The Left-Hand Path: Runaway

by Barnett,T. S.

  “You’re going to go against your boyfriend’s warning?” Chris said as he glanced sidelong at the small chest. “Or you think he wants you to open it?”

  “I don’t care what he wants,” Elton replied without addressing the jab. “I don’t want whatever this is here anymore without knowing what’s in it. I don’t trust him.” He let out a sigh that he hoped was convincing. “But I’ve done enough stepping on toes. You’re supposed to be in charge, Hao. If you say we leave it alone, we leave it alone.”

  Cora leaned forward to try and get a look at Chris’s face without drawing his attention, but the other Chaser only sighed with his coffee in one hand and the other sat pensively on his hip.

  “And you don’t have any idea what’s in there,” Chris said, peeking back at Elton and worrying his bottom lip.

  “It could be anything,” Elton admitted, “but the last time I opened a box of Nathan’s, he was binding a lich with it. So it’s probably nothing good. If he has bound something in there, I’d rather find out and deal with it now than whenever Nathan thinks is the most amusing.”

  “Well that’s promising,” Chris muttered. “So, we ward the room first, put some barriers up. Then we’ll open it and see what happens. It’s better than following breadcrumbs all day.” He took another sip of his coffee before abandoning the cup on the bathroom vanity and moving to his suitcase.

  Elton tilted his head at Cora to urge her closer to him, and she watched with eager interest as he drew a simple leather kit from his suitcase. Inside, there were several long slips of thick paper stamped with intricate red emblems.

  “This is a Mao Shan Fu,” he said, letting her take one of the talismans from his case for inspection. “To protect against black magic. It’s similar to the one you’re wearing in that amulet. Sorry it doesn’t involve any cat bones,” he added with a small smile, “but I can show you how to ward the room.”

  “Hey, if it’s something I can make without having to carry around a sack full of brick dust, sign me up.”

  Elton chuckled and took a stick of charcoal from his kit, and he drew the characters he knew by heart over the stamped emblems on the page with Cora leaning on his shoulder to watch. When he was finished, he put his hand over the talisman and murmured the incantation loud enough for Cora to hear, sparking a momentary light under his palm that fluttered the paper. He picked it up and moved to the door of the hotel room, and as he ran his hand down the length of the paper, it stuck itself securely to the door.

  “And that does what exactly?” Cora asked. Behind them, Chris was setting more standard barriers, sealing the room in an iridescent blue that shimmered on the walls.

  “If we let something out, hopefully, it’ll keep it weak enough to deal with.” Elton looked down at her. “I suppose it’s pointless asking if you want to wait outside.”

  “If there’s something awful in that box, I can help. I took the correspondence course, remember? I’m not useless.”

  “Fair enough,” he smiled. She certainly hadn’t seemed useless when she helped him bear the weight of half a dozen cars without breaking a sweat. He would have to remember not to treat her like the same girl he’d met in Yuma.

  “Are we ready?” Chris called out to them as he placed the chest at the foot of the bed closest to him.

  “Feel free to do the honors,” Elton nodded. He couldn’t help making sure Cora was standing half behind him as Chris knelt in front of the chest. He was fairly certain that Nathan wouldn’t have made the box truly deadly, if only on the off chance that Cora might try to open it, but that didn’t mean that opening it would be pleasant. In fact, he was rather hoping it wouldn’t be.

  Chris knelt down and looked over every inch of the box, running his fingertips over the carvings with his mouth set into a firm line. He tried a few spells with the small pile of runes he had stacked nearby, but nothing seemed to have an effect. The latch stayed firmly shut. He shifted on his knees and let out a grunt of irritation, and Elton thought he was about to give up, but suddenly there was a loud crack and a hiss of smoke from the lock, and Chris fell back onto his rear. The Chaser let out a swear and tried to pull back to his knees, but he stopped mid-way, frozen in place with a look of pained panic on his face. He gagged, his stomach audibly gurgling, and he reached up to cover his mouth with one hand as he retched black bile through his fingers and onto the floor.

