17
Nikita’s extended stay suite on the outskirts of Boston had started to smell some time ago. He didn’t notice it anymore. The grime on the bathtub had turned brown as the layers of blood dried, and a mass of dismembered meat still sat in the basin, waiting for the next trip he took to dispose of it. The woman strapped to the bed laid on the aging stains of sweat and vomit that marked the ones who came before her. A trickle of dried blood had formed under her nose, smeared by Nikita’s fingers. Her face was stained with tears, and she bit into the leather gag between her teeth as she struggled to make her pleas heard. Nikita wasn’t listening. He checked the treated straps keeping her in place and put a hand on her face to check the dilation of her eyes. Responsive. Alert.
He turned from her to pour the oil from a glass vial into his palm and rubbed it into his skin up to the elbow, then laid his hand on her forehead to leave a smear of the grassy-smelling vetiver mixture there. The air conditioner brought up goosebumps on his bare back as it kicked on, but he ignored it. He’d been keeping the room cold for weeks to help with the smell. He climbed onto the bed, kneeling between her spread thighs with his weight on his heels, and raised his hands over her.
“По моей воле, мора, разорвать галстук.”
The woman’s back arched away from the mattress as a dry scream ripped from her throat. She twisted against her restraints, the oil hissing as it burned her skin, and Nikita only faintly grimaced at the heat sinking into his own flesh. His arms were scarred from his previous attempts, turned pink and veined by burn after burn, but he kept his eyes on the face of the woman below him. His whole body ached, but he pulled, willing the spirit to do his work for him as he repeated his incantation again and again. The oil staining the woman’s forehead bubbled down to the bone, her skin marked with red that rose into a broad boil and hardened until the flesh cracked. Pale blue smoke seeped from the first break, and as the woman’s torso shook, the abscess split, folding open like wet petals. The fat, hairy body of an insect freed itself from its prison, soft mottled brown wings twitching in the cool air. Its delicate antennae swiped over the broken flesh, tiny legs finding purchase in the seeping blood, and the dark eye spots in the skull marking its torso flashed a subtle blue as it flapped broad wings and took to the air above the woman’s head.
Nikita reached forward and snatched the moth in his hand mid-flight. He let it struggle in his fingers for a moment before crushing it, releasing a line of smoke that drifted to the ceiling as the insect crumbled to dust in his palm. He bent over the woman, leaning his weight on one hand near her armpit and lifting her eyelids with the other. Her pupils had tightened to pinpricks, just like he wanted. He listened to her ragged breathing as they slowly widened, expanding to hide her iris completely.
He pulled back and put his bare feet on the carpet, retreating to the chair near the closed curtains and sitting down to wait. He let his tender hands lay heavy on the arms of the chair and sat back against the cushion, watching the uneven rise and fall of the woman’s chest. He stayed that way for over an hour while she lay unconscious, watching and waiting.
When she finally gave a soft whimper and began to turn her head, he rose and unfastened the gag from her mouth. Panic struck her as her gaze landed on his face, and she shrieked and pulled her wrists against the straps holding them, but he silenced her by placing a firm hand over her mouth and lifting an ogham-carved stone from the nightstand in his fingers, holding it where she could see.
“You know what this is?” he asked, and the woman froze, wild eyes trained on the token held before her like grapes before Tantalus. She gave a faint, stiff nod, and Nikita pressed the stone into her palm, allowing her to close her fingers over it. “So use it,” he said. He took a step back from the mattress and watched her with cold eyes. “Set yourself free.”
The woman clutched the token and shouted the word “saeraid” with all the loathing she could muster, but no magic followed. The stone stayed lifeless in her grip, even when she repeated the word, chanting it and begging until the spell word only fell out of her in sobs.
Nikita waited. He let her try, whimpering and weeping and fighting weakly against her bonds, until she gave up, shedding the last of her pained tears into her pillow before shutting her eyes in defeat. He checked his watch. Twenty minutes now. That was plenty. Much longer than last time. He put a hand on her chest, the silver of his ring warmed by her straining body.
