Magic Without Mercy (18 page)

“Back to Collins, right?” I said.

Zayvion nodded. “Before the spell wears off and we lose the sample.”

“We still don’t have the Death well sample,” I said.

“Shame and Terric might have it by now.”

“We could go out to the Death well and see if they need help. The graveyard’s public property. It would be easy to get in.”

“Too risky,” Zay said.

“We need that last sample, Zay. And they haven’t sent any sign that they have it.”

“Don’t you think the Authority will be waiting for us there?” he asked. “They’ve had enough time, Allie. Enough time to know their men are dead.”

“Those were Bartholomew’s men,” I said quietly. “The Authority—whoever is running it now—might not know. Might not know what Bartholomew wanted them to do. Might not know that they’re missing.”

“They’ll know,” he said. “Whoever is the head will know. And they’ll know we did it. Our signatures are all over the place. So they’ll be looking for us. And if we went to one well, they’ll expect us at the other wells. The graveyard. The gardens. The inn.”

“They didn’t stop Maeve at the inn.” But even as I said it, I knew that was a different matter altogether. One, Maeve lived there. Two, she hadn’t just been out at the Life well killing people.

“They might not think we’d be stupid enough to do it,” I said.

He half turned to me, shaking his head. “Don’t count
on it. Everything we’ve been doing lately is… insane. We’ve broken from the Authority. People who do that are hunted down and Closed or killed. Always. No matter how long it takes.”

Stone growled.

I looked away from Zayvion and searched the shadows. Something shifted between the buildings.

“Veiled,” I said. “Zay, we’ve got Veiled.” The slide of watercolor light slipped at the edges of shadows. Men and women with black holes where their eyes should be, mouths filled with too many teeth, shifted forward, lining the street behind us. Not just one person or two. A lot. Way too many.

They paused.

Then rushed.

“Run!”

We ran.

They were closing in on us. Fast. Too fast.

The car was just a few yards away. The Veiled were gaining on us.

We’d never make it to the car before they swarmed over us.

Shit, shit, shit. My gun wouldn’t stop them. My knife wouldn’t cut them. The only thing that worked on Veiled was magic. And I couldn’t use magic.

About fifty yards from the car, Stone stopped. He growled, his head down, his fangs bared. He wasn’t running. He wasn’t flying. He was just standing there in the middle of the street, growling at the Veiled.

“Stone!” I called. “Come on, boy. Run. Get in the damn car!”

But Stone did not move.

The Veiled shot past us. I smelled the rotted-meat stink of them. Their fingers scraped and slapped as they crashed in a wave and streamed past me.

Aiming straight for Stone.

“They want his magic,” I said. “Zay, they want the magic in him. In Stone. The sample!”

Stone tore into the Veiled, ripping off arms, heads, and leaving wet, shredded ribbons of colored magic to scatter the ground. But there were too many. They latched on with wide, wide mouths and sucked the magic out of him, draining him down.

Zay cast a quick Sight to see the Veiled and dropped it like a struck match. “Fuck,” he said, wiping his foot over the ashes of the spell to muddle his signature.

“Witnesses?” he asked.

I turned a full three-sixty. “No.”

“Get back!”

I got out of the way. Zayvion pulled his sword and muttered a Disbursement spell that crawled down his spine and bit deep at his low back. Then he traced Impact. It skittered and sparked like lightning down the blade of his sword.

He strode into the mob of Veiled and swung. Hard, clean strokes cleaved through half a dozen Veiled. The Veiled screeched and fell, clawing at him, clawing at Stone, even as they were pulverized into a liquid magic mess.

The Veiled turned on Zay like wild animals. They bit, tore, clawed at him.

“No!” I ran toward the fight, unable to just stand by and watch. I didn’t have a weapon, but I wasn’t going to let them tear him apart.

Before I could even reach Zay, he threw Hold. The mass of Veiled around him froze. He swung his blade again and the undead shattered like glass beneath his blow.

But for every Veiled that fell, more swarmed toward us from the shadows. Stone was still fighting, tearing them apart. So many more were still coming. Too many.

I pulled my knife and slashed at the Veiled, but my
blade slid right through their faces as they pushed past me toward Stone.

