by Devon Monk
“Blow me, Conley.” I flopped back and pulled a pillow over my head.
Terric may have said something, but if he did, I didn’t hear it.
Even though he shut the door behind him, I could feel the confusion of emotions he wrestled. Love and worry about Dash. Love and worry for Jolie.
Jesus. Man was all love and worry.
And yeah, a part of me wanted to just slip out and fix this Russian problem, and the Canada job problem without Terric.
I wasn’t Jolie’s brother or Dash’s lover. They could be mad at me all they wanted and it wouldn’t chew me up like it was chewing up Terric.
When had I started caring about things like that? Caring about Terric’s hurt feelings?
Probably when the connection between us had turned into a two-way street.
Lucky me.
The phone in my pocket buzzed. I dug it out and put it to my ear, still under the pillow.
“What?”
“Manners, Shamus. Manners,” Jak chided.
I shoved the pillow off my face. “Hey, Jak. I never gave you this number.”
“I know how to find what I need.”
She did. And I loved that about her.
“Thought you had a card game tonight,” I said. “Did you come up short and need me to bail you out?”
“I don’t come up short in anything I do. And if I did, I wouldn’t call on a scrawny devil like you.”
I made small hurt sound. “Scrawny?”
“Boy, you should eat a sandwich once in a while.”
“I’ll put it on the calendar. Did you find what I need?”
She hesitated. When she spoke, her voice was a careful construction of cheer. “Come on by tonight. I’ll be at the shop. I’ll tell you there.”
Pretty sure she was lying. Or distressed.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Everything will be. Just come by. I’ll tell you what I know, and then we’ll be done with all this, right?”
All this?
“Sure,” I said. “Right.”
I glanced at the bedside clock. It was six thirty and wouldn’t be dark for a couple hours yet. “You there now?”
“I will be by the time you are.”
“Good.”
I pocketed the phone, pushed up on my feet and grabbed the hoodie off the floor where I’d tossed it. It had a couple holes in it and the sleeve was soaked with blood.
I lobbed it in the general direction of the bathroom hamper. Strode into the hall. Terric, Dash, and Jolie were in the living room, talking.
Good.
I ducked into Terric and Dash’s room.
A little smaller than my room, it was still a large space. Unlike my room which looked like I’d bought it pre-furnished and hadn’t bothered with it since, their room actually reflected the two of them.
The room was clean, of course. I was surprised to see they’d painted the walls a soft cream. I didn’t remember them painting it. Terric’s art and some of Dash’s pieces covered those walls in neat black frames.
Bed was new, another addition I hadn’t noticed, and covered in a deep blue, cream, and burgundy quilt. A small mountain of mismatched pillows crowded the carved wood and leather headboard.
Plants hung by the window, more on a small marble table by the bathroom door, and a couple others on the dressers.
I shook my head. When the hell had Terric crashing here because “I owed him” turned into Dash and him making it their home?
Apparently sometime in the last year or so that they’d been living here.
Imagine that.
I found what I was looking for—Terric’s pea coat hanging on a coat rack in the corner behind the door.
Checked the pockets for money—unfortunately, nothing—then shrugged into it.
Strolled through the living room where Dash and Jolie were playing cards over the coffee table. Terric perched on the arm of the couch next to Jolie, watching.
“Where?” he asked without looking up as I breezed past him.
“Out. Thanks for the coat.”
“If you get blood on that Y “
I slammed the door on the rest of his threat.
Night was coming on cold, but I felt the chill of something more than old winter storms in the air. I paused, one hand on the car door handle, my head tipped, listening.
Nothing but traffic and the wind stirring fir needles high above my head.
Maybe it was just nerves since, hey, I had been shot today, but I felt the need to make sure there was no one around the house.
I reached out with Death magic, just the lightest touch to sweep the heartbeats around the place. Dash, Jolie, Terric—who was curious as to why I was checking on them. Neighbors up the road a bit, and down. All normal. All the usual safe, non-killing people who should be here.
Good.
It took no time to get to Jak’s place.
The shop looked closed except for a dull yellow light coming through the stained glass windows. I walked up to the main door, tried it.
Open. Walked in.
“Jak?” I called. I didn’t walk any farther down the blind aisles because I am not that stupid.
“Up here, Shamus. Why are you skulking around? Come in.”
I let the door close behind me, glanced through the thin window out to the street. Nothing there. No one there.
Nothing my eyes could see.
Still, I was twitchy as hell.
“You gonna make me wait all night?” she asked. “I have a baby shower to get to in fifteen minutes.”
I tucked hands in coat pockets and wove through the clutter up to the register where Jak sat. She’d traded her sequined shirt for one made of nothing but layers of pink feathers that fluffed with every breath she took.
“Stop staring at my bosom.”
“Yes, Ma’am.” I drew my eyes up to hers. “So. What did you find?”
