I didn’t say anything so he just kept on talking.
“You want to know what I think, Shame?”
“I really don’t.”
“I think Terric wouldn’t be trying to keep Jeremy alive if you were around. I think he’d instead use that Life magic to damp down the Death magic that’s killing you.”
“Killed,” I said. “Not killing. Other than the whole breathing thing, I’m not much alive, mate.”
“Sure,” he said. “You’re as dead as I am. Magic changed us. Made us into . . . something else. You don’t see me whining about it.”
“You know what you don’t see me doing?” I said. “Being a prick.”
“Or admitting I’m right and you don’t like it.”
“There must be someone else’s business you can dick around in,” I muttered.
“Oh, there is. Plenty of people’s. None quite as fun as yours.”
“I’m so pleased you find me amusing. Also, you do realize that Terric put Jeremy’s cancer into remission? That means something to him. To both of them.”
“I know. It means something to Jeremy’s doctors too. And his family. As a matter of fact, some members of his family, powerful people, are taking very close notice of what Terric can do with magic.”
And there it was. The angle I hadn’t seen. If Jeremy’s powerful family saw Terric as a way to hold off illness, cure diseases, or hell, put a new kick into the drug-of-the-week they were cooking up, then Terric was suddenly a valuable commodity. Someone worth controlling.
Maybe even someone worth hurting.
“Does this have anything to do with the government hunting down Soul Complements?” I asked.
“That’s . . . news. Want to fill me in?”
“Aren’t you working for the Overseer?”
“Working, yes. It’s not like he invites me into his bedroom to talk over his day.”
“I probably shouldn’t,” I said. So I did anyway. “The Overseer called a meeting. Hell, I guess it was this morning. What day is it?”
“Friday, but only by a few hours.”
“Okay, so yesterday late morning the Overseer fired Terric and me, put Clyde Turner in our place, and told all the Soul Complements in the room that the government had declared it Breaker season and was most likely hunting us down.”
“All the Soul Complements? How many were there?”
“Me and Ter, Zay and Allie, Doug and Nancy, and two other couples I don’t know.”
“What did they look like?”
I did a quick recap of the cougar and the younger man, and of the hipster pair.
“The cougar is Simone Latchly, and the man with her—he’s older than me, Shame—is Brian Welling. They’re out of San Diego. The other couple is from Arizona. Anthony Pardes and Holly Doyle. You should know that. You were Head of the Authority.”
“I left the details to my underlings.”
“Nice try. I know what you did your first year. I was there with you, remember?”
What I’d done was worked my ass off to keep the normal people in the world from killing every Authority member they found out about. There was a lot of anger, mistrust, and blatant hate in the first year of everyone getting their memories back.
If you looked at it right, I’d saved a lot of lives that first year. Well, Terric and I had.
Healing magic had proved that secrets, grudges, hurt feelings, and lawsuits do not die easily.
I just shrugged and rubbed my thumb over the edge of the ring on my finger. We were well out of the dead zone. Magic pooled naturally and flowed through the networks and pipelines far belowground.
Easy to access as it ever was.
My hunger, which must have been snuffed out by being around Terric, then poisoned, covered in Void stones, and dragged to a nonmagical zone, was gnawing on me again.
I needed to consume. Now.
Davy was, strangely, one of the only people who didn’t make me want to drain him. He was right about magic changing him. I could sense it in his heartbeat too. He still carried a trace of the tainted magic that had almost killed him. A lot of magic poured through his body, in his blood and bones. It didn’t give him the power to break magic, like Terric and me. It was simply keeping him alive and, therefore, not easily consumable.
Davy was not quite a real boy.
Eleanor was in the back of the truck, immune to wind or cold or rain.
I didn’t have the concentration to draw on the vegetation rolling past at seventy-five miles an hour. But the truck engine was burning. Working hard. Changing mass into energy. Fire, heat. I could work with that.
“Listen,” I said. “It’s been a long and weird night. I’m going to catch some z’s. I assume you’re taking me back to Portland, and maybe to Clyde or whoever is on top of the information coming in on Joshua’s death?”
“Something like that,” he said.
“Right. Wake me when we get there.”
I closed my eyes and very carefully drew on a thin burn from the engine. Not so much to kill it, but enough that Davy’s gas mileage was going to go to hell.
I didn’t really sleep, but I did my best to be still, to drink the heat and fire and destruction off the truck, and leave Davy and every living thing around me alone.
I’d gotten good at pushing the world away. At making people and anything even remotely resembling life, anything that I might care about, something that existed at a far distance from me.
Worked on doing that now. Closed out the world. Closed out the motion, the sounds. Made all the edges soft and far, far away.
And when I had finally done that, finally settled into that dark, padded place where me and my insanity could sit down for tea, all I saw was Dessa’s face, her laughter breathing over me so close it dug in like a sweet, sharp dream.
Chapter 10
Where we did not go: to the police. To the office. To the Overseer.
Where we did go: to the morgue.
And yes. Terric was there, waiting for us. He looked clean, showered, clothed in dark jeans and a tight black T-shirt. Like his night hadn’t been full of ropes, guns, and trunk rides.
Or, you know . . . maybe it had been.
“Davy, Shame.” Terric held out a cup of coffee for each of us.
I took mine but hesitated before drinking it. “If you spiked this, I’ll make your life miserable.”
“It’s coffee with five sugars and an ungodly amount of cream,” he said.
I took a sip. Man was speaking the truth. It was sweet, creamy, unpoisoned heaven.
“Why so twitchy?” he asked.
“Been running bad odds on my likelihood of being poisoned lately.”
“So she did slip you a roofie,” Davy said.
“I didn’t say that.”
“Who?” Terric asked. “What ‘she’ slipped you a roofie? When? At the bar?”
I could tell he was getting worked up. Not because of his tone or heartbeat, but his control of Life magic was slipping, sort of covering him in a glowing white light.
It occurred to me that having a Life magic user like Terric lose control in the middle of a morgue might be option C for how to kick off the zombie uprising.
“Just a misunderstanding with a beautiful redhead,” I said. “No worries. Davy was watching my back.”
“Really?” Terric turned to Davy. “How long have you been doing that?”
Davy gave a loose shrug. “Not long.”
