Hell Bent

That was odd. Davy had said there was at least one Hound on each of us Soul Complements. I should have seen someone following us, and thought it would be him.

“Did she say anything when she dropped me on your doorstep?” I asked.

“Dessa?” He shook his head. “Just that she’d found you wasted and wandering and was leaving you at my door. Said you were my problem now.”

“Now?”

“That was my reaction,” he said. “Eli said she knows where he or his Soul Complement is?”

“Yep.”

“Doesn’t line up with her story.”

“I know.”

“If you had to put money on it, who’s lying?” he asked.

I thought about that for a second or two. Eli I had some history with. Dessa I’d barely met, but I was more inclined to trust her over Eli. “Could be both. Dessa knows more than she’s telling us. Or Eli might think she knows something her brother knew before Eli killed him.”

“Someone needs to teach him rule one of negotiation: don’t kill the people who can give you the information you need,” Terric said.

“He said he kills whoever they tell him to kill.”

“And you believe that?”

“I believe that’s one of the reasons he does it. I also believe he’s enjoying it. Joshua was a Closer. Eli’s had a vendetta against Closers ever since Victor Closed him and took all his memories and ability to use magic away years ago.”

“So you think he’s going to hit Closers?”

“I’d say it’s on his list. Don’t know if it falls in with the plans of the people who have him captured.”

“If people have him captured,” Terric added.

Yeah, I’d thought of that too. I lit another cigarette, got three drags off it. Then dug around in his very clean glove compartment, looking for sunglasses.

Even though there were heavy clouds today and it was only half past seven in the morning, the light was too damn bright for me. Apparently Tasers and poison were hard on my delicate constitution.

Terric pressed a button on the ceiling and a pocket opened.

“Thanks.” I pulled the sunglasses out of the pocket and put them on. Didn’t care if I looked ridiculous, just as long as my eyes were covered.

I hunkered down in the seat. I missed my coat.

“If you’re cold, I have a coat in the back.”

“Does it match the boots?”

“Maybe.”

“Pass.”

Victor used to live in a very nice home beneath the Japanese Gardens. A home that was built back in the early nineteen hundreds to guard the Faith well beneath it.

We’d pretty much demolished the place trying to survive the apocalypse, and while I’d been told it had been repaired and rebuilt, Victor had moved into a modest one-level home with a couple of acres and a small creek behind it.

He said it was easier on him because of his bad eyesight. I think he just hadn’t ever gotten over his house being blown to bits by magic.

In some ways, he hadn’t gotten over how much the world had changed now that magic was healed and reduced to a fraction of its strength.

Well, unless you were a Breaker.

Terric pulled up into the drive. We both got out.

“Want the statue?” I asked Eleanor.

“What?” Terric said as he walked to the front door.

“Nothing.”

He shot a look back at me, then kept walking.

I nodded toward the car. Eleanor shook her head.

So we strolled up the path. Terric was already walking inside the house and I slipped in after him.

“Thank you both for coming.” Victor wore a sweater with a shirt collar beneath it, and jeans, and of course, his heavy glasses. He shut the door behind us and turned the lock. “Let’s sit in the living room.”

I chose an overstuffed chair, sat there feeling a little bit like the pupil I once was, and tried to keep my hands and hungers to myself. Terric settled on the couch near me, which both helped and, for some reason, annoyed me.

Victor walked with that slow, old man pace he’d settled into since he’d lost almost all of his sight.

“To begin with,” he said, “I didn’t know Eli Collins was involved until yesterday when Joshua’s body was found. I want you both to know that.”

“Victor,” I said. “A confession? My, how the tables have turned.”

“It is not a confession. I am simply clarifying why I haven’t told you this before,” he said. “We know who Eli’s Soul Complement is.”

He stopped at a rolltop desk in the corner and retrieved a file folder. That, he handed to Terric.

“Who?” I asked.

Terric scanned the file, then looked up. “Brandy Scott.” He tipped the file so I could see the picture clipped there. Short dark hair, almond eyes, shy smile with a dimple. She didn’t look old enough to drive.

“How old is she?” I asked.

“That picture is from a while ago,” Victor said. “She’s fifteen in it. She’s thirty-five now.”

“Mental institution?” Terric said.

“That,” Victor said, “is what I needed to tell you. We’ve known Eli had a Soul Complement. Have known it for many years. They were even tested. But Brandy wasn’t stable. We did everything we could, medicine, magic, counseling. But she never recovered from the test to see if she and Eli were a match. Over the years her condition has grown worse. The last report we have from her doctors is that she has grown less and less responsive.”

“You took her from him, didn’t you?” I said, putting it all together. “When you Closed Eli’s memories away, you made him forget her.”

Terric glanced up at Victor over the file. Waiting.

It was, if you thought about it too long, a horrifying thing to do. Like cutting a person in half straight down the middle.

Victor had been standing behind the chair that matched mine. His fingers squeezed the top of the upholstery; then he let go and walked around, sat and exhaled tiredly.

“Mr. Collins . . . Eli is brilliant.” He nodded. “We have the tests that prove it. But he is also unstable and dangerous.”

“A sociopath,” Terric said.

“Yes,” Victor said. “Soul Complements can make magic break its own rules. We’ve always known that. Even when magic was strong, Brandy and Eli were a danger then. To themselves. To the Authority. To mankind.”

“So you kept them apart?” I didn’t know why it was bothering me so much. I mean yeah, I had stayed as far away from Terric as I could these last few years. And a few years before that. But that was my choice. No one had made me forget him. No one had forbade me to be with him.

It was my choice.

Eli and Brandy hadn’t had a choice.

“It was decided, by more people than just me, that it would be best for them to never know about each other,” Victor said.

“So you Closed Eli,” Terric said, “took the memories of Brandy away from him. And then you took the memory of how to use magic away from him too?”

“Yes.” He was quiet a moment, maybe thinking over those times, those decisions.

I’d always wondered if Victor followed rules, or made rules to follow. Too many times in the past he’d