Cora hesitated, glancing between Thomas and the screen of her phone. “But if you guys find people who need help, you’re going to send them back here, right?”
“Presumably. That was the arrangement, wasn’t it, Mr. Proctor?”
“I’m prepared for guests,” Thomas said. “I’ve been able to make contact with some people I know who have connections to safe houses and transportation.”
“Then...I think I’ll stay,” Cora said after a moment. “I’m not so good at murdering people anyway, and it’ll be easier here with two. Thomas even let me into the creepy cellar!” she added brightly.
“Did he now,” Nathan murmured, and Thomas could almost hear the look of disdain on his face. “Isn’t that nice of him?” Thomas didn’t know what he’d done, exactly, to earn Nathaniel Moore’s sour opinion of him, but it wasn’t something he was looking to antagonize.
“Cora, I really don’t need help,” Thomas said. “I did this on my own for years.”
“And wasn’t it easier with someone here to help take care of things while you dipped your knives in blood or whatever? Didn’t it help not having to make dinner, at least? Even if you don’t trust me to do your spooky demon magic, I can at least help with the normal stuff.”
“Tell him what happened with the Chaser,” Thomas said softly. “You’re a target here.”
“What Chaser?” Nathan demanded from across the country. “Korshunov? You saw him again?”
“I mean,” Cora sighed, “okay, so, he came to the house and tried to kill us maybe, but he didn’t! Thomas scared him off!” She pointed an accusing finger up at his face. “And anyway, you said it was safe in the house!”
“It is.”
Cora lifted her hands in a defensive shrug, as if her point was made for her. Thomas sighed through his nose as he stared down at her.
“Soo,” Nathan said following the pause, “is that a no on the plane ticket? Staying in the family manor?”
“He just doesn’t want to admit he wants me here.”
“Well it’s your choice, my love. I’ll be in touch when I know the plan going forward. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she chuckled. “Oh—wait. Put Elton on the phone.” Cora scooped up her cell and turned off the speaker, holding it to her ear and giving Thomas a passing smile as she hurried out of the room while hissing into the phone, “I see you leaving me on read, you ass!”
Thomas watched her go, then sat down at the table to finish his coffee. He frowned over at the cat as it lifted its head to peer at him, but with a soft snort, he reached a hand out and rubbed behind its ear with one finger. He let a faint smile touch his lips as the animal’s breath began to pleasantly rumble. “What am I going to do about her, Herman?”
16
THREE MONTHS LATER
Elton fought with the clutch on the RV, grinding the engine to life and turning around in the driver’s seat to shout out the open side door.
“I’m going to leave you here!”
Nathan clambered up the metal steps, then crouched to pull them up into place and slam the door shut. “You complain when I smoke inside, you complain when I smoke outside,” he grumbled, swaying on his feet as the vehicle began to move away from the campground. He dropped into the passenger seat and propped his crossed ankles up on the dashboard, reaching down to the cup holder between them to take a drink from his water bottle.
“Just tell me where we’re going,” Elton sighed as he pulled onto the road.
The RV had been Nathan’s idea, of course—and while Elton had argued on principle, he couldn’t really dispute the logic. With a—stolen—RV in their possession, they not only had a way to keep on the run without having to avoid the growing number of Chasers present at every public transport station, they also had a mobile summoning circle, which Nathan had carefully measured and burned into the floor. As long as they parked the RV facing the right direction, they could send the displaced people they snatched from the Magistrate straight to Thomas without leaving a trail of destroyed hotel rooms in their wake. This last point was perhaps the most important, as it meant that the Magistrate only rarely caught up to them. No one had yet suspected that Nathaniel Moore might be traveling cross-country in a camper, Elton guessed. For once, Nathan’s reputation for luxury was working in their favor, though the trade-off had been that Elton had been forced to learn more than he’d ever anticipated necessary about RV engines. The thing broke down almost as often as it drove.
