Hell Bent

by Devon Monk

It lifted and passed through the windshield of the car, leaving a thin thread of the spell connected to the dash as it pulled ahead of the hood like a dog tugging a leash.

  Terric followed it, the spell bobbing or leaning left or right, but never out of our sight. One of the advantages to Track was it would find a route that feet or wheels could follow, not just drift off over treetops or rivers like some of the other less specific Direction spells.

  The spell led us up the hill and then shot left, hard.

  Terric slowed.

  “Is there a road over there?” I asked.

  “Looks like a maintenance road.”

  Track continued to pull that way. So we went that way. Up a steep hill and then twisting down it, trees and underbrush close enough they slapped the concrete dust off the car.

  The road ended at a wide warehouse built into the hill, only the first couple feet of it visible before it was swallowed by darkness, stone, and foliage.

  A set of three windows two stories up were dark, and in the car’s headlights, I could make out a triple-wide door.

  “Storage?” Dessa asked.

  “Maybe equipment repair,” Terric said.

  The Track spell had drifted down and was now perched at the front of the car like a many-legged glowing hood ornament. It wasn’t doing anything because it didn’t need to track Eli anymore. It had found him.

  “He’s in there,” I said.

  “What are we going—” Dessa’s words were cut short. The warehouse door was opening, yawning up in one big slab to reveal the dimly lit interior.

  I squinted to see through the darkness. The headlights weren’t doing much more than throwing shadows into shadows.

  Then a man walked forward to the edge of the open doorway, strode into the headlights, and stared straight at us, shaking his head in disappointment.

  Eli Collins.

  Chapter 28

  “Get out of the car, Terric, Shame, and it’s Dessa, isn’t it?” Eli said distractedly. “There are guns aimed at you that could blow you apart before you blink.”

  Terric and I opened our doors and stepped out. I brought the baseball bat with me. Yes, I still had the gun too. Dessa got out a moment after us, probably loading the weapons on her body.

  Eleanor drifted at a distance from me, which was just short of the warehouse. She was bound to me and couldn’t move into the warehouse to look around unless I moved toward Eli.

  “I gave you time,” Eli said. “A full day! And I gave you clues. So many clues. But have you found her? No! You have failed me. You have failed us all. She’ll die because of you, Shame.”

  Dessa stepped to one side of me, pulled her gun, and fired several rounds at Eli.

  He didn’t even flinch. The bullets hit the air about three feet in front of him, slowed, stopped, and fell to the ground.

  “Just put it away, Ms. Leeds,” he said. “This isn’t a place for childish toys.”

  “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 dart
ed 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?”

  The room was a quarter the size of the warehouse, but would still take a jog to get across. It was lit to obscure the walls, ceiling, and the lumps of machinery it contained. I thought it might have originally been used as a generator room.

  Eli stood about a third of the way across the room. He had something metal in his hand that looked like a controller of some sort. Chained to the wall at the far end of the room was Davy. He was naked and unconscious, held down by the neck, wrists, ankles.

  The glyphs carved into his chest, down his stomach, and over his arms pumped with a sluggish light—magic—pushing and pooling there. I didn’t know what they were using Davy for. But I knew they were using him.

  Above the room, on a walkway with metal railings that overlooked the space, stood the man who had greeted us.

  His long gray coat covered most of his body, but his shoes shone, and a smudge of white at his neck told me he wore a white shirt and jacket. His features were obscured by the shadows and the fedora-like hat he wore.

  “We don’t care what you’re doing here, Krogher,” Dessa said as she lifted her gun and aimed it at him. “All we want is Eli.”

  “Why, Ms. Leeds,” the man—Krogher—said. “How disappointing to see you here. Apparently I’ve wasted my efforts trying to track you down in Canada.”

  “You know him?” Terric asked.

  “He was my boss.”

  “You were useful to me, Ms. Leeds. But then you ran,” Krogher said. “This is the only mercy I will show you. If you put the gun down, stand aside, and let me take care of the business at hand, you will walk from here alive.”

  “Give me Eli,” she said. “And we’ll walk out of here and leave you alive.”

  Krogher chuckled. “It amuses me that you think you can bargain with me.”

  “Well, it was worth a shot,” she said.

  She took aim and fired six shots at Eli.

  And all hell broke loose.

  Eli blocked the bullets with another one of those electric barriers. Then the room filled with magic, hot as acid. Eli adjusted the controller in his hand. Davy gave a strangled yell.

