The Left-Hand Path: Runaway

by Barnett,T. S.

  “Well isn’t that great,” Chris muttered. He let out a short sigh. “And what about the box?”

  “Let’s see what’s at the library first. If it’s just another clue, we can go back to the hotel and try to get this open.”

  Chris seemed reluctant, but he nodded. “You’re the one with the inside knowledge. We’ll go. But I still think we need to reevaluate this process.”

  Cora eagerly led the way back to their rental car, and she drummed her fingers on her knees as she rode in the backseat. There was more than one public library in Toronto, of course, but only one large reference library. Chris decided that was the most likely place, and Elton agreed that even Nathan probably wouldn’t have forced them to travel to every branch of the library in the city. Cora watched out the window as Chris drove, hoping she might spot Nathan on a sidewalk somewhere, watching them from a dark corner. He had to be watching all this; there was no point to sending Elton on this chase if he wasn’t going to get to enjoy it personally. But she knew as well as Elton did that if Nathan didn’t want to be seen, then nobody was going to see him.

  The reference library was a huge red brick building held up by a steel and glass bottom floor. People filed in and out, lingering near the bicycle racks or huddling under the overhang to finish their cups of coffee. Evening was coming, and the orange light reflected in the tall glass windows. It was a weird building, Cora thought, but kind of pretty in its own way. Chris parked the car on the side of the street as close to the library as he was able, and the three of them jogged across the street toward the entrance in between traffic. As they entered through the glass doors, Cora shuddered and tried to rub the cold out of her arms.

  “You guys know this is ridiculous, right? It’s April; why the heck is it so cold? When does summer come in Canada? Or is it like a Narnia thing, where you guys have some witch queen who keeps it winter all year long?”

  “It’s not even that cold,” Elton chuckled, but she scoffed at him.

  “I’m gonna put my hands on your stomach, then you’ll know cold.”

  “No thank you,” he said immediately, taking a step to the side to put a bit of distance between them. He approached the counter with Chris and Cora in tow, and he smiled at the man sitting at the desk.

  “Hello,” the man offered, his voice quiet and thick as though his tongue was too big. “Can I help you?” He watched Elton with glassy eyes and a placid smile that made the Chaser pause. He’d seen eyes like that before.

  “I’m hoping you can point me in the direction of some poetry,” Elton answered after a moment. “Keats, specifically.”

  The man stood and leaned against the counter, the smile fading from his face. “Your hands,” he said.

  Elton’s brow knit slightly as he took his hands from his coat pockets. He held them up for inspection, and the man narrowed his eyes and focused with a grim frown on Elton’s silver ring.

  “Is it you?” he asked, but Elton could only shake his head in confusion.

  “Is what me?”

  “The one come for this,” the man said in a slight slur, and he took a blank envelope from the drawer of his desk. It took him three tries to turn the little key in the lock, and he moved as though his hands were numb, but he held the envelope like a treasure once he managed to retrieve it.

  “I think I probably am,” Elton answered gently. He did know this look. He knew the heavy movements, the slurred speech, the empty stare. This was someone who had been through the ingnas and come out the other side. It was about as successful an outcome as any he’d seen. When the Magistrate wanted to punish someone, when the mental torture of the cuimne wasn’t enough to keep them from reoffending or the crime was too severe, the ingnas was the only option. They would touch the person’s mind directly, removing any memories or inclinations they found disagreeable and frequently leaving them a shell of the person they were. Sometimes they were barely able to work magic anymore. It was a punishment that the Magistrate sometimes handed down too lightly.

  “It isn’t for free,” the man said, and he moved out from behind the counter and led them with a slumping step down a few aisles of books. When they were alone, he turned back to face them, his eyes warily drifting back to Elton’s hand as he spoke. “You do something for me first,” he said.

  “Of course,” Chris snorted.

  The man frowned up at him, clearly steeling himself before he spoke. “The man who gave me this—he said you would pay me for it. Said I could get a favor out of a Chaser.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Chris growled. “Are you asking to get knocked in the mouth? I am so sick of this goddamn runaround. You’d better hand over that envelope, you little shit, before I catch you working dorche in front of all these mundanes.”

