Stone Cold

Chapter 12

SHAME

Eleanor strolled over to our table. “What’s going on here?”

“Eleanor?” Victor said. “It’s so good to see you.”

She smiled, surprised. “I still can’t get used to people actually seeing me. Hi, Victor. How are you?”

“I’m wonderful, thank you. I’m so sorry for your death. You left the world far too young.”

“No, don’t worry about it,” she said. “We’d gotten bad information, and were doing what we thought was right. But it was wrong.”

Funny how hearing her say that unknotted something in my chest. I wouldn’t have been fighting her, and consequently lost control of Death magic and killed her, if she hadn’t been trying to kill me first.

I didn’t blame her, though. It’s hard to keep the communication lines clear in an apocalypse.

“And you must be some relation to Shame.” She held out her hand for my dad.

He shook her hand. “Hugh Flynn. I’m his father. Pleased to meet you, Eleanor, is it?”

“Roth. Eleanor Roth. I work for the Authority in Seattle. Well, did.”

“How’d you end up with this piece of work?” he asked, pointing at me.

“He chickened out at the last minute and didn’t kill me enough,” she said. “Then there was that binding thing. How did you do that, Shame?”

“It’s a Death magic Bind.” I looked away from her as I said it. “Souls are energy, life that can be stored and drained later. High-level, illegal, dark magic stuff.”

“Which is why you owe me a drink,” she said. “To celebrate my freedom from all those days tied to your angst.”

“Please,” I said. “I don’t angst. I brood like a manly man.”

Victor snorted and I threw him a grin.

“Celebrate,” she said again. “Drink. You owe me one. Time to pay up.”

She planted her hands on her hips, waiting.

“Well, gents,” I said, “you heard the lady. Your nefarious plans will just have to wait.”

I thought my dad might try to stop us, but he smiled. “Go on. If she’s put up with you for this long, she’s earned that drink.”

Eleanor took the arm I offered her, and we walked toward the bar.

Behind me, I heard Dad and Victor start up a conversation about death and life and how to break the barriers between them.

“Why are you arguing with your father?” she asked. “This is supposed to be heaven, Shame. Weapons left at the door.”

“A little tussle with the old man? Sounds like heaven to me.”

She chuckled softly. Here, where she was real, and soft, and smelled like sweet cinnamon, I found myself liking that I could make her smile.

“How is this for you?” I asked. “You’re untied from me, aren’t you?”

“I think so. It doesn’t feel the same.” She took a stool and I sat next to her and flagged the bartender.

“Good,” I said. “Good. Say, I wanted to ask. Did it hurt?”

“Dying?”

“No. Being tied to me.”

“At first, yes. As time went on, it wasn’t so bad. I just wish you wouldn’t have spent every second of your life racing toward the grave.”

The bartender came over, set two drinks in front of us. Mine: whiskey. Hers: chocolate martini.

“I never raced toward anything a day of my life.”

“So I just imagined you wishing for death every waking moment, is that it?”

“Well, I might have been considering the grave. . . .”

“Please.” She picked up her drink. “You couldn’t get here fast enough.” She lifted her glass. “Here’s to the end. May it be just the beginning.”

“Hear, hear!” I tapped my glass to hers and took a drink, watching her.

She pressed her lips against the glass, tipped it back, and closed her eyes as she held the drink in her mouth. She’d been not quite dead for years now. No eating, no drinking. This had to be the first thing she’d tasted in forever.

“Good?” I asked.

“Mmmmm.” She opened her eyes. “Heaven.”

“To heaven,” I said.

“What about earth?”

“What about it?”

“I heard what your dad and Victor said.”

“Look at you? Once a stalker, always a stalker.”

She made a face at me. “So you’re going to stop the end of the world?”

“That’s the idea.”

She leaned her elbow on the bar and twisted to face me. “I’ve been tied to you for what, over three years now?”

“Yes.”

“And you couldn’t hear what I said for almost the entire time, right?”

“Not since the first few months.” I took another sip.

“Then listen to me now. You have a good heart.”

“This old thing—”

She held up one finger. “It’s still my turn. You have a good heart. I don’t care what you show other people or what you want them to think you are. I lived with you.”

At my look she rocked her head side to side. “Existed. Whatever. But I was there, Shame. Right next to you twenty-four-seven for almost four years. I’ve seen your bad days and your really bad days. But despite all the shit that’s happened, you are a kind man. Sometimes I suspect you’re even a hopeful man.”

I blew air out between my lips.

She held up a warning finger again and I shut my mouth.

“But some of the things you’ve done, Shame. Some of your choices.”

“Were awesome?” I prompted.

She rolled her eyes. “For a while there, I didn’t think you’d ever pull your head out of your ass. If you’d used magic with Terric—don’t give me that look—if you’d just relaxed about it and used magic together without being so damn determined that it would cause the world to explode, everything could have been so much better. You would have been better. He would have been—”

“—inhuman. Dead inside. All Life magic, no humanity, insane,” I said.

