Hell Bent bm-1

by Devon Monk

  Just in case there were more gunmen watching me, I paused outside the front of the store and pulled the statue out of the bag I’d somehow kept ahold of, trying to look casual. There was a lot of blood drying on my hand.

  No gunmen I could see. I scanned for signs of Dessa. If she was following me, she had gotten good at staying out of my line of sight.

  Eleanor touched the back of my hand and pointed at the car. She hadn’t seen any other gunmen either.

  I lit a cigarette and crossed the parking lot. Eleanor stayed at a distance from me. She was still angry about me almost killing those men. I didn’t know what to do about that.

  I ducked into Terric’s car. Chucked the UGGs in the backseat, then twisted and carefully propped the statue in the seat for Eleanor. “I’m sorry,” I said to her.

  She sat next to the statue and shook her head, her eyes sad. She didn’t like it when I lost control.

  “Then don’t smoke in my car,” Terric said.

  “You made me wear those things.” I turned back around and rolled down the window so I could exhale smoke. “You have to deal with the terrible, terrible trauma they caused me.”

  “For God’s sake, Shame. UGG trauma?”

  “Look at my hands. They’re shaking.” I held my hand out and rocked it slowly back and forth.

  “You have blood on your hand.”

  “And on your sweater. Sorry about that.”

  “What happened? Are you bleeding?”

  “Just a nick. My arm. Besides, aren’t we late?”

  “What. Happened.”

  “I ran into Jeremy.”

  “And?”

  “We had a discussion.”

  “About?”

  “He’s part of the Black Crane, Terric, what do you think we talked about?”

  “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “Yes. I do. And you could know it too if you ran his record.”

  “I don’t run records on my boyfriends.”

  “I think he was counting on that.”

  “What about your arm?”

  “He shot me.”

  “What the hell?”

  “Bad aim, though, I think it grazed.” I rolled up the sleeve to look. Okay, so not just a graze. A thumb-sized angry red hole marked my upper biceps. When I twisted my arm to look at the back of it, I discovered the exit wound was twice as large.

  “Crap,” I said.

  “Put out the cigarette.”

  I sighed. Threw it out the window. “Happy?”

  “Thrilled.” He pulled a lever to open the trunk, got out of the car, rummaged around back there, then got in the car, slamming the door shut behind him.

  He had a red first aid bag.

  “I don’t want you healing me,” I said.

  “I’m not. I’m going to clean and bandage that so you stop bleeding on my interior.”

  He set about doing so with the efficiency of an emergency room doctor. It hurt. I didn’t tell him, because I figured he already knew.

  “What did you do to him?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  Quieter: “What did he do to you?”

  “Threatened me. Shot me. Tased me. You know, the usual.”

  “Tased you too?” He glanced up.

  “Black Crane, Terric. Drugs and magic. He’s the drugs, you’re the magic. He wanted to make that clear to me.”

  “He said that? Exactly that?”

  “He did not say exactly that. He did say he wanted me out of his territory and away from you.”

  “Shame—”

  “Forget it,” I said. “He might be someone you care about, but one: he shot me and two: he’s using you. For himself, and for the Black Crane. So he and I have decided to agree to disagree.”

  “Which means what? You’re both going to kill each other?”

  I waited until he’d stuck a thick cotton pad on both wounds, then wrapped my arm in gauze he pulled tight. Didn’t answer him. Because yeah, that was pretty much what we’d agreed upon.

  “Have you seen Dessa?” I said to change the subject. “Or Davy?”

  “No,” he finally said, dropping the conversation. I hadn’t expected that. Maybe he was having second thoughts about the man. He threw everything back into the bag and tossed it in the backseat. Then he started the car.

  “Davy hasn’t reported in to anyone,” he said as he navigated out of the parking lot.

  That was odd. Davy had said there was at least one Hound on each of us Soul Complements. I should have seen someone following us, and thought it would be him.

