The creature opened its bony jaw and let out a piercing, hissing shriek that made Elton flinch. An icy cold touched his heart and slipped like a snake around his neck, drawing him closer to the monster despite his attempts to fight its grip. His voice left him; he couldn’t cast. He could barely breathe.
Nathan and Cora trotted up the street, skidding to a stop at the sight of the creature.
“I knew it,” Nathan laughed. “The old bastard; I knew he’d come looking.”
Cora looked anxiously between Nathan’s cheerful face and Elton’s choking one. “Yeah that’s great—are you going to help him?”
“Help him? What for? Then he’ll just put me in the back seat again.”
She gestured frantically in Elton’s direction as he was drawn disturbingly close to the skeletal creature. “Because your chase is about to be over before it starts and if he dies I’m going to be cursed forever, so will you please just help him please? Like now?”
Nathan pondered for what seemed like an eternity. “The things I do for you,” he sighed, and he took a step closer to Elton’s captured body and held out a hand. “Uts’i,” he called with unusual force in his voice, and the cold grasp on Elton’s neck vanished in an instant. The Chaser dropped to his hands and knees on the street, choking out a gasping breath, but half a moment later he was on his feet. He called out a quick word in Cora’s direction, and she gasped as a visible barrier formed around her.
“No, come on!” she complained, banging on the inside of the invisible barrier and causing ripples of translucent green.
Elton spared a thankful glance at Nathan as the creature hissed in fury, already reaching out for them with bony fingers to draw them back into its grip. Elton’s hand was in his jacket pocket, and he retrieved a small chip of charred wood and clutched it tightly in his palm as he spoke the word daig in a hoarse voice.
Flames appeared in a burst at the monster’s feet, and it wailed so loudly that the awful noise echoed down the street for miles. It struggled against the fire, but was slowly overcome, grasping at the pavement as it sunk into a heap of dusty bones and grew still.
Elton replaced the burned wood in his pocket and touched the front of his neck, testing that he could still breathe. He cleared his throat and glanced at Nathan, giving him a small nod in place of thanks.
“Hello?” Cora knocked on the iridescent wall surrounding her to get the attention of the men. ”Anyone want to let me out now?”
Elton apologized, quickly dispelling the barrier. “Are you all right?” he asked as she jogged over to them.
“Me? You’re the one who was almost...whatever that thing was about to do. Are you okay?” She touched his arm without thinking, and when he glanced down at her hand, she pulled it away and looked down at the ground so that he wouldn’t see her flushed face.
“That couldn’t be what we’re looking for,” Elton murmured half to himself. “What sort of things could have done that? A wight, perhaps, or a slaugh?”
“Definitely one of those things,” Nathan snorted. “Good job there, officer. I guess it’s case closed and you’ll have to take me in now, hm? It’s a good thing you took my bracelet away; I might have done some magic if you hadn’t.”
Elton frowned, irritated by Nathan’s smug look. The stories about him being able to cast without a grounding were true, then. “Let’s just make sure the remains are disposed of and get back to the hotel. I’ll take off Cora’s curse, and I’ll get you on a plane in the morning,” he said pointedly.
“Oh, use your eyes,” Nathan argued, gesturing at the charred bones in the street. “That isn’t a wight. No wight I’ve ever seen could do what it did. It’s a lich.”
“I’m tired of arguing with you.”
“I’m going to hazard a guess that I have a smidgeon more experience with black magic than you do, darling, and I’m telling you that I know a lich when I see one. That’s my old friend. That’s what I was keeping trapped in my box.”
“I’m not doing this with you, Nathan. You’re stalling, and you’re planning something. I’m going to call my contact at the Magistrate and make sure your transport is in order in the morning.”
“Oh, don’t call your babysitter,” Nathan said with a sneer. “You’ll just have to tell them that you let it get away.”
The bones gave a soft clatter as they shifted on the pavement, and Cora touched Nathan’s sleeve without taking her eyes off of the moving bones. Small strips of flesh and muscle grew between the bones, and they slowly knit together into their former shape.