“Those two dead men? Didn’t have any enemies...well, not the kill-and-leave-you-in-an- alley sort of enemies. One had an ex-wife, but she went off and happily remarried twenty years ago.”
“Did you get names on them?”
“Younger thinner man is Mike Durnam. He was a dentist with two offices. Other one is Doctor Raymond Tandy.”
“Both medical guys?”
“Doctor of psychology.”
“So a dentist and a psychologist. Who had the ex-wife?”
“Psychologist.”
“And when you say they didn’t have any enemies?”
“Honey, a squeegee couldn’t scrape dirt off them. Checked through their social circles. Don’t see anyone they have in common.” She slid a small piece of paper with their names across the counter to me.
I picked it up, stuffed it in my jeans pocket.
“Thanks. This will help.” I tapped my knuckles on the counter top, thinking. Took a breath. Didn’t smell oranges, though I’m not sure why I thought that was important.
“You didn’t look any deeper into their affairs did you?”
“You didn’t pay me to. As a matter of fact, you didn’t pay me to look this deep.” She raised one eyebrow, expectantly.
“Money.” I grinned. “I was wondering when you’d ask me for it.”
“I don’t need money,” she said. “I want your word.”
“On?”
“You won’t mix up Claire or her family in any of this.”
I studied her. Tense at the corners of her eyes and mouth, fingers clenched in a fist. She looked worried. As well she should. If she had feelers out in enough places, she had a very good idea of exactly the things I’d been through, the things I had done in the past. She had a feel for just how dangerous those things were.
Jak had seen some bad years. I didn’t doubt her when she’d told me she was retired. I hoped I hadn’t pulled her back into so
mething I’d need to get her out of.
“I promise you I will not let Claire, her family, or you be affected by any part of this. No one knows I came here. No one has to know. You have my word.”
She watched me for a moment, her gaze flicking across my face. “Honey, someone always knows something. I do trust you, Shamus. And I am trusting you in this.”
“Good choice. Do me a favor—forget I ever came here.”
She chuckled with some relief. “I forgot about this the moment you walked in my door. Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad to see you. But I’d rather you don’t come asking me these kinds of questions again.”
“Understood.”
“Then you take care of yourself. Don’t let those houseboys of yours tame you too much.”
Houseboys?
I laughed and headed to the door. “It would be amusing to watch them try.”
I pushed out into the falling dusk. Made it half way to the car before the chill down my spine turned into a spike in my gut.
Someone was watching me.
Now.
Steady finger on a trigger. More than one finger. More than one heartbeat, slow. Even. Six. Six people.
Holy shit. Had Jak set me up for an ambush?
I stopped beside my car, hands down, fingers pointed at the pavement beneath which still flowed the magic I wanted. Magic I could reach, I could use. Magic that was more than just a weapon in my hand.
Magic that flowed in my blood.
Six men. On the street. Moving my way. Shadows between buildings. Nothing more than quick glimpses out of the corners of my eyes.
Could be any half dozen men who wanted me dead. I’d made plenty of enemies.
Could be the Russians. Although why they’d catch up with me here instead of my house, didn’t make sense.
“I’m giving you this chance to turn away now,” I said loud enough the shadows would hear me. “One chance, mates.”
I felt five of them pause. From the rhythm of the heartbeat, one did not. So he’d be the leader.
I waited.
Magic was fast, but bullets were faster.
It would take a lot of bullets to kill me. Even if they had that many bullets and intended to use them, I thought Death magic might just drag me back from the brink and force me to live whether my body liked it or not.
So, I had that hell scenario going for me.
“We just want information, Mr. Flynn.” Leader stepped out from the shadows of the corner building in front of me, right hand free, left hand in the pocket of his coat.
Gun? Maybe.
White guy. My age or younger. Medium build. Slight Texan accent. So I guessed not Russian.
“Information doesn’t require firearms,” I said.
“Perhaps you do,” he answered.
He made no move. Just waited. All heartbeats in the area remained calm.
They weren’t worried about me. Not enough to get their pulse rates up.
Good. That meant they didn’t know me very well.
I put my hands out to both sides and slowly walked toward the guy. “I can be a very reasonable man. I actually prefer talk over taking a bullet. I’m all for agreeing that’s what we’re going to do here.”
I wanted to get closer to him. Magic worked best when I put my hands on people. Back before it had been broken, you could throw a spell across half a city. But locking it away had changed the rules for how Terric and I could use it too.
We needed physical contact to do our worst.
That hadn’t been much of a problem for me when I was killing one-on-one. But six against one weren’t odds I liked.
“What’s your name, mate?” I asked.
“Stop right there, or they’ll shoot.”
I stopped. About twenty feet away from him. I could feel four guys staked out on either side of the street parallel to me, the sixth behind me on the left. Heartbeats drumming. Steady, steady.
“All right,” I said. “I’m standing here talking. Talk.”
“How can we break into magic?”
“Excuse me?”