  “Did she say anything when she dropped me on your doorstep?” I asked.

  “Dessa?” He shook his head. “Just that she’d found you wasted and wandering and was leaving you at my door. Said you were my problem now.”

  “Now?”

  “That was my reaction,” he said. “Eli said she knows where he or his Soul Complement is?”

  “Yep.”

  “Doesn’t line up with her story.”

  “I know.”

  “If you had to put money on it, who’s lying?” he asked.

  I thought about that for a second or two. Eli I had some history with. Dessa I’d barely met, but I was more inclined to trust her over Eli. “Could be both. Dessa knows more than she’s telling us. Or Eli might think she knows something her brother knew before Eli killed him.”

  “Someone needs to teach him rule one of negotiation: don’t kill the people who can give you the information you need,” Terric said.

  “He said he kills whoever they tell him to kill.”

  “And you believe that?”

  “I believe that’s one of the reasons he does it. I also believe he’s enjoying it. Joshua was a Closer. Eli’s had a vendetta against Closers ever since Victor Closed him and took all his memories and ability to use magic away years ago.”

  “So you think he’s going to hit Closers?”

  “I’d say it’s on his list. Don’t know if it falls in with the plans of the people who have him captured.”

  “If people have him captured,” Terric added.

  Yeah, I’d thought of that too. I lit another cigarette, got three drags off it. Then dug around in his very clean glove compartment, looking for sunglasses.

  Even though there were heavy clouds today and it was only half past seven in the morning, the light was too damn bright for me. Apparently Tasers and poison were hard on my delicate constitution.

  Terric pressed a button on the ceiling and a pocket opened.

  “Thanks.” I pulled the sunglasses out of the pocket and put them on. Didn’t care if I looked ridiculous, just as long as my eyes were covered.

  I hunkered down in the seat. I missed my coat.

  “If you’re cold, I have a coat in the back.”

  “Does it match the boots?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Pass.”

  Victor used to live in a very nice home beneath the Japanese Gardens. A home that was built back in the early nineteen hundreds to guard the Faith well beneath it.

  We’d pretty much demolished the place trying to survive the apocalypse, and while I’d been told it had been repaired and rebuilt, Victor had moved into a modest one-level home with a couple of acres and a small creek behind it.

  He said it was easier on him because of his bad eyesight. I think he just hadn’t ever gotten over his house being blown to bits by magic.

  In some ways, he hadn’t gotten over how much the world had changed now that magic was healed and reduced to a fraction of its strength.

  Well, unless you were a Breaker.

  Terric pulled up into the drive. We both got out.

  “Want the statue?” I asked Eleanor.

  “What?” Terric said as he walked to the front door.

  “Nothing.”

  He shot a look back at me, then kept walking.

  I nodded toward the car. Eleanor shook her head.

  So we strolled up the path. Terric was already wal
king inside the house and I slipped in after him.

  “Thank you both for coming.” Victor wore a sweater with a shirt collar beneath it, and jeans, and of course, his heavy glasses. He shut the door behind us and turned the lock. “Let’s sit in the living room.”

  I chose an overstuffed chair, sat there feeling a little bit like the pupil I once was, and tried to keep my hands and hungers to myself. Terric settled on the couch near me, which both helped and, for some reason, annoyed me.

  Victor walked with that slow, old man pace he’d settled into since he’d lost almost all of his sight.

  “To begin with,” he said, “I didn’t know Eli Collins was involved until yesterday when Joshua’s body was found. I want you both to know that.”

  “Victor,” I said. “A confession? My, how the tables have turned.”

  “It is not a confession. I am simply clarifying why I haven’t told you this before,” he said. “We know who Eli’s Soul Complement is.”

  He stopped at a rolltop desk in the corner and retrieved a file folder. That, he handed to Terric.

  “Who?” I asked.

