Cora only answered him with a grin. She turned the knob and whispered her spell as she slipped back into the hallway. She couldn’t wait to see the look on Elton’s face.
19
“You’re lucky you’re not in jail” was the closest Elton came to admitting out loud that Cora had done well, but she didn’t mind. The little smile he’d given her had been enough.
They’d done all the preparatory spellwork they could, packed their things, and loaded them into a car that they rented instead of stole—though Nathan used a fake name and glamoured the clerk into thinking he’d paid, of course—and they parked it on a quiet street far away from the factory. They snuck close to the building once the sun had gone down and the inside had gone quiet, and Cora parted with them to creep her way to the apartment building. They had managed to get right up to the building without drawing any attention to themselves.
Then Nathan put his hands on the wide entry doors and blew them off their hinges. The metal crashed into the still machines nearby, ringing loudly as the doors ricocheted and skidded down the narrow aisle ahead of them with a trail of sparks in their wake.
“Subtle,” Elton sighed under the echoing noise.
“You don’t bring me along for subtle, my darling,” Nathan grinned. “Better get a move on.”
People inside were already shouting. Nathan walked forward, hands spread innocently at his sides, and allowed Elton to slip off behind him toward the overlooking office. Elton heard cries of alarm as guards rushed forward only to be hurtled backward through the air, but he kept his eyes forward. He swept through the pooled mist chilling his ankles and swung himself around the railing of the metal steps leading up to Maduro’s office. The man himself was inside, huddled back against his desk in the corner, but Korshunov and Chris stood blocking Elton’s way to the door.
“Predictable,” Korshunov snorted. He extended one hand, showing a thin chain tangled in his fingers, and his word bent Elton’s knee toward the step. Chris approached as Elton’s arms were twisted to the ground and his throat was closed by the silencing spell, reaching to wrap his wrists with the thin dampening rope that had been made right in the factory.
Elton couldn’t even try to break the binding. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t hum—he could hardly breathe through the narrow space the spell left him. Chris didn’t look at him as he wrapped the cord around the blond’s hands in front of him, but Elton noticed him jump at the sound of Nathan’s voice shouting from the factory floor.
“Oi!” he called, and Elton was able to twist his neck just enough to spot the other man standing on top of one of the hulking, silent machines. One of the guards was lying dead under his foot, spine twisted so far around that his back was now his front. Nathan crooked his finger at Korshunov with a vicious smile on his face. “You and I have business, little Chaser.”
“Hold him,” Korshunov commanded Chris as he stepped past Elton toward his challenger.
Elton felt the binding slip away, whether from Nathan’s help or Korshunov’s distraction, he couldn’t tell—but as soon as he heard the crashing and the shouted spells from the two men behind him, he lurched forward and buried his shoulder in Chris’s gut. He threw all his weight into pushing the other man backward, slamming him into Maduro’s office door so hard that the hinges creaked. Chris grunted in pain but had his hands on the back of Elton’s jacket immediately, struggling to force the larger man away from him. Elton was pushed back a step but brought Chris with him by both bound hands in the Chaser’s shirt. His mouth opened to call out a spell, and Elton shoved him again, cracking his head against the small window in the office door. Chris broke the blond’s grip with a growling surge of effort and put just enough distance between them to throw out a punch that connected with Elton’s jaw, snapping his head to the side and making him sway at the edge of the narrow landing. With the taste of blood in his mouth, Elton gave a derisive snort.
“Dying wasn’t good for your swing, was it?”
The Chaser’s nostrils flared as his lip curled into an angry sneer. Deeper in the factory, a loud crack and a sudden explosion startled both of them and rolled searing heat through the air toward them. Both men winced, but Elton acted first, rushing the Chaser and fastening his grip in the front of his shirt as he forced him back toward the office.
The hinges rattled as Chris hit the door again and again, and when the wood finally split from the force and broke away from the frame, Elton pulled the dazed Chaser in his grip and dropped him unceremoniously down the stairs. He shifted his hands free of the binding cord with practiced ease and paused to straighten his suit jacket, then locked eyes with a cringing Maduro through the glass. Elton stepped toward the splintered door without hesitation, but he stopped short when he saw the metal whistle in the other man’s lips and heard the warning growl that echoed through the factory.