“You don’t know that,” she said gently. “I watched you. I watched him with you. You made each other better, not worse. Just neither of you was willing to have a little faith that you were meant to use magic together. That maybe it would be the one good thing you had together that worked.”

“Water under the bridge, darlin’.”

She took another drink. “You too easily see the world as full of sorrow, and you too quickly assume that sorrow is all you deserve. Also, you are as stubborn as a mule in mud.”

“Whoa. Someone can’t hold her martini,” I said.

“I think your dad and Victor are right.”

“About what?”

“You don’t belong here yet.”

I swallowed the last of the whiskey. “I might not be staying long anyway. They think they can send me down to the green grasses.”

“Even so, you do belong here.” She reached over, pressed her fingers against mine.

I smiled. “You deserved so much better than what you got, love.”

“Well, this isn’t so bad.” She patted my hand and finished off her drink.

“Sure, death is fine,” I said. “But life is nothing but suffering.”

“Not all of it,” a voice said. A woman’s voice.

I looked across the room. At my dad, who held open the door for a woman who had just walked into the bar. Dessa Leeds. The woman I’d loved.

I stood. Suddenly she was the only person I could see.

“Dessa?” I breathed.

She raised one eyebrow. “Hey there, charmer. Didn’t think I’d see you so soon.”

Beautiful in life, but here in death she was vibrant, more alive than ever. Red hair long and silk-soft around her shoulders, she was wearing a very simple pale green dress, short enough to show thigh, and sort of flowing as she walked toward me.

Her skin was moon-pale, her face a porcelain perfect heart, and those blue eyes. . . .

I stopped breathing at the sight of her, and realized that yes, you not only breathed in heaven; your heart could pound so hard it was difficult to hear your own thoughts.

“Hey,” I said. “You’re here.”

She lifted one hand and very gently drew her fingers down the side of my cheek. I closed my eyes at her touch, savoring that connection, wanting it to never end. Wanting her to never disappear.

“Shame,” she said.

I opened my eyes.

“I’m so glad to see you before you leave.”

I frowned. “Maybe . . . maybe I can stay awhile.”

“No,” she said. “You have to go.”

“Why?”

“Because only half of you is here.” She placed her hand over my heart, and beneath the warmth of her palm was a cool hollowness, a blackness that only Terric could fill.

“Your father told me there’s still work for you to do. Hero things.”

“My father has a big mouth and overestimates my abilities.”

She smiled. “There’s someone counting on you back there.”

“I know,” I said. “Terric.”

“Yes. But you made a promise to look after someone.”

“Allie and Zay?”

“Their child, Shame. You promised to be there to look after her.”

“Hold on,” I said. “Her? They’re having a girl? Zayvion’s going to have a daughter? Lord, he’ll go mental over that. How do you know all this? You weren’t there when I promised to look after my goddaughter.”

“Just call it a heaven thing. Okay,” she said, “maybe I was spying on you a little.” She stepped closer to me. I could smell her perfume, feel the warmth of her body against mine. “Go be a hero, Shame.”

She kissed me and it was heaven.

I lost myself to her. Lost myself and never wanted to find myself again.

She pulled back, finally, tipped her forehead against mine. “Don’t hurry back. But don’t be gone forever, okay?”

She looked up at me and I discovered that even in heaven, a heart can break.

“Dessa . . .”

Two hands landed on my shoulder. Firm. Familiar. “It’s time, son,” Dad said on one side of me.

Dessa stepped back. “See you, Shame. You know . . . that spying thing of mine . . .”

“Da,” I said, glancing up over one shoulder, then the other. “Victor. Just a few minutes?” I might not be a love-’em-and-leave-’em guy anymore, but if the kiss had been that good, I had a list of other things I wanted to try out.

“Son,” my dad said as he and Victor pushed me toward the window that now had a couple of spells painted on it. Transference and Crossing. Magic in heaven. Who would have guessed? “We might be too late as it is.”

“Wait,” Eleanor said. She ran toward me. “You’re not going without me.”

“No,” I said. “Hell no. Stay. You’ve earned that.”

“You’re going. I’m going,” she said. “Will this hurt?”

“Can’t say this is going to feel good, exactly,” Da said.

“Through the window?” I said, bracing for the impact and fall and impact.

“We’ll give you everything we have, Shame,” Victor said. “Godspeed to you, son.”

Victor and Da jerked me off my feet at the same moment, and then they both said one word. A word that shattered all sound, shattered all light, shattered the heavens. Or at least my heaven.

Magic.

“Good-bye, Shamus,” I heard Dad whisper. “Make me proud.”

And then I was flying through the air, into the window.

I threw my hands out to try to protect my face. Glass exploded, sliced through me, shredded my clothes, my skin, my bone.

I yelled. And fell forever.