  Terric scanned the file, then looked up. “Brandy Scott.” He tipped the file so I could see the picture clipped there. Short dark hair, almond eyes, shy smile with a dimple. She didn’t look old enough to drive.

  “How old is she?” I asked.

  “That picture is from a while ago,” Victor said. “She’s fifteen in it. She’s thirty-five now.”

  “Mental institution?” Terric said.

  “That,” Victor said, “is what I needed to tell you. We’ve known Eli had a Soul Complement. Have known it for many years. They were even tested. But Brandy wasn’t stable. We did everything we could, medicine, magic, counseling. But she never recovered from the test to see if she and Eli were a match. Over the years her condition has grown worse. The last report we have from her doctors is that she has grown less and less responsive.”

  “You took her from him, didn’t you?” I said, putting it all together. “When you Closed Eli’s memories away, you made him forget her.”

  Terric glanced up at Victor over the file. Waiting.

  It was, if you thought about it too long, a horrifying thing to do. Like cutting a person in half straight down the middle.

  Victor had been standing behind the chair that matched mine. His fingers squeezed the top of the upholstery; then he let go and walked around, sat and exhaled tiredly.

  “Mr. Collins . . . Eli is brilliant.” He nodded. “We have the tests that prove it. But he is also unstable and dangerous.”

  “A sociopath,” Terric said.

  “Yes,” Victor said. “Soul Complements can make magic break its own rules. We’ve always known that. Even when magic was strong, Brandy and Eli were a danger then. To themselves. To the Authority. To mankind.”

  “So you kept them apart?” I didn’t know why it was bothering me so much. I mean yeah, I had stayed as far away from Terric as I could these last few years. And a few years before that. But that was my choice. No one had made me forget him. No one had forbade me to be with him.

  It was my choice.

  Eli and Brandy hadn’t had a choice.

  “It was decided, by more people than just me, that it would be best for them to never know about each other,” Victor said.

  “So you Closed Eli,” Terric said, “took the memories of Brandy away from him. And then you took the memory of how to use magic away from him too?”

  “Yes.” He was quiet a moment, maybe thinking over those times, those decisions.

  I’d always wondered if Victor followed rules, or made rules to follow. Too many times in the past he’d leaned a decision one way or another to make sure things in the Authority turned out the way he approved of. The way he thought was right, despite what the Authority stood for.

  “Yes,” he said, “I did. I made him forget Brandy. I took away his ability to use magic.”

  “Not that he didn’t relearn it,” Terric said.

  “And when Eli demanded you Unclose him back when Davy Silvers’s life hung in the balance,” I said, “you didn’t give him the memories of Brandy back, did you?”

  “No.”

  A pause while I, at least, swallowed the fact that my teacher, my friend Victor, had been playing God with someone’s life. With their soul.

  “It was my decision not to let him know about her. I still believe it was the correct thing to do. She is broken. There is no future for them together.”

  “I had no idea you have a crystal ball,” I said. “How very convenient you know what they can and can’t be.”

  The rings snapped with tiny sparks of red.

  Yes, I was angry. Even though I hated Eli, I hated even more that Victor had made decisions that only Eli and Brandy should have made.

  “Would you rather I have let two very unstable people have full access to a magic more powerful than ninety-nine percent of magic users in the world could access? It is not unthinkable that they could have destroyed the world.”

  I knew he wasn’t being overly dramatic. Soul Complements could be walking time bombs. Soul Complements, in fact, had almost ended the world just three years ago.

  “But to just cut them off from each other? There had to have been other options.”

  “There were not.”

  “Have you considered that by not having Brandy it drove Eli to extremes? That all this—all the crap he’s doing—is because of what you did to him? Joshua might still be—”

  “Shame,” Terric said gently. “Don’t.”

  I just glared at Victor.

  He nodded. “Yes,” he whispered. “I have thought of it many times. Especially over the last three years.”

  I’m sure he had. One of the side effects of surviving the apocalypse was that Cody Miller had healed magic with the intension of making everything better. That healing had made magic soft, and it had given memories back to everyone in the world who had had their memories taken away by Closers.

