Devon Monk - Hell Bent

“You killed Victor,” Terric said.

“What?” Eli looked genuinely surprised. “Of course I did. Did you think I would miss my chance to pay him back for the living hell he made of my life? Twenty years he toyed with me. And I had less than two minutes with him. Not enough time to kill him the way I wanted. Not nearly enough time to do to him what he deserved. It hardly seems fair.”

“He was our teacher,” Terric went on. “He was our family.”

“It’s nothing personal,” Eli said. “It’s. Just. Business.” He smiled and spread his hands. “But our business isn’t finished, gentlemen. Is it? This business between you and me. You still owe me.”

I lifted the bat over my shoulder. “You know what, Eli?” I strode toward him, the ground beneath my feet turning from grass to dust, the brush on either side of the road withering, cracking, falling, as I passed. “I’m here to pay.”

I drank all the living things down. Filling up with life. Feeding my anger. My rage.

So I could use it to beat him to a bloody pulp.

Trees groaned and went ash white in the night. Ferns, vine maple, and brush blackened and died.

Eli’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not afraid of you, Shamus.”

“It’s mutual.” I was almost in front of the protective barrier now. “Tell me if you change your mind when I’m breaking you.”

Eli didn’t move.

Terric was at my side, Dessa behind us, her gun still out, scanning the shadows.

“You think you can hit me with a bat?” Eli said. “Did you not see the bullets that couldn’t penetrate that wall?”

The barrier was powered by tech, not magic.

Too bad for him.

I swung for the bastard’s head.

Damn straight he jumped back.

The barrier snapped to life and poured insane amounts of wattage across the open space.

Electricity was energy. Energy was life. I absorbed it. Hot enough it blistered the inside of my mouth. Electricity snapped and arced across my arms and down my back.

I yanked the bat away, turned my head to spit blood. I pulled off my rings and let them drop into the ground. Then I smiled at Eli.

No rings to block my reach to magic. No rings to block my power.

I swung again. Hard.

The barrier sparked, flared, and shattered.

Eli ran.

Emergency lights caught to life inside the structure.

It was a huge, three-story warehouse with arched metal ceiling and steel beams splayed out to the metal walls. Concrete floor, repair stalls to the left separated by more steel beams. The rest of the place was broken up by industrial shelves filled with boxes and things that might belong to a hospital or a machine shop.

The whole place looked like a military silo tipped on its side and nailed into the hill.

I put one foot inside and I knew why Eli had chosen this warehouse. The structure was built like a bunker. There was nothing alive in it, and thick metal and stone made it much more difficult for me to draw on the environment—life and magic—outside the structure.

It didn’t make it impossible.

I reached out for Eli’s life. Ran into some kind of Diversion he’d cast. I could untangle that spell given time.

Or I could beat him to death with my bat.

I preferred the second option.

Terric, Dessa, and I ran, our boots striking in matched rhythm across the warehouse to the hall at the end where Eli had disappeared. Eleanor flew in front of me and pointed up to the catwalks at the edges of the building.

Eli had said there were guns trained on us. He had not lied.

A barrage of bullets rained down.

Terric drew magic up from the floor in a blinding white arc. I called magic up in crackling black flames.

We didn’t draw spells. We didn’t have to.

We could break magic and make it do anything we wanted it to do.

Stop bullets? Yes.

Stop hearts? Yes.

There were eight shooters. Before we made it to the other side of the warehouse, there were eight dead shooters.

Stop Eli?

That was the question, wasn’t it? Because he could make magic do what he wanted it to do too.

Even with the spells he’d cast and the magic he’d broken to protect himself, I could feel his heartbeat. Eli was running for his life.

It would be the last thing he ever did.

The hall was wide enough to drive a truck through. Pipes and wires snaked above our head, down the walls. The floor was metal grating. I heard the thrum of machines and rush of water somewhere far below.

That, I could reach. That, I could use.

“He’s slowing,” I said.

“How far ahead?” Dessa asked.

“Not far,” Terric answered.

Eleanor flashed into the walls, flew out, flashed through them again. Searching for Eli.

The hall ended at a massive metal wall and hatch, bolted together like something made to handle deep-sea pressure.

Eleanor darted toward it, struck the wall, and pulled back, screaming in pain.

Holy shit.

I hadn’t heard her voice in years.

“Don’t!” I said as Terric jogged to the door. “Something’s set here. A trap.”

He didn’t ask me how I knew.

“Do you see something?” Dessa asked.

I cleared my mind. Drew Sight. It was magic that surrounded the door. But no spell I’d ever seen before. It wasn’t formed in a shape, a glyph, an order of some sort. It was just a pulsing blob of magic.

“What?” Dessa asked.

Terric drew a spell: Reveal. Different from Sight, it should show the true form of any physical object.

“What the hell is it?” he asked me.

“I don’t know. It made Eleanor scream.”

“Eleanor?” Dessa glanced around us as if expecting another person to be hiding in the shadows.

“What hurts her?” Terric asked.

“I have no idea.” I looked over at Eleanor. She stood at a distance from the door, her arms crossed over her chest. She was frightened and angry.

“Do you know what it is?” I asked her.

She shook her head.

“Who?” Dessa asked, but Terric was already talking.

“Three heartbeats on the other side of that door.”

“I noticed.”

“Is Eli one of them?” Dessa asked.

“Yes,” Terric and I said together.

“That’s enough for me.” She strode to the hatch, her hand out.

I stood in her way. “No.”

“Move, Shame.”

“No.”

She reached for her gun. “I’m not going to let him get away.”

I wrapped my arm around her waist, pulled her against me, and kissed her. She kissed me back, but her hand didn’t leave her gun.

I pulled away, looked down into those hard blues. “We do this smart, and we do this together,” I said, staring into her grief and pain and anger. “Because we are all making it out of this alive. Do you understand me?”

“Except Eli,” she said. “Eli dies.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Eli dies.”

Terric began a spell, probably Cancel to clear the door so we could go through.

“He’s the only one who dies today,” I said.

Terric reached out with magic. I let go of Dessa and turned to him.

He wasn’t casting Cancel. He was casting Explosion.

Shit.

I grabbed Dessa’s arm and tugged her back down the hall, even as I was supporting the spell Terric was casting. We carved a quick Shield spell into the air to block the explosion and Terric stepped back to join us.

Then we broke magic and sent the spells flying.

The door blew apart with a huge roar, smoke and molten metal shooting toward us and into the room beyond.

We waited a heartbeat, two. Dropped the Shield and strode through the smoke and rubble into the room.

“We didn’t think you would come this far,” a man’s voice said. “We hoped you might, but never thought you could.” I didn’t recognize the voice. It carried a soft burr, like the speaker was practiced at standing on a stage and reading Shakespeare. “But we underestimated both of you, didn’t we, Mr. Conley and Mr. Flynn?”