Avi pushed to his feet, his gun drawn.
Rafael shielded me, one arm thrown out to each side to keep me behind him. “Ash, he’s a null.”
The one possibility I hadn’t considered because nulls were so rare. Then again, who was I to talk?
Avi waved Rafael over to the table, demanding we both keep our hands where he could see them. “I’m also a very good shot, so step back. Who are you?”
A sluggish fear swam up from deep in my core as I stared down the barrel of that gun, but it was flash frozen into a cold, hard ball of rage. “Ashira Cohen. Did you kill my father?”
“Possible. I killed a lot of people.”
“Avi Chomsky was his alias.”
“Aw, girlie. Did you come here looking for some kind of closure? He didn’t suffer, if that helps. One clean shot.”
“When?”
“Hmm. It was after Cuba, so maybe fifteen years ago? Look. I was hired to a job. I did it. It was business, nothing personal.”
My father was dead, and with him every last shard of hope I’d so carefully nurtured all these years. And for what? Men playing power games? A bullshit dream of immortality? My fists clenched.
“I wouldn’t.” Avi cocked the trigger. “You have no magic and this isn’t the kind of place where anyone is going to come running to help you."
“What were his last words?” I ground out.
Avi shrugged. “You think I’d remember that after all these years? Come on.”
Right. A job. So inconsequential that Dad’s dying words weren’t worth remembering. I blinked hard to clear the wetness from my eyes.
“And the scroll?” This couldn’t all be in vain. I couldn’t have lost him for nothing. Something good had to come out of this.
“What scroll?” Avi scratched his chin with the gun.
Rafael grabbed the pint of beer and chucked it at Avi. It fell short, smashing on the ground, beer staining the sand, but the noise caught Avi off-guard.
I grabbed a dart and chucked it.
It hit him in the arm, causing his shot to go wild. The sound in this small room was deafening, but no one bothered to investigate. Tough crowd.
Rafael lunged at Avi, wrestling him for the gun. He slammed Avi with some kind of complicated forearm strike, smoothly yanking the gun from his grasp.
Avi stumbled back.
“Drop the nulling,” Rafael said, the gun trained on Avi.
“Fuck you.”
Rafael coldly fired a bullet into Avi’s foot.
He screamed, and fell to the ground, writhing and bleeding.
Two misshapen swords appeared in my hands. I tossed them away, my magic flaring wildly.
“Now,” Rafael said, “what happened to the scroll?”
“There wasn’t one.” Avi’s hysteria-tinged words had the ring of truth.
The ball of ice in my core cracked and broke, releasing a slithering darkness. I jumped Avi and started wailing on him, smashing his jaw to pulp. “There has to be a point.”
“Ashira,” Rafael snapped.
Everything was red: my vision, my fists, Avi’s face. But it still wasn’t enough. It wasn’t even beginning to be enough. I called up my magic and hooked it into his.
Rafael grabbed my shoulders, but I threw him off, dimly aware of my Attendant crashing into the table that still held my beer.
I wrenched Avi’s magic out of him and stabbed my red forked branches into it.
He gasped and clutched at his heart.
So weak—and mine for the taking. My last sliver of rationality yelled at me to stop. I was killing him. This was a line I could never uncross, never make up for, but it wasn’t too late.
I smiled, pouring more power into him. I was the instrument of a goddess. An eye for an eye.
Avi spasmed, his eyes rolling back to show the whites. His face disappeared, replaced with my father’s, wearing an expression of deep sorrow and disappointment.
With a frustrated cry of rage, I pulled my hands away. Avi’s magic snapped back into his body. He was unconscious, but alive.
“Get out of here,” Rafael said, already calling for an ambulance. “I’ll take care of it.”
He didn’t look at me as he spoke.
I stumbled outside, wracked from head-to-toe with violent spasms from stopping the process of taking Avi’s magic. I made it as far as the beach out back, where I collapsed in the shade of a nearby palm tree, my heart skipping beats. Plagued by dizziness, I clawed at the sand.
A woman in a housekeeping uniform from one of the hotels crouched down to ask if I needed help. Water? A doctor?
She was so kind, slinging my arm over her shoulders to help me up. She didn’t deserve to have me sneak my magic inside her, exhaling in the sweetest relief when I confirmed she was Nefesh.
I had never hated myself more for what I was about to do, but that siren song in my head was drowning out the very ocean itself.
“Ashira!” Rafael sprinted across the sand to us. He took me off the woman’s hands, assuring her that he would get me help. Believing I was suffering from sunstroke, she told him where to find the nearest clinic, and hurried off to her shift. Safe.
“Help me,” I whimpered.
His expression hardened. “You promised,” he snarled.
My legs buckled; I was almost bent double, sweating while the world swam drunkenly around me. Every particle of light stabbed me in the eyeballs.
Rafael dragged me to behind a boat parked on the sand and tossed me on the ground. His shadow fell over me, blocking out all light. “You knew this could happen if you aborted the magic destruction. I should have trusted my instincts. You’re a liability, but you won’t make me one.”
I reached a trembling hand out to him, flinching as he abruptly pivoted, leaving me convulsing in the brilliant sunlight.
The world dipped and swirled, a fever dream pulling me under. It was getting harder to resist, but I had to. I had too much to live for. Spasms rocked me in burning waves. I was on my knees, hyperventilating
