whisper to himself for hours and not remember doing it.
Each time he used Life magic, it took him a little longer to come back to being the Terric I knew and sometimes, such as around repentance holidays, liked.
He’d told me I was just making shit up about him going inhuman.
He was right to think so. I made shit up all the time. But not that shit.
Terric, who still looked mostly human, drew a glyph with his free hand, tracing white magic that glowed green at the edges into the air.
Something brushed my boot.
Plants sprang to life. Vines and flowers and those tropical leafy things that always look plastic in hotel lobbies wriggled up out of the cracks in the concrete and bricks, growing at time-lapse speeds.
“No. Just. Don’t,” I said.
“Shut up and eat your vegetables,” Terric snarled.
Annoying—that was still the Terric I knew.
The plants were elbow high, vibrating with life. Terric showed no sign of backing down.
I hated him for not backing down. I hated him for being right. I needed life. And he could give it to me without it killing him.
Much.
I couldn’t endure the hunger a second more. I cussed and threw my hands out to both sides, palms down. I gave in to the hunger and devoured the plants, greedily consuming, killing. Without moving a single inch, I sucked the sweet life out of every stalk and frond he called up out of the world.
I was pulling on the life around me so hard the concrete under my feet cracked and shifted as I dug down looking for more.
As fast as I could consume life, Terric could call upon it faster. Life magic poured out of him in that alien white light, green and growing, smothering me, drowning me in life.
Somewhere in the back of my head a reasonable part of me was counting down from ten. When I hit one, I’d punch Terric in the face if that’s what it took to get his hands off me and break his magic spree.
We’d both done stupid things when we lost control of magic. Stupider things when we’d lost it at the same time, together.
I’d sort of made it my life’s goal not to use magic with him. Not to let him use magic with me. Because when I did, when
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
Two and a haaalf.
I curled my right hand into a fist. Time to stop this. Time to stop him.
Before I lost him.
“Terric,” Detective Stotts said from somewhere to my right, completely blowing my concentration. “What is going on?”
Detective Paul Stotts was a decent human being with Hispanic heritage and an unflappable moral code. Today, he was wearing a blue scarf tucked into the collar of his jacket, dark slacks, and a frown. They used to say he was cursed, but that wasn’t true. An awful lot of cover-ups and deaths in this city were caused by magic people didn’t know about, and it was Stotts’s job to investigate those deaths.
It had also been the job of the Authority to keep people, and especially detectives like Stotts, from discovering how deadly magic could be back then. The Authority did that by taking away people’s memories.
Weird stuff used to happen a lot around Detective Stotts. There had been no explanation for it because we made sure there wouldn’t be.
Now everyone had their memories back. Including him. It was a problem.
“About time you got here,” I said. I shoved Terric’s hand off me and stepped to one side to make sure I was out of his reach. I stuffed my hands in my coat pockets to keep from touching him again.
Terric took a step back, blinking hard like he wasn’t quite seeing the real world yet. Not a lot of human in that angelic face of his. Not a lot of my friend.
Had I let it go on too long?
I bent, scooped up the Void stone buried in the plant ashes, and dropped the stone into his hand. He shuddered at the contact of the magic-canceling stone.
“Shamus,” Stotts said. “I haven’t seen you out of a bar for the last month.”
“You’ve been keeping an eye on me? You’re a sweetheart. This”—I pointed at the ox—“is something Terric seemed worried about.”
Stotts glanced at the man. His eyebrows went up a bit. That Bind spell I’d cast was standard back in the day, but much rarer to see now.
“Did you do this?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He wasn’t using his inside voice.”
Stotts slid me a scowl.
I so didn’t care.
“Terric?” he asked.
Terric didn’t say anything.
His eyes were closed, hands curled around the stone, pressing it against his chest as if hoping it would fill a hole inside him. His lips were moving so slightly I couldn’t tell what he might be whispering.
He swallowed hard, then opened his eyes.
A lot of light coming out of those blues. Cold, silver light.
“Terric?” Stotts said in his put-the-gun-down voice.
“We got a lead,” Terric said like he was reading someone else’s lines from a note card. “This man, Hamilton, Stan Hamilton, has information on the girl who showed up dead out in Forest Park yesterday.”
By the end of the sentence, he sounded more like Terric. Looked more like him too. Blue eyes blue, white glow gone. Life magic was pushed back somewhere inside him where most people wouldn’t look.
He crossed his arms and made a point of not looking at me. I wasn’t most people.
“I called as soon as I saw him,” he said. “Then Shame got involved. Started a fight.”
“Started? You mean ended a fight,” I corrected. “Like usual.”
“You should know better,” Stotts said.
“Excuse me?”
“There are procedures for using magic on other citizens, Mr. Flynn. Rules that every person in this city must follow now, whether they are Authority or non-Authority.”
“Hello? Choir here you’re singing to.”
“I’m assuming Terric told you to stay out of this matter with Hamilton?”
“Yes, but—”
“Procedure. You will make some effort to follow it from now on.”
I bit down on a smile. My bad habit of arguing with police officers had never once worked in my favor. “We called you, didn’t we?”
“Terric called me.”
“And?”
“This town doesn’t need a vigilante,” he said.
“Vigilante? You got me wrong, mate. I’m too lazy for that kind of thing. Spent a month in a bar, remember?”
“I’ve seen the things you’ve done in the past.”
“Yeah, well, that was the past.”
Right about then another police car pulled up.
