Why was he thinking about this at all? He shouldn’t be in this situation in the first place. A year ago, if he had known he was meeting Nathaniel Moore somewhere, he would have set all the wards he knew, lured him into a trap, bound him, and dragged him back to the Magistrate conscious or not. He still could. He could lay his cards on the table now—tell Chris everything, get him to help, and bring Nathan in like he should. Like Nathan deserved, honestly. He could finish what he started and prove to Jocelyn that it hadn’t all been a waste of time.
But he’d had Nathan within reach countless times, and he hadn’t bound him. He hadn’t even tried. He had come here to see where the rabbit hole led, and now he knew. He couldn’t keep sitting by and pretending not to notice the payoffs, the nepotism, the blind eyes. He’d joined the Chasers because he’d wanted to clean himself up, be a part of something stable, and do good for the community. He’d wanted to do the right thing instead of the easy thing. But the look on Thomas’s face when their eyes met—Elton hadn’t done the right thing when it came to him. They had been friends, long ago, and Thomas might have been surly and cynical, but Elton had never seen him look so bitter and empty as he looked now. He had done the easy thing by turning him in to the Magistrate. It had been easy to hide behind the law, behind the obligation of his status as a Chaser, and ruin his friend’s life. Thomas had lost his lover, suffered under the cuimne, and moved across the country, and was still trying to do not what the Magistrate told him was the correct thing, but what he knew was the right thing. The hard thing. Elton could never do good while working for a system that punished people like Thomas while killers like Hubbard went free.
“Thomas,” Elton began quietly, “I want you to know that I regret what I did.” He looked up at the other man’s untrusting face. “It won’t bring Claire back for me to say it. But what I did to you—there isn’t any excuse. I’m sorry, Thomas. I should have said it a long time ago.” He dropped the photos back into the chest with the rest of the paperwork and held his hand over the stack of papers. At his word, a flame licked from his palm and ignited the contents of the box, quickly devouring the evidence and putting itself out when Elton shut the lid.
“What the hell are you doing?” Chris finally spoke up. “You don’t seriously think we’re letting this guy off? Aside from his own crimes, Moore led us here! You don’t think turning this asshole in is the next step to catching him?”
“If Nathan wants me to send Thomas to prison to advance in his game, then I forfeit,” Elton said, not taking his eyes from his friend’s. Thomas relaxed just slightly, though he still stared at Elton uncertainly.
“That isn’t your choice, Willis!” the other Chaser snapped.
Elton turned to face him with a dark scowl. “I’ve made it,” he said. “I quit.”
Chris stared at him for a beat. “You what?”
“I quit,” Elton said again. He felt Cora touch his sleeve but didn’t look at her.
“You quit,” Chris echoed. “What the hell do you mean, you quit? You don’t get to quit. I came all the way across the country to keep an eye on you because you’re the only Chaser Moore doesn’t seem to want to kill on sight. You were sent here to bring him in. If that’s a job you can’t do—if you’re thinking of deserting, then I need to call our home Magistrate and get you put back where they got you from.” He let out a swear in Cantonese that Elton knew wasn’t complimentary. “I thought this guy was your collar. What the hell happened to that? You’re giving up?”
“I’ll do it my own way. I didn’t have the Magistrate’s help finding him; I don’t need help catching him.”
“Do you hear yourself? All the shit you got into in Arizona, everything we’ve done since we got here trying to catch this asshole, and this—” He motioned across the counter at Thomas with a frustrated gesture. “This is where you draw the line? At arresting someone who’s admitted to breaking the law?”
“This is where I draw it.”
Chris gave an irritated snort. “Well, I hope you enjoyed this little bullshit runaround, because now you’ll be going back to Vancouver empty-handed. You’re going to rot in that jail. Puk gai,” he swore. “I can’t fucking stand people like you. Have you ever finished anything you’ve started? Maybe you’d care more about catching Moore if he was Sun Yee On, huh gweilo?”
Elton didn’t even realize what he’d done until Chris was already slumped against one of the shelves, the broken wood showering abalone shells onto the floor around him.