  The man flinched, clutching the envelope tightly in his hands, and Elton felt Cora’s anxious grip on his sleeve.

  “Stop it, Hao,” he cut in as he moved between them. Chris scowled at him, but Elton ignored him and turned to face the nervous man with an encouraging nod. “What is it you want?” he asked.

  “Need a fix,” the man grunted. “I’m…sick.” Elton’s frown softened slightly as the man looked up at him. “I want something to make me…better. Not…this.”

  “Better?” Elton echoed. “But you’ve…had the ingnas, haven’t you?” He heard Cora gasp beside him and refused to look at her. He knew the look she would give him. “There isn’t any getting better after that.”

  “That’s my price,” the man insisted. “I want to be better. Better than this.”

  Elton shook his head. “I don’t know how to give that to you.”

  “Then…then you don’t get what you want,” the man huffed, and he stuffed the letter pointedly into his pocket.

  Elton sighed, but before he could answer, he felt Cora’s grip tight on his arm.

  “Wait,” she said. She looked up at Elton, eyes wide, and she bit her bottom lip for a moment and pulled on his sleeve. “I know that. I mean, I can do that. I know a way. There’s a thing. The Four Thieves. I can make it.”

  “What is it?” Chris asked skeptically.

  “It’s just a tonic,” she answered. “Nathan told me how. I can make it,” she said again, staring up at Elton with bright determination. “I need the stuff, but I can make it. It’s easy.”

  “Hold on,” Chris interrupted. “Now we’re talking about trying to fix someone who’s had the ingnas? This man’s a criminal,” he pointed out.

  Elton hesitated, glancing briefly between Cora and the man scowling at him from beside the bookshelf. “If you’re sure. And if it isn’t dangerous,” he added quickly.

  “No way,” she assured him. “It’s a helpful thing. Nothing in it even blows up, I swear.” She turned to the man and offered him a kind smile. “If you tell us your address, I’ll make you the Four Thieves, and I’ll bring it to your house tomorrow and show you how to use it, okay?”

  “You promise.”

  “I promise,” she answered. He scribbled down an address on a scrap of paper, seeming to have to focus intently to make the pen move, and he handed it to Cora with one last suspicious glance at Elton and Chris. “I’ll bring it,” Cora promised again, and she took Elton by the hand to hurry him out of the library.

  She told Chris to drive them to a grocery store, and though he seemed mildly put out at being told what to do by the young woman, he found one nearby and let her out of the car. She led the men around the store, gathering up a couple of tall bottles and a small variety of jars. Her arms were overloaded by the time she reached the front counter, and she had to scramble not to drop anything as she piled her items on the moving track.

  “Don’t,” Elton said preemptively as she pretended to dig in her purse, and he put a hand on her shoulder to push her behind him so that he could pay properly. She smiled innocently up at him but moved back at his touch.

  They drove back to the hotel to allow Cora to mix the concoction, and the two men watched her as she ground the herbs she�
�d bought with a makeshift mortar and pestle made out of a coffee cup and the television remote.

  “I’m surprised there’s nothing explosive in it, if Nathan taught you,” Elton muttered, and she grinned up at him.

  “Well you didn’t think I’d tell you about the ones that blow up,” she teased, smiling at his frown. “There’s that pouty face I missed.”

  Elton shook his head and just watched her elbow twist with effort as she ground down the herbs. Nathan had been rubbing off on her.

  “This will probably actually help him, you know,” she said. She carefully poured her powders into the open bottles. “I mean, I hope it will. Nathan says it’s supposed to help keep you healthy and keep away diseases. If it’s magic, too, then maybe it can help him with his jacked up brain, right?”

  “He wants it,” Chris cut in, “and he’s going to give us our next lead in exchange for it. It doesn’t matter if it works. You could give him a bottle of chewable vitamins and say it was this Four Thieves thing.”

