The Left-Hand Path: Prodigy

by T. S. Barnett

  “Should we really be just wandering around like this?” Elton spoke up. “The Magistrate is looking for us.”

  “Darling, I forgot a long time ago what it felt like not to have the Magistrate looking for me. Don’t fuss. If someone comes, we’ll worry about handling it then. That’s just the way of things.”

  Elton was unconvinced, but Nathan left him no more room for argument. He led them through the streets looking for shops that probably closed fifty years ago, but once they were able to find one, the clerk directed them to more. They gathered herbs, gemstones, oils, wood samples, bits of bone and teeth, and talisman papers and ink for Elton, as well as a neat leather folio for him to keep the completed spells in and a nondescript-looking jade amulet that he assured them was an effective grounding. Nathan even found what he dubbed a “delightful” travel-sized vintage apothecary case that folded out into a surprising number of little slots and drawers, which he promptly filled with a variety of bottles and tins. Cora and Elton used what real money they had, since only Nathan felt comfortable trying to use glamours to pay other witches with.

  Cora did feel comfortable, however, with using a glamour to replace the laptop she’d left behind when she’d run away with Elton in the first place. Nathan even got her a few cartoon kitten stickers from a quarter machine outside the shopping center, which she carefully arranged on the back of the laptop as soon as they stopped for lunch. They picked up prepaid cell phones at Elton’s insistence, since he didn’t like the idea of not being able to contact Nathan when he inevitably ran off. He let it pass without even sighing when Nathan leaned close to him with one elbow on his shoulder and let him see that he’d set Elton’s name in the phone as “♥Darling♥.”

  They killed the rest of the afternoon over coffee, during which Cora checked her long-neglected email and Elton frowned at his file folder for the hundredth time. Eventually it drew close enough to six o’clock that Nathan guided them back toward Nock’s little shop, and by the time he was pushing the glass door open again, Nock was already shutting off the lights and turning the open sign to closed.

  “Back right on up,” she said, shouldering Nathan back out the door. “We’ll go to my place. Nobody following you, right?”

  “Free and clear, beloved.”

  With a soft grunt of acceptance, she tilted her head and led them down the street. It only took a few minutes to walk to the tall, red-brick apartment building. Nock finally looked back at them once they were all in the elevator. She gave Cora a brief glance up and down before peering up at Nathan with a skeptical frown on her lips.

  “Apprentice, huh?”

  “A platonic one, of course,” Nathan said. “Don’t make that face. Do you honestly think I’d bring another woman to see you?”

  “What’s it to me who you bring with you?”

  “Straight for the heart, as always,” Nathan sighed.

  The elevator doors opened with a ping, and Nock walked the few steps down the hall to her door. As soon as she stepped over the threshold to her apartment and entered the entry hall, a pale silver shimmer passed over her, and the woman from the shop had been replaced by a yellow-green version of herself with pointed ears poking out between the flyaway tendrils of her reddish-brown hair. She had a slight underbite and a bent nose, and her eyes seemed narrower. She turned back to look at them as she kicked off her boots.

  “Take off your shoes,” she said, showing sharp canines on her bottom row of teeth.

  Only Nathan seemed not to notice this transformation; the others took a few seconds to be startled, but none of them voiced their surprise. They just did as they were told and followed Nock into the living room, where she scooped a few articles of clothing from the sofa and cleared away a toolbox sitting on a chair. She dumped them just inside another door and closed it behind her, then gestured impatiently at the empty seating as though baffled that her guests hadn’t yet sat down.

  “She’s a goblin?” Elton asked in a low voice as Nock disappeared into the kitchen, and Cora and Thomas turned their eyes to Nathan.

  “Very observant, darling.”

  “And...how do you two know each other?”

  “I told you; we’re old friends.”

  Elton hesitated. “Were you two...?”

  Nathan gave a longing sigh with his eyes on the cutaway window into the kitchen. “She’s too good for me,” he said. “I tried my hardest, but she wouldn’t have me. Turned me down flat.”

  “What are you talking about in there?” Nock’s rough voice sounded from the doorway, forcing Elton to rein in his look of disbelief. She returned balancing four glasses of water in her arms, which she thunked onto the coffee table in front of them. It was the grumpiest show of hospitality Cora had ever seen.

