Stone Cold

by Devon Monk

  Portland was one of the first to make strides in the Hounds being compensated fairly for their work, and for their work to be legitimized.

  We might have a network of Hound eyes and ears here in town, but it wasn’t the same everywhere. I was pretty sure the Hound situation in Spokane wasn’t nearly as well run as what Allie had started and Sunny and Davy had perfected.

  “We finally got eyes on the ground,” he continued. “One of our people got into the plant and took a look around. “The entire place was cleaned out. Not a desk, test tube, or latex glove left behind. No record of a sale. Wasn’t bankruptcy. One minute the company appeared to be in full operation. The next, it was gone.”

  “Odd,” Terric said, “but not that unusual. They could have pulled up tent stakes for any number of reasons.”

  “Overnight?” I shook my head. “I’m going with Dash on this one. Company that size doesn’t blow out of Dodge without some warning. So why do you think Davy was there?”

  “Our person on the ground got this.” He pulled out a photo, handed it to Terric instead of me.

  Old habits die hard. Sure, both Terric and I had been Dash’s bosses, but Terric had stuck with it twice as long.

  “A Containment spell?” Terric said. “Anyone could have drawn that.” He handed the picture to me. Concrete warehouse floor, yellow safety tape marking x’s and t’s where equipment or maybe pallets would have been.

  But it was the spell on the floor—not drawn, burned into the concrete—that drew my attention. “This isn’t Containment,” I said, turning the picture upside down. “This is Crossing. See the faint double arc?”

  Zay leaned forward and I handed it across the coffee table to him. Crossing was a spell that could be used for getting over a river or across a border safely. But Crossing could be used for other sorts of difficult passages if you had the will for it. Might even be used for getting out of shackles, getting out of a jail cell, or getting out of a warehouse.

  And Davy had a hell of a will.

  “It’s both,” Zay said. “Containment and Crossing. One on top of the other. Sunny, are they Davy’s signature?”

  She walked over, took the photo, her gaze tracing through the lines of the spell. “The Containment isn’t him, but the Crossing? Yes.” She handed Zay the photo. “Are we done talking about this? Every minute we waste here is a minute we lose finding him.”

  “Give us fifteen minutes to come up with a plan,” Allie said, “and get some backups in place.”

  “You do that.” Sunny walked toward the door. “Shame, you’re with me.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You owe me,” she said.

  Terric looked over at me and raised his eyebrows. “What do you owe her?”

  “And I’ll pay up,” I said, ignoring him. “But I’m not driving three hundred and fifty miles to an empty warehouse without a little more info.”

  “What else do you need to know?” she asked. “That’s his signature. He was there. Now he’s not. You and I go find out where he went from there.”

  “Shame’s not a Hound,” Allie said.

  “Meaning?” she asked.

  “He won’t be any good at tracking Davy.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  “You don’t need Shame to help you find where Davy went anyway,” she said. “You can do that. All you need Shame for is to kill the people holding him.”

  “I’ve got guns,” she said.

  “Guns won’t be enough,” Terric said. “And neither will Shame.”

  “Oh, come on, now,” I said. “Right here. I’m sitting right here.”

  “We tried it that way.” Terric threw me a look. “Shame and I together, we tried stopping Krogher and Eli Collins and the kidnapped people they’d carved up to hold magic. It didn’t work.”

  What he was omitting was that we’d pulled on Life and Death magic against them and taken down half a hospital defending against the magic and tech Eli was using with his boss, Krogher. Terric had nearly died. Dessa Leeds had died. I’d come out of the entire event in a killing mood that wasn’t anywhere near done yet.

  “We’ll find Davy,” he was saying. “But no one is going to walk into a trap.”

  “How can this be a trap?” she said. “That warehouse is empty. You have eyewitness confirmation.”

