Hell Bent

Chapter 3

If you ask me, there are about a thousand better places to have a meeting in Portland than the old woolen mill over in St. Johns. For instance, any place that sells beer.

Obviously, no one asked me.

Terric parked a couple blocks away and started walking without so much as a single word. He hadn’t said anything on the drive over either. Not that I cared. My headache was pounding spikes into my brain. Sure, he’d used magic to make things grow so I could kill and consume so my hunger for death wasn’t back yet. But it wouldn’t be gone long.

I got out of the car and lit a cigarette, smoking as I made my way to the front entrance. Terric stormed inside the building before I’d even made it halfway down the street. I took a look around to see if Assassin Chick was up on the roofs or down the dark alleys.

Nope.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t just a little disappointed.

Ah well. It was, if not fun, at least distracting while it lasted.

Of course a meeting roomful of magic users might be its own little good time.

I threw my cigarette to the ground, then walked into the building. The main meeting room was up a couple flights, and I so wasn’t walking those. I took the elevator at the end of the hall, stepped in, pushed the button, and stuffed my hands in my coat pockets while I waited.

The only other person in the elevator with me was Eleanor. She stood near the buttons and bent a little, her hair flowing down around her face in that sort of underwater slo-mo she had going for her.

She pushed a button, but it didn’t respond to her, so she quickly pushed all the other buttons.

“Worst. Poltergeist. Ever,” I muttered.

She made a face at me.

The door opened and that kind of silence that makes you want to chew gum filled the hall. Mute spell, I’d guess. Couldn’t have a secret meeting of secret magic users and make a ruckus.

As soon as I reached the meeting room at the end of the hall, the Mute spell swallowed me up and let in the roll of voices. Sounded like we had a crowd today. Of course, last I knew it had been a while since the Overseer of the Authority had been here in our little, but dangerously quirky, town.

I paused in the doorway and tipped my sunglasses down.

Crowd was right. Fifty people at the least. Lots of familiar faces.

Bring on the good times.

I pushed my glasses back up, spread my hands wide, and called out, “Hello, party people! Drinks are on Terric!”

I grinned as all eyes turned to me. A lot of people had retired out of the secret magic business over the last three years. It made sense—there wasn’t much of a secret left about magic’s business, and since magic couldn’t do the big world-changing explosive sorts of spells anymore, the gig had lost a lot of financial and political influence.

Most of the people in the room I knew either well or well enough.

Zayvion Jones: tall, dark, and deadly. My best friend and a real goody-goody, though I’d never held it against him. Allie Beckstrom: tall, light, and deadly, she was Zay’s girlfriend and really, the reason we had all survived the apocalypse.

Next up: Victor Forsythe. Dressed casual, which meant no vest with his jacket today. He was one of my teachers and an old-school magic stick-in-the-mud. Clyde Turner: rocking the NY Giants jersey in extra-extra large. A down-to-earth guy who took over the position of Blood magic when my mum ran off to Alaska with her old crush.

Plenty of other people I knew too. Violet Beckstrom-Cooper, slender, but a little icy for my tastes. She used to be married to Allie’s dad and had taken over his magic and tech enterprise. Next to her was Kevin Cooper, a man with an unremarkable face, and a killer’s instincts who used to be her bodyguard.

Melba Maide looked as disheveled as always, which I’d long suspected she did to throw people off her litigious brilliance. She was talking to the Beckstrom accountant, Ethan Katz.

It did not escape my devious little mind that there were only old-timey Authority magic users in the room. No police. No Hounds who used to track illegal spells and, yeah, might still do that, but more often worked with the police as informants. No government officials.

No “normals.”

This appeared to be a magic-user-only invitation. Naughty. It wasn’t like us magic users or the Overseer to sneak around behind the law anymore. We were purely aboveboard open-book saintly types nowadays.

Well, except for when it came to the things we wanted to hide.

My grand entrance got a mixed reaction from the crowd. A little hatred and amusement, but mostly just long-suffering annoyance. Huh, I must be losing my touch. I could usually get at least one or two people riled up enough to tell me to shut up.

“Everyone.” Terric was on the other side of the room, his coat shucked and already draped over the back of a chair. He had found a microphone. Bastard.

“Thank you for coming.” He tipped his head down and gave me a look. “Shame, shut the door.”