They had already sent at least a dozen individuals and couples back through the house in Salem as well as making a significant dent in Elton’s list. Nathan wasn’t exceptionally pleased at the fact that the last woman they’d helped relocate had recognized him with admiration instead of fear—apparently she was a cousin of Charles Walker, who had sung the dangerous witch’s praises. Nathan had been right, however, in his prediction that Elton’s reputation would also grow. More than once, now, he had shown up at the home of someone who, up until his arrival, had been protected by the Magistrate, only to be bargained with or begged. He couldn’t pretend it wasn’t satisfying.
The other downside was that the two men had been sharing exceptionally close quarters for the last several weeks. Elton had listened to countless Creole conversations while he drove and Nathan paced the length of the vehicle, chatting with Adelina, and he’d lost count of the number of times Nathan had come out of the small shower naked. It didn’t even bother Elton anymore. Most importantly, the pair of twin beds at the rear of the vehicle were only a scant two feet apart, which had led to what felt like infinite late-night whispers of, “Elton, are you awake?”
Nathan dug his phone from his rear pocket and brought up a map on the screen, scratching at his cheek while the app chose the best directions for them. “Which one was this one, again?” he asked. “The actress or the sex trafficker?”
“The actress is the sex trafficker.”
“Oh.” Nathan snorted out a laugh. “So, that one?”
“Yes, that one.”
“Down south again, to sunnier climes at last. If we’d spent one more week in Portland, I would have started pissing vegan cheese.”
“Poetic. At least the mountains were nice. Makes me a little homesick.”
“There aren’t any Canadian evildoers you want to pick off before summer ends and they all hole up in their igloos to weather the winter?”
“Not yet.”
Nathan tossed his phone onto the dashboard as the robotic voice began to direct them toward the highway, and he picked at his fingernails in the silence that followed. “Cora told me last night that one of Mr. Proctor’s contacts has gone dark. They think he’s been picked up.”
“That’s the third one, isn’t it?”
“Mhm. We’re going to run out of people to trust if this keeps up.”
“Too many people going missing,” Elton sighed. “They can’t all just be being executed, can they?”
“They’d have a line out the door. Señora Marquez says they aren’t letting her into many council meetings anymore, but maybe she knows something she hasn’t told us.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to send you on any more assassinations, since the last one didn’t seem to help much.”
“It helped!” Nathan countered. “The man she wanted ended up on the council, didn’t he?”
“For all the good it did. The Order is still in effect. Chasers are fucking everywhere. People are still disappearing. They’re being tortured or hanged no matter how many people we kill. We can make a dent by sending some back to Thomas, but that won’t stop what the Magistrate is doing. Did you talk to that woman back in Medford? She said her sister hasn’t even gone to the Magistrate about a man she thinks is poisoning her husband because she’s afraid of being arrested for something herself. The Chasers aren’t even doing their jobs; they’re just gestapo now.”
“Sorry you quit?”
Elton glanced sidelong at him with a thin frown on his lips. �
��Why don’t you call Ms. Marquez and ask if she’s heard anything? There may be a better way we can be spending our time. If the Magistrate is closing in on Thomas’s contacts, they’re going to be closing in on him.”
Nathan leaned across the gap between their seats to tilt his head at the blond. “You haven’t been enjoying our time together, darling? But you’ve come so far.”
“Will you please just call?” Elton watched the road ahead of him while his companion reached for his phone again, only half listening to the brisk Spanish coming from the seat next to him. Having the councilwoman available to them hadn’t given them as much insight as Elton had hoped in the previous weeks—it seemed that the outnumbered opponents of the Order of Repression were simply being cut out of the decision-making process. Marquez’s own life may even be in danger soon, but it wasn’t feasible for the two of them to just pick their way through the council one by one, no matter how many times Nathan suggested it.
Nathan went quiet beside him, and after a few more subdued exchanges, he ended the call and let his phone rest in his lap. “Well, we’re certainly going to get our sunshine, Elton.”