  “Maybe,” Terric said. “But if I were a government agency that wanted to get rid of Soul Complements who could stop it from using people—people like Davy, people like those they’ve kidnapped and turned into weapons—I’d start by luring a couple Soul Complements out into the middle of nowhere, then picking them off nice and easy in an empty warehouse.”

  “One Soul Complement,” Sunny said. “You aren’t invited, Terric.”

  “Where Shame goes, I go.”

  They had themselves a little staring match. Terric won.

  Well, this was fun and all, but that hunger inside me wasn’t backing off. Time to move this along.

  “Dash, do you have someone on this?” I asked. “A Hound or two?”

  “Try a dozen,” he said.

  Sunny exhaled loudly. “I’m going.”

  “They don’t need you there,” Zayvion said.

  “Davy needs me.”

  “Alive,” Allie said. “He needs you alive.”

  “So we sit here?” she demanded. “Do nothing?”

  “We make a plan,” Terric said. “And we gather information so we’re not going into something blind. Dash, have the Spokane Hounds uncovered anything yet?”

  Dash pushed his glasses closer to his nose and glanced at Sunny. “We have three leads saying they disappeared in three different directions. The moment they find out which one isn’t a wild-goose chase, they’ll call.”

  “And that’s when we’ll go get Davy,” Terric said to Sunny.

  “Good for you,” she said. “Sit here and wait for all I care. I’m out.” She started toward the door.

  “Sunny,” Terric said. “Don’t go after him.”

  “See you around.” She stormed across the room and slammed the door behind her.

  “Tell me you have someone tailing her,” I said to Dash.

  “Several someones. Want me to put in a call so they keep her in the city?”

  “She’ll slip them,” Allie said. “She’s been a Hound for too long now not to expect someone to be shadowing her.”

  “Suggestions?” Dash said.

  “Tell the Hounds to—” Allie stopped, took a deep breath, and held it.

  Zay shifted and looked down at her, his arm up off her as if she suddenly couldn’t bear the weight of it. He wasn’t breathing either.

  I scanned the room, expecting magic or some kind of attack. Nothing.

  “Hello?” I said. “Are you two okay?”

  They exhaled in unison. Allie nodded. “Fine. False alarm.”

  “False alarm for what?” I asked.

  “Contractions,” Zay said. He gave me a level look that did nothing to hide the fact that he’d gone a little wide-eyed for a minute there.

  “The baby?” Dash asked. “Allie, do we need to get you to the hospital?”

  “No.” She brushed her fingers back through her hair and tucked it behind her ears. “It’s false labor. Just giving us a preview for the big day.”

  I shifted my gaze back to Zay. He settled his arm around her again and was working the supercalm and supercollected. Nice cover-up, but I could see the panic in the twitch of his lips.

  “Isn’t it a little early for the baby?” I asked, just to watch Zay sweat.

  “A little, but I’m not having the baby yet,” Allie said. “This is fine. Normal,” she stressed, taking Zay’s hand and giving it a squeeze.

  I delighted in the faint sheen of sweat that broke out on his forehead.

  “You sure i
t’s not the real deal?” I asked while Zay’s heart rate kicked up a bit. “Baby could be here any second, mate. You sure you’re ready for that?”

  “I’m not in labor,” Allie said, giving me a dirty look because she knew exactly what I was doing. “I’d know.”

  “Of course, darlin’, ’cause you’ve done this so many times yourself.”

  “Shut up, Shame,” Terric said.

  “Just tell the Hounds to keep an eye on Sunny,” Allie told Dash. “Contact and pay a few of them between here and Spokane to look out for her. If Sunny goes after Davy, we’ll want to know where she is at all times.”

  “Sure,” Dash said.

  “And what are we going to do about finding Davy?” Terric asked. “If Krogher and Eli are on the move, they might be vulnerable. This could be our chance to pinpoint him.”

  We were all quiet. We’d tried looking for him all the standard ways, and plenty of nonstandard ways, for months. But wherever Eli Collins had him hidden, it was buttoned up so tight we had gotten nowhere.