  “You’re a shitty person,” Cora said matter-of-factly. “What if Nathan told him that because he knew I’d know how to help? Or something. He must have known this is what he would ask for. It’s what I would ask for if I was like that.”

  “Because we’re supposed to believe Nathaniel Moore is so damn benevolent,” Chris grumbled.

  “That’s not what I said!” She huffed and looked up at Elton while she shook one of the bottles. “He wouldn’t give this guy that kind of hope if it was a lie,” she said. “Tell him Nathan’s not like that.”

  Elton hesitated. He had spent a week with Nathan, the myth, the villain, but he’d seen too many sides of him to know which had been a lie. The Nathan who laughed and teased and rescued mundanes because he felt sorry for them, the Nathan who was fearsome and ruthless and let a whole crowd of people die just to be rid of one Chaser—they couldn’t both be real. “I don’t know if I know what he’s like,” he admitted after a moment.

  “He wouldn’t do that,” Cora insisted in a soft voice. She paused with her thumb over the end of the bottle and let it rest against her knees. “You guys can see him however you like. But when I think about what my life might be if he hadn’t found me—if he hadn’t helped me, and taught me, and taken me with him that day? I’d still be living at home, alone and miserable, working my ass off for a family that hated me. I’d have this gift, this magic, but no idea how to use it. I’d have to hide it away, try to keep from killing anyone accidentally. I’d be even more alone.” She frowned down at the bottle as she gave it one last experimental shake.

  “He set me free,” she murmured, and she took a small pocketknife from her purse and pricked her own finger with it, squeezing a few drops of blood into each bottle. She covered the narrow mouth of one bottle with both hands and laid her forehead on her knuckles, whispering and rolling slightly on her knees. Elton watched, still half expecting the whole concoction to burst into flames, but Cora only set the bottle aside and repeated the process with the other. She lit a candle from her bag, easily lighting a small flame in her palm to touch to the wick, and she melted some wax down the front of each bottle. She blew on it to help it dry and then carved a small hatched circle in the white wax.

  “Cora,” Elton spoke up, “you know you really ought to be careful with this sort of thing. If Nathan is teaching you his voodoo—”

  “It’s hoodoo,” she corrected him immediately. “Hoodoo is different. He doesn’t teach me the real voodoo stuff. Yet,” she added under her breath as she carved the last of the circle. “Done!” she announced before Elton could question her. She screwed the caps back onto the bottles and placed them carefully on the bedside table. “They need to sit for the night, and then we can see if we can help undo whatever fuckery the Magistrate put on this poor guy.”

  “It wouldn’t have been for no reason, remember,” Chris said. “He did something to deserve it.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Cora argued. “He did something so bad that the only option was to dig around in his freaking brain? People die because of the ingnas, don’t they?”

  “Sometimes,” Elton admitted, but Chris didn’t seem concerned.

  “You’d rather they’re locked up in prison instead? It’s a question of resources. Keep them in prison, you have to pay for the upkeep of the building, pay the guards, pay to feed and clothe the prisoners—with the ingnas, it takes a single afternoon, and then you can send them back out into the world to be as productive as they can be.”

  “That’s horrible,” Cora murmured, and Elton could see the hunch in her shoulders. “That’s like back in the old days when they used to lobotomize people instead of treating them. Isn’t magic supposed to make people’s lives better?”

  Chris clicked his tongue in annoyance. “Who told you that?”

  Cora frowned as she brushed her fingertips over one of the bottles. “Nathan did.”

  “Magic complicates things,” Chris said. “It’s a fact of life, just like the fact that some people are going to be criminals no matter what. Magic just makes it easier for those people to be dangerous.”

  “It makes it easier to do good, too.”

  “So does money, but you don’t see too many billionaires throwing all their money at the less-fortunate, do you?”

  Elton sat down on the bed in silence, watching Cora scowl at the table to keep herself from snapping at the other Chaser. She was young. Elton had been that idealistic once, too. Working for the Magistrate was an easy way to grow disillusioned.

  Chris huffed and finally suggested that they order pizza and get to bed early, but he kept a wary eye on Elton the entire time they ate.