  Closers like Victor.

  So Eli had remembered Brandy and the part Victor and the Authority had played in keeping her separate from him.

  “Damn,” Terric said softly. “He’s known for three years that she’s his match? And that she was locked away?”

  Victor nodded.

  “When did he find her?” I asked.

  “Our sources say it was two years ago. She doesn’t have family, was a ward of the state. They were trying a new medication. It seemed to be helping. She was more responsive. Aware.”

  “Then?” Terric asked.

  “Then the war.” Victor spread his hands. “The end of magic being separated into dark and light. The end of our power. And the beginning of the new world where the Authority is no longer secret, where memories are no longer hidden, where those of us who fought to keep the world, and all its people safe, are ignored. Unwelcome. Silenced.”

  “You’re not unwelcome,” Terric said. “The Authority still needs you. Needs what you can teach.”

  “Faith magic?” Victor smiled sadly. “The things I would teach are nothing more than a history lesson now. Those spells, Closing people, guarding gates, fighting to keep dangerous uses for magic secret and safe? Unnecessary.”

  “All right,” I said, “fine. Things might not have worked out the way you wanted them to. We’ve all shed our tears. But we’re still breathing, and we all have a problem: Eli. How do we find him? How do we stop him?”

  “I don’t know the answer to either of those questions, I’m afraid,” he said.

  “Do you know about a woman named Dessa?” I asked.

  He frowned. “The name isn’t familiar to me.”

  “Dessa Leeds?”

  His gray eyebrows pushed wrinkles up his forehead. “Leeds? Do you mean Thomas Leeds?”

  “That’s her brother,” I said. “Dessa’s brother. You know him?”

  “He was a Closer. Out of Seattle. He was working for us. What do you know about him?”

&n
bsp; I leaned back. Studied him. “Nothing, really. I do know that you’re holding out on me, though.”

  “Shame,” Terric said.

  “Come on, Ter. The old man’s got a secret he doesn’t want to share.”

  “Old man?” Victor drew himself up and gave me a stern glare. “You know I’m in contact with your mother, don’t you, Shamus?”

  I grinned at his indignant tone. For all that I was angry about his decisions with Eli and Brandy, Victor was one of my teachers. I’d grown up with him being a stern, proper sort of uncle. Plus, he’d taught me some of the dirtiest tricks you could do with magic. He was family, and that bond couldn’t be broken. Not even over dangerously poor decisions.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Tell her I’m being disrespectful to one of my teachers. It won’t be the first time she hears it. Oh, and while you’re at it, ask her why you don’t have the balls to tell us the whole truth.”

  Terric leaned back on the couch and threw his hands up. “Jesus, Shame. Did that Taser fry your brain?”

  I just watched Victor. In the past, needling him couldn’t make the old man change his mind. I didn’t think it would work this time, but figured it wouldn’t hurt to try. People who are upset or angry tend to say all sorts of interesting things they would never say in a calm state of mind.

  “We’ve known the government was becoming . . . interested in the members of the Authority,” he said quietly. “Certain members. Our Closers, our Soul Complements, and those of us in higher positions. But we didn’t know why. We needed someone on the inside. Someone who had a contact.”

  “Thomas?” I asked.

  “Yes. Thomas thought he could use his relationship with his sister—I do believe her name was Dessa—to get closer to the matter.”

  So Dessa did work for the government. “Which department was he infiltrating?” I asked.

  “He worked his way into a government-sponsored research and development facility. On the surface, it is a testing lab for biotechnology. Everything from increasing crop yields to deterring invasive species. But beneath that facade, Thomas found evidence of other tests. Human tests.”

  “Medical tests on humans are far from rare, Victor,” I said. “What made these different?”

  “The tests weren’t for medical advancement. They were searching for ways to weaponize people.”

  “What?” Terric said.