  That was the problem when your enemy buddied up with government insiders like Krogher. They suddenly had resources for a lot of things, including experimental magic tech.

  We were at a dead loss for anything else we could do to find him. Well, anything nonmagical.

  “If the baby’s doing okay—” Allie started.

  “No,” Zay said.

  “But you could find him, couldn’t you, Zay?” she asked.

  “We don’t know that,” he said.

  Actually we did kind of know that. One of the tricks that Zayvion had picked up from being Guardian of the gates was he could go into a sort of Zen state and locate people in the city. He was especially good at locating people he knew, and he knew Davy very well.

  Of course that was when magic was broken and strong.

  “We could break magic,” Allie said. “Maybe it wouldn’t hurt the baby. I’m far enough along—”

  “No,” Zay said. He closed his eyes for a moment, and Allie stared off into the middistance, then closed her eyes, listening to whatever he was saying to her in her mind.

  The thing about Soul Complements is they became closer and closer until they could read each other’s minds. Then they were in each other’s minds more than they were in their own, and in a very short amount of time, they were no longer separate at all. They were joined so tightly they were something else, a combination of two people, two souls.

  Allie and Zay had that kind of closeness. They didn’t seem to mind it, so bully for them. But it was more than a little strange to see the two of them so easily slip into being just one of them.

  I looked over at Terric. He had a kind of wistful expression on his face until he glanced over at me. Then all that emotion locked down tight.

  Yeah. I didn’t want that for us either. Shoving Life and Death in the same little cage would only end up with one or both of us bloody and broken.

  “Well,” Dash said. “I’ll contact the Hounds, make sure they have eyes out for Sunny. I’ll let Clyde know about it too, since I’m sure we’d like the current head of the Authority to know what we’re doing, right?”

  Terric nodded. “He should know.”

  “Good,” Dash said. “If there’s anything else I can do, please give me a call.”

  Allie and Zayvion opened their eyes at the same time. They had that sort of not-quite-them look on their faces.

  Gave me the creeps.

  Zayvion pushed up to his feet. “Thanks for coming by, Dash. Keep us in the loop. If one of the trails pans out in Spokane, I want to be a part of it.”

  Dash filed the photo and report away into his messenger bag. “I’ll let you know if we get anything on Davy’s location. But I understand you have other more pressing priorities.”

  “Thank you,” Allie said softly.

  This suddenly seemed like a good time to bail and go find me something to kill before Allie decided she was going to bring up the whole Brandy Scott thing with Zayvion.

  “I’m off, then,” I said. “Terric, you going to catch a ride with Dash?”

  Terric frowned. “No. We came in my car.”

  “Then let’s go, mate.” I said my good-byes with a wave and a “later,” then tromped out of the house, wanting distance between me and the living, pronto.

  Terric lingered to talk to Zayvion, which left me out by the car smoking for a minute or two.

  Dash strolled up to me. “You okay, Shame?”

  “I’ve been worse. Including dead.”

  He leaned against the car, hands in his back pockets, and faced the house the way I was facing the house. “Do you have any idea what Terric’s been doing?” he asked.

  “Specifically?”

  “Research of some kind,” he said.

  “He hasn’t mentioned it. Why?”

  “It’s just . . . he asked me for access into some pretty old texts. He’s been spending a lot of time looking for them. The word obsessive comes to mind.”

  “Magic, I assume? Old Authority stuff?”

  “Not exactly. He wanted into some of Allie’s father’s records.”

  Allie was a sweet woman. Loved her dearly. But her father was a complete dick. He was a cold, hard bastard, who was also Eli’s mentor. He had an obsession with mixing magic and technology. An obsession that had made him a very rich man and had given Eli the kinds of ideas that landed us where we were at—kidnapped Davy, and kidnapped people spelled up with enough magic and tech they were human bombs. Beckstrom had been a big player in the Authority, and yeah, he’d killed my father.

