White Trash Warlock

by White Trash Warlock [retail]

  Annie glowed. The pain in the seal grew. Adam burned with her.

  Too much. Too much.

  He wasn’t sure which of them thought it as Silver stopped the car.

  The dragon, wounded, but not fatally, retreated.

  She’d taken a small measure of its magic, but still it was—

  Annie exploded into light.

  The wave of force tore over Adam’s defenses. He felt Silver’s ward wrap the car, buffering the magic. The wave passed. Annie lay on the road.

  The passenger door opened. Vic stepped out.

  Blackness gathered around him, inky and creeping.

  He didn’t look like the other Reapers, not exactly. White-dotted lines made patterns, flowers and geometric shapes, on his robe.

  Vic drew his baton, extended it, and it kept growing. The scythe blade swept open, cold and pale like true moonlight.

  Adam watched Vic kneel over Annie, rise, and sweep her with the scythe.

  Something fluttering, made of light, like a bird or butterfly, rose. It landed on Vic’s open palm. He closed it, and he was himself again.

  Annie.

  She was gone.

  43

  Bobby

  Ten of the bulbs remained lit. Then nine. One by one, they dimmed and died. Bobby knew where he was now. This was Liberty House, the real Liberty House, as Adam had seen it. He followed echoes of laughter, avoided the shouts of madness. Above all, he kept his distance from the double doors and the darkness that lay beyond them. He still wasn’t hungry. Hadn’t needed to pee. He had some tenuous awareness of his body, but it felt faint. Occasionally there were small jabs of pain, needles, he suspected. That was his only real sense of time changing, of the world outside his prison.

  He’d tried praying, something he hadn’t done since he was little. He’d called to Adam, closed his eyes and said his brother’s name, over and over. The one time he’d had magic, the ability to speak silently with his mother, he’d done something horrible with it and lost it forever.

  Adam did not come. His mother did not come.

  As alone as he felt, he did not want Mrs. Pearce, whatever she really was, to return.

  Robert turned another corner and found Annie standing there. She glowed. She wore jeans, a T-shirt, and looked so much more like herself than she had in a long time.

  “Robert,” she said with a beaming smile.

  “Is it really you?” he asked. “Are you dead too?”

  “You’re not dead,” she said. “Just sleeping.”

  She examined the water-stained walls, made a disgusted face. He couldn’t really blame her.

  “But I can’t wake up,” he said. “I’ve been trying. And the lights are going out.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, offering him a hand. “I brought what you need.”

  She stretched out a palm full of cotton candy. Well it looked like cotton candy, but it glowed, clung to her fingertips in wisps.

  Bobby reached for it, for her, but paused just shy of taking her hand.

  “It’s magic,” he said.

  “It’s life,” she stressed, pressing it toward him.

  “Whose?” he asked, reaching, tentatively, but not touching.

  So many dreams, of their future together, their children. It had all gone wrong.

  “I can’t give it back,” she said, bright eyes watery. “But I can at least do some good with it.”

  Robert chewed his lip. He’d chosen normal. He’d denied this part of himself his entire adult life. He’d wanted nothing to do with the shadows and magic since he’d killed his father at his mother’s silent urging. The light flickered at her fingertips, curling away in wisps, a dimming warmth he did not have long to seize.

  “I can’t hold it forever,” she said. “You have to decide.”

  “If I take that, I’ll be like Adam,” he said. The door to that world might never close.

  “Would that be so bad?” she asked. “He loves you, your brother. And you love him.”

  “I . . .”

  “And he needs you. I need you. Come back to us. Come home.”

  She was right. He had to live. The lights were going out. This was his chance. He could still make things right with Adam, show Annie how much he loved her.

  Tears welling in his eyes, Robert—Bobby—took her hand.

  He felt it, the moment the light poured into him. She had lied.

  “Annie?” he asked, looking into her bright eyes.

  “Live,” she said, smiling as the lights winked out. “Live for me.”