  “Oh Jesus,” Cora grimaced, instinctively taking a step back, but her hand snapped out to grip Elton’s sleeve as white smoke began to rise from the thick puddle on the floor.

  “Fuck,” Chris swore, “my fucking hand—”

  Elton could already see the welts bubbling up on the other man’s skin, but before he could move forward, Chris vomited again, the black liquid pouring from his lips with such force that it spattered the bed and nearby dresser. Thin smoke hissed everywhere it touched, burning curling holes into the fabric of the blanket and melting the particle board drawers. Chris frantically tried to wipe the bile from his mouth and chin but only made the burns on his hand worse. Elton took a step closer in an attempt to help, but he didn’t have many spells on hand for “help your partner stop projectile vomiting acid.” This was more trouble than he had planned for.

  “We need to get him out of here,” he said, giving the puddle as wide a berth as he could in the narrow space as he stepped around behind the other man. Chris made a sickening belching sound as more black fell from his lips, and Elton hooked him under the arms to pull him away from the growing mess around him. The rough carpet had begun to peel away from the masonry, and the sulfur smell of the bile burned Elton’s nostrils. “Can you keep us hidden, Cora?” he called over Chris’s pained cries.

  “What? Like from everybody? I mean, I can try—”

  “Try,” Elton confirmed with as much reassurance as he could muster while dodging sticky globs of vomit. “And get the box. They might need it.”

  Cora swore as she dodged a puddle and tucked the chest under one arm. She clutched her braceleted wrist close against her chest, and she took a steeling breath before stepping over to put a hand on Elton’s arm.

  “Don’t touch it,” he warned, and she spared the time to look up at him like he was an idiot. She squeezed her eyes shut and near shouted out the spell as she tugged him toward the door.

  Elton had to lift Chris awkwardly in both arms to keep him from trailing through the smoking liquid as they moved hurriedly out of the hotel room. Chris let out another stream of black halfway to the elevator, and Elton hissed and dropped him to the floor when a fat drop of the bile hit his hand and began to burn into his skin. The cleaning woman at the end of the hall didn’t seem to notice them, which he assumed meant that Cora’s spell was working, but they still needed to move quickly. Elton wiped his hand hastily on Chris’s already ruined jacket and picked him up again.

  “Oh, wait! Wait!” Cora said, releasing him to bolt down the corridor to the parked cleaning cart. She snatched a large bucket from a hook on the side and darted back to Elton’s side, taking hold of his arm again and tucking the bucket under Chris’s chin just in time to catch another rush of vomit.

  “I don’t know how much help that’ll be,” Elton grumbled as he dragged Chris into the elevator with them and hit the lobby button with his elbow.

  “It’s plastic,” she assured him. “Acid doesn’t eat through plastic, or something. I saw it on Breaking Bad.”

  “The pinnacle of scientific accuracy,” he sighed, turning his head away from the sight of the glop in the bottom of the bucket.

  “Just shut up,” she groaned, and as the elevator doors opened again, she repeated her incantation under her breath and pulled Elton through the lobby with her as fast as they could go with Chris bubbling out tar in Elton’s arms. The people around them showed no sign of concern as they hurried by toward the parking garage, which was thankfully empty between the door and their rental car. Elton made a mental note to tell Cora how impressed he was—later, when his partner wasn’t losi
ng a battle with a curse. He shifted Chris into the back seat of the car, and Cora shut the box in the trunk and climbed in beside him to keep the bucket steady while he emptied another stomachful of black into it.

  “You’d better get wherever we’re going fast,” she called as Elton dropped into the driver’s seat and turned the key. “This thing is going to fill up.”

  Elton threw the car into gear and pulled out of the parking garage in a tear rather than answering her. He didn’t know how to deal with this. The Magistrate was their only option. He focused on driving, but he winced every time he heard the thick echo of liquid pouring into the bucket behind him.

  “Is he going to die?” Cora asked, and Elton looked up at her through the rear view mirror at the slight waver in her voice. She had an arm on the back of the seat to keep Chris in place by his shoulders. “I mean, people only have so much liquid in their bodies, right?”