Doorman. Really?

If I cared about the fact that I should be up there at that microphone with him, doing this job with him, I might be angry that he’d pretty much just publically demoted me from Head of the Authority to Guy Who Shuts Doors.

Luckily, I didn’t care about any of it. Right?

I turned, shut the door. Then leaned against the wall and glared at Terric through my sunglasses.

He felt the glare. Even across the room. He lifted his chin and pulled his shoulders back. Then he ignored me.

“You two still fighting?” Zayvion asked.

Zay and Allie stopped next to me. They stood there, arm in arm, Allie just an inch or two shorter than Zavyion’s six foot something. She wore a tank top that showed off those kick-ass magic-born tattoos down her arm and the bands of dusty black ringing her other wrist and elbow. Now that we weren’t on the run for our lives, both Allie and Zay had put on about ten pounds, and lost the dark circles under their eyes.

They smiled more, laughed more, and had that calm, sweet dedication to each other that meant they never walked into a room without holding hands.

I figured kids couldn’t be far off now.

Zay’s hair was buzzed short, and he had on a gray T-shirt that made his dark skin look even darker and set off the stone in the necklace he insisted on wearing. Apparently, the necklace had been an anniversary gift from Allie. Apparently, they were keeping track of those sorts of things now.

“You know how he is,” I said. “Stick up his ass.” I leaned toward Zay just a bit and pulled my glasses down. “Which he enjoys.”

Allie just rolled her eyes. Green, with a glint of mischief tempered by that lingering sadness that made a man’s heart skip a beat or two. Dark hair brushing right at her shoulders, pale skin. And yes, a beauty.

“We haven’t seen you around much lately,” she said. “What have you been doing?”

“Who. Ask me who I’ve been doing.”

“You have a girlfriend?” Didn’t sound like she believed me.

“I have a beautiful, full-bodied flaxen vixen at my side every night.”

“So, a bottle of whiskey?” Zay asked.

I grinned. “Ah, now. Do I look like a lad who’d kiss and tell?”

Zay gave me one of those looks of his that could wound a man who still had a heart. “You’re in a slump, Shamus. If you don’t pull out of it, I’m going to pull you out. By your nostrils.”

“I like how you think I’m afraid of you, Jones. What are you going to do? Throw magic at me?”

“Yes,” Allie and Zay said at the same time.

I made a tsk-tsk sound. “Listen to you two. Aren’t you just the hard-core Soul Complements now? Not only finishing, but also starting each other’s sentences. Do you still remember who pees standing up?”

Allie pulled her hand away from where she’d draped it through Zayvion’s arm. She took me down a notch with one raised eyebrow. “Don’t be an ass, Shame.”

It was unfair of me to dig at them about how fucking in sync they’d become with each other since the apocalypse. They’d both, separately, told me they were happy. Allie had given up the life of a Hound so she could restore an old house in St. Johns. She had plans of opening it up as a community center for disadvantaged kids or something. Zayvion had given up being Guardian of the gates so he could do whatever Allie was doing.

I didn’t begrudge them their happiness.

Oh, who was I kidding? I hated them for it. Hated that they’d gone through hell and back again for each other and ended up so damn happy. What had I gotten? A round-trip through hell, then a “We’re sorry, Mr. Flynn. Your happiness was lost in route through purgatory. Better luck next time.”

“By the nostrils,” Zay said with enough chill in his words I knew I’d struck a nerve.

It was good to see him rile a bit. To know he’d still threaten to wipe the floor with me—not that he could—if I made Allie frown.

I counted on him standing up and taking me down one of these days. And the way things were going, it would be sooner rather than later.

The first pangs of hunger, of the need to consume life, scraped through my belly. And there was a hell of a lot of life in this room.

I pushed my sunglasses back into place. I usually didn’t regret giving him a hard time, but Allie was right—that had been an ass move. I might hate that they had found happiness, but I didn’t hate them. They were the closest damn thing I had to a brother and sister. I thought very highly of those two crazy kids.

“Duly noted, mate.”

Zay was classy enough to take it as the apology I meant it as.

“Shh.” Allie pointed to the stage.

I tuned the world back in. Roomful of people who thought they were important, magically speaking. Terric up onstage glowing like he’d been dipped in angel shit.

Yes, angel shit glows. Never seen proof it doesn’t.