“Indoirg.”
The woman jerked once more, the mattress creaking under her weight, and then she went still, her heart crumpled inside her chest. The stone in her hand thumped softly to the floor, and Nikita bent to pick it up, turning it slowly in his fingers as he looked at her. He was close. He just needed to be able to do it without directly applying the oil to his target. If he could do that, then the bodies that had passed through his room for the last three months would have served their purpose. He would be able to take a witch’s magic from them as he pleased—at least for long enough to kill them.
At least for long enough to kill Nathaniel Moore.
18
Elton didn’t hear from Cora again until late into the night, but she was able to give them a heading. The little town of Newell, according to Nathan’s phone, was about three hours away, so they got a few hours of sleep and got back on the road before dawn. Cora had been justifiably upset on the phone—the camp she’d described was the sort of thing he would have liked to think died out decades ago. But little surprised Elton anymore. Not with the overwhelming atmosphere of terror and silence he and Nathan had encountered everywhere they’d been for the last three months. No one knew anything; witches had been going out their lives as normal, but almost in a single day, it was if the Magistrate had simply become a ghost, and its Chasers boogeymen. Families were torn apart by men in black SUVs, and no one who disappeared had yet come back home.
The RV was too high-profile and unsteady to take into the desert beyond Newell itself, so they left it behind in the shade between a pair of warehouses on the outskirts of town and “borrowed” a pickup truck from one of the neighboring houses. Nathan was on edge beside him as they drove on the uneven roads into the hills.
“Remember that today we’re here to look,” Elton said. “We can’t cause any trouble we can’t contain.”
“I’ll look,” Nathan promised him. “And then I’ll burn the whole thing to the ground.”
“Steady,” Elton said. He glanced over at the dark, focused eyes of the man next to him. “I don’t like this any more than you do, but we don’t want to get any of these people killed. We have to be smart.”
Nathan snorted in irritation and flicked the butt of his cigarette out the open window, scanning the horizon rather than answering.
When they’d been driving for half an hour, Nathan reached out to put a hand on Elton’s arm and pointed toward a distant hill, where a faint shimmer caught the light of the rising sun like waves of a mirage.
“There,” he said. “The barrier.”
Elton turned the truck off the road and drove toward the subtle blue dome ahead. Before they got too close, he parked the truck, and they abandoned it in favor of closing in on foot. Nathan took his hand to keep them hidden while they approached at a jog, but even when they reached the barrier, they were still a good two hundred feet from the nearest tent. Nathan reached out a hand to touch the dome and sent a subtle ripple from the touch of his fingers.
“I can’t just break it,” he murmured. “Even if I did, they’d know we’re here right away. I wonder if—hold on.”
He released Elton’s hand and flattened both palms against the glimmering light of the barrier, a soft flow of whispers falling from his lips as he slowly drew them together. When his hands touched, a slim tear opened in the dome, and Nathan crouched low to the ground with his hands breaking up the iridescence, splitting open the seam all the way to the earth.
“Go,” he urged, and Elton slipped sideways through the tear,
scanning the edges of the nearest tents to watch for guards while Nathan crawled past the barrier himself, removing his hands with a soft spark once he was through and allowing the dome to knit closed again.
The fence inside was easier—Nathan simply gripped Elton’s arm and whispered, “Tsiks,” and the next thing Elton knew, they were beyond the razor wire, pulled by a gust of heated air and dropped back to solid ground.
They crept toward the closest tent and glanced through one of the sun-warped plastic windows. It was just as Cora had said—rows of bunks filled the space inside, forced up against each other to leave only narrow rows for walking, and filthy men laid or sat in each one, many of them with torn scraps of cloth tucked between their skin and the sharp edges of the metal around their necks.
