The Left-Hand Path: Runaway

by Barnett,T. S.

  “We don’t have time for field trips, Willis.”

  “But we do have time for leads, don’t we?” Elton snapped back impatiently. “This isn’t my first assignment, Hao. We need to make a stop. It’ll be worth our time.”

  Chris stared at him with slightly pursed lips, clearly weighing his options, and then he let out a snort. “Fine.” He tilted his head to urge Elton to follow him, barely giving him time to pull on his coat, and as they walked down the hall toward the elevator, Elton heard him mumble in grumbling Cantonese, “Don’t know why they decided I was the one to stick with this job; gweilo better watch his damn mouth.”

  “Ah! Zan hou,” Elton answered him with a pleasant smile as he continued in Cantonese. “I haven’t been able to practice in a while.”

  Chris stopped at the doors to the elevator and stared at him with a grim frown. “Don’t get cute, gweilo,” he muttered.

  Elton only smiled as the elevator dinged, and he stepped inside with Chris right behind him.

  Chris parked his car at the entrance to Jameson T. Blight Academy, an imposing building of grey stone. It looked more like a castle than a school, with tall windows lining the front façade and tall towers marking the corners of the sprawling estate. Elton led the way to the entrance and spoke politely to the woman at the receptionist’s desk.

  “What are we doing here?” Chris asked as the woman turned away to fetch their visitor’s badges.

  “Checking in on the closest thing we have to an inside man,” Elton answered simply, and he smiled and thanked the receptionist as she offered him two badges. He handed one off to Chris and clipped the other to his lapel, then he followed the woman’s directions through various hallways until he reached the student dorms. He tilted his head to check the numbers marking each door, and then he stopped to knock once he’d reached his destination.

  There was a quick sound of shuffling papers from inside the room, and then the door opened. Cora looked up at Elton, momentarily stunned, and then she let out a sudden laughing shout and fixed her arms around his neck, tugging him downward into a tight, bouncing hug.

  “Oh my god, you’re here!” she cried, squeezing him so firmly that he felt he had no choice but to politely return her embrace. She dropped back flat onto her feet after the extended hug, but she kept her hands on his shoulders as she leaned back from him. “I didn’t know you were out! What are you doing here?”

  Cora beamed up at him, her smile more easy and unabashed than he’d ever seen it. Her hair had grown long enough to hang past her shoulders, but to make up for it, she had shaved the left side of her head nearly short enough to show skin and kept the length of her hair flipped to the opposite side. Elton thought he spotted a strip of dark blue snaking from the hair at the back of her neck to the tip of her dark tresses. She was wearing clothes that fit her—a pair of dark skinny jeans and a stretchy sweater that hung purposely off of one shoulder—and she even had on a touch of shimmering black eye makeup. She looked confident and comfortable, and the thought made Elton smile.

  “I came to see how you were, and to ask you for some help,” he said.

  Cora glanced over at Chris, who was lurking suspiciously behind him, and she pursed her lips. “Well I’m doing great, but are you still in trouble, Elton?”

  “I’m working,” Elton clarified. “Can we come in?”

  “Oh! Sure, sure. My roommate’s in class right now, so it’s fine. Come on in.” She backed up to let them inside and tucked her legs underneath her on the bed, leaving Chris to shut the door behind them and stand back as though guarding it. Elton lingered uncertainly for a moment before taking his place beside Cora on the bed.

  She looked up at him and pushed a lock of hair behind her ear. She was still wearing the bracelet of wood and bone that Nathan had made for her—Elton was a bit surprised it hadn’t been confiscated. “So you’re here about Nathan, right?” she asked.

  “You know I am,” Elton answered. “Don’t try to tell me you haven’t seen him.”

  “How would I have seen him?” she countered with an obvious scoff. “He disappeared as soon as we got here, remember?”

  “Cora,” Elton warned as she crossed her arms and shrugged. “You can’t seriously expect me to believe that he hasn’t contacted you.”

