Back Lash

by Devon Monk

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s still true. You should have. The Russian mob isn’t trying to kill people with magic.”

  “Dead is dead,” she said. “They have guns. They’re obviously not afraid to kill people—with guns or any other way. Walking in there is suicide.”

  Terric and I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what expression we wore, but it must have been the same. She looked between the two of us and shook her head.

  “That’s...freaky.”

  “Speaking of the Russians,” Dash said, changing the subject. “We set up a meeting with them for tonight.”

  “We did what now?” I asked.

  “Fuck,” Terric exhaled. “You contacted them? Without telling me?”

  “Shame was sleeping,” Jolie said, “and you were...well, you weren’t sleeping or doing anything else. We got a hit on a direct line to contact someone up the food chain and we did some work feeling it out.”

  “And?” I asked. “Who are we meeting, where, when?”

  Dash got up, brought the coffee pot over and refilled our cups. “His name’s Art...”

  “Doesn’t sound Russian,” I said.

  He threw me a shut-up look. “As far as we can tell, he’s a couple levels above the guy Jolie was working for. He assures us he can bring this to a resolution to make this problem go away.”

  “Good thing that doesn’t sound like a threat,” I muttered.

  “When?” Terric asked.

  “Seven tonight,” Dash said. “Down at the waterfront.”

  “Plenty of space,” I said.

  “Plenty of witnesses in case something goes sideways,” Jolie said.

  “Who do they want to see?” I asked.

  Jolie shrugged. “Me.”

  “No,” Terric and I said at the same time.

  “I don’t think they care about what you want, Terric,” she said. “If they see you—any of you,” she pointed at each of us, “they’re just going to walk away and kill me quietly. I’ll meet with him. See what kind of deal I can make.”

  “You aren’t going alone,” I said.

  “God, I hope not.” She grimaced. “I don’t want to be some Russian’s target practice. I’m counting on all of you to be there, right beside me. Well, hidden. With guns. Beside me in spirit.”

  I glanced over at Terric. Waited to see if he was going to give up on that scowl. Even I could tell there was no talking her out of it.

  “She’s going to have to deal with this mess she got into,” I said. “She can do it. We’ll be there to make sure nothing happens to her.”

  He inhaled, sipped his coffee. “You will wait for us to come home. You swear you won’t go without us.”

  “Swear,” she said.

  “Where are you going?” Dash asked.

  “To see what Harold Thorne has to say about the dead bodies in town,” Terric said.

  “You and Shame?” Dash asked.

  “About time.” I stood, stretched. Was grateful when nothing snapped.

  “I’ll drive,” Dash said.

  “Nope,” I said. “Not invited.”

  “You were half dead just a few hours ago. Terric does not make good decisions when that happens. If it happens again Y “

  “ Y it won’t. It’s not like I get shot every day.”

  “The last two times you went out of this house you got shot,” Dash said.

  “Coincidence.”

  “I’m driving,” he said again.

  “Terric,” I whined. “Make him listen to me.”

  “He’s driving.” Terric stood. “Get your shoes, Shame. Jolie, promise you’ll stay here.”

  “With all the doors locked,” she said. “You’ll be back before seven?”

  “Yes. This should only take a couple of hours. Be careful. Be safe. If anything goes wrong, call the cops.” He bent, gave her a quick kiss on the top of her head.

  Then he and Dash walked out of the room.

  “Shame?” Jolie asked before I’d taken more than two steps toward my room. “You didn’t see him. These last couple of days.”

  “Who?” I walked down the hall and she followed me.

  “Terric.” She leaned in the doorway to my room, both hands in her back pockets.

  I pulled on socks, boots.

  “I don’t know what kind of thing you have between you,” she said. “Dash told me you’re not lovers.”

  She waited, one eyebrow up.

  “Dash is one hundred percent correct on that.”

  I grabbed a T-shirt out of my drawer. Sniffed it to see how clean it was. Clean enough.

  “It’s just that, well, there’s three of you living here. I’ve seen how Terric and you look at each other. And I can tell Dash and Terric are fighting about something.”

  I tried not to laugh. “They are not fighting about Terric and me being in love. I’m straight. Very,” I made a line with my hand, “straight. He’s in love with Dash.” I laced my boots.

  “They’re fighting over a job thing that might require one or, dear God, please,” I rolled my eyes to the heavens and pressed my palms together, “both of them moving out.”

  “Okay,” she said, “fine. But he...he really cares for you. He blamed himself for you going out there like an idiot and getting shot like an idiot.”

  “Strange. Usually he just blames me for being an idiot.” I gave her a smile.

  She did not return it. “If he gets hurt, if you do some stupid thing to get him hurt, I’m blaming you for anything that happens to him. Do you understand me? Keep yourself safe, keep my brother safe.”

  “One of those things is usually my goal.”

  “Make him absolutely your goal. You don’t want to know what I’ll do to someone who hurts my brother.” She cracked her knuckles just in case I didn’t get her message.