  “Do I have something on my face?” Elton asked, and Chris frowned at him.

  “I’m just wondering what the deal is with you and Moore and all these love notes.”

  “They’re not love notes,” Elton sighed, though he knew Nathan might disagree.

  “It’s not like I care if somebody’s gay,” Chris insisted a little too loudly. “If you split up from your wife because your dick had a change of heart, it’s not my business.” Elton’s jaw clenched, and he caught Cora peeking up at him warily out of the corner of his eye. “But you had better be focused, and you had better not think you’re sharing a bed with me.”

  “Dude,” Cora protested, but Elton lifted a hand to quiet her.

  “You’ve clearly got a lot on your mind,” Elton said in a low voice, his pale eyes locked onto Chris’s brown ones. “So I’m going to let that go. But we’re on an assignment, Hao. It’s not me who’s getting distracted. Why don’t you just relax, eat your food, and we can keep moving in the morning.”

  “You aren’t sharing with her either,” Chris pressed.

  “Make up your mind at least,” Elton answered roughly. “Am I gay, or am I preying on young women?”

  “You just sleep by yourself.”

  “What, and you and me share?” Cora scoffed. “Not likely, man. I don’t even know you. I choose Elton.” She leaned against the Chaser’s shoulder. “We won’t be too noisy; promise.”

  “Cora,” Elton scolded, but the scowl on Chris’s face was satisfying. The other Chaser shut himself in the bathroom with a quick muttering about a shower, and Cora looked up at Elton as her cheeks puffed out in a sigh.

  “He’s a ray of freaking sunshine, isn’t he?”

  “He’s just trying to do his job.”

  “Well he’s shitty at it,” she grumped as she pulled away from him. “I’m putting pajamas on. Don’t look.”

  Elton dutifully kept his back turned while she changed into a pair of shorts and a tank top, only glancing over his shoulder when he felt the mattress dip behind him.

  “How much has he taught you, really?” he asked. “Nathan.”

  “I already told you; he said it’s cheating to share.”

  “But it’s things like this, too? Helpful things?”

  “Sometimes,” she admitted.

  “But it’s all voodoo—hoodoo,” h
e corrected himself. “Isn’t it?”

  Cora peered at him as though she was onto his game, but she only pursed her lips for a moment before answering. “Mostly. What’s with the twenty questions?”

  “You really admire him, don’t you?”

  Cora paused, and a faint touch of pink showed in her cheeks as she lowered her gaze to the blanket. “You don’t have to say it like that,” she muttered. “He’s done a lot for me. He’s still doing things for me. Nobody asked him to take me in; nobody asked him to teach me. But he’s still trying to make sure I’m taken care of. He’s not perfect, and I know a lot of the things he does aren’t okay—I do know that,” she said again, lifting her eyebrows and peeking up at him. “But he actually wants me to be able to take care of myself. To him, that means knowing how to do what he does.”

  “And if there isn’t a grocery store or open grave nearby where you can pilfer your supplies?”

  “Rude,” she chuckled. “I’m still learning a lot of things.”

  “I just worry that you’ll rely on his methods too much. Nathan is skilled, but he’s offensive. In both senses of the word.” Elton looked back at the bathroom door to make sure he could still hear the water running. “In some cases, you’re going to need to defend yourself.”

  She tilted her head and leaned closer to him to drop her voice. “You’re worried about our babysitter?”

  “I’m thinking of eventualities. If Hao decides he wants to take me back, I don’t want him dragging you with me.”

  “But couldn’t I just be Nathan-offensive for you, and then he won’t take either of us?”

  “You don’t need to make an enemy of the Magistrate for my sake, Cora. I just want you to be prepared. Can I show you a trick?”

  “Always. I love tricks.” She edged closer to him on the bed and leaned forward on her hands to listen.

  “I’m sure Nathan’s taught you how to break out of a binding, but you can’t always guarantee you’ll have your groundings with you. There is a way. To be used under special circumstances,” he added, and Cora rolled her eyes.