  “He’s not going to die,” he promised her, though he wasn’t entirely sure himself. He’d never seen a curse like this—he wasn’t even sure how Nathan had gone about setting it, but he was sure he found the idea hilarious.

  By the time they reached the Magistrate office and parked the car, the bucket was threatening to overflow, and Cora had to repeatedly readjust her grip to keep from burning her hands as tar sloshed thickly over the edges. Elton trusted her to take care of the bucket however she pleased and lifted Chris unceremoniously from the seat, rushing him into the lobby of the office. He shouted a warning at the man at the front desk when he tried to approach them, and with the help of two other Chasers from back offices, they were able to rush Chris into an elevator and down into the basement infirmary. Cora appeared shortly afterward, having stripped off her coat and abandoned it in the hall to keep the acidic bile from seeping through the material, and she sat beside Elton on a worn metal bench, both of them catching their breath as the other staff rushed to stem the flow from Chris’s insides.

  Cora sighed and rubbed at a spot on her wrist that had been burned, flexing the ache of exertion in her hands. “Nathan thinks he’s so fucking funny,” she muttered grumpily, but when she leaned against Elton’s shoulder, he let out a soft chuckle that made her smile. She shoved him with her elbow and bit her lip until they both shook with restrained laughter. Elton shushed her as Stark approached them with a disapproving stare, but he was still smiling.

  “Willis,” she said, gesturing toward the end of the hall with exasperation. Chris had gone quiet now, but there was still movement near his bed. “What the hell happened?”

  Elton stood to face her and cleared his throat to wipe the smile from his lips. “A backfire,” he said simply. “Hao tried to open a curse box left behind by Moore, and he must have done something wrong.”

  “A curse box did this?” Stark shook her head and looked up at Elton in disbelief. “Did you get it open, at least?”

  “No.”

  “Of course.”

  “But we do have a lead,” he said. “We know where Moore is going to be next.”

  “You’re on probation, Willis,” she pointed out, “and your handler is going to be out of commission for hours, if not the day. I’m not sending you out with nobody but your informant to keep tabs on you.”

  “What do you expect me to do? I can’t just wait with Moore still loose in the city.”

  “I expect you to get your tone in check, first thing, Willis,” she snapped, and Elton straightened slightly out of instinct.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  Stark looked him up and down for a moment, daring him to speak again, and then she went on. “It seems to me that Moore’s much more interested in making trouble for you than for my district. You go back to your hotel and sit this out for a while, and once Hao’s on his feet again, you can get back to tearing up my streets. Don’t think I don’t know about your little levitation show yesterday,” she cut in when he opened his mouth to object. “You’re lucky I haven’t already sent you back to Vancouver. I’ll have someone escort you back, and I will call you when Hao’s well enough to move. Until then, you stay where I can see you and just quiet down for a while, you understand?”

  Elton’s jaw tightened, but he held his hands behind his back and only let the faintest sigh escape his nose. Arguing with her would only make it worse. “Yes ma’am.”

  “Good.” Stark waved down a man who was still drying oils from his hands as he approached. He tossed aside the rag to shake Elton’s hand. He was young—probably fresh out of the academy—and he watched Elton with kind eyes. “Morgan will keep an eye on you. Make sure they make it back to the hotel without incident,” she said to the other Chaser, stressing the “without incident” part of her instructions with a lift of her eyebrows.

  “Yes ma’am,” Morgan answered without question, but he paused when he looked past Elton. “Is she coming too?”

  Elton glanced over his shoulder at Cora, who had slumped over sideways on the bench and seemed to be quite happily napping. The invisibility must have been impossibly taxing for her. Elton was impressed she had been able to keep it up at all. He bent to shake her by the shoulder and rouse her, and after a few moments of grumbling resistance, she sat up and pulled to her feet.

  “Just behave yourself for a while, Willis,” Stark warned as Morgan led them back to the elevator. Elton heard her huff out a sigh as she stalked out of sight again.

  As promised, Morgan drove them back to the hotel and took his place outside their door, leaving the pair of them to stand in the room where sticky, foul-smelling black fluid stained half the floor.

