magic inside me demanded to be fed life. Any life. Mine, if there was nothing else to devour. It grew stronger, more uncontrolled, the more I denied it.
I hadn’t killed anyone for more than a year, and that had been an accident—I’d passed out in an alley and woken up next to a dead bum. I hadn’t destroyed, drained, demolished a living thing since. Sure, I consumed. Some. A little. Enough. Just enough. Maybe a plant withered and died, maybe a bird fell out of the sky. But not as much life as I wanted. Not what death craved.
I’d always wanted to be a superhero, well, maybe a superneutral. But Reaperman? No.
It was a fucked-up and damn slow death, staying as far away from the living world as I could. To starve myself and offer up my life to the Death inside me. But it was my death, not someone else’s. And it was under my control.
Terric opened his mouth, then shut it on whatever lecture he’d been about to launch into. He tipped his head and there was, briefly, sorrow and desperation in his eyes that made my heart stop beating.
I hated when he looked at me like that. I hated that I could make him look like that.
Even though I don’t like Terric, it’s not because
“Why don’t you take a shower?” Terric said in that calm and easy tone he always used when he didn’t want to let on how he was really feeling. “We have time.”
“You’re not my boss.” I shoved up on my feet. “Not even my friend.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Then close the blinds.” I crossed the floor to the bathroom and shut the door behind me. “And don’t touch my stuff.”
I stripped, pissed, then got in the shower. Turned the water on as hot as my skin could stand it. I let it pound down over my back while I washed my hair. The inside of my mouth tasted like gutter runoff, so I stepped out of the shower and dripped on the floor while I grabbed my toothbrush and toothpaste.
Took those with me into the shower and scrubbed until I could feel my teeth. Then I applied soap and a washrag. Got that done, got out, even though both me and my headache wanted to linger awhile.
I didn’t bother to shave.
Took all of three minutes from start to finish; then I wrapped a towel around my hips and barefooted it to the bedroom.
Terric was standing there, a mug from the restaurant downstairs in one hand. “Coffee.”
“Apology coffee?” I asked as I stepped over a week’s worth of dirty clothes on the way to my dresser.
“No, just coffee.”
I pulled on boxers, blue jeans, black T-shirt. Then I added a black sweater and dug for socks of similar color.
“Have you eaten at all this week?” Terric asked. I could practically feel his gaze scraping over my ribs, spine, and shoulder blades.
“Yes. Also? None of your business.”
There were four heavy rings on my dresser. Made of metal and Void stones, they looked like brushed steel with stones inset in their flat, square surfaces. I slipped them on each finger of my right hand, the red stone, the black stone, the amber, and the white, and shivered at the slight ease from the push of Death magic they gave me.
I curled my fingers into a fist, the rings lining up like brass knuckles.
“How about you drink this?” Terric said.
I turned. He held the coffee out.
“Why? Did you poison it?”
That, finally, got a dazzler of a smile out of him. Yep. Leading man material. “And ruin a good dark roast? Please.”
I took the cup, which meant he and I were standing pretty close together. I could feel the Life magic coiled around him like a second skin. Just as Death magic had changed me, Life magic had changed him. He carried it inside his body, just like I carried Death. This close, I could feel Life magic reaching out to me like a cool breeze. It made my mouth water.
I took the cup. We both ignored how bad my hand was shaking.
“We could solve this,” Terric said. “Use magic together, you and I. Cast a spell. Life, Shame.”
“No.”
“I don’t understand why you won’t.” He lifted a hand but didn’t touch me. “I’ve respected that you want space and time. An entire year and a half. We’re still Soul Complements. We can use magic like no one else, break it so that it’s just as strong as it used to be. Why fight that?”
He was right about magic. It didn’t have the delightfully dangerous “use it hard and it will use you back harder” kick like the days before the apocalypse. We’d forced dark and light magic to join and mingle together, diluting the strength of both. Magic had gone soft. Limp. Light spells were a dim glow, Illusions were thin as glass, and a knock-you-senseless Impact spell was no worse than a polite pat. The price to pay for those spells had lessened too. No more weeks of pain and agony in exchange for powerful spells. The best you could hope for was a barely discernible spell that might give you a case of gas.
And while I found it hilarious that people who used to do very bad things with magic were now raging to find the magical equivalent to Viagra, I was simultaneously just a little terrified about what magic could do in my hands.
Well, in my hands and Terric’s hands. Magic might be neutered, or “healed” as Terric likes to remind me, for other magic users . . . but not for us. Soul Complements, or Breakers, as some people like to call us, could make magic do all those powerful things.
As long as we used it together.
I could have told him all that. But he had heard it before. He knew why I didn’t want to cast magic with him.
I took a drink of the coffee. Whatever snappy comeback I was working out died on my lips at about the same moment the coffee came alive on my taste buds. I didn’t care that it was hot enough to scorch. I gulped it down all in one go.
“You know you need it,” Terric said. “Need me. Need Life magic. Just like that coffee.”
I tipped the cup down. Was going to ask what the hell he was talking about. But then I got it. He’d put something, a spell of some kind, in the coffee.
“You spiked my coffee.”
“I spelled your coffee.”
“With what?”
“Health. A little Life will do you good, Shame. Nothing you say will change my opinion on that.”
I dragged my tongue over the roof of my mouth a couple times. “Gritty.” Truth was, I felt a hell of a lot better. Sure, I was still hungry, sure, I was still hungover, but at least there was something—coffee and magic—in my belly. Something to stave off the death growing in me.
I hated to admit that Terric could do something to make my hunger and need go away.
Because every time he cast magic with me, every time I admitted I needed him, magic tied us closer together. I’d watched it happen with other people like us, other Soul Complements.
I knew what my future held. Either I would become a killing monstrosity like Jingo Jingo and other Death magic users before me, or I would die, consumed by my own hunger. Since the whole monstrosity thing was just too cliche and would make my mum cry, I’d made my choice.
There was no need to drag Terric down with me.
“There’s a meeting today?” I asked.
He nodded slowly. “The Overseer called. He’s flying into Portland. Says it’s urgent?”
“I knew this?” I kicked pants, shirts, and half a dozen random cheeseburger wrappers out of the way, looking for my shoes. My room was a mess of clothes and broken things—a pile of burnt matches on the dresser, the phone book I’d compulsively shredded page by page for six hours straight that overflowed the wastebasket, and six dead potted plants that had been alive the day before yesterday.
I could draw life out of almost anything. And I did. The furniture in my room wasn’t antique; it had gone frail