  “Like how? You think we chat on the phone? Like that wouldn’t get me in trouble. ‘Who are you talking to all the time, Cora?’ ‘Oh, nobody, just the most dangerous witch alive, calling to make sure I’m doing my homework.’ He’s probably a little too busy being on the run to worry about me, don’t you think?”

  Elton stood. “Then you won’t mind if I have a look around.”

  Cora bit her lip and glanced anxiously at her desk, though she tried to brush it off with a casual wave of her hand. “Whatever; there’s nothing for you to find.”

  Elton hummed a soft agreement and turned immediately to the desk, pulling open the top drawer. He took out the pair of notebooks inside and flipped through them. The contents were mostly schoolwork and notes—potion ingredients, history lessons, sketches of circles and various charts—but as he moved to put the notebooks back in their place, he spotted a small gap in the bottom of the drawer.

  “Kind of a shallow drawer, isn’t it?” he mused, watching the girl out of the corner of his eye as he ran a finger along the bottom edge of the wood.

  “Yeah, it’s really weird,” Cora answered in a tense voice. She was leaning halfway off the bed to try to see what he was doing. “Can’t fit anything in there, it’s a pain actually,” she added unconvincingly.

  Elton found the gap underneath and pressed it upwards, popping open the false bottom and revealing a third fat notebook stuffed with extra bits of paper and marked with colorful sticky tabs. As he lifted it out of the drawer, Cora shot to her feet and tried to place herself between Elton and the desk, her hands fastening tightly onto the book.

  “You wouldn’t peek through a girl’s diary, Elton,” she tried. “Honestly, it’s really embarrassing—it’s old, you don’t want to see it, it just says ‘Mrs. Cora Willis’ like a thousand times, I swear.”

  Elton gently pried the book out of her hands with a stern frown, and she finally relented, letting out a long sigh and dropping back down onto her bed. He opened the book and skimmed it, but he only had to see a few pages before it became obvious that it was full of incantations, rituals, and ingredient lists that were definitely not a part of the Magistrate’s curriculum.

  “So you’re taking the correspondence course,” Elton said, glancing over at her as he snapped the book shut in one hand. “Is he writing to you?”

  “No,” Cora answered grumpily.

  “He’s contacting you somehow,” he pressed. “He’s teaching you somehow. Cora, if you know where he’s headed, what he’s planning, you have to tell me. He’s killing people. We need to find him and stop him.”

  “Find him and have him hanged, you mean,” she argued.

  Chris took a step forward, reminding both of them of his presence. “If you have information about Nathaniel Moore and you don’t report it, I’ll have you brought in for complicity,” he said. “A time under the cuimne might loosen your tongue.”

  “I’m handling this,” Elton cut in as Cora shrunk away from the other man. He took a seat beside her again and looked down into her frowning face. “Cora, I know you want to protect him. But you know what he’s like. Whatever’s coming to him, he brought it on himself. I’ll make sure that he’s treated fairly—I promise.”

  “Maybe I’d believe that if you had any say in how he’s treated,” she scoffed. “I don’t know anything. Really. I just get these notes sometimes, in the mail or through a courier or whatever. There’s no return address. You probably know more than me.”

  “Has he said anything to you about where he plans to go next? What he’s doing? Anything at all.”

  “No,” she answered, but Elton was only half convinced. “If there’s anything personal in the packets at all, he just tells
me stuff like, ‘Today I totally flipped a car, you should have seen it.’ He doesn’t tell me the boring stuff.”

  That Elton believed. He sighed through his nose and frowned down at her. “If I leave you my mobile number, will you promise to call me if you find anything out? You know he’s too dangerous to run loose.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she grumbled, and she took the slip of paper from him once he’d written his number on it. She stood holding her elbow while the men moved to the door, and Elton nodded to her.

  “I’ll make sure your book gets back to you,” Elton said. “It’ll probably be a bit redacted, but you’ll get it back.”

  “You’re a bully, is what you are,” Cora sighed, and Elton offered her an apologetic smile.

  “Take care of yourself, Cora. I’ll come back and see you when this is all over.”