  “This is stupid,” Cora lamented as she curled up on the untainted bed. “We should be checking out the museum. What good are we just sitting around here? Don’t they know if Nathan gets bored, he’s going to start setting crap on fire?”

  Elton spared a wary glance at the closed door and stepped over a small, tacky puddle to sit beside her. “I need to see him,” he said in a whisper. “He left me a note telling me to meet him today. I can’t stay here.”

  “What?” she asked, leaning up on one elbow. “When did you get a note?”

  “It was...under my pillow,” he admitted softly. “He must have been here last night.”

  “What a creep,” she laughed, but then she paused and lifted up the pillow by her head. There was only sheet underneath. She dropped the pillow again with a disgruntled snort. “He didn’t leave me any love notes. Rude. So what do you want to do?”

  “I’m going to need your help, I think. To get by our keeper.”

  “You want to be invisible again? Fat chance of that,” she sighed, and she sat up to wring the joints in her hands. “Even if I had another one in me, I have to be touching you. So you wouldn’t be sneaking out by yourself. But,” she added with an encouraging smile, “not all problems are solved by magic. Sit tight.”

  Cora got to her feet and opened the hotel room door, startling the young man in the doorway. When he turned to look down at her, she reached out to put a pleading hand on his arm. “Hey, so listen,” she started with a bright smile, “I know you’re supposed to be guarding us and everything—which is fine, really, you’re doing God’s work—but Hao getting laid up is the first chance Elton and I have had to really be...alone, you know what I’m saying?”

  Morgan paused for just a moment, and then the faintest touch of red crept up his cheeks as it became clear he did know what she was saying. He moved as Cora led him, turning his back to the door as she squeezed his arm on the pretense of speaking more privately.

  “I just don’t want you to randomly open the door and be surprised,” she murmured, her lips curled into a sly smile. For just a moment, she caught Elton’s eye, and he saw his opportunity. As she turned Morgan’s shoulder to whisper to him, Elton slipped through the door behind the Chaser’s back and ducked around the corner a few feet down the corridor. He distantly heard Cora thanking Morgan for his discretion as she slammed the door shut again, and he hurried down to the elevator as quietly as he could.
Cora was becoming positively devious.

  13

  The rental car was still at the Magistrate office, so he had to take a bus to Eglinton Station. The street was spotted with pedestrians as he exited by the condominium complex Nathan had directed him to. He didn’t like that. Maybe he could lead Nathan to somewhere more secluded. Elton stood at the bus stop and took a steeling breath before he started toward the high-rise. He didn’t see Nathan as he approached, but that didn’t surprise him. It would be too simple to just meet someone where you said you would meet them. He walked toward the corner with his hands in his pockets, prepared to wait near the lamppost on the quiet residential street. Before long, he felt a soft puff of air on the back of his ear and turned to find Nathan’s taunting face grinning up at him.

  “How did it go with your suspect?” he smiled, clearly mocking Elton’s quaint attempt at justice. “They arrested him, of course, what with your multiple eyewitness accounts.”

  “They’re relocating him, which I suspect you know already,” Elton sighed. “The Magistrate is corrupt; congratulations. What a startling revelation for everyone.” He frowned at the other man’s teasing smile. “What do you want, Nathan? Where do we go from here? You want to have it out in the street and be done with it?”

  Nathan scoffed. “I hardly expected this sort of defeatist attitude from you, darling. But you know, now that you mention it.” He paused and took a quick glance around as though surveying the area, and he leaned to peer at the beige brick building behind them. “Isn’t this strange—I happen to know that Mr. Johnathan Hubbard lives in suite 104 of this very building. I’ve been waiting for you for some time, and I haven’t seen much in the way of coming and going, so I suspect he’s still at home. You know—if you wanted to pay him a visit, by chance.”

  Elton paused. He looked past Nathan’s shoulder at the tall condominium behind him. That kidnapper was inside, just a short walk away, and soon he would be shipped off to Ottawa, his crimes forgiven. Elton wouldn’t have been surprised if Stark had already thrown his report into the incinerator. Hubbard would settle into a new city and start abducting people all over again. How many times had he been moved by his father before this? How many times would he move again?