  He woke, choking, gasping. Everything felt so stiff, his limbs and head were so heavy, but he felt—the catheter, the leads for the monitors. He was alive.

  “Bobby?” a voice asked.

  Robert opened his eyes.

  Adam sat beside him. His eyes were sunken. He looked rough, beaten.

  “You look like a raccoon,” Bobby said.

  “And you look like thirty miles of bad road,” Adam snipped, but he smiled.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “Getting a smoke. Not happy she has to cross the street from the hospital to do it.” Adam opened his mouth to speak, but he choked on the words, finally managed to say, “Annie . . .”

  “I know,” Bobby said. “I saw her.”

  Adam squeezed his eyes shut.

  “So much happened,” Adam said. “I have so much I have to tell you.”

  “Me too,” Bobby said. “I need to tell you that I’m sorry, and I need to tell you about Dad.”

  44

  Adam

  Adam would get answers. Sue still wasn’t taking his calls. The need to know why she hadn’t told him made him put in very long days at Jesse’s shop.

  His brother and mother circled the Cutlass now. Bobby didn’t smile. He hadn’t smiled since he’d woken up. He wore black grief like a shroud of tar slow and clinging. Perhaps Adam’s brother hadn’t loved his wife the way that Adam loved Vic, not that he’d drop the L-word into conversation anytime soon, but Adam knew he’d been wrong to doubt Bobby’s feelings.

  They’d buried her body on the Other Side, on Lookout Mountain. She’d have a dragon to watch over there, and no one would ever be fool enough to disturb her. It was easier than the questions. No one would blame Bobby. The elves had constructed a tidy paper trail of her leaving him.

  “Well?” Adam asked, resisting the urge to wring his hands. “How’d I do?”

  “It looks a lot better than before,” Bobby admitted, drawing Adam back to the driveway. “You did all this yourself?”

  Adam scratched the back of his head.

  “Jesse helped me, especially with the body and the paint.”

  When he wasn’t on the clock, he’d replaced the smashed panels and the hood. He’d scrounged for parts across three states, calling salvage yards and searching for them online.

  Vic had ridden out with Adam, borrowing Jesse’s old truck, to fetch pieces from Kansas and New Mexico. Cleared for the streets, he’d go back to his day job soon. So far he hadn’t taken another soul. And he’d gone home, back to his apartment in Capitol Hill. It was small and sparse. Adam visited him there, though he had yet to stay the night.

  Things between them were cool since Annie, and Adam did not blame Vic for that. He had no one to blame for anything except Death herself.

  The car looked good, better even, but it wouldn’t win any awards for accurate restoration.

  “We couldn’t match the paint,” Adam said. “They don’t make that color anymore.”

  “I like the black better,” Bobby said.

  Adam had to agree. The new paint had an inky shine.

  “Mom, what do you think?”

  Tilla circled the car at distance, nibbling her lip. She’d been quiet since Bobby had woken.

  Ad
am knew he’d never bridge the distance between them. They’d each come as far as they could. But she liked Vic, and she took care of Bobby.

  She’d go home soon, to guard Dad’s secret grave. Adam would go with her. He had to know, though he worried that what he had with Vic wouldn’t survive the distance. He hoped it would. He hoped he’d learn what he had to, make his peace with Sue, and find the warlock, the other warlock, for Seamus and for Annie. Because the note had lied.

  There’s still time to save her.

  Adam pressed a hand to his chest. The pain felt like a ring around his heart, a tension. He would live it. It would remind him that magic had a cost.

  He’d come all this way, hoped to solve a mystery. Now he only had a new one. His dad could not be the warlock, the dark druid. His dad had died.

  Bobby had killed him, to save Adam, and the ache that put in his heart was almost as bad, sometimes, as the wound he’d inflicted on himself. Bobby—Robert—had saved his life.

  His mother and brother’s secret was laid bare, to Adam at least. Maybe, just maybe, the three of them could start to heal some of the space between them.