“Uh, guys?” she whispered, tugging on Nathan’s arm.
“I did not let anything get away,” Elton insisted.
“It’s killed three people already, and it almost killed you. If it was just a damn wight, it wouldn’t be killing in these numbers, and you know it. What do you think it’s killing for? It’s feeding. It’s getting strong enough to come after me.”
The bones scraped on the street as the skeletal figure rose, and Cora pulled harder on Nathan’s sleeve. “Guys! You really need to—”
“Cora, grown-ups are talking,” Nathan said, but he turned his head when Elton swore. “Oh.”
Elton immediately retrieved the willow bark from his pocket and moved toward the creature, but the flames he cast were deflected by a shimmering barrier surrounding the undead. That was unexpected. Elton tried to throw up a protective spell, but the creature had its grip on him immediately, wrapping cold, unseen tethers around his throat.
“For Heaven’s sake, Elton,” Nathan said, but the counterspell he called out had no effect on the barrier or the monster itself. He stepped closer to Elton to try again and found himself knocked backwards by half a dozen thin shards of ice formed out of the dry desert air. The sharp slivers buried themselves in his left shoulder, drawing a shout from him and causing Cora to rush to his side.
“Oh my God, what do I do? What do I do?” she asked in a panic.
“Just keep out of the way, Cora!” Nathan snapped, brushing her aside and calling out spell after spell in an attempt to free Elton. His shoulder ached and seeped blood into his shirt as he moved closer, fighting the waves of cold that radiated from the undead and the frozen shards that stuck in his arms and nicked his cheek. The creature opened its jaws, seeping a heavy blue mist, and Elton’s body spasmed in its grip. In another moment, he would be the same shriveled mummy as the rest of them.
Cora pulled at her bracelet, hoping for some inspiration, but she barely recognized any of the carvings on the beads. It would have been handy if Nathan had given her any spells for dealing with completely unexpected circumstances. Maybe he had. She wouldn’t be able to cast them even if he had. She wanted to help, but she feared that even calling out to him would distract him from the task he was obviously more suited for.
Finally, Nathan got close enough to almost touch the creature, and he held out his hand and shouted out, “Efasman,” a destructive word that even he was hesitant to use. The bright orb that formed in Nathan’s hand quickly expanded to surround them, and Cora turned her head away to avoid being blinded. The crack that echoed through the neighborhood as it shattered was almost deafening. The undead’s hold on Elton broke in an instant, but so did the surrounding pavement. The street sunk in on itself in a wide circle around them, crumbling the sidewalk and causing Cora to cry out in alarm as the three of them tumbled into the ground. Elton fell to his knees in the rubble, gasping for breath and clutching at his throat while the creature above him shrieked.
“Holy shit!” a strange voice broke out above the noise, and Nathan groaned in frustration as he saw a man carrying plastic grocery bags stop ten feet from the pit. He called out to the man to run, but the undead had already turned toward him.
“Fuck’s sake,” Nathan swore, and he quickly snapped out the word bak, sending the man backwards across the street. “Elton, you’d better get off your ass!” he shouted, pulling the coughing Chaser to his feet by the collar of his jacket.
T
he undead hissed at them, but before it could raise its bony arms again, both men held out their hands and spoke in unison, bursting bright flames into life at the creature’s feet. It screamed and clawed at them, but the combined spells were too much for it; it collapsed into blackened bone in a pile of broken asphalt.
Nathan doubled over with his hands on his knees, panting and dripping blood and sweat onto the ground. His legs trembled, threatening to give out from under him, and his hands burned. He hadn’t even had his groundings. He’d pushed himself too far.
Elton dropped back to sit on a cracked bit of sidewalk. “We have to make sure it’s dead,” he said in a rough, breathless voice.
