Hell Bent Read Free Page A

nodded slowly. “The Overseer called. He’s flying into Portland. Says it’s urgent?”
    “I knew this?” I kicked pants, shirts, and half a dozen random cheeseburger wrappers out of the way, looking for my shoes. My room was a mess of clothes and broken things—a pile of burnt matches on the dresser, the phone book I’d compulsively shredded page by page for six hours straight that overflowed the wastebasket, and six dead potted plants that had been alive the day before yesterday.
    I could draw life out of almost anything. And I did. The furniture in my room wasn’t antique; it had gone frail beneath the incessant picking of Death magic. My jeans weren’t faded and shredded at the edges for fashion’s sake.
    “Yes,” I realized Terric was saying, “I told you on the phone yesterday. I told you at the bar the day before. And I told you by e-mail the day before that. You’re not listening to me, are you?”
    “What?”
    He sighed. “Your boots are in the bathroom.”
    “Right.” I pulled my coat off the bottom of the bed and shrugged into it. “Where’s the meeting?”
    “St. Johns.”
    “Again?”
    I walked into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bathtub to tie my boots. Ever since the four wells of magic under Portland had turned out to be five—the hidden fifth well crystallized beneath St. Johns—a lot of magic users saw it as some kind of sacred ground. Neutral territory, peaceful land of blessed magic users mumbo-in-the-jumbo.
    Not that magic users had much in the way of fighting one another anymore, other than traditional guns and violence. Which, sure, could be handy, but lacked the particularly satisfying backstab–double-cross–kill-you-dead-without-anyone-knowing that magic used to offer.
    Since healing magic had included restoring people’s memories that those of us in the magic-oversight business had worked hard to take away, well, both the government and law enforcement agencies and the magic-ruling Authority were pretty twitchy about the role magic played on all levels now.
    Or at least that’s how it had been the last time I was paying attention a year ago.
    “...be there,” Terric was saying. “Are you listening?”
    “Yes,” I lied. I walked out of the bathroom.
    Terric lounged by the front door, staring at his nails. “Liar.”
    I grinned. “Only when I’m conscious. Ready?”
    “Waiting on you.”
    But I wasn’t talking to Terric. I was talking to the ghost who was hovering near my half-filled bookshelf.
    Eleanor Roth. She had long light hair, an athletic twentysomething body, and a smile that transformed her from pretty to pretty please. She had wanted to date me once.
    But now she was a ghost, tied to me and the magic I wielded. She was a constant reminder of what happens when I lose control over the Death magic inside me. I had consumed her. Put my hands on her and drunk her down.
    I’d taken her life, but somehow she hadn’t quite gotten death out of it either.
    Like I said, I can break anything.
    And I regretted what I did to her more than anyone would know.
    She pointed to a book on the shelf. I strode over, pulled it out, glanced at the front cover. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. It was probably a gift from my mum. I didn’t remember reading it.
    “I don’t think you’ll need reading material at the meeting,” Terric said. “It won’t be that boring.”
    He couldn’t see Eleanor. Not without working magic specifically to look for her. I made it a point not to mention her. Ever.
    Over the last three years of being haunted, I’d found out Eleanor liked to read. So I helped out with that, tried to get to the bookstore once a month so she could pick out new books, turned the pages so she could read.
    It was the least I could do for what I’d done to her.
    I pocketed the book. Eleanor smiled and floated along beside me.
    “Everything about this job bores me,” I said to Terric.
    He just shook his head. He didn’t believe me.
    Who could blame