  “Say something, Mom,” Bobby prompted, pulling Adam back to the moment.

  “I was just thinking that I always found it strange how much you loved this car,” she said to Adam.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Well you were conceived in it,” she said, her face cracking with a faint, wistful smile.

  Adam made a sound between “yuck” and “yeargh.”

  Maybe he didn’t need their family to be as open and talkative as Vic’s after all.

  “Maybe you can find new seats,” Bobby said, a little smile of his own dawning.

  Adam thought that maybe, just maybe, they would be all right. In time. When the grief lessened.

  The sense of it, the strange feeling of almost peace, followed Adam downstairs. It was over. For now.

  With the Cutlass rebuilt, he’d put as much to bed as he could before he talked to Sue. He felt like sleeping for a week. Vic had the day off tomorrow. They could spend some time before Adam left.

  Adam reached the basement, started unbuttoning his blue coveralls from the shop, when he spied a shadow, something dark, curled at the foot of the bed.

  “Spider?” he asked.

  The black cat opened its green eyes and lifted its head.

  All the weariness rushed out of him.

  “Is Sue okay?” he asked.

  The cat meowed, long and sad, then vanished.

  Cold dread pulsed through Adam as dialed the trailer. No answer.

  He started throwing his clothes into his backpack.

  If he drove straight through, he’d be there in twelve hours, ten if he drove like an elf. He’d call again and again until he heard her say she was all right.

  Adam knew she wasn’t.

  Acknowledgments

  The list of people who helped bring Adam’s story to you is long. Some of the biggest thanks go to the following people. I owe them so much for bringing a lifelong dream into reality.

  My incredible agents, Lesley Sabga and Nicole Resciniti. To everyone at Blackstone, especially Rick Bleiweiss, who saw what I was trying to do with this book. To Marco Palmieri and Deirdre Curley for edits. To Mandy Earles and everyone in marketing. To Sean Thomas for the incredible cover. To James Persichetti, who leveled me up.

  My partner, Brian McNees, who baked phrases from this book into fortune cookies for Valentine’s Day.

  To the friends and family who stood by me and believed in this bloody little windup toy of a book: Sara Albert, Mary Block, Marnie Christenson, Stephen Chubb, Nikki Cimino, Angela Del Ponte, Carisa Goho, Debby Haude, Adrian Hellberg, Suzanne Johnson, Lisa Manglass, Lynn McCormick, Bob McNees, Barbara Middleton, Neva Murphy, Richard Patrick, Lauren Piner, Bonner Slayton, Kaleb Slayton, Brian Staley, Alfred Utton, and Aaron Wood.

  My aunt, Bonita Dyess, who first sparked my love of writing.

  The amazing soon-to-be published writers, critique partners, and editors in my life: Elly, Amanda Barrentine, Cat Clyne, Katie Day, B. D. Ervin, Liz Freed, S. J. Kemsley, Erin Kennemer, Kim Klimek, Kim Lajevardi, Chad Mathine, David Myer, Amanda O’Connell, M. B. Partlow, Lee Sandwina, Anitra Van Prooyen, and Nikki VanRy.

  Everyone at Pikes Peak Writers and Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers.

  My rock stars, whose books I love: Rena Barron, Carol Berg, Lisa Brown Roberts, Veronica R. Calisto, Gail Carriger, Kat Cho, Kameron Claire, Helen Corcoran, Hilary Davidson, Alex Harrow, Sara J. Henry, Angie Hodapp, Josi Kilpack, Shannon Lawrence, Jenna Lincoln, Heather McCorkle, Axie Oh, Cecy Robson, M. R. Rutter, Angela Sylvaine, Mason J. Torall, Aimie Trumbly Runyan, Danica Winters, and Barbara Ann Wright.

  And finally, those I’ve lost. I miss you every day: My grandmothers—Tilla Slayton, who read everything, and Juanita Dyess, who let me build worlds. Summit, the paw-shaped scar on my heart.