“Hey!” Thomas shouted as Chris climbed out of the smashed shelf. Elton took a half step back to put more space between himself and the other Chaser’s scowl, and when Chris reached for him and snapped out the word to bind him, he was ready. Chris was good, but he wasn’t that good. He certainly wasn’t good enough to mouth off about Elton’s past.
Chris tried to knock him off his feet with another word, and he almost succeeded. Elton caught himself on the counter, but when Chris pushed again, his elbow cracked through the glass in his attempt to stay upright.
“For fuck’s sake,” Thomas lamented. Elton spared him an apologetic glance as he pulled his elbow free of the broken glass.
Chris barked the word balbae, and a spark flew from the ring on his hand as Elton’s throat tightened. He couldn’t speak to counter the binding that came next. Elton’s arms snapped to his sides, his wrists twisting behind his back against his will as he fell to his knees. He heard Cora shouting, but her voice was cut off by Chris’s sharp command, and Elton had no choice but to stay on the floor, his forehead touching the worn wood. He could just barely turn his eyes enough to see her knocked backwards against the counter, her cry of pain causing every muscle in his body to tense against the binding spell. Stupid to let himself be distracted. He should have made sure she was safe before lashing out. He should have made sure both of them were safe.
Cora broke free of her own binding before she could be pinned to the ground, but she had no recourse against the barrier Chris formed tightly around her. The iridescent wall shimmered green with every beat of her fists, but none of the spells she knew could break it. Elton looked past her at Thomas, silently pleading with him to fight, to run, to do anything at all—but when Chris turned on him, Thomas only froze. Chris must have been stretching himself thin by keeping up both the barrier and Elton’s bindings, but Thomas gave in, a tense furrow in his brow as Chris locked him into place on the floor. Elton grit his teeth and struggled in vain against the spell holding him. Why wouldn’t Thomas fight?
Chris had a sheen of sweat forming on his forehead as he approached. He bent to tug the silver ring from Elton’s right hand and tucked it into his pocket with his lip curled into a sneer. He stood back near the broken shelf to keep watch on his captives while he lifted his phone to his ear, and Elton’s mind raced through a hundred unworkable ideas. He didn’t even have a voice to apologize to Cora with as she crouched inside her narrow barrier with her hands against the glimmering wall.
“Stark,” Chris began, his voice sounding slightly strained with effort, “I need backup. Right now. Whoever’s nearby. Willis tried to run, and I’ve got a couple of bonus criminals here. Abetting fraternization and assaulting an officer of the Magistrate. Yeah,” he said with a dry chuckle. “It’s been a busy day. Okay. Thanks.”
He hung up the phone and crouched in front of Elton to peer into his glaring eyes. “You’re done, Willis. And so’s your little girlfriend. And all those people who ran off with mundanes? They’ll be tracked down. This heroic little outburst was for nothing.”
“You are such a shithead,” Cora muttered, echoing within the barrier.
“You just wait, you fuckin’ brat. You won’t have such a smart mouth after what’s coming to you.”
Elton strained against his bindings, but though his body tensed, he had no way of breaking the spell. Not without his voice, and certainly not without his ring. He let out a breath as Cora’s fingers curled against the wall of her cage. All of this was his fault.
When Chris rose to let the other Chasers into the shop a few minutes later, Elton could only watch as they put Cora and Thomas to sleep and carried them from the building. Chris stopped them before they could take Elton and shook his head, glancing down at him and giving a small snort of disgust.
“I’ll take care of him,” he said. “We have a lot to talk about.”
15
Elton’s eyes followed Chris as he circled the shop, and he felt the Chaser’s hands on him as he was patted down. Chris set aside the small notepad Elton kept in his breast pocket and even took away his willow token, as though Elton might have been planning to seeking spell his way out of the binding. The Chaser sat down on the floor in front of Elton and gave a brief gesture that loosened the tension in his throat.
“Here’s how this is going to work, Willis,” he began while Elton coughed. “I know you know more than you’re saying. Whatever game you’ve been playing with Moore, it ends now. You know where to find him. I know you do.”
