Devon Monk - Stone Cold

I was breathing hard after the first fifteen minutes. By the hour mark, I was covered in sweat, shaking, and so hungry I’d pulled Eleanor and Sunny up on such a tight leash they were almost standing in the same space with me. Only Hayden’s arm around my waist was keeping me on my feet.

Terric seemed to be doing pretty well so far. But then it wasn’t the prep for this spell that was going to knock his teeth out. It was when I poured magic into it.

“Almost done,” Cody said. “Just tie that line into the diagonal arc. Yes, that one.” He paused. “Okay, Shame, I think you have it, his UnClosing. Hayden, do you see anything we missed?”

He took his time looking through the glyph I had carved, a glyph that hovered in a milky white light in front of me like the flight paths of air traffic control over La Guardia.

“It’s good,” he said. “For what it is. Eli is no Closer. I wouldn’t know how to make it better.”

“So, cast?” I asked through my teeth. I was glad they were being extra careful, but I was counting down the seconds of consciousness here.

Terric was the one who answered. “Cast it, Shame.”

I held his gaze with my own. Saw the trust implicit there and the feelings he had for me: friendship, caring, maybe hope. God, had we ever been that innocent?

“See you on the other side, mate,” I whispered.

I drew on magic from beneath the inn, opened my hand wide, and let the magic fill the lines of the spell. It caught like a lit fuse, hot red liquid flowing through the glyph so quickly I barely had time to register that the spell was charged before it whipped out and wrapped Terric from head to boot.

He yelled, stiffened. Davy caught him as he fell, slowing his descent to the floor as he eased him down.

Terric was still yelling.

I had done it wrong. Cast wrong. Drawn it wrong. Somehow I’d connected the spell to me, as I had connected it to him.

I could feel his mind breaking open, dull teeth tearing at my body, my mind. I could see his memories. Not just the torture, not just the last few years, but all of his past. All of the things he’d been through with me, without me. All the things he’d endured because of me.

Jesus. How did anyone go on living after that?

“Shame?” Someone was shouting, their voice muffled and distant. “Shame!”

A hard slap, maybe two, landed across my face. Got my attention.

Hayden was looking down at me. Not worried. Angry. “Are you in there? Are you listening to me, Shamus?”

Eleanor was looking down at me too. That must have been the second slap.

“I’m here.” My voice sounded so far away and strange, the very weirdness of it pulled me up to full awareness, sweating.

I was in the middle of Terric’s head. Got the full double-vision thing of looking out of his eyes—he was currently staring at Dash, who looked worried for Terric—and out of mine, where Hayden still had on his ass-whupping glare.

Story of my life: Something goes down, everyone frets over Terric and blames me.

Terric laughed, and I could feel it, feel his laugh on my brain walls. “You think you’re the one they blame?” he asked.

“Stop listening to me.”

“Stop whining in my head.”

“Your—?” I swore, then turned to look at him. He was sitting on the floor, Dash on one side, Cody on the other. Hayden was standing next to me, and Eleanor was at my left, kneeling beside me.

When I looked at Terric, I got that mirror-in-a-mirror sensation. I was looking at him while he was looking at me, while I was looking at me from him, looking at me from me.

“How the hell do Allie and Z do this shit?” I asked.

Terric bit his bottom lip, which I realized was bloody and swelling from all the screaming and whatnot that had just gone on.

“For one thing, they want to be connected this close,” he said. “But for us . . .”

“This is a bad idea,” I agreed. “I’ll step back if you step back. And no nicking the valuables, on the way out, mate.”

He smiled and I got a weird wash of him thinking I was adorable when I assed around and pretended not to be terrified.

Way too much information for me. I wasn’t built to know what a real human heart felt. Pretty sure if I ever had to deal with real emotion any real person should experience, I’d snap in half.

“Please,” he said. “And I always thought I was the drama queen.”

“Done being your brain buddy. Just shush up and step back.”

No one else in the room seemed to have anything to add to the conversation.

I didn’t know how much of what we were saying was going on in our minds, and how much was actually coming out as words.

I had cast magic, UnClosed Terric . . . I hoped . . . and we’d ended up sunk knee-deep in the mud of each other’s minds.

“This might hurt,” he said.

“I’d be surprised if it didn’t.”

There was a one-two-three countdown, a holding of breath and gritting of teeth, and then we both jumped back into our own thought space.

“Son of a bitch,” I panted. Terric just groaned.

“. . . coming, Shame,” someone was saying. I blinked, looked around. Dash was hanging up his phone. “Here. We have to get moving.”

“Where? Who? What?” I said. Hayden was already hauling me up to my feet. After a couple steps I finally got the hang of feet and legs and walking.

There were too many people in the room doing too many things: Hayden, Terric, Cody, Dash, Mum, Davy.

We were headed to the door.

The air sizzled and popped. I knew that sound—had last heard it in my kitchen before Eli had killed us.

“Gate,” I yelled.

And then there was chaos.

Three men—drones—stepped out of nowhere, a flash of light pouring through the room. They stood with their hands extended, fingers and thumbs together, focusing magic.

“Down! Down,” I shouted.

Magic pounded through the air in a blast of heat. I lifted my hands in a Block spell, but I was too unfocused to cast, or even begin to pull a spell together.

Time stopped for a moment, my heart, all the people in the room, the magic, stopped.

I saw my mom falling, the spell the drones had cast—Impact—burning a fire through her. Hayden was midstep, trying to reach her, trying to block the magic with his own body.

Too late.

Terric was just closing off the line of a Cancel spell, impressive since he had to be at least as rattled as I was, and both Eleanor and Sunny were blank-eyed and frozen in place.

Davy was nowhere to be seen, maybe already out the front door.

Dash was halfway through firing his gun, not at the drones, but at the man I saw behind them, the man standing in the hole in space.

Eli. He waited for me to make eye contact. When I did, he nodded and held up something in his hand. A disk.

“Come and get me, dead man,” he said. Behind him was a house. A manor. I knew that place.

He flipped the disk and caught it in his fist.

Hammer and steel cracked like a broken gong as he canceled the Time spell he had cast. Time cranked up again; the hole in space burned into itself, closing Eli away and leaving the drones behind.

Magic sizzled through the air toward Mum, completing the spell the drones had cast.

She fell.

Dash’s bullets hit one drone in the chest, the next in the neck. Terric’s spell ignited and sucked down all the magic in the room.

I busted the chains on Death inside me and let it have its due.

Death drank down the lives of all three drones, who screamed, and fell, and died.

I turned. Mum was on the floor, Hayden calling her name. She wasn’t breathing.

Cody ran to her and started CPR.

I stood there, numb, frozen. I watched her spirit, her soul, lift up out of her body. She looked around, confused.