  I got the message.

  “You know Terric can take care of himself.” I shrugged into the T-shirt.

  “So?”

  “It’s just, out of the two of us, he’s the one who usually comes out of these things unbloodied.”

  “He’s missing a finger because of something you two got mixed up in a couple of years ago.”

  Right. I tended to forget about the finger since he didn’t make a big deal about it.

  Also, I felt guilty as hell about it.

  Not that I could have saved him at the time he was losing the finger, since I happened to have been dead then.

  “Did he tell you about that?”

  “Dash did.”

  Mental note: tell Dash to keep his mouth shut.

  “He tell you anything else about that something we got mixed up in?”

  “Only that you both almost died. And that it had something to do with magic. He wouldn’t tell me what.”

  We hadn’t almost died. We had actually died. Terric had been tortured by an asshole named Eli Collins who wanted to weaponize magic—that’s how he lost his finger. We’d killed Eli. Messily.

  And we’d shut down the organization that had turned living breathing people into walking magical bombs.

  That was why magic was locked away. It wasn’t just because Terric and I are Soul Complements—two magic users perfectly matched who can make magic do things it was never intended to do.

  We’d chosen to put magic in a timeout to keep it out of the wrong hands.

  Mankind had proven just how asinine it could be with that kind of power readily available. We thought maybe a few decades away from that temptation would do the world, and all the people in it, some good.

  “Are you going to tell me?” she asked.

  “Nope. It’s old shit that no longer applies to the rules of this world.”

  “This world has rules?”

  “Magic does.”

  “Yeah. Strange how that all changed around the sa
me time you two got out of that mess you got into and then decided to move in together.”

  “Our living arrangements have nothing to do with the laws of magic,” I lied.

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Shame!” Dash called. “You coming?”

  “Get off my back, Mom!” I yelled.

  I gave Jolie a wink. “Lock the doors behind us. Don’t let anyone in.”

  I started down the hall.

  “More rules?”

  I opened the door. Looked back at her. “I’m serious.”

  “Do you get that many visitors?”

  “Only the occasional family member running from the Russian mob. If a sibling shows up, I’d suggest slamming the door in his or her face before they make your life a complicated mess.”

  “Ha-ha.” She took the door out of my hand.

  “Lock it.”

  “I will.”

  And just because she was Terric’s little sister, and we were leaving her alone for the first time since she had hit town, I waited on the other side of the door until I heard the locks turn and the chain slide into place.

  Chapter 11

  We took Terric’s car. Dash drove. Terric sat in the front seat and I lounged in the back.

  “So you two figure out the job in Canada yet?” I asked.

  “We’re not dealing with that in front of you, Shame,” Terric said.

  “Well, you’re not really dealing with it anywhere else either. How long before you both admit that you just want to stay here in Portland?”

  “Job’s in Canada,” Terric said.

  “Job’s anywhere,” I said. “They made this thing called the > Internet’. Real handy. Dash can do the game designing online.”

  “Still not dealing with that now,” Terric said.

  “Seriously, Shame,” Dash said. “We have enough disasters on our hands.”

  “Speaking of which,” I said, “how much did you really tell Jolie?”

  He shrugged. “I kept it general. But it’s not like I can pretend nothing is happening when we’re dragging your barely breathing body into the house and Terric has gone all blue-glow eyes and Faith healer hands.”

  “So she knows he uses magic?”

  “Yes,” Terric said. “We told her both you and I have remnants of magic in our bodies. We told her it was because of all the shit we went through a year ago. And no, we didn’t tell her exactly what that shit was. Just that we’d been a part of taking down some maniacs who had killed a lot of people on their rise to the top and who were doing very bad things with magic.”

  “She let it go at that?”

  He sighed. “Not for long, I’m sure.”

  “And that’s when you and she tracked down the Russians and our boy Harold Thorne?”

  “She knows her shit,” Dash said. “Got into records I would have had a hard time breaking.”

  “Don’t get used to it,” Terric said. “She’s going back to Seattle after this.”

  “I know,” Dash said. “And I think she should. Her family and friends are there. But if the Authority was still a going thing, I would have hired her in a flat second.”

  “Maybe you can take her with you to Canada,” I suggested.

  They both went silent again.

  “Or not,” I said.

  “What else do you know about the men who killed you?” Terric asked, maybe to remind me that I was only alive because he had taken pains to see that I was. “They had wands?”

  “Wands in one hand, guns in the other. Mix of ages, mix of races. All male, I think. They killed the hell out of the guy who I thought was their leader. I’m going to guess there is an opening for upward movement in their organization.”

  “You sure they’re not the Russians?” Dash asked.

  I absently rubbed at one of the bullet holes over my heart. “I don’t know. The accents sounded American. But there’s...I don’t know. Something.”

  “What something?” Dash asked.

  “They were coordinated. Determined. Like they were used to working together in that way. It wasn’t the first time they’d drawn on magic with those wands.”

