Devon Monk - Hell Bent

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.

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.”

“Davy,” Terric began in his boss voice.

“Hey!” I said. “Isn’t there a dead body we should be looking at? I mean, come on, Terric. Put your issues on the back burner for a minute. This isn’t always about you. Have you no decency?”

Terric turned toward me so Davy was behind him. Davy shook his head at me and rolled his eyes.

“Joshua’s here, isn’t he?” I asked.

That seemed to bring Terric back to the business at hand. “Yes. Davy, you don’t have to come in if you don’t want to.”

“I want to,” he said.

So we all followed Terric down the gray hall to a door at the left. Then through the doors and into a room with a metal wall of twelve closed drawers, each big enough to hold a human. Paperwork hung from a few of the drawers, and when I took a second to glance at the rest of the room I noted medical equipment, sinks, lights, and movable tables.

All as clean as could be.

Well, except for the harder-to-reach corners and tiles where vague proof of the day’s business lingered.

You’d think I’d feel right at home here. All this death. All those dead bodies cooling on the shelf.

I didn’t. It gave me the goddamn creeps.

Terric strolled over to the metal drawers and tugged on the one to the far left, bottom. No paperwork there. As a matter of fact, I noted he pulled out a set of keys and unlocked it before tugging it open.

“Keys? Don’t those belong to Clyde Turner now?” I asked.

“I haven’t had time to turn everything over to him yet,” Terric said. “Was going to finish that up today.”

He pulled the drawer open.

Thankfully, Joshua was draped with a sheet, leaving only his head uncovered.

Still, it wasn’t easy to look down on a man who I’d last seen laughing at a birthday party.

Terric was calm, steady. He handled death a hell of a lot better than I did.

Bastard.

“They initially said it looked like a heart attack,” he said. “So that’s what I’m letting out to the media and police. For now. There are some marks I want you to see, Shame. And, Davy?” He glanced up at Davy, his hand on the edge of the sheet. “Are you sure you want to stay?”

“Even more now that you’ve asked me twice,” Davy said.

Terric drew the sheet down to reveal Joshua’s bare chest and stomach.

Carved into his skin with a thin, artistic hand were spells. Pain. Binding. Death.

“Jesus Christ,” Davy breathed.

I glanced up, met Terric’s gaze. Even though I couldn’t hear his thoughts, right then, right there, he and I had an agreement: kill the son of a bitch who had done this.

“Shame,” Terric said, maybe more for Davy than me, “do you recognize this signature?”

See, here’s the thing. Every magic user has to draw glyphs, or symbols, that in turn magic fills and acts upon. And just like handwriting, every magic user has a unique signature. The way I cast Light doesn’t look exactly the same way Terric casts Light.

Hounds, like Davy, are trained in knowing every magic user’s signature. They spend a lot of time keeping up on such things, and there were databases where each magic user had to register his or her signature.

But I didn’t need a database to know who had killed Joshua.

“Eli Collins,” I said.

Davy’s heart kicked up into fight-or-flight mode, the kind of sweat-terror you fall into when realizing the nightmare didn’t go away when you turned on the lights.

“Davy,” Terric said in a tone that pushed Davy’s heartbeat down a notch. “Do you agree?”

Davy nodded. “That’s his work. I’d swear on it.”

The door opened.

We all turned, Davy with his hand on his hip—was he carrying a gun now?—Terric with his left hand casting a spell, and me with my right hand already through a spell, only the cracking red static across my rings holding the magic from filling it.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” Dessa said as she sauntered in without batting an eye at any of the near deaths we were aiming her way.

“Shame,” she said, “want to introduce me to your friends here?”

“No.”

She stopped about halfway across the room. “Look, I’m unarmed. Well, I have these guns.” She reached inside her jacket and Davy pulled a gun.