  “Sure.” She watched Elton shut the door and folded her arms across her chest to frown pensively after him.

  6

  As promised, Chris was able to arrange for the two of them to take a flight to Toronto that afternoon. When they left the school, they had a quick lunch together in stony silence. Chris only spoke up when they had finished, pausing to wipe his mouth with a napkin before leaning forward on his elbows.

  “So that girl,” he began, “she’s the one from your report?”

  “Yes. Cora Daniels.”

  “And you, what, kept in touch while you were in custody?”

  “A bit,” Elton nodded. “She wrote to me a few times; I wrote her back.”

  Chris leaned his chin on his wrist with a faint frown. “She’s young.”

  “And?”

  “Mrs. Cora Willis, hm?”

  Elton sighed. “She’s just a kid. Or she was. Lonely, shy type out on her own for the first time. She had a bit of a crush.”

  “Unrelated to you spending time with young Asian girls, I heard your wife left you,” Chris continued, and Elton’s fingers tightened in his lap.

  “Is there a question in there, Hao?” he said as politely as he could manage.

  1

  “Just trying to get a feel for you,” the other man answered. “You seem a little tense. I don’t want you snapping once we’re in the field.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “Good. I hope you’re right.” He tilted his head toward the door, and they climbed back into the car and drove to the airport without speaking again.

  Chris seemed at least as bitter about being assigned to watch Elton as Elton was about being watched. He knew that it was only fair—he had betrayed the Magistrate’s trust in him by stepping so far out of line in Arizona—but he still resented having a babysitter. What had been the point of imprisoning him for six months if they didn’t think he’d learned anything?

  Once they reached the airport, Elton leaned into the back seat to retrieve his small suitcase, and he heard a sharp thunk and a hissed curse. He paused, waiting, but the silence that followed was almost as telling as the sound. He glanced over his shoulder at Chris and tipped his chin to the back of the car.

  When they opened the trunk, Elton sighed to see Cora curled up neatly between the toolbox and the jumper cables. She was clutching a backpack to her chest, grinning up at Elton like a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

  “Cora, what do you think you’re doing?” he asked. He offered her a hand and helped her clamber out of the trunk, and she dusted herself off before answering.

  “Well, you’re going to find Nathan, right?” She slipped her backpack onto her shoulders. “So I’m coming with you.”

  “You most certainly are not,” he countered. “You need to get back to your school.”

  Cora slumped slightly and gave a short, dramatic groan. “Come on, Elton. You can’t see how it might be useful to have someone with you that Nathan is actively trying to communicate with?”

  “She has a point,” Chris piped up, and Cora gestured to him appreciatively without taking her eyes off of Elton.

  “See? You want to find Nathan. I want to find Nathan. It’s win-win.”

  A frown touched Elton’s lips, and he bent down to her level to stare at her with narrowed eyes. “How did you get into the trunk without us noticing?”

  The girl’s sly, proud smile almost ruined Elton’s stern expression. “Pretty good, right? I even opened and closed the trunk and you guys were, like, right there. I’m a good student,” she finished with a grin and a pointed lift of her eyebrows.

  Elton sighed through his nose as he straightened. “We don’t have a ticket for you—even if I was agreeing with you,” he added.

  “So what? Getting things for free is, like, Nathan 101. If the Magistrate can’t cough up for another ticket, then you guys just turn your heads, count to ten, and I’ll be through security.”

  Chris took a step forward to stand beside Elton and frowned over at him. “Do you think she’ll be an asset?”

  “I think she ought to go back to school,” Elton argued.

  “Call it an internship,” Cora suggested. “I’m on a scholarship or whatever so I’m going to have to work for the Magistrate eventually, right? So this is like a summer job.”

  “It’s April.”

  “Spring job, whatever. If Spring ever fricking comes in Canada. Come on, Elton,” she said again. “I can help. Please,” she tried, reaching up to lay a pleading hand on his coat.

