neighborhood. Before we reached the tracks that separated St. Johns from the rest of the city, magic rumbled and rolled again, and I saw the faulty-lightbulb flicker of lightning somewhere high, high above us.
“Do you know where?” I asked.
“The bridge.”
“What is it about that bridge?” I scrubbed at my arms, but the itching only got worse. “Too many weird things happen there.”
Shame didn’t answer. We were over the railroad track and into St. Johns. Even in the darkness, St. Johns looked like it always looked. Magic never prettied it up to make it into something marketers would approve of. St. Johns wore her face bare, and even if she wasn’t perfect, she was more beautiful because of her flaws.
Broken-down, homey, unapologetic, St. Johns wore many faces. All of them the truth.
Crossing the railroad track made my teeth hurt. Not like there was no magic in St. Johns, but like there was far too much magic here.
Stone clacked a low growl and rubbed the top of his head against the back of Shame’s seat. Stone felt it too. Something was wrong. Very wrong.
Shame took the speedometer down out of death-defying, and worked off the main drag toward the towering green arc of the St. Johns Bridge.
“In the park?” I asked.
“I think so.” He got us there in too little time. Parked in the open lot and got out.
I turned to Stone. “You stay here, boy. Sleep, okay?”
Stone’s ears flattened, then perked back up. He tipped his head and looked out the window, making the bag-of-marbles sound and then the coo again. He jiggled the door handle.
“No. Don’t go out. Don’t leave the car.” I pointed at him and he let go of the handle. “Sleep,” I commanded.
He clacked, then clunked his snout against the window, ears up in triangles.
I hoped he would stay put. I didn’t want anyone in the Authority to see him. I locked the doors and stepped out.
The air had so much magic in it, it felt like it was made out of lead. It weighed on my shoulders, legs, and feet, crushing. Shame had lit up and sucked his cigarette down to half ash. His face was tipped toward the sky, his neck exposed, hood fallen away, to let his dark hair fall free from his eyes. Eyes closed, the arc of his body was taut with ecstasy as he drank the magic down.
He held the cigarette smoke captive in his open mouth, then exhaled, his mouth still open, eyes still closed in rapture.
The air broke under the impact of thunder. Shame moaned away the rest of the smoke, and took in a breath like it was his first, like he could suck down the sky and still not be full.
He opened his eyes. “Fuck yes,” he said up into the rain. “That’s what I needed. More. Much more of that.”
I finally got a full breath myself. “This is not good.”
“It’s magic. It’s never good.” Shame grinned at me. “But it’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative.”
“Not if it’s wild magic.”
I’d been through a few wild-magic storms before, fast-moving tangles of lightning and thunder and magic. Beckstrom Storm Rods did their job and channeled the strikes of lightning and magic down into the glyphed channels that stored magic throughout the city.
This was different.
This storm had death on its wings.
“Come on,” I said.
I jogged across the parking lot toward the center of Cathedral Park, Shame at my side. Above us, thunder broke, the high demonic wail an earsplitting echo. Magic crackled through the sky, tracing out in flashes of glyphs.
Lights on the bridge flickered. A rolling blackout washed over the city downriver.
The void stone at my neck burned.
I ran, but my feet moved mud-slow. My breath came too quickly, too loudly. The void stone flashed cold again as lightning the color of dead roses webbed the sky with wild, elongated glyphs and spells.
Even my feet itched.
What had Maeve said? We were wearing the stones because when magic came back, the stones might help us not burn to death? Nice. And since I held magic inside me, I was in for a world of pain. Maybe Shame had the stone pressed against his neck for another reason. Like to keep him from drinking down too much energy once it hit.
What if magic wouldn’t fill me again? What if it was a onetime thing, back when Cody had pulled it through my bones? Maybe now that it was gone, it was going to stay gone, leaving nothing