“...welcome the Overseer of the Authority, Salvatore Moretti.” Terric stepped away from the mic, and even though a normal crowd would clap, we didn’t.

Not so good at the normal, us magic users.

A man stepped up to the stage. He was just under six feet tall, I’d guess, built a little on the thick side with an impressive mop of steel gray hair and mustache to match. I’d guess he was a lady-killer in his day, but was a little heavy in the jowl now. Still, there was a wicked intensity to his dark eyes.

This was the second time I’d ever seen the man. The Overseer position of the Authority used to mean making the hard calls for all members of the Authority in the world, dealing with reports from the regional Watch and Ward, who in turn took reports and complaints from those of us on the street, as it were.

The Overseer position changed hands and countries every four years. He had taken it on right after we’d snipped magic’s nads. It had been a chaotic time, an uncomfortable coming-out between the secret organization of magic users and the rest of the world.

A few people had been thrown in jail, still more were up on trial, but the world hadn’t gone to war or followed through with those witch-hunt rallies that were all the rage for the first couple years.

Well, not officially.

And the Overseer had handled the entire mess pretty well. We’d held up our side of the bargain too, or at least Terric had. And since Portland was one of the only cities in the world that had five wells of magic beneath it, that meant we had more than our share of crazies, cover-ups, and other dangerous meltdowns to handle.

“Thank you all for coming here, especially those of you from other areas of the United States,” he began.

What? Reassess the room, Flynn.

Local faces, local faces. Ah, there. Three sets of couples I hadn’t noticed before because they were sitting at a table and the standing crowd obscured them. I didn’t recognize the twentysomething guy with the cougar fortysomething woman, nor the milk-skinned yuppie man and woman who were both squarely in their thirties. I did, however, recognize the elderly man and woman.

Doug and Nancy Williams. They were legends when I was a kid, and old then. They had to be pushing their nineties. Seeing two old magic users wasn’t all that unusual. The unusual thing was that they were Soul Complements, the oldest known to be living, even though they hadn’t found each other until they were in their sixties.

My mum and all my other teachers in the ways of magic made a point of telling us, constantly, that Soul Complements didn’t last. Soul Complements burned out, were killed, went crazy, or simply croaked from magical ailments.

No happy endings for those of us who can use magic together stronger than anyone else.

Not even a happy middle.

But every breath old Doug and Nancy took was one more whack with the cane to that shack of lies. Happy endings for Soul Complements, which included growing old and gray together without killing each other like me and Terric, or losing yourself in the other person’s mind and personality like Allie and Zay, might just be possible.

Or, you know, Doug and Nancy could be a complete fluke.

I wasn’t the only one staring at the couples at the table. Everyone else in the room realized there were an awful lot of Soul Complements gathered in one place. To be specific, there were five sets. The three couples at the table, lovebirds Allie and Zay, and though it made me barf in my mouth a little, Terric and me.

Which meant I got a few stares too. Mostly followed by disgust.

Ain’t that just special?

“Shame,” Zay said quietly.

I looked over at him. He nodded toward the stage.

“...of quite a serious nature,” the Overseer was saying. “We all know that three years ago, magic was healed: dark and light magic rejoined. We didn’t realize just how mild magic would become due to that rejoining. I believe we, and most of the world, have done an admirable job coping with that loss of magic, and the changes it has brought about.

“Soul Complements are in a unique position. When they work magic together, they are able to briefly break magic into its dark and light states, and cast it once again with the full force and effect it once offered.”

Not news. Not even worth rehashing. There’d been a hustle back in the early-postapocalypse days to try to find more Soul Complements. To seek the poor suckers out and shove this happy screwed-if-you-do, screwed-if-you-don’t life down their craws.

Hadn’t worked. One, the system for judging if when two people use magic together they are so in sync they can break it used to involve several dozen experienced magic users and a fine manipulation of magic for both the testees and the testers. With the dulling of magic, that system was simply not viable anymore.

Two, there are a lot of people in this old world. And since everyone can use magic if they want to, tracking down perfect matches was damn near impossible and turned out to be a waste of time, what with all the magic haters out there.

We’d given up, and done our best to keep the whole Soul Complement situation on the down-low.