Below him, Nathan and Korshunov were both bleeding, but Nathan was distracted by the spirit’s snarling, and Korshunov was not. The Chaser snapped out a word, and Nathan was set upon by a dozen small, sharp-looking creatures, each black, spindly sprite hissing as it drew blood. Nathan swatted them away with fire in his palms, and the little spirits screeched in pain, but only a few skittered away and vanished. For every one that escaped, another appeared in its place, biting and scratching at any flesh it could reach.
The thump of heavy hooves sounded from behind the nearest machine, and a menacing growl rolled from the doglike jaws of the factory’s monstrous guardian. By the time Elton spotted it, it was already on top of Nathan, snatching him around the middle amidst the clicking hisses of the smaller spirits.
“Nathan!” he called, talisman in hand and ready to snap forward toward the creature, but before he could cast it, his feet were knocked out from under him. His back hit the metal steps with a reverberating thud. Chris was on his feet at the base of the stairs, and his next grunted spell seemed to crush Elton from the inside. His stomach twisted and clenched as if it was being tied in knots; his lungs felt like they were collapsing and squeezing his heart. He let out a startled, strangled cry, his back arching involuntarily, and for a moment, he could only plant his hands on the nearest step and try to breathe through the spots that appeared in front of his eyes.
When Chris approached him, bleeding from his head onto the stained red collar of his shirt, the Chaser reached out and took an unsteady breath. Before he could cast his next spell, Elton grit his teeth and pressed his fingertips into the talisman still trapped underneath them. At his tight-jawed command, the paper shot out and slithered around Chris’s ankle, disappearing under his pants as it spiraled up his leg and leaving a deep gouge in the flesh it passed over.
Chris swore and scratched at himself in a panic to try to find the talisman and dispell it before it could travel too far up his body, and his own spell wavered enough that Elton was able to push to his feet. He immediately scanned the room below for Nathan and spotted him with only a few of the skeletal sprites still clinging to him, but he was bleeding through his shirt and panting heavily. The monster’s face and shoulder looked charred, and its single red eye was locked onto Nathan with deadly focus.
Farther down the narrow aisle, Korshunov snapped out a command. The boy looked a little unsteady on his feet, and blood flowed from the corners of his mouth, but his hand raised to cast the spell with cold determination. Nathan jerked backward as if he was on strings, his feet leaving the floor as he was lifted by his wrists to dangle above the machinery. He struggled, body writhing and legs kicking, but even if he had been able to free himself from the spell, the massive creature still lurked underneath him like a hungry pet waiting to be fed. Nathan fought for breath with tiny, needle-limbed sprites still biting and tearing at the flesh of his arms and neck and the dog spirit’s iron teeth snapping at his heels. He was exhausted, dripping blood onto the concrete floor with every movement.
Elton moved to run down the steps toward him and was stopped again by Chris’s spell, the Chaser’s renewed focus chur
ning Elton’s insides and forcing the blond to stumble. He turned on the other man with gritted teeth, but as he slid another talisman through his fingers, a deep pounding echoed through the factory, shaking him on his feet. The air itself seemed scorched by the heat that washed over Elton and pushed Chris back a step. When Elton turned his head, he saw Nathan dangling limp from the spell that held him, head drooped so far that his chin touched his chest. A second pulse followed, and Nathan’s body arched. He lifted himself by the firm grip of the spell, knees curling up to his belly, and he raised his head as another painfully hot surge rippled through the warehouse.
Elton knew this rhythmic heat. He’d felt it twice before—once when Nathan was casting his spell on Chris in that Toronto hotel, and again just three days ago when he’d knelt in front of that gruesome altar. This wasn’t Nathan—this was the loa.
Nathan’s head fell back and his legs dropped as a last pound knocked the others from their feet, and beneath him, the floor cracked under the pressure of the spell. A black mark appeared there, burned into the concrete as if stamped by the pulsing heat. Elton recognized it immediately as the same sigil branding the back of Nathan’s neck.