“Why’s that?”
“She asked me to check on a site not too far from here. She can’t confirm it with anyone since she’s being locked out of meetings, but she thinks they’re keeping people. Lots of people—not just in the prisons. She overheard someone talk about a something called an ‘isolation camp.’ I don’t like either of those words, and I dislike them even more put together.”
Elton gripped the steering wheel a little harder. “Neither do I.” He nodded toward the phone in Nathan’s hand. “Tell me where to go.”
It wasn’t possible to get Google Maps directions to a secret Magistrate prison camp, but Marquez had been able to point them in the right direction. Once they reached the California state line, they had no choice but to start traveling smaller back roads, taking their time while Nathan hung halfway out the passenger window and kept a seeking spell active along the way. Their chances of happening upon the camp were slim, but with Thomas’s contacts dwindling, they didn’t have many options for information.
By the end of the third day, they had searched what felt like every square foot of three of the state’s northernmost counties with no luck. Elton stopped the RV at a campground alongside a wide creek and stretched his arms over his head as soon as his feet touched solid earth.
“I’m on the verge of turning myself in just so that I can be sent to this camp myself,” Nathan lamented, leaning against the warm hood of the vehicle with an already-lit cigarette in his hand and offering another to the blond, who took it gratefully.
“Need a ride?”
“You could come with me. We haven’t had a good prison break in a while.”
Elton snorted and took a long drag of his cigarette. “We need to have a better plan than this. Just driving around hoping that we run into it isn’t going to work.”
Nathan straightened and rapped the blond on the bicep with the back of his hand,. “We’re idiots,” he said around the cigarette tucked into the corner of his mouth, then plucked it from his lips with two fingers. “Aren’t we looking for something hidden? Unknown? Distant?”
“Don’t make me guess, Nathan.”
“We know a young woman back in Massachusetts who has a talent for finding hidden things, don’t we?”
Elton paused. “We are idiots.” He opened the door to the RV and took his phone from the center console. He didn’t have to scroll very far to dial Cora’s number, since he only had five numbers in his phone.
“Tell her she has to come here and do it, so she can get away from her glum housemate,” Nathan said, and Elton hissed him away as he raised the phone to his ear.
***
Cora started at the sound of her phone on the kitchen table and wiped the flour from her hands with a nearby towel before answering. “Hey; you’re alive! What’s up?”
“Bad news from Marquez,” Elton answered. “She thinks the Magistrate has set up some kind of camp for the prisoners it’s keeping, but we don’t know where it is.”
“Jesus,” Cora breathed. “A camp? Is that where we are now?”
“This probably isn’t the only one. It’s just the one that’s closest. Think you can help us find it?”
“I can try. What do you have to go on?”
“Nothing except ‘North California.’ We don’t even know how big it is.”
“Well, I’ll see what I can do. Jesus,” she said again. “This is only getting worse, isn’t it? I thought we were doing everything we could, but...are we even helping at all?”
“We’re helping the people the Magistrate doesn’t have because of us. For now, that’s all we can do. If we find this camp, maybe we can do more.”
“Okay,” Cora sighed. “I’ll call you later. Hug Nathan for me.”
“I won’t.”
“I know,” she said with a smile. “Bye, Elton.”
“Thanks, Cora.”
She put down the phone when he ended the call and leaned against the counter with a sigh. Camps. She couldn’t even say that she couldn’t believe it was happening anymore—they had seen too many people pass through the house in the last three months who had friends that had simply disappeared in the night or barely escaped the Chasers themselves. Cora had even heard that Magistrate officials weren’t safe anymore if they were on the wrong side of the Order. Calero, the Magister who had helped her in Miami, had gone “mysteriously missing” a month ago. They were running out of allies.