“Why the hell would I have gone through all this if I knew where he was?”
“Because I think you like it,” Chris answered. “I think you’re enjoying this cat and mouse bullshit. Maybe you get off on it. But you know how to find him, don’t you? So tell me. Tell me where Moore is, and I’ll try to make things easier on you. Believe me,” he added when Elton hesitated, “you really want me to make things easier on you.”
Elton stared up at him as best he could with his head still against the floor, his lips pressed into a thin line. His options were limited. His eyes moved to the small notepad on the floor. “Okay,” he said with a heavy sigh. “I don’t know where he is right now. But his cell phone number is in my notebook. The last page.”
Chris scoffed as he reached for the leather notepad. “All this fucking time,” he muttered. “All the fucking stupid riddles and love notes, and you had his number the whole time? You were just enjoying exchanging dirty texts, or what?” He flipped open the notebook, but as soon as his fingertips touched the back page, his body jerked, and he dropped to the floor in a lingering spasm of electricity. Elton’s wrists relaxed as the binding spell faded, and he scooped up the notebook from where it fell from Chris’s hand. The page he’d touched was marked with Chinese characters Elton had written there ages ago—a precaution he’d told himself he would never have to use. He had felt guilty for keeping it before, for even allowing himself the emergency crutch of magic not approved for official Magistrate use. But like the curse he’d laid on Cora months before, some things were hard to let go of. And he wasn’t bound by the Magistrate’s rules anymore.
He turned a page in the book and took a pen from Thomas’s broken front counter, hastily scratching a few rows of characters onto the paper. He tore the page out and pressed it to Chris’s forehead with a quick incantation, and the Chaser gave a ragged gasp, his back arching away from the floor before he went slack and quiet against the wood. His fingertips trembled slightly, and his breathing was too quick, but Elton wasn't concerned. He rose and snapped his book shut before slipping it back into his pocket. The talisman would keep Chris under indefinitely, but it certainly wasn’t good for him to stay that way for a prolonged period. A dark tug at the back of Elton’s mind told him that he ought to kill him. It would be safer. He would be able to get away. Chris might even have deserved it, he thought with a grim frown. But killing him wouldn’t help right now. Right now, he needed to figure out a way to get into the Magistrate and get Cora and Thomas out—preferably before any lasting damage was done.
Elton crouched beside Chris and started to reach into his pocket to retrieve his stolen ring, but then he paused. He’d given it up, hadn’t he? He’d quit. That was a Chaser’s grounding ring, for using a Chaser’s magic. And Elton wasn’t a Chaser anymore.
He left the ring where it was, locked the front door of the shop, and began to scour the aisles, gathering up anything he thought might be useful. He took some citrine and some jet, and he picked out a few pieces of honey locust wood, holly, and hawthorn, tucking them into his jacket pocket. He found a few packets of rice paper hidden away in a corner and held onto them while he searched the shelves for the ink sticks he wanted. He found a small basket of bronze, square-holed cash coins, but they were all reproductions with inscriptions for high salaries or happiness in marriage. They were useless trinkets for mundanes who claimed to be spiritual. Thomas had probably ordered them in bulk. If Elton had any time to spare—and didn’t have an unconscious Chaser to worry about—a trip to Chinatown would have been extremely helpful. But he could make do. He left the ink and paper on a small carved table at the back of the shop and scanned the rows of incense, picking out a few sticks of jasmine and tucking them into a simple wooden burner from the shelf below. He almost tried to light them by magic, then gave a snort of irritation as he noted the absence of his ring and dug for matches in the drawer in the front counter.
Elton had almost finished scraping the black stick into ink on the stone tray when his phone rang in his pocket, startling him into dropping the ink with a clatter. The caller ID read “Private,” and Elton hesitated to answer, but as soon as he touched the screen and answered, he gave a short sigh.
“Darling, you’ve left me hanging,” Nathan said. Elton could hear the smile on Nathan’s face and chose to address later how disconcerting it was that he actually felt relieved to hear the other man’s voice. He could also wonder later how Nathan had gotten his cell phone number.
