Decemberland

Chapter 23: As it Goes

The door to Elliot’s apartment opened with hesitation as he carefully scanned the room coming inside. The lights were off, and there wasn’t any sign of entry beyond the mysteriously unlocked door. Taking a step inside, he reached to the side of the door and flicked the lights on. There, sitting in a chair right in front of the door was Nico, giving him an expectant glare signifying she had been waiting.

“I’ve been expecting you, Mr. Spark,” she announced dramatically.

“Gods dammit, Nico,” Elliot grunted, “Give me back my dorm room key.”

“Oh be a good sport and play along, ya stick in the mud!” said Nico, hopping from the chair, “I’ve always wanted to do that.”

“Well, now you’ve had your fun, so scoot along.” He held his hand out to cue her giving back the key she somehow managed to pilfer from him at some point, and she tossed it to him.

“Not so fast, Sparky,” she said, causing him to raise an eyebrow. “I wanna know why you went to the Outskirts just now.”

According to the pieces Nico had been putting together on random scraps of paper just recently, Trust and Elliot, who she just recently discovered to be brothers by a somewhat successful scouting mission, were involving themselves with a possibly unrelated issue with Clarity. Her well renowned gut instinct had been nagging her unrelentingly all evening to look into it, just in case she was more involved with the two brothers’ than she seemed. Even more so she could guess that it would shed more light on the relationship between the witch of Pierce Valley and the two brothers, one that reached beyond hunter and target, as Trust had told her.

“That’s none of your business,” Elliot snapped.

“The black hell it isn’t, that’s the father of my good friend you just went to visit, and I want to know why.”

Elliot raised his finger in protest about to argue with her, but debating was pointless, as she had proven to him time and again. Instead, he asked, “Do you want some tea?”

Nico nodded happily, and he prepared black tea for the both of them. Although she was aware it was just his way of stalling, she had her ways of running him down. He wasn’t easy, but he wasn’t uncrackable. Point in case, how she knew about his arm. She had a feeling it was a magical item; it wasn’t farfetched to hear stories of humans using magical items in one way or another. They were smart enough to manipulate their environment with the practice they called “science,” the human equivalent of magic, after all. Whether or not his arm had any place in the story of the witch was still to be determined, and it was exactly what she planned on finding out.

Elliot handed her the tea he had prepared. “I’m not going to tell you anything about what’s going on, you know that, right?”

“I figured as much,” she said with a grimace, “You’re a hard ass, and I have no idea why. But it just drives me to find out more.”

“There’s a good reason I told Clarity and not you, too.”

“But you’re not going to let me know that either, are you?”

“No.”

“I hope you know that keeping me in the dark clarifies exactly how involved I am with all this witch business, right? Even more so for Clarity.”

“Not so much for Clarity. That particular topic is a little more complicated.”

“I’m smart.”

“And nosy, rash, impulsive, carry a lack of plausible standards and morals-”

“I got it, I got it. But that doesn’t justify keeping something I have the right to know from me.”