Nathan hung there a moment more, suspended by Korshunov’s spell, but when his eyes opened, they weren’t the deep brown Elton knew, but a moving, burning red. Something black oozed from them like tears, staining his face but never quite seeming to fall. He rolled his wrists and audibly snapped one hand and then the other free from the spell, but he didn’t drop. He hung in the air seemingly under his own power, his expression distant and composed. With a casual brush of his hands as if clearing crumbs from his shirt, the sprites assaulting him shrieked and burned away into puffs of ash.
Elton pulled to his feet with the help of the metal railing and tried to call out to him. This was possession. Not a spell or a religious ritual—that simply wasn’t Nathan floating there ten feet above the ground. Elton tried, but though he felt the vibrations in his throat as he yelled, no sound left his lips. Korshunov was shouting too, but no words made it into the air. Behind Elton, Chris was still on the floor, his hands pressed into the steps so hard that his knuckles were white and his arms trembled. His wide eyes were locked onto Nathan, and Elton could see the prickling shiver in the Chaser’s skin.
The dog spirit below gave a wet-sounding snarl, and Nathan dropped heavily down to the floor, steady on his feet and red eyes locked onto the creature. It rushed at him, dingy teeth bared and long claws outstretched, and Nathan allowed it to grab hold of him. He grappled with it almost like a parent playing with a child—whenever it moved, he gripped its wrist or its shoulder to move it harmlessly away. When it snapped its jaws at him, he took it by the neck and twisted it to the floor with a sudden, jerking movement. The beast struggled, and though its claws raked across Nathan and left bloody scratches, he never flinched. Korshunov had moved forward, furious and red-faced from his inability to cast spells despite his silent shouting, but he clearly also wasn’t willing to get too close.
Elton was so engrossed in watching that he didn’t notice the broken door scraping open behind him. He saw Nathan’s face twitch over to focus on him, and those red, seeping eyes turned his blood to ice. He hadn’t heard Maduro sneaking up behind him knife in hand, but he heard the crunch as the man was thrown violently against the railing. Elton stumbled back a step in shock as an image flickered in front of him—he blinked and squinted, not quite sure if the vision was real but wincing from the heat rolling outward. A woman was standing at the top of the stairway, her dark skin draped in a thin white sleeveless gown and her head covered by a pure white cloth wrapped snugly around her hair. The dress turned to tatters halfway down her legs, which had been stripped to the skeleton, so that she walked on bare bones that licked fire up from the ground with every step. Thick shackles hung heavy, trailing chains from her wrists, the links scraping noisily as she lifted her hands toward Maduro. The railing beside her gave a cry of bending metal as it snapped free of the steps and twisted itself around the man, wrapping him knee to shoulder in an iron cocoon. The woman turned her head to watch Elton’s face with shining yellow eyes just for the span of a heartbeat, and then she vanished, leaving Elton to lean against the opposite rail with his heart threatening to leap out through his throat.
The dog creature had locked its teeth onto Nathan’s leg in his moment of distraction, but Nathan only sneered and reached down to grab it by the muzzle. He took the beast’s jaws in both hands and pried them loose enough to step his lacerated leg back out of reach, but he didn’t let go. The serrated teeth tore his hands as he pushed the jaws farther apart, and he moved to plant one foot on the monster’s flailing body to keep it still. His own blood running down the beast’s teeth, he eased them farther and farther apart until one final push caused a wet, sickening crack as the bones gave. The break sent a jolt down the monster’s body, and Nathan jerked its whole head to the side for one last snap that left his victim limp and motionless on the concrete floor.
His eyes lifted from the corpse at his feet, and he scanned the room in silence, but Korshunov was gone. Elton hadn’t seen him leave. Nathan didn’t seem concerned; Elton expected him to give chase, but he only looked up toward the stairs and in an instant stood right in front of him, so close that the blond flinched. At this distance, the black fluid seeping from Nathan’s eyes seemed almost living, flowing in subtle pulses down his cheeks. He stared past his shoulder with those empty red eyes focused on Maduro, who was faintly whimpering behind them, and then looked back to Elton’s face.