“It’s not dead,” Nathan insisted, and he turned to look over his shoulder at Elton because he wasn’t confident in his ability to stand up straight. “I told you; it’s a lich. We could put it down a dozen times, and it would just come back.”
“We can’t just leave it here,” Elton croaked. “It’s going to kill more people.”
“It’s going to kill us if we don’t get the hell out of here. Do you want to do this all night, or do you want to actually kill it? Your call, boss.”
“Uh, guys?” Cora called out from the top of the pit. She pointed down the street. “You know there’s a man over there, right? He might be dead.”
“He’s fine,” Nathan said. Elton lifted slowly to his feet, and they both climbed out the far side of the pit. Nathan put the mundane to sleep with a quick incantation, and the two men dragged him into a nearby alley and laid a simple protective spell on him. The best they could hope for under the circumstances was that he would avoid the lich’s attention and wake up thinking it had all been a bad dream.
“We have to be able to contain it somehow,” Elton said as they approached the rim of the pit. “How did you do it before?”
“Let’s see,” Nathan panted, “I befriended it, lived with it for three years, and then stole from it, and took it by surprise, and trapped it in a specially-made curse box. Think we have that kind of time?” Elton frowned at him. “No, I thought not. Now can we please get going before that thing gets up again? I think my arm’s going numb.”
Elton gave him a disapproving frown. “We need to report it to the local Magistrate.”
“So he can do what? Phillip’s useless. I know how to kill it,” he promised. “But I need time.”
Elton hesitated, staring down at the pile of bones. How could he leave this creature on the loose with only Nathaniel Moore’s word that he could kill it? He didn’t want to trust him, but Nathan was right. “Neither of us is in any condition to keep going,” he admitted reluctantly as Cora jogged up to them. “We have to go.”
“Thanks, boss,” Nathan sighed. Cora caught him as best she could when he stumbled, pulling his arm around her shoulders and helping him to the car. Elton lingered to put down as many barriers and purification markers as he could, but eventually he had to return to the car and drive away with Nathan bleeding all over the back seat.
Elton drove back to his motel and set up his police scanner near the window, listening for any news while Nathan dropped onto the far bed with a grunt. He called the detective at the Yuma police station and requested that they make an announcement telling citizens to remain indoors at night if at all possible. He told them that there was a dangerous suspect confirmed loose in the city, which was true enough for mundane purposes.
“Get up,” Cora commanded, taking hold of Nathan’s wrists to pull him up into a sitting position. “You’re hurt. We have to clean it.”
He let out a sigh but complied, tugging his shirt over his head and dropping the bloodstained fabric to the floor. Cora wet a hand towel from the bathroom and knelt beside him on the bed. For a moment, she felt hesitant to touch him. The things he had done in the street should have been impossible. Even knowing that magic was real, she wouldn’t have believed in the kind of magic Nathan was capable of—not after how often he beat into her head that magic wasn’t easy, that groundings were absolutely necessary, that you could really hurt yourself. Maybe Elton had been right when he said she didn’t know who she was dealing with. But he only looked at her with exhaustion on his face, the skin on his neck and chest glistening with sweat as he rubbed his hands together with a wincing frown. He had protected her, protected them both, and put himself in danger to do it. He hadn’t done a frightening thing tonight—he had done an amazing thing.
She focused on the injury on his shoulder, gently cleaning the blood away from the wound. It didn’t look too serious, but it probably didn’t feel very good. She searched his arms and torso for other scratches and checked them for severity, finishing with the small cut on his face.
“Excellent nursing, my love,” he chuckled softly as she dabbed the damp cloth to his cheek. He glanced across the room at Elton, who was listening carefully at his police scanner and watching the window with a frown. He had a small tablet in his hand, which he periodically glanced at, touching the screen to skim through various pages of records. “Wouldn’t you rather check up on him?” Nathan whispered, tilting his head in the Chaser’s direction. “I’m sure he could use your tender care.”
“Don’t be a jerk,” she mumbled, but he smiled at her embarrassed frown.
