deserve to be hurt,â 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 wasnât 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 Iâd 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 hadnât 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.
âBeer and ketchup.â Terric shut the refrigerator door. âIt was your turn to shop, Shame.â
I pulled out my cell phone, dialed.
âWhat are you doing?â he said.
âShopping. Hey,â I said when the voice picked up on the other end. âTwo large pizzas, vegetarian, pepperoni.â
Terric rolled his eyes and grabbed us both a couple beers. âYouâre all kinds of class.â
I hung up, took the beer, and popped the cap. âBack atcha.â
âCall me when it gets here,â he said, walking off.
âWhere you going to be?â
âShower.â
I paced and drank. Checked on the ferret Iâd inherited from Dessa, the last person Iâd 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 Dessaâs brother, Thomas, before heâd been killed by Eli Collins under Krogherâs orders. I didnât know what secrets theyâd 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 brotherâs 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 Iâd gotten a file from Dash.
Boy was quick.
I pulled out a chair, sat, and opened the file.
At first I wasnât 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 didnât look modern. Diagrams sketched glyphs I did not recognize connected together in ways I didnât 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.
âIt didnât,â Terric said from behind me.
âWhose research is it?â 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