He walked me into the house, took me to a bed, made me sit. The magic was gone. So was the porch, melted to slag and ash.
Hell.
The ringing in my ears was so loud, I couldn’t hear my own thoughts.
Shuttering darkness and blasts of light still rolled through my brain, across my eyes, but I was pretty sure that was Terric at my side, Terric who had brought me here.
“Rest,” he said maybe from somewhere in my head, his hands still on me, words carrying a soft yellow light. Life magic. Healing.
The next time I woke up, I didn’t know where I was. This was not my bed, not my bedroom. I was alone. Well, just me and the ghosts of three women. I was on top of the covers, a light blanket over my torso.
Go slowly, Mum said from where she sat on the bed next to me. That was a lot of magic to consume.