Magic Without Mercy (13 page)

“What did you do?” I whispered.

Collins stepped into the room, and turned off half the bank of lights. “I told you what I did. I saved him.”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do. Collins walked toward Davy.

“The light bothers his eyes,” he said softly. “Which is why you caught him… surprised. He is learning to control the shift between solid and incorporeal—”

“Get away from him,” I said.

Collins stopped, turned toward me, calm. “Come see him for yourself.”

I heard a gun cock from behind me. “You’re bothering my friends, mate,” Shame said from the door. “Why don’t you get over to that wall, and keep your hands where I can see them.”

Collins did as he was told.

I walked across the room, but stopped short of where Davy was still huddling in the corner. “Davy?”

My eyes were pretty good in the dark. But there was a lot of magic surrounding Davy, like he was wearing a
shadow made of thin flashes of black and silver and weird green threads that formed a not exactly human-shaped suit of armor around him.

“It’s Allie,” I said. “Davy?”

He tipped his head up and I squinted to see through the magic to the Davy beneath.

His eyes flashed red in the darkness.

Holy shit.

Davy was there, the Davy I knew, thin, smiling, yellow hair stuck up with a bad case of bed head, smelling of cedar and lemons and wearing a pair of sweatpants and a loose T-shirt. But he was something else too, something else that surrounded him.

I’d thought he was a Veiled—a ghost—but that wasn’t quite right either.

“Are you okay?” I asked him. I held my hand out for him. “I don’t think you should be on your feet right now. Let me get you to a bed, okay?”

He hesitated, then took a step forward, but it was like his feet weren’t working. He buckled, caught himself with one hand on the wall, his other hand falling into mine.

No. His hand didn’t fall into mine. His hand fell right
through
mine.

Somehow he caught himself, pulled his hand back from me and out of the wall. Then he pulled his feet up out of the floor, one by one, and stood there, mostly solid and mostly just Davy again.

“You’re tired, Davy,” Collins said, with quiet encouragement. “Keep calm and try not to strain. You are fine. You are alive.”

“Shut it,” Shame snapped.

“Davy?” I said again.

“I’m,” he said in a voice that sounded far, far away, “trying.” He took another step, and then another. His
feet stayed on top of the floor instead of inside it, and with one last step he was out into the light of the room.

“Fuck me,” Shame breathed.

“Shame,” I said, keeping my voice low and my eyes steady on Davy’s face. His eyes were wide with fear. “You’re fine. You’re going to be just fine.”

Davy’s gaze searched my face, looking for the lie. He didn’t find it, though. Because I believed it, had to believe it with all my heart. Everything might not be right at this very moment—Davy might be flickering between looking like a Veiled ghost and looking like a man—but he was going to be fine. Because I’d make sure he was fine. I’d twist Collins’ guts until he made Davy fine.

“Think you can walk over here to the bed?” I asked.

“Is there beer?” His voice was still faint but growing stronger.

I smiled at him. “There better be a beer in it for both of us,” I said. I held my hand out, and Davy stared straight in my eyes and took a breath. He lowered his hand to mine.

And it stopped against my skin, warm, a little sweaty. Davy was solid, just Davy again, though he was sweating, trembling, and working hard to stay calm and solid.

Boy was freaked the hell out.

I didn’t blame him.

“Don’t like that bed much,” he said. “Bad dreams.”

“Then I’ll get you another one.” I didn’t look away from Davy; I didn’t move. “Collins. I need a place for Davy to rest.”

“He can use my bedroom,” Collins said. “I offered it to him once before. He didn’t want to move from this room.”

“Show me,” I said.

I heard Shame and Zayvion shift behind me. “Don’t need your hands to walk,” Shame said to Collins. “Keep them up. Let’s go.”

“Really,” Collins sighed. “Under gunpoint in my own house? After all I’ve done for you? I am not your enemy.”

“Lucky for you, we haven’t decided what you are yet,” Shame said cheerily. “And until we do, I’m not putting this gun down. Probably not even after that, you vengeful bastard,” he added.

“Vengeful?” Collins said. “Wherever do you get such ideas, Mr. Flynn?”

“I’ve heard the stories. I’ve seen the obits.”