Stone roared out, a painful rusty screech I’d never heard before. The Veiled grabbed him by wings, arms, and legs and forced him to the ground. They piled on him, burying him in a heaving, sucking heap.

“Zay!” I yelled. I slashed and hit the Veiled, trying to get them off Stone, but it was like punching fog. I hated this. Hated being so damn helpless.

Stone was slowing, the magic in him fading. The light in his eyes was growing dim, and even the rusty screech was down to a whisper.

He was dying.

“We have to save Stone. Zay, we have to get him out of here.”

Zayvion took three steps back, and called on magic. And magic answered. He slammed his sword, tip first, into the concrete. Magic crackled across the buildings, scrambled down the street, licked arcs from storm rod to storm rod across the night sky.

And then magic poured into his sword and blasted through the concrete. The street fissured into a glyph, a spell: Grounding.

The Veiled were sucked toward that spell like smoke to a chimney.

They flew, to Zay, to his sword, swirling around him in gruesome, tattered shambles of the once-living, then lost all form.

Watery hues of magic, of the dead, washed down the glyphs of his blade and spread out into the fissured spell broken into the concrete. Then the Veiled were gone, like rain sluiced down the drain.

Zayvion crackled with sparks of magic that wove silver and burned copper over his skin.

He said a single word and pulled the sword out of the
concrete. He took a step back, wavered a little, and caught his balance with his arms spread slightly.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

He didn’t say anything. Was still staring at the massive pothole he’d just carved into the street.

That was when I realized the magic sparking around him wasn’t leftovers from the spell. It was the Disbursement—the price he was paying for throwing that massive Grounding spell.

Holy hells, he must be on fire.

“Where are your keys?” He still didn’t move, maybe couldn’t move. I patted his jeans, found the keys in his front pocket. I jogged to the car, got in, and started the engine. That spell Zayvion pulled down from the heavens was going to call attention to us from every magic user in the city. Especially the ones who were looking for him, for me.

I turned the car around and stopped next to Zay. I got out, leaving the engine idling. “Can you walk?” I hurried around the passenger’s side of the car and opened the door.

“Zayvion. Jones. Can you walk?”

He shifted slightly and inhaled, then groaned. Somehow that man lifted his feet. Somehow he turned around.

Then I was next to him, my arm around his waist.

His pain shot through me, bit so deep I wanted to let go. But I gritted my teeth and helped him get to the car. He slumped into the passenger side and closed his eyes. I shut the door behind him and looked at Stone.

“Stone?” Far off, I heard the wail of a siren, then two. Another joined in. Maybe coming our way to check what the big explosion and spike in magic had been.

Definitely coming our way.

Stone was frozen midstride, his right hand lifted. The light in his eyes was very, very dim.

I jogged to him and put my hand on his head. “Stoney?”

He rumbled, a sigh of his usual bag-of-marbles sound.

“You’re going to be okay,” I said. “I’m going to help you, boy. It’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”

Sure, the mouth was promising, but the brain had no idea how to deliver.

Stone was doing what he could. He managed to get his hand to the ground, shift his weight, and take another underwater slow-motion step forward.

I needed to get the car closer to him. Otherwise we wouldn’t be out of here before dawn.

I scrambled back to the car, got in, pulled up so the back door could open right in front of Stone.

Then I got out, opened the door, and put my shoulder to Stone’s hind end, helping shove him into the car, even though he weighed a ton or two.

The sirens were louder. Flashes of blue snapped in the distance. The police were coming. Probably the Authority too. Time to make scarce.

I ran around to the driver’s side again, got in, and hit the gas. Screw the speed limit. I needed to get us out of there as quickly as I could. I wondered if I should backtrack and do something sneaky so they wouldn’t follow us, but the best way to stay out of sight was to look like every other car out there.

There were no spells on this car, which wasn’t that unusual, and Stone and Zay and I weren’t leaking magic, so that was good. After several blocks, I brought it back down to the speed limit, took the first corner, then navigated a long, meandering route to the warehouse, heading toward it from the opposite direction than the last time I’d been there.

I didn’t know what the Veiled had done to Stone. I
didn’t know what they’d done to the magic he held. Zayvion was hurting, and too damn quiet.