  No bullets on us this time. They’d tried that, and it hadn’t worked.

  This time it was fire.

  Terric and I ran. For Eli. We could save Davy by killing Eli. We could get the hell out of here when Eli was dead.

  The man above us was using magic to call up the very real fire that burned over the metal walls and stone floor. Fire made by magic.

  “How?” I said, or maybe thought, as Terric and I carved Cancel spells, absorbed and diverted the fire, the heat, the magic, like we had choreographed this dance and knew every move.

  “Eli,” Terric replied, or maybe thought. “And them.”

  I ducked a fireball roaring toward my head, glanced up. There were five people standing at equal distance across the catwalk. These were not men in business suits. These were regular people, all of them in sweatpants and loose shirts—hospital issue.

  All of them staring blankly, hands pushed palm out, thumbs crossed.

  Holy fuck. The last guy I’d seen stand like that had blown up a building. As a matter of fact, he was up there too, assuming the position.

  “What the hell are they?” Dessa yelled. “Breakers?”

  “No,” I yelled back. “They’re using magic. Stay back.”

  Dessa apparently did not know what those words meant.

  She pushed her way through the fire, running for Eli.

  “God. Damn. It. Woman!”

  I drew in the magic, a god-awful lot of it, twisted it, felt Terric’s hand behind mine supporting the weight and chaos of it as we heaved it back at the people standing on the catwalk.

  “Very good, Shamus,” Eli somehow said so close to me I thought he was next to my ear. “But not good enough.”

  Davy moaned again, a gut-wrenching sound.

  Time slowed.

  This wasn’t a trick of my mind or adrenaline that made it seem like time was slowed.

  All the world around Terric and me was slowed. Even Dessa.

  But not Eli. And not Terric and me.

  “You lift one finger, take one step, and all bets are off,” Eli said hurriedly. I noted he was sweating. Whatever he had done with the controller, with Davy, took a toll on him too.

  “Krogher has Brandy bound. Trapped. I cannot touch her without killing her. Save her and I will give Davy a quick death. Refuse and his death will be long and agonizing.”

  Brandy had to be close enough he could draw on her to break magic. But I didn’t see her or feel her heartbeat.

  Just because the world was slowed didn’t mean it was at a standstill. Dessa was pulling another gun
on Eli. The people upstairs had recovered from the backlash I’d thrown at them. At this speed, I could see that it was Krogher who controlled them, and he did so with some kind of device in his palm.

  Probably something Eli had invented. The people were like individual generators of magic. Like matching bombs just waiting for Krogher to tap their power.

  Strong as Soul Complements.

  Maybe stronger.

  Weapons.

  “Fuck you, Eli,” I said. “You got no card in this game.”

  I reached out for the spells he was supporting to protect himself and drank the magic out of them.

  Davy screamed.

  “Shame!” Terric said. “Don’t. He’s tied to Davy. You’re killing him too.”

  I glanced over at Davy. Terric was right. Davy was weakly thrashing, the magic burning into him, blood streaming out of the glyphs and pouring down his body.

  I broke my connection to Eli’s magic. “As you see,” Eli said, “I do have a card to play, Shame. The last card.”

  He pressed a button and ribbons of razor-sharp magic shot out from the thing in his hand, aiming straight for Dessa’s heart.

  Chapter 29

  Time was not slow anymore. It was suddenly, brutally fast.

  Dessa yelled as the magic slammed into her, throwing her across the floor.

  Terric and I lifted our guns. Terric aimed at Eli’s head. I aimed at that damn thing in his hands.

  We unloaded the clips.

  He had a choice of which part of himself to Shield. Chose his head. The controller fell to the floor.

  And the blank-eyed monstrosities from above hit us with another spell.

  Impact.

  It blasted through the room like a sonic wave. Threw me off my feet. An entire ocean of magic pounded and roared through the room.

  Crushing us.

  I couldn’t breathe. Tasted blood.

  Tumbled, hit my back, shoulder, head, into something metal, felt my spine crack. Felt Terric’s pain too: arm, shoulder, neck. Could not tell where he was, or hell, where I was.

  Ran out of air.

  Drowning. Drowning in magic.

  “Dessa!” I yelled. I didn’t hear her. Couldn’t see her.

  Then Terric was there, standing above me. A goddamn angel with alien eyes. He did something with Life magic that made my ears ring with an ungodly chorus of sound. My head spiked with pain.