They walked out of the room, and Zayvion paced toward me slowly, quietly, but heavy enough Davy and I could hear his footsteps.

Davy was tensing up the closer Zayvion came toward us, like an animal ready to bolt.

“He’s your friend, Davy. He’s worried about you too, and he’s not going to hurt you,” I said. “Can you let him stand on the other side of you so we can help you walk?”

Davy nodded.

I risked breaking eye contact long enough to look up at Zayvion. “Be careful—he’s still sick.”

“We can do careful,” Zay said in a gentle voice. “We got you, Davy. Now let’s get you in bed so you can rest and we can figure this out.”

Davy shifted his look from me to Zayvion, searching Zayvion’s face as if he was having a hard time focusing on him. Finally, his eyes cleared. “Hey, Zay.”

“Evening,” Zay said smoothly. “Ready to sit down for a bit?”

“Sure,” Davy said. “Sure. Allie?”

“Right here.” I stood next to him and put my arm around his back, gently lifting his arm up and around my shoulder. He was solid; he felt solid. He smelled like Davy should smell, and strangely, the magic that covered
his skin like a gauzy veil of color didn’t stink. He was the shape Davy should be.

He didn’t look like what Anthony had looked like at the end before he’d died—rabid, out of control, desperate. But the weave of magic around him did not go away even though I was touching him, touching his flesh. I could not shake the reality of what I had seen. Davy had been a ghost, a Veiled, just a moment ago. He’d put his hand through a wall.

I was going to tear Collins’ heart out through his throat for this.

“T
hat okay?” I asked after I got Davy’s arm settled over my shoulder.

“Like I’d complain?” he said.

I smiled. “Like you wouldn’t.”

Zayvion got situated on his other side and we started walking. Got as far as the door, Davy breathing pretty heavily as if he were dragging an impossible weight behind him, instead of like he was practically being carried by Zayvion and me.

“Need to rest?” I asked.

“Need bed,” he panted.

We kept walking. Through the door, down the hall to a room behind another door—this time a wooden door with iron bracers, hinges, and locks that gave it a medieval look.

This was a bedroom. Huge, but a bedroom. There was a potbelly stove in the corner and dressers built into the walls, and an iron four-poster king-sized bed. Collins stood to one side of the room, looking bored.

Shame held the gun level with his chest, looking content as a cat.

“This must be the bed,” I said. “Good enough for you, Silvers?”

“It. Will do,” he panted.

“Almost there,” I said, knowing he was wearing out.

Davy took another step and tripped. I braced to keep him from falling. So did Zayvion.

Something cold slid up my left arm, sticking and grabbing to keep hold of me as Davy’s arm slipped from my grasp. I glanced at my arm.

A lash of magic—black with flecks of colors, the same colors that lay over Davy’s skin—wrapped around my arm like a vine, like a whip.

No, like a tentacle. I’d seen lines of black like that before. It was what the tainted magic looked like under Anthony’s skin. It was what the tainted magic looked like under Davy’s skin.

It was the tentacles of poisoned magic that were trying to kill Davy.

“Concentrate,” Collins said firmly. “You are alive, Davy. Flesh and bone. Refuse the magic.”

Collins’ voice snapped me back to reality, and I realized Davy was falling, still falling, Zayvion bracing to catch and hold him, but there was nothing to catch or hold.

Davy fell through Zay’s grasp, his feet and shins already sinking into the floor.

“Davy,” I said. “Knock it off.”

The tentacle let go of me, and Davy landed on the floor. Hard. Solid. His feet and legs weren’t in the floor anymore. He was, all of him, on the floor.

“Sure, boss,” he whispered. “Whatever you say.” He panted, covered in sweat and pain and fear.

I reached for him, but Zayvion brushed me aside and bent. He picked him up, then carried him to the bed.

Davy was so out of it, he didn’t even protest the damsel-in-distress treatment.

I pulled the covers back and Zay got Davy in the bed; then I covered him up, except for his chest.

Davy was already asleep, or maybe passed out. His
face was slick with sweat, his hair stuck against his forehead. But his breathing was already settling some. He remained solid. That was something, right?

His pale arms were corded with muscle and marks of magic that inked a hard, thick black line under his skin, wrapping like a vine and splitting at his wrist to send thinner tendrils up each finger all the way to his fingernails.