“The wall you and Mr. Conley erected around magic must come down. We want to know how to break that wall.”
“Listen, pal. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“But you do. A year ago, you and Mr. Conley fought a covert government program that would have weaponized magic. You closed magic behind a door no one can find and no one can open. If you tell us how to find that door...how to unlock that door...you will come to no harm.”
“Like Lyle Carpenter came to no harm? And Mike Durnam and Raymond Tandy came to no harm? That kind of no harm?”
His heartbeat kicked up fast. Faster. So did the pulse of the five thugs around us.
They hadn’t expected me to know that. Interesting.
“That was your handiwork, wasn’t it?” I took a couple steps forward. “Did you ask them how to unlock magic too? Did they tell you just enough to get themselves killed for it?”
That was the million dollar question that didn’t add up. This joker wanted to know how to access magic. But whoever had killed those men had killed them with magic.
Someone knew how to get at it. Someone was getting at it.
And if it wasn’t these assholes, then that meant there were some other assholes out there I had to track down.
“We are searching for magic, Mr. Flynn. Any trail. No one will stand in our way of finding it.”
“Magic’s gone.”
He smiled. It was a heartless thing.
“We both know that’s not true. There’s enough magic in this world to injure. Enough to kill. You just said so yourself.”
“Littering the city with corpses will get you noticed and dead,” I said. “Why be that sloppy? A bullet would have blended in with every other murder. Why be so obvious with the magic kills?”
“We are looking for the person responsible for locking magic away. And here you are, Shamus Flynn, easy as that.”
He drew his left hand out of his pocket. That was not a gun in his hand.
I had no idea what it was. It looked like a wooden stick. A pointer? A wand?
Seriously? A wand ?
There are no wizards in this world, Mr. Potter.
Time did a weird thing.
No. Magic did a weird thing with time.
Split seconds slowed, crawled.
Death magic roared inside of me, rage, filling my bones and flesh with the glorious bladed heat of magic looking for something, anything to devour.
The wizard pointed the stick at me and chanted.
Fuck the what?
Magic doesn’t follow chants. Magic only shows up for duty if the magic user draws a glyph for it to fill. And then magic only enacts the nature of that glyph.
No chanting, no fucking wizards or wavy-wanding necessary.
But that man, and that wand, were channeling magic. A dark, sickening magic I’d never felt before. I didn’t know how he was tapping it. Hell, I didn’t even know where he was drawing it from.
I so didn’t care.
I threw myself at him, punched his face.
The air filled with bullets and the stench of burnt oranges.
I came down hard on top of the guy.
He swung at me with the wand in his fist. Kicked to get free.
I caught his wrist, broke it. He yelled.
The wand fell onto his chest, then the sidewalk. I hauled him up into a choke hold, between me and the gunmen. Didn’t track where the wand went.
They had said they were looking for magic, but they obviously already had it. Or maybe they only had some of it and they wanted more.
“Throw the guns out here. All of them,” I said, holding the guy as my shield. “Do it and I’ll let him go. Keep even one bullet on your body—I’ll kill him. Then I’ll kill each and e
very one of you.”
Silence.
Death magic rolled in me, lashed out at the guy.
He yelled.
“I am not fucking around,” I growled into his ear. “Call off your dogs. Now.”
He lifted his hand to signal the men.
They stepped out of the shadows of the buildings. Five in total. Guns in one hand, wands in the other.
Bloody hell.
They chanted. Raised wands. Raised guns.
And fired.
The guy in my arms screamed through the first five or six shots that hit him. Then he stopped breathing and went silent, heavy, dead.
The gunmen unloaded their clips as I dragged the dead guy with me back toward a notch in the alley for cover.
Didn’t make it.
Bullets hit my shoulder, broke my collar bone, shattered ribs in my chest.
Slick, hot blood sprayed over my face, stomach.
My arms went numb. Then legs. I stumbled.
Death magic, somewhere at a far distance, caught fire.
The world rock-a-byed sideways, taking me down.
Then pain kicked the hell out of whatever was left of me and everything went black.
Chapter 9
Light.
Pain.
Screaming.
I was under dark water. Drowning.
Hands broke through. Grabbed me. Dragged me up.
Into the light.
Into the pain.
I yelled.
“...got you. Easy. Easy.”
Terric’s voice.
Terric’s hands on my face. On my chest.
I blinked away blood and blackout.
Terric leaning above me, eyes filled with fury and magic.
I tried to talk. He shook his head. “You’re okay. You’re going to be okay now.”
His voice was far away and garbled. I thought I felt the world humming beneath us. Were we moving? Were we in a car? Then everything slipped away again.
~~~
Someone had tucked me into a soft blanket. Soft bed, too. Pillow under my head. I was warm. I didn’t hurt. I didn’t feel much of anything, really.
All I wanted was to slip back into sleep before anything changed, but I heard someone inhale, then the crack of a chair adjusting as that person moved.