“Pa bliye poukisa ou te vini,” he said. Nathan’s voice was discernible under the low, rolling sound the loa made as it spoke. “Pini nonm ou.”
Elton didn’t understand the words, but he felt he understood the meaning of what the spirit was telling him—to finish what he’d started. And as unnerving a sight as Nathan was like this, Elton wasn’t frightened. This spirit was powerful and dangerous, and the waves of heat and thrumming magic from Nathan’s body were like standing too near a bass speaker, but he could sense in his gut that it wasn’t a threat to him. It seemed to quicken his blood and remind him of the way he’d felt looking down at Hubbard’s cringing, begging face. He was certain. Calm. Justified. When he turned to face Maduro, he spotted Chris still sitting hunched on the floor, his face hidden from Nathan with both arms around his knees as if he was trying to stay unnoticed. Korshunov had left him behind. Elton stepped over the Chaser’s feet without a second glance and moved to stand in front of the sniveling man trapped by the twisted railing. The metal groaned as it unraveled from around him at a twitch of Nathan’s fingers. Elton watched Maduro shrink away with weak protestations still falling from his lips and reached into his breast pocket for one of his talismans.
He felt justified.
20
The apartments adjacent to the factory were musty and run down, with chipped stone steps and peeling paint. Before Cora even got to the front door, she could smell the decay. Not just the building—the people inside were rotting, too.
A man stood guard near the entrance, scanning the small parking lot and the alley nearby. The workers weren’t allowed to leave their rooms at night, of course. What a miserable job, to be a jailer for innocent people who were suffering. At least he had the decency to look tired. She took a breath and swallowed the last traces of her fear. She had called both the local TV news station and the Miami Herald and anonymously informed them that if they checked out the factory at this address tonight, they would definitely find something scandalous and newsworthy. Raise some hell, Nathan had told her. She might not be as good at it as he was, but she could still cause enough of a ruckus to get the attention of some reg reporters.
The first step was to get that guard out of the way. Cora peeked around the corner of the building and felt her bracelet warm against her wrist as she opened her mouth to speak her spell. Before she could get it out, a crashing bang sounded from nearby that almost made her jump out of her skin. The g
uard heard it, too, and another pair of men appeared from inside, pressing him to stay behind while they ran to investigate. That would be Nathan, she guessed. One-upping her again.
“Enkonsyan,” she whispered once the other men were out of sight, and the guard at the door crumpled to his knees and then down the short concrete steps, fast asleep. Cora slipped up to the entrance and stepped over his still body to push through the front door.
The inside of the building smelled even worse than it looked. Grungy doors lined either side of the hallway in front of her, browned by years of handprints covered in oil and grease from the factory. There was no noise—no friendly voices or television chatter from behind the doors. Just heavy, sullen silence. She moved down the hall with cautious steps, expecting another guard to come from around a corner at any moment. A few dirty food trays sat on the floor along the walls like the nastiest kind of room service, and Cora scrunched her face at the smell. Some of them must have been at least a day old. The apartments didn’t seem to have locks, but when she reached out to brush her fingertips across one of the greasy doors, she felt the tingling of barriers there. With no way to break them, the workers were probably better kept that way than by physical locks. Awful.
She knew she had limited time, but she wanted to at least see the scope of what she was dealing with before she gave herself away. She was sure Nathan and Elton would be keeping the other guards busy, anyway. The stairs at the end of the hallway led her up to an almost identical second floor lined with trays and wadded up sheets. When she reached the back wall of the second corridor, she finally spotted something different—a metal door with a heavy bar lock and three separate deadbolts along the frame.
Cora rushed for the barricaded door immediately, her hands flattening against the magic barrier. It shimmered blue at her touch and shattered as she hissed out the counterspell she’d heard Nathan use countless times. She turned the deadbolts and pulled the bar lock away as quickly as she could, hauling the heavy door open with both hands the moment it was free. When the light from the hallway hit the inside of the locked room, Cora’s heart sank.
The Left-Hand Path: Prodigy Page 22