“They took Cora,” Elton said without pretense. “I didn’t do what you wanted me to, but the Chasers came for Thomas anyway. They took Cora too. I’m going to get them out. I’ve told my partner I’m quitting, but he was going to have me sent back to prison, so he’s here but he’s unconscious, and I’m hoping you have some advice on being a wanted criminal and breaking people out of the Magistrate because I’m a little bit at a loss here.” He was aware that he was rambling, and he clamped his mouth shut again to avoid further embarrassing himself. There was such a long pause that he wasn’t sure Nathan was still on the line, but then he heard the other man’s unrestrained laughter and sighed through his nose.
“Elton, are you serious? This is amazing! Where are you?”
“Did you hear me? They have Cora. She attacked a Chaser. They’ll put her under.”
“Oh, I heard you,” he answered in a low voice. “Tell me where you want to meet.”
“I’m at Thomas’s shop.”
“Don’t fret, darling. Stay right where you are.”
Elton set his phone on the table when the call cut off and returned to his work. Nathan would be an uncontrollable variable, but Elton knew he could at least count on him to be reasonably helpful if it concerned Cora. He’d found himself accepting the criminal’s aid again, somehow, but suddenly Nathan seemed very much like the preferable choice when compared to the massive institution called the Magistrate.
After a while, the bell on the shop door jingled despite Elton having turned the deadbolt, and he looked up to see Nathan and Adelina standing near the ruined counter.
“My, my,” Nathan chuckled as he plucked his cigarette from his lips, “you’ve made a bit of a mess, haven’t you? When you quit, you really quit.”
Elton left his half-finished talismans on the table and rose to meet them. Before he could speak, Nathan had crouched down beside Chris’s unconscious body and lifted the Chaser’s hand by the sleeve of his jacket to give it an experimental bounce.
“He’s well asleep, isn’t he? What have you done to him? What’s this on his head?”
“It’s a fu. It’s keeping him unconscious,” Elton explained as Nathan straightened. “Also, he may be dreaming about being eaten alive by beetles. That’s just a side-effect.”
Nathan put out a hand to steady himself on Elton’s shoulder, clutching the other to his heart as best he could with a cigarette between his fingers. “Oh, my darling,” he laughed. “Not even a day free of the Magistrate, and look how much you’ve grown
.”
Elton brushed his hand away with a scoff, but he tapped Nathan’s coat pocket suggestively and accepted the pack of cigarettes the other man offered him.
“What exactly are you planning to do with him?” Adelina asked as Elton leaned forward to allow Nathan to light his cigarette for him.
“That’s problem number one,” Elton admitted, exhaling smoke.
“What, this one?” Nathan nudged the unconscious Chaser with his shoe. “Kill him and dump him in the river. Or the lake. Or whatever body of water happens to be nearby. Easy day.”
“We can’t just kill him. He was only trying to do his job. It would be helpful if we could convince him to help us, but the chances of that seem slim, since he thinks I’m a traitorous gay ephebophile.”
Nathan snorted, resting an elbow on Elton’s shoulder and leaning in close to him. “Listen to you, using words like ‘we’ and ‘us.’ I like you more all the time.”
“Nathan, this is serious,” Elton sighed as he elbowed the other man away. “This is Thomas’s second offense, and it’s a big one. They’ll torture him until he breaks. They can keep Cora as long as they feel like if they claim she’s resisting. And I don’t trust Stark to treat either of them fairly. Not after the way she handled Hubbard’s crimes.”
“What did he do?” Adelina spoke up, glancing between the two men. “Mr. Proctor.”
“He was helping witches run away with mundanes,” Elton said. “They call it ‘fraternization,’ and he’s an accomplice. He made them fake passports and glamors and helped them leave town or get out of the country, it looked like.”
She turned to Nathan with an accusing frown. “And you led the Magistrate to this evidence? That’s what you hid in that box?”
“Well, I did have some apparently misplaced hope that Elton here would be able to hold off a single Chaser,” Nathan muttered. “In any case, let’s do away with the spare here and get to storming the Magistrate.”
The Left-Hand Path: Runaway Page 14
