I sat back a bit. Impressed. I didn’t think he’d noticed. “Redhead?”
“You’re not blind. You’ve seen her.”
“I have no idea. And you didn’t answer me,” I said.
“About?”
“If you’re staying.”
“With Jeremy?”
“Is that his name? Also, no. In Portland.”
“It makes more sense for me to leave.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Yes, it’s an answer?”
“Yes, I’m going to stay. Also, yes. It’s an answer.”
“I forget how much I don’t miss this,” I said.
“What?”
“Talking with you.”
“Nice try,” he said. “You love it. Because there’s no one who knows you as well as I do.”
“Zay knows me.”
“I don’t see you having lunch with him.”
“So you’re really staying?”
He tipped his head down just enough that his hair fell over his eyes a bit. He gave me a predatory smile. “Someone has to keep an eye on you.”
“Me?” I grinned. “I’m not the one causing trouble in this town.”
“No, but you’ll be right in the middle of it when it happens. You can’t resist.”
“Trouble?”
“Danger.”
I waved my hand dismissively. “I got no stake in this game, mate.”
“Yes, you do.”
He was right. I did. For one thing, I cared about what happened to Zay and Allie. And my other friends like Dash, and Clyde, and some of the people who worked at my mum’s inn. But that’s not was Terric was getting at.
He meant him.
“You mean you,” I said.
“I mean me. You’re worried about me.”
“Please.”
“You asked me about my boyfriend. My
I opened my mouth, closed it. Sat back. Scowled. And flagged the waitress.
“Leaving?” he asked.
“Drinking. More than beer. And so are you. Because I am done with the talking. And so are you.”
He grinned. “Not even close.”
Chapter 7
A thing I don’t tell a lot of people: Terric is hilarious drunk.
Mostly because as the drinks go down, his clothes come off. It usually starts with the shoes, then socks, belt, and shirt. Sometimes it goes a lot further than that. I’d bailed him out of jail once for indecent exposure. I’ve never let him live it down either.
So, yes. I was thinking about seeing how many layers he was going to shed here in a very public pub, but he’d only taken off his shoes and unbuttoned the top button on his shirt before his phone rang. Again.
He’d ignored it twice already.
“You going to get that?” I asked.
The waitress had cleared the food from our table, and now five shot glasses were lined up, neat as socks in a drawer, in front of Terric.
He downed the sixth and carefully set it in place at the back of the line like a good little soldier.
“It’s Jeremy.”
“Right,” I said, toying with my third shot that wasn’t even half-empty yet. Another thing I don’t tell people: when Terric drinks, I just . . . don’t as much. Seems like one of us should be sober in any given situation.
“Your boyfriend wants to talk to you, mate.”
Terric looked off over my shoulder, pretending he hadn’t heard what I’d just said. But his heartbeat sped up, and I could see his eyes dilate. Fear? Lust? I sipped my whiskey and waited.
“He’s picking me up,” he said. “Here.”
“Is that a problem?”
He wiped his hand over his eyes. When he took his hand away, his eyes were still closed. He set the fingers of both hands one-at-a-time precisely on the tabletop, as if ready to play a piano.
“I can feel your heartbeat, Shame.” He said it almost too quietly for me to hear over the noise in the bar. But his finger was tapping the tabletop. Tapping in exact rhythm to my pulse.
“I can feel all their heartbeats. I can tell who is healthy, who is sick. Who is dying. I can feel their time ticking away under my skin. It burns there with every beat of their heart. And sometimes, some days, I can’t keep the magic from spreading out to swallow them. Life magic heals, mends, fixes.” He nodded, his fingers tapping, tapping.
“But when I lose control of it, it makes anything grow, accelerate, thrive. Even disease. Even sickness. The living are made stronger, but the dying are accelerated, burned out like old candles. If I refuse to use Life magic, it consumes . . . me. I drown in it, lose my thoughts, my reason. My mind.”
He opened his eyes. Maybe realized those words were coming out of his mouth. Maybe realized who he was talking to and where he was.
I wondered if he’d given up trying to explain to people what it was like to die and come back with magic having changed you. Changed your body. Changed your blood. Changed your needs. I’d stopped trying to explain it years ago.
Let them think I was a burnout. A loser. A slacker.
I guess Terric let them believe he was a success. A winner. A hero.
It didn’t matter. There wasn’t anything to do to fix what we really were. What we both had become: monsters.
Most people did not want to be reminded of how dangerous we were.
But I rarely heard Terric’s fight with Life magic. He never spoke to me about it. Just like I didn’t talk to him about Death magic. I had no idea what it was like to be driven by Life magic. I had no idea what it demanded of him. What it made him do. How it wore him down. How he coped.
“Life magic devours?” I said. “I thought that was Death magic’s trick.”
“Life magic infiltrates, overtakes, possesses. Makes everything grow: plants, people.” A long pause. “Diseases, sickness.” He tipped his head, licked his lips as if remembering the taste of each of those things. “Everything I touch I change. Everything that I touch I force to change.”
“You know there’s a price for letting magic use you like that.”
He nodded once. His eyes were too sober for how much whiskey he’d been drinking. “My life. My . . .” He looked at a loss for words. So I gave them to him.
“Your humanity,” I said.
I didn’t think he’d ever believed me when I said that before. But this time he did.
“When I let go. When I relax, when I just let go and breathe . . .” He stopped talking. Just stared at me.