  “Just telling our love story,” Nathan chuckled, and the goblin rolled her eyes. “What year was it, beloved? Nineteen-aught-something.”

  “1908,” she answered as she took a spot on the couch beside him. “You had a brand new Model T.”

  “Oh, of course! I don’t miss it; absolute death trap. Don’t recommend them.”

  “As if they make those anymore,” Cora laughed.

  “Well, just the same. Anyway. I happened to be walking through a little market in Chicago when I came across this vision,” he said, gesturing to the goblin at his side, “selling her little handmade toys for a nickel. I thought they were quite clever, so I asked her why she was wasting such talent selling them on the street. We got to talking, and Nock told me about her unfortunate situation.”

  “My husband was a slime,” she said, picking up the story without pause. She picked at her sharp, yellowed fingernails as she spoke. “He never had a job, and he drank every cent I brought home. But I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Nathan offered me one.”

  “I asked her to run away with me, and she immediately told me she wasn’t going to do ‘any weird sex shit.’ Once I assured her of my pure intentions—” Nock interrupted him with a scoff. “—she agreed to let me help her.”

  “Aw, that’s really sweet actually,” Cora said.

  “Isn’t it?” Nathan agreed. “We stayed together for—what, almost four years, wasn’t it? Before you settled here.”

  “About that, sure.”

  “We set her up with the fine little shop you saw, and we parted ways. By now it’s been almost seventy years since I saw you last, hasn’t it?”

  “I thought you were dead,” the goblin drawled, slouching to tuck her feet up onto the coffee table.

  “I think I was, until Mr. Willis here appeared to bring me back to life.”

  “I’m not sure I want the credit for that,” Elton muttered.

  “Nonetheless, it lies squarely with you.”

  “Reminiscing is great and all,” Nock said, “but you still haven’t actually told me why you’re here.”

  “How rude of me. Nock, allow me to properly introduce Mr. Thomas Proctor, formerly of Toronto, Canada, and currently of nowhere. I’m hoping you have room for a stray.”

  “What—like you want me to take this guy in? For how long?”

  “As of now, indefinitely, I’m afraid.”

  “You’re out of your mind.” She looked over at Thomas, who seemed exceedingly uncomfortable with the conversation. “Who are you, huh? Why do you need putting up?”

  “I was ‘aiding fugitives,’“ he answered, sparing a bitter sidelong glance at Elton. “Helping people in relationships with mundanes hide from the Magistrate. I was arrested for it, and...these people helped me escape.”

  “So he’s on the run,” Nathan finished for him, “but you know me—always getting into trouble. Mr. Proctor is hoping for a quiet place to lay low, hopefully without sustaining the bodily injury that would inevitably occur were he to carry on with us. He has no connection to you that the Magistrate can trace, and I’m sure he’s more than willing to be as inoffensive as possible during his stay. He even has some level of business acumen, don’t you, Mr. Proctor? Perhaps Nock can put you
to use.”

  “I’d be glad to help,” he agreed.

  Nock considered for a while, one sharp tooth worrying her upper lip. “Fine,” she said at last. “The spare room’s my workshop, but there’s a futon in there you can claim. If you can clean up after yourself and help out,” she clarified.

  “Of course. I appreciate it,” Thomas said.

  Nathan slapped his hands decisively on his knees. “Excellent. Then if you don’t mind, beloved, we’ll take up space until morning, and then we’ll be on our way. Lots of important things to do, after all.”

  “Uh-huh. Way to invite yourself.” She dropped her feet from the coffee table and stood. “I’ll order something for dinner, then. You’re paying.”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  “Indian’s good for everyone, right?” the goblin asked, but she was already in the kitchen before anyone could answer.

  Elton stared across the coffee table at Nathan until he drew the other man’s attention. “1908 is the year you were connected to that housing fire in downtown Chicago,” he said in a quiet voice. “Was that because of her?”

  “He hit her, Elton,” Nathan answered, eyebrows lifted in bemusement as though the correlation should be obvious. “And she wasn’t going to kill him.”

  “Does she know you murdered her husband?”

  “Well, we never had the conversation outright, but my involvement was rather an unspoken understanding, I think. She wasn’t exactly moved to tears by the news.”

