Devon Monk - Hell Bent

“Thank God for that,” I said. I shoved the last of it in my mouth and chewed. “Awful.”

“Where do you stand on this, Shame?”

“Whatever Terric just said, I’m probably against it, but am too lazy to do anything about it. So, what do we know about Eli?”

“We got a call from Davy,” Dash said. “He thinks Eli is working out of one of the hospitals in the area.”

“As a doctor?” The implications of that made my skin crawl. “Ew.”

“He didn’t say,” Dash said. “But he found this.” He walked over and handed me a printout of names.

“It’s a printout of names,” I said.

“Right,” Clyde said. “The first twenty-five on that list have hit the missing persons reports. Three of them have shown up dead in Forest Park.”

“Davy thinks Eli is . . . smuggling people out to Forest Park and killing them?” I guessed.

“He thinks it’s connected,” Clyde said. “Said there’s security footage of him being in the waiting room while one of the people on the list was there too.”

“Doctors see lots of people. Lots of patients in waiting rooms,” I said.

“You know what all those people on that list of names have in common, Flynn?” Clyde asked.

“They’re on this list?” I held up the paper.

“They were all hospitalized for tainted magic poisoning three years ago during the battle to heal magic.”

I looked at the paper. Tried to follow the logic of how that linked up with Eli. “Uh . . . buy a vowel?”

“Davy thinks Eli’s using those people who carried tainted magic as experiments,” Clyde said. “That he’s been picking them out, running tests on them, and then killing them and dumping their bodies.”

“Two things,” I said. “One: Davy does not trust Eli, has good reason not to. Two: Davy considers Eli a monster who likes to carve magic into people to screw with them just like he screwed with Davy. And two-part-two: Collins the Cutter is not that sloppy. If Eli wanted to do tests on someone and not get caught, we’d never find the bodies.”

Terric nodded. “So do you think he wants us to know he’s killing these people? To . . . lead us to him?”

“Are any of the victims altered in any way?” I asked.

“You mean with glyphs?” Dash asked.

“Or any other way.”

“Not that we found,” Clyde answered.

“Well, there were the tattoos,” Dash said.

“What?” I asked.

“Tattoos. Each of them had a tattoo somewhere on his or her body.”

“What kind of tattoos?” Terric asked. “Roses, hearts, serpents?”

“Glyphs.”

Clyde hooked his thumbs in his pockets. “Lots of people have tattoos of spells now. Especially since magic has changed. There’s a bullcrap myth that if you get a tattoo of a certain kind of spell, that spell will be stronger when you cast it.”

“I’m guessing there’s a lot of fertility inks out there,” I said.

He nodded.

“Do you have a list of them, Dash?” Terric asked.

“Fertility spells?” Dash asked, a little startled.

I laughed. “The look on your face! Priceless!”

“No,” Terric said, giving me a scorching glance, “the tattoos on the missing people.”

“That, I have,” Dash said. “Shut up, Shame. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.” Then, to Terric, “Give me a sec.”

“Thanks,” Terric said.

Dash smiled like the sun had just decided to shine on him.

I watched Dash walk off and considered Terric. He had no idea. Zero clue that Mr. Dashiell Spade liked him.

So dense. I wondered if I should give Terric a hint about his secret admirer.

“If it is Eli,” Terric said, back to business before I had a chance to put my thoughts together, “why did he choose those twenty-five out of all those people on the list?”

Clyde shrugged. “Convenience and availability?”

“Naw,” I said. “Eli doesn’t mind doing things the hard way if it means he gets it his way. There’s a reason he picked these specific people. What do we have? Fifteen men, ten women?”

“Yes,” Terric said.

“Do you have files on these people?” I asked. “Photos, medical history, addresses?”

“Yes.” Dash walked back into the room. “We do.” He placed twenty-five files, folded open, across the desk closest to Terric.

“Perfect,” Terric said as he leaned down to look at the files. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Dashiell.”

Dash smiled, and shot me a warning look.

I just blinked innocently.

“Which are still alive?” Terric asked.

Dash pulled away three folders. I noted, with a twinge of anger, one was the ten-year-old girl.

“And what are the tattoos?” Terric asked.

Dash pointed a finger at files with each word his spoke. “Refresh. Enhance. Light. Light. Ground. Impact. Combust. Refresh.”

“Strange collection of spells,” I said. “I can understand Enhance and Refresh. But Ground and Light? Who uses light spells so much they want that tattooed on their body? Ground isn’t even needed anymore. Magic doesn’t ever get so out of control that it needs to be Grounded.”

“Some people just get a tat because they like the look of it,” Dash said. “Even when they don’t know what it means.”

“Okay,” I said, “so that’s one explanation. But if Eli is a part of this, a part of the tattoos, then they are in no way random.”

“Can you put the people in the order of when they went missing?” Terric asked.

“Yep.” Dash moved the files, lining them up in order.

“And the tattoos?” he asked.

“Light, Ground, Light, Refresh, Enhance, Impact. Combust, Refresh.”

“That’s a better setup,” Clyde said. “Cast Light, maybe it doesn’t work, so Ground to keep magic stable, then cast Light again. Maybe it fades too quickly, so you’d need Refresh, then Enhance to make it more focused and then Impact. Combust? Light doesn’t lend to that, Fire does, but okay. And Refresh to keep that strong. Not sure what that can be used for other than knocking the crap out of something or someone.”

“These are tattoos,” Dash said. “Not actual spells. It could be coincidence. You could be seeing order where there really isn’t any.”

“When did they get the tattoos?” Terric asked.

Dash thumbed through the files. “Um . . . other than this older man, Walter, all of the tattoos were fresh ink.”

“How fresh?” I asked.

Dash looked back a couple pages in the file. “On the dead? Coroner said very fresh. Maybe a few weeks or a month at the most.”

“So there’s a chance they were tattooed in preparation for being taken,” Clyde said.

Terric nodded. “They’ve each been missing for more than a few months, but they weren’t all kidnapped on the same day. They were kidnapped weeks, sometimes months apart.”

“Clyde’s theory is starting to look promising,” I said.

“But they’re tattoos,” Dash insisted. “Magic won’t fill a tattoo. It fills a glyph.”

“We don’t think Eli is using magic like normal people,” I said.

“How else can he use magic?”

“He can break it,” Terric said. “He has a Soul Complement. She’s been in a mental institution. Went missing from there. We think he knows where she is. And we know he wants us to rescue her before he kills again.”

Clyde went silent, rolling through just exactly what that all meant.

Exactly what it all meant was that Eli was a weapon now. Potentially just as powerful as Terric and me, or any other matched set.

“So, where is she?” Dash asked.

“We don’t know,” I said.

“And we don’t know where Eli is, other than his possible connection to a hospital,” Dash said.

“Yes,” I said. “But he has technology—probably triggered by magic—that lets him open up holes in space and walk into any room he wants to.”