Suicide Kings, page 27
I’m not letting this end the same way. I pull her back down onto me, lean into her. The kiss is harder this time, more urgent. She straddles me, her skin burning against my lips, my hands. Everything is a blur of heat and need and hunger. I pull back on her hair and she tightens her grip around me. She fumbles to unbutton my shirt while I press my teeth against her neck just under her jaw and slide my hand under her dress and up her back.
We don’t have enough time. We’ll never have enough time. We aren’t the kind of people who get to have things like this for long. All we can do is grab it as it comes by and hold on tight because soon enough it’ll all be ripped away. Nothing lasts and everything breaks. But right now we’re here and for a little while, at least, nothing else matters.
A cough from the bathroom door. Amanda is standing there watching us, a bemused expression on her face.
“Can we go kick the shit out of my uncle now?”
* * *
—
We take the long way, stopping at my room so I can grab the Sig and the derringer. Otto’s Glock is nice and all, but I’ve never been a fan of plastic guns.
Amanda doesn’t want to take any chances. She’s worried that now that the house is stable any change might give Liam a chance to take it back. I don’t know how it works so I’ll take her word for it.
She slows a bit while we’re walking to the billiard room and Gabriela goes a little faster. It takes me a second to realize what’s going on. I figure I might as well start the awkward conversation.
“So,” I say. “You and Gabriela.”
“So,” she says back at me. “You and Gabriela.”
“The other night I was ready to kill her,” I say.
“She told me. How do you feel about her now?”
“I was a little caught off guard. But I liked it. Liked it a lot, actually.”
Amanda snorts back a laugh. “I kinda noticed. Should I have not interrupted?”
“Depends on whether you wanted to see a floor show or not,” I say. “How about you?”
“I’ve only known her a month. It’s been a really intense month, but it’s still only a month. We hooked up after the thing with Darius. I think we were all drained. And she thought you needed some space. One thing led to another and—”
“And now you’re getting married?”
She laughs. Her smile eases the lines the tension in her face. “God, no. Marriage. Gah. We’re . . . dating? I guess? I really don’t know.”
“People like us don’t get to have normal lives,” I say. “Not even normal for mages. Best we can do is grab happiness where we can and not let go. It’ll get pried away from us eventually.”
“I wish I could say I disagree. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about her. I like her. Obviously. The sex is great. Was that TMI?”
“I accidentally told my ex-girlfriend I was hoping to get back with that I got the car we were in off a guy I’d violently murdered in Texas. As awkward TMI situations go, I think I got you beat.”
“Is this gonna be a problem?” Amanda says.
“Not for me,” I say. “I don’t even know what the hell’s going on. How about you?”
“No,” she says. “I don’t think it will. I don’t feel jealous. You?”
“I’m still coming to grips with being alive again. And honestly, I don’t think it’s up to us anyway.”
“When this is all over, the three of us probably need to sit down and have a conversation.”
“I think I’d rather have my eyes gouged out.”
“I didn’t say it was going to be a fun conversation,” she says. “Just that we should have it. There are—”
“Political consequences,” I say. I think back to the conversation we had back at the Nickel Diner. “If people lost their shit just because I was talking to you and really go nuts when Gabriela and I are just in the same room, they’re gonna love this.”
“Aren’t mage politics fun?” she says.
“Oh, look, we’re here,” I say as we catch up with Gabriela waiting for us at the door. She looks a little nervous.
“Good talk?” she says.
“We’re not telling,” Amanda says.
Gabriela takes it in stride. “Do we have a plan?”
“Don’t kill anybody,” I say. “Just beat them until they’re open to answering questions.”
“How about we start with the questions,” Amanda says. “Anybody makes a move, then we can beat them.”
“I vote for the beating,” Gabriela says. “I just want to get this over with.” She’s exhausted. We all are.
“Let’s do it,” Amanda says. She puts her hand on the door, but instead of opening it, she simply dissolves the entire wall.
Helga leaps up from her seat on a sofa, outrage plain on her face. Siobhan lifts her eyes from the billiard table to see what’s happening and takes her shot without looking, knocking the 8-ball into a side pocket. Tobias, as expected, is rocking quietly in the corner with his arms around his legs.
“Has he always been this bad?” I say.
“Not when he first showed up,” Gabriela says. “He’s gotten worse with everything going on right now.”
“How dare you keep us locked up like animals,” Helga says, marching up to Amanda as if she’s the concierge at a hotel that’s not up to her standards.
“I don’t think animals get a pool table and a full bar,” Siobhan says. “I take it we’re under suspicion for something, but I can’t imagine it’s Liam’s murder. None of us liked him.”
“He was my brother,” Helga says, turning her anger on Siobhan, who simply rolls her eyes and starts to set up a new game.
“Yes, mine too, and you hated him more than anyone else did,” Siobhan says.
“Liam wasn’t murdered,” Amanda says.
“Oh, now this has just gotten interesting,” Siobhan says. She puts the pool cue down and hoists herself up to sit cross-legged on the table. “Should we make popcorn?”
“We all saw his body lying facedown in the soup,” Helga says.