  Elton pressed his lips together. “It isn’t my call,” he said reluctantly, so she turned her attention to Chris with her bottom lip in her teeth.

  The man grunted out a short sigh and put his hands in his jacket pockets. “I’ll allow you as an informant,” he said after a moment. “But if I think you’re playing us, you’ll be back on the first plane to Vancouver with the angriest escort I can find, you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said brightly, bouncing excitedly on the balls of her feet. She followed along beside Elton as they made their way inside, and Chris was able to secure her a last-minute seat on their flight after some heated negotiation with a reluctant airline rep.

  Cora settled in the window seat next to Elton and leaned to look out through the double-paned glass as they rose above the clouds. When the view became a boring sea of white, she slouched back in her seat, fingers idly twisting the silver chain around her neck. Elton smiled faintly as he caught sight of the small silver and jade pendant at her collar.

  “Has it helped you?” he asked quietly, and she looked up at him in confusion until he nodded toward her necklace.

  “Oh,” she laughed, tugging the little cylinder out of her shirt. “Well, I haven’t had any curses put on me lately, so it might have. Why, do you want it back?”

  “No,” he said immediately. “I’m glad you still have it.”

  “What, like I’m going to give away a present from my handsome Chaser protector?” She grinned up at him. “Then what would I use to make the girls in my class jealous?”

  “Honestly,” he chuckled.

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” she sighed. “Nobody warned me that I’d be starting this school thing almost three years behind everybody else. You don’t think seventeen to twenty is a big age difference, but when you have to hang around a bunch of seventeen year olds, it suddenly becomes a very important couple of years, you know?”

  “Did you have a birthday?” Elton frowned.

  “Yeah, in January.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  Cora laughed at him. “It’s not like we’re old friends, Elton. Where would you have gotten a birthday card in Azkaban anyway?” Her face softened slightly, and she looked down at the pendant in her fingers. “How was it? I know when you wrote, you just said everything was fine, but how was it really?”

  “It was fine. Really,” he promised. “I knew what to expect.”

  “And the…the brain thing?” she asked in a meeker voice.

  “I’m fine, Cora.”

  “That stuff happened to you…and you did
it for Nathan. I mean, he probably would have gotten away anyway, but you weren’t going to turn him in. He won’t forget that, you know.”

  “I’m sure he won’t let me forget it, either,” Elton muttered, and she laughed.

  “I wasn’t expecting you to show up at my dorm all of a sudden. He did something, didn’t he?”

  “He sent a note,” Elton answered honestly. “The Magistrate probably would have left me locked up, but Nathan asked after me by name. He’s killed a lot of Chasers since he got loose, so they’re a little desperate.”

  Cora smiled faintly despite being reminded of her mentor’s body count. “Well, he does have a total crush on you, so of course he wants you to come.”

  Elton scoffed. “I can do without that kind of affection.”

  “I’m just saying. I’ve heard things here and there. You have to know the whole thing’s got a very ‘it’s all for you, Damian’ kind of vibe to it.”

  Chris leaned over to stare at both of them with a knit brow. “Just what kind of trip did you all have in Arizona?” he asked, the corners of his lips curved into a suspicious frown. “You and Moore get close?”

  Elton glanced over at him. “Don’t make that face, Hao. It’s the twenty-first century.”

  Cora laughed at the slight scrunching of the other man’s nose. Chris sat back in his seat and stuck in his earbuds, but Cora wasn’t convinced that he wasn’t still eavesdropping on them. The movement of Elton’s hands caught her eye as he fidgeted, and she felt a slight tug in her heart at the faint line on his skin where his wedding ring used to be.

  “You’re not…wearing it,” she almost whispered, and she reached out to lightly touch his fingers when he looked at her curiously.

  “Oh,” he answered with an empty smile. He flexed his fingers experimentally, as though feeling the ring’s absence. “Yeah, well. The paperwork might not be finished yet, since we’re only separated, but it’s a done deal as far as she’s concerned. She wouldn’t like if I kept wearing it, I think.”

  “Are you…you know, doing okay?”