“You mustn’t be afraid to speak up, Cora, if there’s something in this world that you want. I’m much more attractive than he is, and you never blushed to look at me. If you want him, take him.”
“I am not listening to this,” she hissed, and she climbed off of the bed and took the bloody cloth into the bathroom to rinse. She could see Elton’s back in the mirror. She watched him run a hand through his honey-colored hair, slip off his jacket, and drop it over the back of one of the chairs. He could have died tonight—but as soon as he was free from the lich, his first thought had been to shield her. That was just his Chaser instincts, of course. He was a police officer, essentially. It was his job to protect people. It didn’t have anything to do with her personally. This person had put a curse on her, she reminded herself—a curse that was apparently so bad that she wasn’t going to sleep until it was gone. And even if that wasn’t true and he had protected her on purpose, he was still definitely married, and she didn’t know anything about him except that he had a nice smile.
She wrung out the cloth and hung it over the edge of the bathroom sink, then walked back out to sit beside Nathan on the bed. He had already dropped onto his back and closed his eyes when Elton turned to them and loosened his tie.
“Tell me what you know about the lich,” he said, and Nathan opened one eye to peer over at him. “Everything.”
“Are you serious? Right now?”
“Right now.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“I saved your life twice tonight and got bloody for your sake, and I haven’t eaten in hours because you dragged me to the reg jail and left me. If you want information, I want a greasy, disgusting meal and a good night’s sleep.”
Elton hesitated, feeling an unwelcome guilty tug in his stomach. He had only been thinking of the creature and its potential victims, but the fact remained that Nathan had actually saved his life. He had protected a mundane instead of using him as a distraction, and he had exhausted himself burning the undead to the ground. He may not have been trustworthy, but he had been more helpful and straightforward than Elton had any right to expect.
“Fine,” he said. “Let’s find something to eat.”
Despite the misgivings of his companions, Nathan chose a tiny Mexican restaurant about a block away from the motel. The name on the small, squat building was painted with bright colors and surrounded by cartoon cactuses, leaving Elton skeptical of the authenticity advertised on the street sign. Nathan ordered an enormous plate of food, including beef tongue tacos, which he assured Cora were actually quite delicious. She still declined to share when Nathan offered. Elton was hungry enough for two people himself, but he at least managed to eat his meal without hunching ov
er the table and shoveling cow tongue into his mouth, which Nathan did without shame. He only looked up to smile and flirt with the waitress in Spanish.
“Tell me why you saved the mundane,” Elton said when their plates were clean.
Nathan looked up from his cup of soda with the straw still caught between his teeth, the end flattened by his chewing. “What?”
“Tonight. You could have let the lich have him. It would have been a good distraction.”
Nathan shrugged. “He didn’t ask to be there. Poor bastard didn’t deserve what it would have done to him. He already can’t do magic; isn’t that punishment enough for one lifetime?”
“But you don’t care about mundanes,” Elton insisted. “You kill them all the time. You kill them for fun.”
“I don’t kill people for fun,” Nathan objected with a defensive sneer.
“Much,” Cora interjected, and Nathan tutted at her with a smile.
“You expect me to believe that you feel guilty about the things you’ve done?” Elton asked.
“Well, no. I didn’t say it particularly bothered me when it happened. I would in general much rather someone else die than me. I’ve even done it on purpose, sometimes. But that doesn’t mean it’s just for a lark. I have reasons for things.”
“What reasons could possibly justify that?”
Nathan shrugged, stirring the melting ice around his cup. “You’ve never wanted to kill someone?”
“I am an officer of the Magistrate,” Elton frowned.
“Oh, come off it.” Nathan snorted. “You can’t fool me, Chaser. None of you do your job because you just love all the paperwork. It’s the fight, right? The chase. It’s in your name.”
“I asked you why you saved that man.”
“And I told you. What, I’m not allowed to do anything nice?”
The Left-Hand Path: Mentor Page 9