Thomas was exhausting himself trying to keep up. Cora did what she could to help, but he was clearly more comfortable performing the rituals on his own—and she wasn’t particularly sad about not having to pray a hundred times a day anymore, if she was honest. So she helped in other ways. She tended the garden of herbs they’d cultivated in the back yard, kept the guest rooms organized and their passing through refugees fed, and she went into town to do the shopping. She’d even gotten pretty good at baking fresh bread in the weird little shelf oven in the fireplace, which she considered important to Thomas’s mental health, since bread was sometimes all he was allowed to eat by the restrictions placed upon him by his demon.
She also used her scrying mirror to help pinpoint the people who might need them most. It had been difficult at the beginning, looking for people she’d never met in places she’d never been, but she was getting better. It was becoming easier to lose focus and see what the mirror allowed her to see. She hoped she’d be able to find this camp—though she wasn’t excited about what she might see there.
Cora left her dough behind to rise and trotted upstairs to her room, passing by the cellar door without a glance. Thomas would come out in the evening, like he always did. She’d gotten used to the quiet of the house during the day when they didn’t have guests, and when she’d stopped pushing quite so hard, Thomas had become less distant all on his own. They even had conversations in the evenings now—they would sit in the study together and have tea or coffee, and he would help her read some of the books from his bedroom. She was getting good at Hebrew. He had even let her borrow his disgusting human leather book so that she could copy it. Apparently the contents had been his gift from the demon when he’d made his deal with it—a lexicon of every magical herb and precious stone there was, passed to him through a two-day-long trance of automatic writing and sketches. He said that he’d come to his senses with the book completed on his desk, but that he hadn’t needed it since. The knowledge was just his now, like Wikipedia in his brain. There had to be some upsides to the deal he’d made, Cora guessed.
She shut the door to her bedroom and drew the curtains closed, leaving her in the dark of the warm room. She sat cross-legged on her little pillow on the floor and lit the candle behind her obsidian mirror with a small flame from her hand. North California. A Magistrate camp keeping who knew how many people prisoner, for who knew what insignificant or imagined crimes. That sort of place was guaranteed to b
e a well of despair and bitterness, which would make it easier to hit on, if nothing else.
She let her eyes fall shut a moment, her hands on her knees as she took a slow, steadying breath, the only noise in the house the sound of her own slowing heartbeat in her ears. When she opened her eyes and let her soft gaze land on the center of the slick black surface of the mirror, the dark room sank deeper into nothingness behind her. Getting to this stage was easy now—the subtle state of abstraction where coherent thought left her, and there was only her intent.
Find them. Help them. They need us.
A dozen landscapes flashed across her vision, deserts and forests and widespread little towns. She skimmed over the blips she normally focused on, tiny tugs of desperation that led her to the people she needed to direct Nathan and Elton toward, and searched for something larger. Something deeper.
They need us.
Her attention snapped to a stop over a desert dotted with sparse growth, rows of beige, industrial tents nailed into the rock and surrounded by razor wire fencing. It was difficult to focus on, as though she was looking at it through a fog or through smeared glass—a magic barrier. She felt the sweltering heat of the stagnant air inside the tents, her nose filled with the smell of unwashed bodies and human waste, and she saw the people within, wasting away on cots of metal and canvas, the skin of their necks rubbed raw by metal collars. Men filled some of the tents, and women others, but all were thinning and gaunt with exhaustion. Men in uniforms stalked the dirt lanes between the makeshift barracks with blackjacks in their hands, each of their right hands glinting with the silver rings of the Magistrate.
With her heart squeezed tight in her chest, Cora forced her awareness away, searching for anything nearby that might help her identify the place. She spotted a small airport surrounded by farmland, a church, a small sign—Newell. Newell.
Cora let herself pull back, her vision blurring as the light of the candle returned to her sight, and she leaned back on her hands to let the dizziness pass. She’d learned quickly that standing up too soon after scrying was a fast track to hitting the floor face first. When she felt confident she wouldn’t fall, she smothered the candle and turned to crawl up into her bed, barely wrapping the blanket around herself before she fell into her usual post-seeking nap.
The Left-Hand Path Page 15