The tainted magic had spread. Was that what had scraped across my arm while Davy fell? Was the tainted magic inside him trying to get out? But it didn’t smell bad. Didn’t smell like the taint.

My arm was still sore from that touch, as if fingers had dug in hard, leaving slightly bruised lines behind.

“What did you do?” I turned to Collins.

He inhaled, caught his breath as if gauging what he should tell me that would keep me—well, Shame—from shooting him.

“Everything,” I said. “Tell me everything.”

“He was dying,” he started. “Transporting him here from the den made his condition worse. Much worse. The poisoned magic was spreading faster. The Syphons I set up on him couldn’t keep up with it. He was… suffocating as it consumed him. I’d done everything I could to keep the taint from spreading through his body, to pull magic out of him.”

He tipped his head up, looked over at Davy. “I thought I’d lose him. My skills… well, they aren’t what they used to be since the Authority Closed me, are they?” He gave Zayvion a sardonic smile.

Zayvion cracked his knuckles, a promise to bruise up the other side of Collins’ face if he didn’t get on with the explanation.

“This warehouse is built to focus magic,” he said.

That would explain the girders and ornate crisscrossed metal rafters.

“And that was something I could work with to help Davy. So I made a decision.”

“Without me,” I said.

“I couldn’t find you. And even if I had told your Hounds to find you, it would have been too late for Davy. I had a matter of minutes to do what needed to be done, Allison, not a matter of hours. It was because of you that I did what I did. You were my inspiration. The magic that marks you”—he pointed toward my right arm, to the ribbons of color, of magic, there—“suggested I could do this.”

“Do what? Turn Davy into a… into a…”

“Living Veiled?” Collins suggested.

Shame exhaled a curse. I just nodded. “Is that what he is now? A dead man? Half ghost, half alive?”

“No. Not exactly.” Collins took a step toward me.

“Stay where you are,” Shame said.

Collins glanced at Shame’s gun, then crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the wall. “I created a Containment spell, drew magic into it, filtered through several layers of spells and tech, and cast it around Davy and myself. I also reconfigured the equipment, drawing upon several delicate spells at once. Dozens,” he added quietly. “Dozens of spells.”

I suddenly realized he was more than just bruised up—he was exhausted. He had paid the price of pain for each of those spells he’d used on Davy. I was actually impressed. When the Authority had Closed him, they’d taken away his memories of how to use magic. Everything he did with magic now, he had had to learn from scratch. And I had to admit some of it was pretty genius.

“I had to reroute the paths the magic was already burning through his body. Draw it out of his vital systems, and give it a place to flow. It had to have a place to complete its task, and I needed to give it that place.” He
paused, staring at the bed. I didn’t think he saw Davy there. Or maybe he saw him in a way none of the rest of us ever would.

“Feed a fever,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“Fever,” he said. “Extinguish it with ice, or burn it out with fire. Ice wasn’t working; stopping the magic wasn’t working. So I poured magic into Davy, forced it to burn, to run its course as hot and quick as it could. But not the course it had been choosing to sear through his body, his organs. I forced it to follow pathways of my making. Pathways I carved
into
him.”

Okay, crazy man was freaking me out now. “You carved spells into him?” I asked.

His gaze pulled away from some far distance and he studied my face, my mouth, my forehead, and finally met my eyes. “Yes.”

I turned and pulled Davy’s shirt up. The black tentacles of tainted magic still traced beneath his skin, just like they had since Anthony bit him and infected him. They began on his shoulder in a solid black-and-blue bruise and snaked out from there, across his back, then around his ribs and up over his shoulder, digging down along his collarbones, and his chest.

They had been reaching for his heart. I knew that. They had been reaching for his stomach, his liver, his lungs. But not anymore.

Scars decorated his chest. Thin, morbidly beautiful strokes and lines, some wide and still red, some thin, glossy pink, others white and crinkled. All the lines, the scars, created a design that reached from just beneath his collarbones and tapered down to the edge of his waistband. Through those scars, and trapped between those scars, magic flowed.

I just stood there, staring, trying to get my head
around the reality of this. Of what this was. Of what it meant.