“Dampening collars,” Nathan whispered. “That’s how they’re keeping them subdued. I haven’t seen them used in years.”
Elton did a quick count of the beds inside—more than fifty people were crammed into the stifling heat, and he could see three rows of tents on either side of them. Depending on how deep the rows went, there may be a thousand people held here, at least. That was too many for them to free on their own. If the Magistrate ran their camps anything like they ran their prisons, they were likely to maintain no less than a twelve-to-one ratio of prisoners to guards, which put the number of Chasers in the camp at maybe a hundred or more. Too much resistance, even for Nathan. As much as Elton’s blood boiled at the state of the people inside the tents, this visit had to be reconnaissance only. Even if they could kill that many Chasers between them, they had nowhere to hide a thousand people.
“We need more information,” he murmured back to Nathan.
“I know everything I need to.”
“Nathan.” Elton took the other man by the elbow to force his attention from the window. “We’ll get people killed. We need to find out what we’re dealing with and come back with a plan.”
Nathan sighed sharply through his nose and scowled across at the blond for a few beats, but then he nodded with his lips pressed into a thin line. “Fine. Information.”
He hesitated a moment longer before taking Elton’s offered hand and glamouring them back into invisibility. They searched the perimeter of the barrier, pausing to let Chasers pass by when they drew too near, and Elton counted five rows of seven, plus a pair of larger, longer tents facing a metal facility at the center of the camp. This was an actual building and seemed to have electricity, so it must have been the housing for the assigned Chasers. That put Elton’s estimate of the camp’s population closer to two thousand, assuming all of the tents were full. One side of the camp had been dug into a crude farm, and Chasers stood by at the ends of planted rows while men and women crouched in the dirt, tending thin sprouts of plants.
At the far end of the encampment, skirting the barrier itself, a row of unmarked graves had been dug into the hard earth. A man in a collar stood at the end with a shovel in his hands, forcing the blade through the dirt with slow, deliberate shoves and keeping his eyes from the three bodies on the ground behind him. By the size of the piles of freshly-turned earth nearby, Elton guessed that all three were meant for the same hole.
They waited a few moments, watching the closest alleys between tents for any approaching Chasers, but this man seemed to have been left on his own to work, at least for now. Nathan led Elton closer to him and drew the man’s attention with a quiet murmur.
“Don’t yell,” he said, making the prisoner jump and glance around himself in a panic. When Nathan let the glamour fall, the man almost dropped his shovel, scrambling to keep it upright and in both hands. “We’re here to help,” Nathan went on, and the man’s eyes grew large.
“I know you,” he whispered. “You’re Nathaniel Moore, aren’t you?”
“I am,” he nodded, while Elton kept his eyes on their surroundings.
“Thank god,” the prisoner half sobbed. “I’ve heard what you’ve done for people like us. Please—you have to get us out of here. People die every day. They barely give us anything to eat, and they make us grow agrimony for their damned ropes and cut the ogham into more rings for more Chasers. I’m not a criminal—they picked me up for ‘anti-Magistrate activity’ and wouldn’t even tell me what that meant!” He reached a cut and dirty hand out to take Nathan by the arm. “Please,” he begged. “They’ve taken our kids, too, but they’re not here. Do you know where they’ve taken the kids?”
Nathan covered the man’s hand with his own, a grim frown on his lips. “I’ll find them,” he promised. “But you’ve got to tell me everything you know.”
The prisoner let out a shaky sigh and sent a nervous glance toward the tents. “There are Chasers everywhere,” he whispered. “They came and got me in the middle of the night, put a bag on my head and bound me. They said I was being taken to trial, and they put me in a cage with I don’t know how many others. They left us there for two days with only a little water, and when they took me out, they stood me in a room in front of men I couldn’t even see because they’d put the bag back on my head, and someone told me they’d found restricted materials in my house. I had some plants that I knew were illegal, but I never used them to poison people! My dad has heart trouble, and I make him a tonic with foxglove to help it. They said I was guilty of stockpiling contraband for distribution, and they sent me here on a bus. I’ve been here for a month and a half.”