  “Some kind of splinter group in the Authority gone rogue?” Dash asked.

  “Or a group from outside the Authority,” Terric said. “Government?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think it’s government. Didn’t have that vibe. The leader said they weren’t sloppy. That they were killing with magic and leaving the bodies behind to be found for a reason. You said you thought they wanted to find us. By us do you mean you and me?”

  Terric nodded. “From what Dash and Jolie dug up, I’m assuming they’re looking for how to bring magic back into the world and they think you and I are mixed up in it. They might even think we’re the ones who locked it away.”

  “So you were listening to us,” Dash said. “I thought you were catatonic the last couple nights.”

  “No, I heard you. And Jolie. I just...I just couldn’t answer. Life magic was...it took all of my attention to deal with it.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “They do think we locked it up. Which means either they are very good guessers or someone who knows what we did told them.”

  “The people who know what we did make for a pretty short list,” Terric said.

  I nodded. “Cody Miller. Allie and Zayvion. Davy and Sunny. Detective Stotts and Nola. Maybe Violet and Kevin, and my mum and Hayden.”

  “That’s not exactly a short list,” Dash said.

  “Do you think any of those people would tell someone that we were the ones who locked magic away, Shame?” Terric asked.

  I thought it over. All of those people had fought and nearly died beside us. More than once. To keep the Authority secret. To keep magic safe and out of the hands of people who tried to do horrible things with it.

  So, no. They would never tell anyone that we had locked it up. Not even under torture.

  Well, maybe Cody Miller. He and I had run on the wrong side of the law, not to mention a couple mobs when we were too young to be out past curfew.

  But Cody had made huge sacrifices to make sure magic was safe and locked away, too. For many years, he’d given up his sanity for it.

  I knew he wouldn’t go around talking about what we’d done.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Cody, maybe. No one else. And I don’t think he’d rat us out. He has as much reason to want magic safely out of reach as we do.”

  “Except you both can still reach magic,” Dash said.

  “Yeah, well, it’s possible Cody can too. Not how he used to, but he acted as the focal point for us to fix magic. There’s some chance he might have an > in’ on it.”

  “Have you talked to him lately?” Terric asked.

  “Had a beer with him a couple weeks ago.”

  “And?”

  “Same old Cody.”

  Terric nodded. “It can’t be him. So we’re looking at some kind of rogue group of magic users who just happened to find a way to access magic with wands?”

  “About that,” Dash said, “I’m curious. Can either of you tell when someone is accessing magic?”

  “I can, when they’re throwing it at my head,” I said.

  “No. I mean did you feel someone get into the magic. Break into it?”

  “No,” Terric and I said at the same time.

  “Don’t you think that’s weird?”

  “I think all of this is weird,” I said.

  Terric was silent. Because, yes. That was weird.

  Not that Terric and I had locked magic away with warning bells attached. We were connected to magic, carried magic. If someone was getting into it, we should have felt something.

  Shouldn’t we?

  “Or the magic they’re using isn’t connected to all magic?” I suggested. “It’s stashed aw
ay? Maybe they’ve found a storage of magic?”

  “Like the disks Allie’s dad made to hold magic?” Dash asked. “Those were destroyed, weren’t they?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “So that can’t be it.”

  “Or could it?” Terric asked. “Allie’s father can’t have been the only magic user in history who came up with the idea of portable magic. Maybe that’s where the wands play into all this.”

  Dash glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “Were the wands carrying the magic, or were they pulling magic out from behind the locks you and Terric put on magic?”

  I thought about it. “I’m not sure. You didn’t see anything on the street near me?”

  “Blood and guts,” Terric said.

  “Beside that. The guy who died dropped his wand.”

  “No wands, no bodies,” Dash said. “Nothing but you lying there. And if Terric hadn’t have been with me, I’m not sure I would have seen you. You fell in the shadow of the alley.”

  “Really wish I’d been conscious when you found me.”

  “Really wish you’d been alive,” Terric said quietly.

  Yeah. I was still dealing with the horror of that too.

  “This is it,” Dash said, slowing the car.

  We were on a two-lane highway west of town. We’d been traveling down it for a while, businesses giving way to houses, houses giving way to farms, farms giving way to hilly fields strung with grapevines, and finally, vineyards giving way to tree cover, the occasional glimpse of a creek, and not a lot of anything else.

  An opening between the trees to our right, and a rutted driveway leading deeper into those trees, was the only hint that man had ever wandered that way.

  “No mailbox, no fence,” Terric said. “I thought this was a fortified place.”

  “It’s off the grid,” Dash said. “We don’t know how fortified it might be. But I wouldn’t rule it out. I’ll get the guns out of the trunk.”

  My stomach clenched. For all that I had been killed more than once in my life, for all that my death had far too often come from me being on the wrong side of a weapon’s discharge, it sure didn’t make being on the right side of a firearm any easier.