“Oh, he’s dead,” I say. “He just wasn’t murdered. He committed suicide and shoved his soul into somebody else. They’re dead and one of you isn’t who you say you are.”
“Ooh,” Siobhan says. “Exciting.”
“This is ridiculous,” Helga says. “I demand—”
“Aunt Helga, if you don’t shut up, Eric here will put a bullet through your kneecap, because I have asked him not to kill you.”
“And I’ll have fun doing it, too.”
“We’re going to find out who’s who,” Amanda says.
“How do you propose to do that?” Helga says. “Threats and torture?”
“Just a few simple questions,” Amanda says. I find myself wishing Letitia were here. Handy when someone can tell if you’re lying as soon as you open your mouth. We’d have had this wrapped up hours ago.
“How’d you feel when I cut off your kid’s head at the fight?” I say.
There’s something bothering me about this whole thing. That’s been bothering me since I realized what Liam had done. Then I have it. The Baba Yaga.
“When I heard the next day I was appalled. But I wasn’t there. Are you trying to catch me in a lie?”
I walk over to the pool table and pick up one of the balls, weigh it in my hand.
“Yes,” I say, though not the way she’s thinking. “How about you, Siobhan? Who’d you come here to kill?”
“Helga, of course,” she says. “I told you that.”
“You what?” Helga says.
“I think this is where you say ‘How dare you’ again,” I say.
“You can’t possibly be surprised,” Siobhan says. “I’ve been trying to kill you for decades. And I know half the assassins who’ve come after me over the years have been yours, so don’t deny it.”
“Tobias,” I say. “Catch.” I hurl the billiard ball as hard as I can at the kid’s head and add a push spell to it for good measure. If I’m wrong it’ll punch through his skull and Amanda and Gabriela are gonna be pissed. The ball stops inches from his face, hanging in mid-air.
“Shit,” he says.
When I faced off against the Baba Yaga, I was worried it would hop into one of the normals. A mage will fight, but a normal will crumple like a Coke can in an industrial press. It’d be instantaneous. If Liam had hit any of his other relatives, we would have known.
But if he hit the most vulnerable person in the room, the only one who had no magic, we’d never notice.
I open up on him with the Sig and jump behind the sofa. As expected, he stops all the bullets with a shield. Siobhan flips the pool table at him, less to crush him and more for cover. Amanda calls half a dozen iterations of Bigsby to surround him, all armed with cavalry sabers. Before they can so much as move, Liam disintegrates them.
Gabriela slams her open palm onto the floor, a massive crack tearing through the hardwood and erupting directly beneath Liam. Hands made of flames reach up through the fissure, but he’s too fast. He’s levitating just out of reach.
“Liam?” Helga says. “You sonofabitch.”
“Always a pleasure to see you, darling sister. Tell me, were you distraught when I died?”
“You murdered my grandson,” she says. Lightning bursts from her fingers toward Liam, who sends out tendrils of his own energy. They’re both a match for each other, so who knows how this will end up. I doubt I’m going to get another shot.
“Don’t kill him,” Amanda yells, throwing her own spells into the mix.
“Not sure that option’s on the table anymore,” I say. I run at Liam and jump. My razor appears in my hand and I slash down when I get close enough. It hits his defenses, so it doesn’t take his arm off, but leaves a long gash.
Liam howls in pain. He hits me hard with a push spell that throws me into the wall behind him, and the wood cracks from the force. I drop to the floor, wind knocked out of me.
He’s distracted enough for Helga’s attack to get through. He jerks as the lightning hits him, but a moment later he pushes out, starting to turn Helga’s lightning back on her. She stops casting quickly, before it can hit.
Thinking she’s the greater threat, he ignores me and sends a lance of green energy at her. She staggers. Her defenses hold, but he has her pinned down under a barrage of fire. She’s too occupied to get back in the fight.
Gabriela and Amanda are attacking Liam from different angles. Fire, lightning, wind, a glowing spectral tiger. I need to get them to teach me that one. He’s shunting everything aside. But he’s still not paying any attention to me. I get close enough to take a shot.
I raise the blade and suddenly I’m picked up and flung over to the side of the room next to Siobhan. I’m pinned to the wall.
“What the fuck, Siobhan?”
“I’m sorry, Eric,” she says. “But I can’t let you do that. Once Helga’s dead, I’ll let you go and I’ll even help.” Of course. Siobhan can’t kill her sister, but she can let Liam do it for her.
If Helga goes down, I don’t know that all of us combined will be a match for Liam. But with Siobhan and me effectively out of the fight, there’s no doubt we’re going to lose.
“She dies, you and I hit Liam?”
“That’s the deal,” she says.
“Gabriela,” I yell. She glances at me, sees me pinned against the wall. “Helga.” She realizes what I’m saying right away, turns to Helga, and throws a spear of lightning straight through her head. Helga staggers back, sways, and falls over.
“There, she’s dead. Happy?” I say.
“Ecstatic.” Gabriela’s hit on Helga has surprised Liam enough for Siobhan to make a move. She decides that the best weapon to throw at him is me.