“What have you heard?” Nathan pressed. “Do you know if there are other camps besides this one?”
“I don’t know for sure. People talk, and they say they knew people who were arrested with them but got on a different bus. If they’re not dead, they must have taken them somewhere.”
“Nathan,” Elton interrupted as a Chaser turned a distant corner, and the other man reached back to take his hand automatically. The prisoner glanced around him in a panic as they disappeared again, but Nathan reached out to put a firm hand on his shoulder.
“We’ll get you out,” he said. “All of you.”
The man gave a small nod and drew a shaky breath as he bent to dig the grave with redoubled effort, clearly hoping to avoid the wrath of the approaching Chaser.
Nathan half dragged Elton from the compound, pulling him through the alleys so quickly that he had to twist his body to avoid slamming into passing Chasers and not releasing him until they had reached the outer barrier. He didn’t speak as he opened the narrow gap in the dome for them to exit through, and once they were through and the barrier snapped shut again, he stalked a few paces from the iridescent wall and reached into his pocket to light a cigarette.
Elton watched him with concern knitting his brow. Nathan lit his cigarette between scowling lips and stood staring at the ground, the bangles on his wrist tinkling softly as he put a hand on his hip. Elton waited, hesitant to take his eyes off of the other man while he took a long, slow pull from his cigarette and held the smoke in his lungs. A quiet Nathan was an angry Nathan, and an angry Nathan was unpredictable to him even now.
“Tell me your plan, Elton,” he said at last in a breath of smoke. He took the cigarette from his lips and let his hand hang at his side without looking up at the blond. “Give me a plan before I turn right around and do it my way.”
“I don’t have one,” Elton admitted. “But your way is going to end up in a lot more death than you really want. You’re more of a Molotov than a tactical missile. Let’s call Cora and Thomas—they may have some ideas.”
The sound of an engine echoed over the hill, and both men turned to look as an unmarked truck pulled away from the distant barrier and left a trail of dust behind on its way toward the nearest road.
“Deliveries?” Elton said, and Nathan’s eyes narrowed as they followed the truck’s path.
“Let’s find out what they know.”
They raced back to their stolen truck and slung rock from the tires from turning so fast, the engine struggling to force the heavy vehicle through the dirt at the speed Elton demanded. Nathan rode in the
bed of the truck, bracing himself against the lack of suspension bouncing him along the desert hills.
“Please wait until they get out of the town,” Elton muttered, but Nathan, for once, seemed to have the same plan. They followed the box truck south down the single road that led through Newell, and once the last silo had passed from view behind them and left them on a lonesome strip of highway, Elton felt the prickling of magic under his skin.
The truck ahead of them was blasted upwards by its rear tires, the back end crumpled as if by an unseen hand, and the whole vehicle flipped, sending a rain of sparks from the metal frame as it scraped sideways down the asphalt and spun to a grinding stop. Elton stopped the truck a fair distance away, and Nathan was on the ground and stalking toward the hissing wreckage by the time he even got out of the driver’s seat.
The passenger door of the truck ahead came open with an uncertain creak, and Nathan reached out a hand to the bleeding man who tried to crawl out. The man fell from the cab in a jerking motion, as if he’d been pulled, and Nathan beckoned him forward with a single curling finger, dragging him to skid through the dirt. The blood that ran from a cut in his forehead seemed to drain toward Nathan’s outstretched hand as Elton approached, pooling into a droplet on his sweating skin before landing with a soft pat on one of Nathan’s knuckles. The man grimaced from his held position kneeling at Nathan’s feet, his throat exposed by the forced upward tilt of his chin.
“Hello there,” Nathan purred, tilting his head. “Why don’t we skip the foreplay here, and you just tell me what you know about that prison you just left.”
The Left-Hand Path Page 16