Stone Cold by Devon Monk

there?” Eli said. “I told you he’d fall in line. Because Terric always does the right thing. Don’t you, Conley? You have such a hero complex.”
    â€œDid you kill him?” I asked.
    â€œWho? Your little fuck-buddy Flynn?” He stepped up to the bars, a hypodermic needle in one hand and a black leather satchel with glyphs painted across it in the other. “Tell me you didn’t feel the connection break. Tell me you can’t feel, right now, a raw burning sickness chewing its way through your spine, screaming and puking in your brain. Tell me you didn’t feel him die.”
    I was breathing hard, trying to keep Life magic from flaring and burning me up. “Did you kill him?” I asked again.
    The door to the cage slid aside and he stepped into my prison.
    He was close enough I could kill him with a thought.
    Except the glyphs that bound me to the cot, the spells carved into the cell bars, the spells burned into the concrete floor, bound me too. I knew how to kill him, but Life magic refused to move, refused to take shape to my will.
    He had done a very good job of locking magic up inside me.
    Eli strolled over to the cot. Distantly, I heard the clack of Krogher’s gun chambering a round. Heard that echoing throughout the warehouse, three, four, half a dozen other guns trained on me.
    So there were at least six other people here. People I could not sense.
    Magic is fast. Bullets are faster.
    But I was two things: patient and vengeful.
    Eli stopped next to my cot. Stared down at me through round gold-wire glasses. It had been some time since I’d seen him. Haggard, he hadn’t shaved in probably a week, his hair was three missed appointments too long, and his clothes—a button-down white work shirt and gray gabardine trousers—were wrinkled and stained at the cuff.
    Stained with blood.
    â€œDid I kill Shame?” Eli bent at the waist, putting his mouth near my ear. “Yes. Just like he killed Brandy.”
    I jerked at that. “Your Soul Complement? She died of a heart attack.”
    Eli straightened, then placed the satchel next to him, his face immobile as his hands delicately manipulated the locks on it.
    â€œShe was under doctors’ observation,” I said. “Close observation. Shame didn’t kill her. He couldn’t have.”
    The locks gave with two soft
snicks
. I smelled sharp chemicals and hot plastic.
    â€œEli,” I said, “there were cameras on her. Protection spells on her. She was under lock and key. We wanted to keep her
alive
. There was nothing in it for us if she died. Shame never touched her. He couldn’t have touched her.”
    I knew I was reasoning with a madman, but getting through to Eli was the only card I had to play right now.
    He didn’t turn, didn’t shift from the slow, measured motions of whatever he was unpacking onto the table or surface just beyond my view. Like a man caught in the trance of a dream he’d gone through too many times.
    I looked the other way. Krogher was still there, the gun pointed at my head and his finger resting near the trigger. I knew there were other gunmen doing the same.
    â€œHe was there,” Eli said so quietly my own breathing nearly drowned out the sound of his words. “He sat down beside Brandy. Covered her mouth so she couldn’t scream. Stared in her eyes. Told her . . .”
    He held up a knife, long and razor sharp, glyphs and spells cracking into shadows and sparks of light as he turned it. “. . . that he wanted to hurt her. For me. To make me feel pain. Her pain. To tell me . . .” He turned toward me the knife—a blood blade—in one hand. In the other hand was the hypodermic needle.
    â€œTo tell me that he was coming to kill me. For what I’d done to Victor. For what I’d done to Dessa. For what I’d done to you. What have I done to you, Terric? What have I ever done to