I slam into him, knocking him to the floor. I’m about to take a swing with the razor when he shoves his palm against my chest and tries to shove my soul out of my body. The same spell he used on Attila, and similar to the one the psycho baby necromancer at Alice’s tried to use on me, only a thousand times more sophisticated. His look of triumph turns to confusion when it doesn’t work.
“Oh buddy, did you back the wrong horse.” I grab hold of his soul and start pulling. It takes a second for him to realize what’s happening. He panics and lashes out, a wave of energy hitting me like a truck and sending me flying toward Gabriela. I stop in midair and float to the floor.
“Gotcha,” she says.
“Much obliged.” I turn and see Liam running from his corner toward us. More specifically, toward Amanda. I jump for him, snagging his leg and bringing him down just as Gabriela moves to block him.
His fingers touch Gabriela before I can yank him away and I feel and see him do to her what he tried to do to me. I see her soul rocketing away from her body, attached by the glowing thread. Her body falls to the floor, dead.
I slam my head into Liam’s face, breaking his nose. “Everyone out,” I yell. I follow up the headbutt with a fist, bouncing his skull off the floor. Spells, gunfire, razors he was expecting, but me using his head like a carpet hammer wasn’t on the list.
“What—”
“Get us out of here and freeze the room. We have to preserve the body.” I’m still pounding Liam’s face.
“Don’t kill him.”
“I’m not,” I say. “But he needs to be unconscious.” I don’t want this sonofabitch in any shape to cast a goddamn thing.
“I’m sending you to the study. The mage manacles are next to the door.”
“Manacles. Door. Got it.” The room disappears and a study with a brick fireplace and dark wood wainscotting appears around me.
“You fuck,” Liam says, voice thick through a busted nose and bloody, broken teeth. “I’ll fucking kill—”
“Shut up.” I hit him one more time and drag him over to the door where the manacles hang over a coat hook.
The moment I pick them up I can feel their effects. It’s like grabbing burning ice, and magic is only barely registering for me. I slap them on his wrists. He screams and goes unconscious.
“Oh, now you pass out. Asshole.”
* * *
—
Amanda appears a few minutes later. Alone.
“Where’s Siobhan?”
“Stuck in a room until I can figure out what to do with her,” Amanda says. “I don’t like being used. If she hadn’t pulled that shit with Helga, Gabriela wouldn’t be—” She closes her eyes. “Is she dead?”
“She’s in the same state your dad is,” I say. “We’re going to fix this.”
I’m pissed off at Siobhan too, though I can understand why she did what she did. It was the perfect time to take Helga out. Her entire focus was on Liam. Any other time and she’d see an attack coming a mile away. I hate her for it, but I have to respect her for it, too.
“Have you figured out the spell?”
“Not entirely,” I say, “but having Liam try to use it on me gave me a better idea of what it is. I can’t reverse it until I know more, though.”
“Then he’ll tell us,” Amanda says. She looks at Liam in the corner. One eye already swelling dark and purple, his nose like a ripe tomato, blood crusted on his face. His jaw looks a little out of line.
“Hang on,” I say. “I’ve been thinking about this ever since you brought up how the powerful mages of your family were the only things keeping everyone in check and I think I’ve figured out what the hell happened here.”
“I’m glad somebody knows,” Amanda says. She walks over to a shelf and pulls down a decanter of whisky and two glasses. She brings it to a table between two chairs I hadn’t noticed before. Christ, if I had to live in this house I’d go nuts. She pours us both a drink.
“Anybody who has the inheritance automatically has a target on their back,” I say.
“Yeah, which is why none of this makes any sense,” Amanda says. She sits and leans back, her eyes closed. She’s beyond exhausted. “If I died the inheritance would go to the next in line, which is Liam. So why all this?”
“Because he’d have the same target on his back. But if all the mages here died, who would it go to?”
“Oh shit. All the really powerful mages in the family are here this weekend. He takes Tobias, we all kill each other, he gets the inheritance and there’s nobody powerful enough to take him on.”
“It’s the only thing that makes any sense to me. I think there’s something he either didn’t count on or hoped nobody would notice, though. The same magic that makes him free of the curse takes away the protections, too. If you killed him, nothing would happen to you.”
She laughs. “Oh, I wish I’d known that sooner,” she says. “Not that I think I’d want to take that chance. Okay, maybe a little. Okay, that’s the why, but what about the how?”
“How do you mean?”
“You know what Liam’s knack is? Architecture. The shit he can do with a building is fucking nuts. He built a lot of this place. How he got control of it so easily.”
“I see where you’re going with this,” I say. “Souls don’t really fall under the architecture category. They’re more my domain. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have been taught.”
“Right,” she says. “So who taught him? Your Magic 8-Ball friend?”
“I hope not,” I say. I just had a thought, and if I’m right this whole situation just got a lot more complicated.
“Wake him up,” I say. “Let’s ask him.”
Liam comes to, coughs up some blood, spits out a tooth. He looks up at us. “You got me. Bravo,” he says. “I’d clap but I can’t quite get my hands to work. Is this the study? Delightful. Could I have a drink? I’m parched.”
“How about a piranha tank, instead,” I say.