“We have recent proof that high-ranking government officials in major countries are now aware of Soul Complements and what they can do with magic. They know there aren’t many Soul Complements in the world, but we believe they have their names and information. They know that Soul Complements can break magic.”

Huh. Maybe the redheaded assassin was government issue. Still didn’t explain why she hadn’t shot us.

“We believe governments are screening magic users and setting up protocol to search for Soul Complements.”

“For real?” I asked. “Why do they give a damn?”

Shut-up glares zinged my way from all corners.

I didn’t care. Life was a lot more fun now that magic couldn’t do the bigger “shut up, Shame” spells I’d been dealt in the past.

The Overseer didn’t seem overly bothered by the question. “We believe, Mr. Flynn, that they intend to use Soul Complements to break magic and use magic either as a resource, or a weapon. They are certainly more interested in finding Soul Complements than makes me comfortable.”

“Right, sure,” I said. “Who wouldn’t want to get their hands on the only people who can use magic to kill, destroy, and yada-yada ultimate destruction. What do you think we can do about it? Go on strike? Sign a petition?”

I wasn’t going to lie. I had a bad feeling of exactly what he wanted us to do about it. Probably something heroic like band together and take down the government forces that wanted to use magic for less than savory reasons.

And while some people, like Zay and Allie and Terric, would probably line up like good little soldiers and do just what was expected of them, I wasn’t good at doing what I was told.

Ever.

“That is why I am here,” he intoned. Yes, intoned.

“We believe you are each in grave danger and may, even now, be targeted. Our intelligence suggests government forces want you alive. But we cannot be one hundred percent sure of that.

“This meeting is both a warning and an offer of assistance. If you want to go into hiding, we in the Authority can make that happen. If you want security guards, we can provide that too. But it is of the highest importance you understand you are in terrible danger before you make the decision of how you want to go forward.”

I wondered how the other Soul Comps were taking the news of their sudden popularity.

They looked startled. Even old Doug and Nancy had gone a whiter shade of white. I’d say they were going to run. All of them. They were going to hide.

Good on them.

Then I glanced at Allie and Zay. They were staring straight ahead at Moretti with that odd blank look Zay had once told me meant they were speaking to each other silently.

Creeped me the hell out that they could do it, but I had to admit it would be useful.

They were also holding hands, fingers slipped one between the next, pale, dark, pale. I didn’t expect them to run. Hide? Maybe.

No way the old Zavyion would have run, but now that Allie was in his life, he was all about safer decisions. Being responsible.

And boring.

Allie, though . . . there was something about her. She had that tough-as-nails but fragile-as-glass thing going on. I’d seen her handle some really crappy situations, most of them while her life was on the line.

So death threats weren’t anything she hadn’t heard before. She knew how to deal with death. Dying did not scare that chick. She’d done it too damn many times.

But this threat shook her. Her hand in Zay’s was so tight I could see the bone of her knuckles. And her other hand was flat across her stomach as if just thinking about someone out to kill her and Zay made her sick.

It was . . . weird.

I frowned, caught Zay’s eyes. He gave me a blank stare.

No, that wouldn’t do at all.

I slid my gaze to Allie’s hand over her stomach, then right back at him.

Well, mate? What’s that all about?

Gold flashed in his eyes like paint hitting ink. Not a speck of brown left, only violent anger.

Holy shit. Z didn’t like me pointing this out to him. I wondered what the hell I was pointing out to him.

I gave him a sly I-know-what’s-going-on-here smile, even though I had no clue what had made him so angry.

He tipped his head down just enough to tell me, he knew I knew, and he’d talk to me about it later.

Good. It was going to be all kinds of fun to find out what he didn’t want me to know.

He lifted a finger and pointed at the stage.

Right, there were important people talking about important things.

I’d heard the only thing that really mattered—someone wanted me dead.

Big deal. The line started on the left.

Up onstage, Terric was wide-eyed and still, like a deer caught in rifle sights who’d just heard a stick snap. He was frozen, staring at me. I wasn’t sure if he was breathing.

Fuck. Of all the time for him to lose his composure.

I started toward the stage. No need for everyone to be staring at him like that.

“I am sorry, Mr. Flynn,” the Overseer was saying.

Hold on. I must have missed something.

“About what?” I asked, still moving toward Terric.

“About relieving you and Terric Conley of your position as Head of the Authority here in Portland.”