Dirty Work

Dirty Work

Book 4 — Broken Magic

The gargoyle had very large teeth. He pulled his lips back in a snarl and tipped his wide head side to side, giving every one of those teeth its moment in the spotlight.

I, Shamus Flynn, did not like being flat on my back with a deadly beast growling down at me like I was lunch. Luckily, I knew this particular deadly beast.

“Hey, Stoney,” I said, blinking up at the gargoyle and the clear night sky he’d just dropped out of. “What’s shaking, buddy?”

Stone’s growl turned into a watery burble as his triangle ears swiveled forward, then toward the noise coming from the house.

Party noise. From the party-goers saying their goodbyes and see-ya-laters at the front of the house.

Was there a reason I was sneaking around the back of the Beckstrom-Jones’s place? Yes. I’d been avoiding both of my besties for months now. Not just because I carried Death magic and had to do some killing every now and then to keep it happy.

The reason I’d been avoiding them was because Allie Beckstrom-Jones, and her hubby, Zayvion, were too damn smart for their own good.

Smart friends made for suspicious friends.

Suspicious friends got hurt.

The last thing I needed was either of them paying attention to what I and my Soul Complement, Terric Conley, had been doing in our off time.

Stone sniffed at my head, his breath hot and wet in my hair. I patted the side of the big lug’s face. “It hasn’t been that long, mate.” I scratched behind his ears.
He shivered in pleasure and leaned into my hand, wings up and out like twin umbrellas, all the grumbles traded for vacuum cleaner sounds.

Happy sounds. Which was good. I never wanted to really piss off the big guy.
Stone was a rare bit of magic in the world now. The only magic-fueled creature in existence.

He was Allie Beckstrom’s pet and had become my goddaughter, Ramona’s, guardian.

Apparently he’d also appointed himself the bouncer for this particular shindig.

“We good?” I asked giving his head one last pat. “’Cause I landed on a rock and my ass is killing me.”

He leaned closer and glared, saucer eyes black and shot through with little sparks of light. He growled.

Then he picked up my hand and put it back on the top of his head.

I scratched, and he snorted and grumbled again, burbling like a broken toilet.

Complaining. He was bitching me out.

“Hey, now,” I said. “It hasn’t been that long since I’ve been here.”

“It really has,” a male voice said from somewhere over my shoulder.

Footsteps came my way, quiet on the stone pathway, even though the boots were big. There was a good reason for the size of those boots. They fit the man, all muscled six-feet-two of him, who stared down at me disapprovingly.

He was darker skinned than my own white-boy self, his tight black curls shaved close to his head, which only make his cheekbones and brown-gold eyes sharper. His lips were turned down in a scowl, his clean-shaven jaw clenched.

Sure, most people who knew him thought he was calm and cool. Zen. But I’d seen him tear people apart with his bare hands.

“Zayvion,” I said.

Stone planted one big mitt on my chest and leaned, pushing all the air out of my lungs like I was some kind of kill he’d just bagged. “Nice weather we’re having,” I wheezed.

Zayvion Jones was my best friend in the world. He and I had grown up in the Authority, a now defunct secret magic society that had secretly taught secret ways to use magic, and secret ways to use magic to hurt people.

The Authority’s main goal had been to keep bad guys from doing bad things with magic. Bad guys had, of course, found ways to do bad and worse things with magic and had used it to nearly destroy the world.

Good guys had found ways around the rules too.

The whole thing had led to a lot of battles, a lot of deaths, a lot of betrayals and revenge, yada-to-the-yada, and then magic got locked away for good.

No more powerful spells that moved faster than the eye could track. No more using magic and making someone else pay the price of pain for it.

No more magic for anything.

Good or bad.

My friends and I had paid the price to lock away magic.

In doing so, we’d lost friends and lovers. We’d died—I had died more than once—to shut the door on magic, slam the bars, stick it on a shelf so high, no living thing could touch it.

Zayvion knew about all that because he’d been there doing most of it.

But at the end…there at the very end, it had been Terric and me who shut magic down.

If we’d also cheated and left one little loophole that let just the two of us—Terric and me—still use magic? Well, no one needed to know that little secret.

Especially not my best friend, Mr. Zen, Mr. Perfect Zayvion Jones.

“Shamus.” He crossed arms over his chest. “About time you showed your face. We expected you months ago.”

“Invitation got lost in the mail.”

Stone gasped a little hoot sound.

“We sent it via gargoyle. Pretty sure Stone handed it directly to you.”

Stone leaned a little harder and stuck his face in my face. The teeth were back on display.

He growled.

“Okay, fine. I got the invite. I just got busy.”

“Too busy for friends? For family?”

“C’mon, Jones—Stoney, mate. Ease up. Can’t talk. No air.”

Stone just leaned a fraction more forward.

“Oh, fuuuck…”

Zayvion tugged on the gargoyle’s ear. “Let him up. You did good, Stone.”

“Good?” I groaned as Stone finally shifted away. “My ribs are crushed. He sat on me and crushed my actual bones.”

“You’re lucky it’s only your ribs that are crushed. I told him to sit on your head if needed.”

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