  So in general, I hated the son of a bitch.

  But his magic tech? The disks that could store magic, and the networked conduits underground that could channel magic? Damn. He changed the world with his technology.

  I had no idea why Terric would be digging into that man’s past.

  “Which of his records?” I asked.

  “A lot. Notes from decades ago. Tech records. I finally tracked them down.”

  “And gave them to Terric?”

  He nodded again. “I might have scanned copies for myself.”

  I grinned and slid him a sideways look. “I forget how underhanded you can be. You make me proud. Going to give me a peek?”

  “I’ll send them over later today.”

  “Good. So, when are you going to ask Terric out?”

  “What? Did he say something about me?”

  “No,” I said. “You like him. He likes you. Ask him out. Worst he can say is no.”

  “He did.”

  “What?”

  “He said no.”

  I glanced back at the house. “Recently?”

  “Couple months back. He says he’s not interested in a relationship. That he likes me as a friend.” He winced. “So that’s that.”

  “Really?” I was tied to Terric’s emotions. I knew he most certainly didn’t only like Dash as a friend. I wondered why he was lying to him. “My bad, then. Sorry. I don’t mean to meddle.”

  Dash chuckled. “You always mean to meddle.”

  “Not always.”

  He just raised an eyebrow. “Think we’ll find Davy alive?”

  “I don’t think he’s dead. Eli was having too much fun with him. Davy’s useful to Eli or his bosses in some way.”

  “You’d think things would be different,” he said. “Magic gets healed so people can’t use it to destroy. And instead of considering that a blessing, or a warning, people just find a new way to use magic to destroy.”

  “We are determined little bastards, aren’t we?”

  Terric stepped out of the house and Dash pushed away from the car. “That’s my cue. You take care of yourself, Shame. Go kill something, okay? You’re not looking so hot.”

  “Is it that obvious?”

&n
bsp; “To me it is. You were practically salivating over Allie back there.” He glanced over at me. “Lots of terminally ill who wouldn’t mind an end to their contract.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. Also, you are a twisted, twisted man, Dashiell Spade.”

  He looked away to Terric, then back at me again. “I’m a pragmatist, Shame. You have a need for death. There’s a merciful way to deal with that.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll get right on it.”

  “One of these days, you’ll listen to me. See you.”

  I watched him stride off to his car, watched him not turn to look at Terric, who was headed our way, watched him get in and drive off as if he couldn’t feel Terric’s eyes following him.

  “You told him no?” I asked when Terric was close enough.

  “About what?”

  “Dating.”

  Terric paused with his hand on the door handle of the driver’s side. “Of all the things to pay attention to, it’s my love life? You seriously need a hobby, Shamus.”

  “I’m just saying, you like Dash.”

  “Crocheting, stamp collecting.” He snapped his fingers. “Porn.”

  “What?”

  “Hobby. Get one.”

  “Have one. It’s bothering you. So, why shouldn’t you date Dash?”

  “Why do you think he deserves that?”

  “Why doesn’t he?”

  Terric stared at me. The warmth and humanity drained away like a wave receding, revealing the stone cold inhumanity beneath. Apparently he had about as much control over the magic inside him as I did.

  Death pushed so hard I could feel the cold of it behind my teeth. It wanted that. Wanted the magic roiling inside him. I took a deep, steadying breath, but the corners of my vision went shady and my heart thumped hard enough it was a bass drum in my ears.

  We’d just used together too much. I wasn’t going to do that to Terric again. Not so soon. Not ever, if I could help it.

  This was getting ridiculous. My control was in the sewer today. Okay, lately.

  “Because he doesn’t deserve to be hurt,” he said. Then he opened the door and ducked into the car.

  I stood there until I could breathe right again. Maybe a few of the scrub oaks by the river died. Maybe a lot of the bushes died too. It wasn’t just people I could pull life from, but people were always best.