“Zay, are you hurt?” Dumb question. I’d felt his pain from the Disbursement. I knew he was more than hurt. Nothing but slightly ragged breathing from the passenger’s seat answered me. I glanced over at him. He had his eyes closed. Sweat covered his face.

“Zayvion?” I said a little softer. “Are you okay?”

He swallowed. “Fine. The spell…”

And that was all he had to say. The cost of casting a spell that damn huge was crazy. “Pretty dramatic,” I said, trying to keep him talking and conscious. “Think you could have maybe pulled on more magic to Ground them? I think most of Washington still has power.”

“Could have,” he managed. “But we were in a hurry.”

He shifted, and pressed his hand against the dash to push himself more upright in his seat. He left a thick smear of blood behind. He had been injured. Injured by the Veiled.

“Zayvion,” I said. “You’re bleeding.”

He shook his head, though his eyes still weren’t open. “No, I’m fine. Fine.”

And then he passed out.

S
hame was pacing in the garage area of the warehouse smoking a cigarette. He didn’t even wait for me to get out of the car before he started in on me.

“Where the hell were you? It’s been hours.”

“We got hit by the Veiled.”

“Jesus, Beckstrom. You leave to call in one little gargoyle and end up tangling with the undead?”

“Zay’s hurt.”

That shut Shame up, which was what I had hoped it would do. He circled the car with me. I opened the passenger-side door, and Zayvion opened his eyes.

Relief washed over me. At least he was conscious.

He was sweating, his face covered in finger burns and bruises, blood flowing from his forehead and nose. His eyes were slits of molten gold. I don’t think he saw either of us.

“We’re going to get you inside,” I said, calm and matter-of-fact. “Shame’s here to help. Can you stand up out of the car, or do you want me to drag you out on a gurney?”

Zay closed his eyes. Swallowed. I could feel the mustering of energy he pulled inward. Not magic, just a steeling of will before the effort.

And then he swung both feet out of the car, held on to the doorframe, and pushed up on his own two feet.

“Bravo, hero,” Shame said around the cigarette in his mouth. “If you put one arm over my shoulder and don’t fall down before we get inside, I’ll give you a cookie.”

I put my arm around his waist on one side, and Shame did the same on the other. I didn’t expect Shame to actually be much help, but I was wrong. Shame might not be up to full power, but he was plenty strong enough, or at least stubborn enough, to help me get Zayvion inside.

Lucky for us, the door was unlocked.

“Where’s Stone?” Shame asked as we navigated the first room.

“Backseat. He’s not moving very well.”

By the time we’d hit the arched doorway to the next room, I could hear people moving.

“Let me trade places with you, Allie,” Hayden said. And even though I was doing just fine, I slipped out from beside Zay. “What happened to him?” he asked.

“Fought the Veiled,” I said. “Grounded everything in a ten-mile radius.”

“Good lord, boy,” Hayden said. “You should know better.”

“Go get Stone,” Shame said. “We got him.”

“I could use some help,” I said.

Terric walked over. “Let me.”

I nodded.

Terric looked good. No bruises, burns, or blood. “What did you find out?” I asked.

“I sent a message to Zay,” he said.

“We missed part of it. Who’s the head of the Authority?”

“Jingo Jingo.”

“Hells,” I said. “Just what I didn’t want to hear. Does he know about you defecting? Or are you a double agent now?”

Terric shrugged. “He has a small group of people he
trusts. I’m not one of them. Neither is Violet, if that helps any.”

“It does. Did you see Violet? Is she okay?”

“I didn’t see her. But Victor said he contacted Kevin. He’ll keep her safe.”

“I hope so,” I said. “She can be strong willed sometimes.”

“Stubbornness seems to run in Beckstrom women,” he said.

We were at the car now. Terric bent down and looked through the window at Stone. “Is he moving at all?”

“Some. But the Veiled sucked the magic out of him. They piled up on him. Hundreds. I couldn’t get them off him. I couldn’t do a damn thing to help.”

“Well, he’s here now,” Terric said. “If we have to, we can try transferring magic into him. Maybe give him a jump start. I don’t know if it will work, but if he’s not moving, it might be worth a try.”

I opened the car door. “Hey, Stone. You awake?”