Free Stone Cold by Devon Monk Page B

deserve to be hurt,” he said. Then he opened the door and ducked into the car.
    I stood there until I could breathe right again. Maybe a few of the scrub oaks by the river died. Maybe a lot of the bushes died too. It wasn’t just people I could pull life from, but people were always best.
    The local vegetation was just enough to dampen the need. Barely.
    If I was this close to the edge of losing control, Terric was even closer. Maybe he was right. No one deserved what he and I were. We were nothing but pain.
    I opened the door and got in the car.

Chapter 6
    SHAME
    The house I’d won in a poker game was staked against the hills in Portland and surrounded by trees. The road snaked above it and the only way to get a good look at it was if you happened to glance up when you were navigating hairpin corners on the road below.
    Terric had taken one of the spare rooms, and while he hadn’t added a single item to my living room decor, which was no longer an armory of weapons, but was definitely still thrift shop chic, he had nonetheless made himself at home here.
    Why had I let him stay?
    For one thing, the man liked to cook.
    I considered it one of his better qualities.
    â€œBeer and ketchup.” Terric shut the refrigerator door. “It was your turn to shop, Shame.”
    I pulled out my cell phone, dialed.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” he said.
    â€œShopping. Hey,” I said when the voice picked up on the other end. “Two large pizzas, vegetarian, pepperoni.”
    Terric rolled his eyes and grabbed us both a couple beers. “You’re all kinds of class.”
    I hung up, took the beer, and popped the cap. “Back atcha.”
    â€œCall me when it gets here,” he said, walking off.
    â€œWhere you going to be?”
    â€œShower.”
    I paced and drank. Checked on the ferret I’d inherited from Dessa, the last person I’d loved and gotten killed.
    The ferret, Jinkies, was asleep, curled up in the soft cotton blanket Terric had bought him.
    Jinkies used to belong to Dessa’s brother, Thomas, before he’d been killed by Eli Collins under Krogher’s orders. I didn’t know what secrets they’d gotten out of Thomas, but I was pretty sure his death had proved that having Eli Collins on board to help the government track all us Soul Complements down and kill us was worth the trouble.
    Of course, Eli had a slightly different story. He said the government had kidnapped him and was forcing him to kill. But I knew the guy. He liked dealing out the blood and pain.
    Somehow on the way to tracking down her brother’s killer, Dessa and I had fallen, fast and hard, for each other.
    Then Eli killed her.
    I wandered over to my laptop set up on the table in the corner of the room. Checked messages.
    Looked like I’d gotten a file from Dash.
    Boy was quick.
    I pulled out a chair, sat, and opened the file.
    At first I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. I had expected technical manuals, or research papers from Beckstrom Enterprises.
    The scanned pages were handwritten and yellowed, and didn’t look modern. Diagrams sketched glyphs I did not recognize connected together in ways I didn’t understand, all working together in a manner I could not fathom.
    Why the hell was Terric looking at this?
    I clicked through a few more pages until something caught my eye.
    Unbinding. It was the steps of an unbinding spell, mixed with a few other spells, carved into flesh with the blood of two people.
    No, with the blood of Soul Complements.
    This was a spell to unbind Soul Complements.
    I wondered if it worked.
    â€œIt didn’t,” Terric said from behind me.
    â€œWhose research is it?” I turned in the chair.
    Terric was shirtless, drying his hair with a towel. The Void-stone-bullet scars from our last fight with Eli were still red knots of scar tissue sprayed across his gut, crisscrossed with marks from the surgery that had saved his life.
    When I