  “I can see why you guys are friends,” Cora laughed.

  When their food arrived, Nathan paid for it with a few scraps of paper glamoured to look like cash, and then over dinner he regaled their host with the story of how he fell into his current companionship. Nock actually seemed begrudgingly interested during the high points of his tale, specifically their fights with the lich and their dramatic escape from the Magistrate in Toronto. Cora helped clean up the dishes and put away the leftovers when they were finished, and then she settled in an armchair in the living room with her laptop on her knee. She had a lot of catching up to do.

  Thomas busied himself with writing out everything he could think of that the Magistrate might have learned from him so that the others could take it with them when they left him behind, and Elton set to replenishing his supply of talismans, but the longer they sat, the more he glanced over at the girl nearby. She was tapping away at the keys of her laptop with a pensive furrow in her brow, and she hadn’t looked up for almost fifteen minutes.

  “I know you’re not keeping up with your schoolwork,” he said, and she finally peeked up at him.

  “I’m actually in the middle of a pretty intense psychic reading right now, so,” she trailed off.

  Thomas looked up from his notebook to join Elton in staring at her.

  “A psychic reading,” Elton echoed.

  Cora held up a finger to tell him to wait as she returned her attention to her screen. After another couple minutes of typing, she let out a huffing sigh of satisfaction and shut the laptop. “Since before I left school, I’ve been running this magic website blog thing and offering readings and divination for PayPal donations. I even sold some charms, though obviously that’s been on hold since I left. Simple stuff—love, luck, wealth, you know. All blessed by an honest-to-goodness witch with a bunch of really impressive-sounding credentials that I totally made up. ‘High Priestess of the Coven of the Trifold Law’ sounds really good, right? Super legit. Anyway, it’s worked out really well. You’d be surprised how many people are willing to pay for this stuff.”

  “Cora, you’re selling charms to mundanes?”

  “I mean, kind of,” she said with a shrug. “I just throw together some appropriate herbs and whatever into a little gris gris and tell them it’s magic. No matter what, either they’ll think it’s working, and it’s fine, or they don’t, and I can just say they must have some kind of curse on them or something. Then I can charge them again to ‘cleanse’ them.”

  Elton snorted, but Cora couldn’t tell if it was disdain or amusement. “You know, I’m not sure that’s better, actually.”

  “I had to make pocket money somehow. I feel guilty using glamours for everything. This might not be totally honest money, but at least they’re giving it to me of their own free will.”

  “Regs love to buy into magic things,” Thomas said, hesitating when they both turned to look at him. “I saw them in the shop all the time. They think it makes them more spiritual to hang a pentacle around their necks. You’re providing something that people want,” he added.

  “See? Thomas gets it.” She smiled at him, and she thought for just a moment that he might almost have returned it before he looked back down at his slowly-filling notebook. Elton only shook his head and turned a page in his file.

  Cora drummed her fingers on her closed laptop and paused as she realized she hadn’t seen Nathan or Nock in some time. She squinted and strained her ears, her brain giving her uncomfortable flashbacks to the sounds she’d been subjected to in the needle-woman’s house in Arizona. But she couldn’t hear anything suspicious. Setting her laptop aside on the coffee table as she rose, she looked around the corner into the little dining room and found it empty, so she stepped over to the kitchen doorway and leaned to peek inside.

  Nock was sitting on the counter, almost high enough to be face to face with Nathan, who leaned against the corner wall beside her with a smile on his face. Nock wasn’t quite smiling, but she had a much more relaxed look on her face than she had in front of the others. Nathan had her hands in his while they talked, and Cora couldn’t quite hear the words he murmured as he drew them up and placed a light kiss on the inside of the goblin’s wrist, but Nock laughed softly in response.

  “You know you seriously owe me for this,” she said.

  “If only you’d let me repay you properly,” Nathan sighed.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  He squeezed her hands and kept hold of them as he returned them to her lap. “I’m glad you’re doing all right, beloved.”

  “You’d know I was all right if you bothered to call every now and then.”

  Nathan chuckled and nodded, accepting his scolding. “I’ll do better.”

  Cora bit her lip as she smiled, and she crept away from the doorway to keep from eavesdropping any more.

  After a while, Nathan reappeared in the living room and dropped down heavily on the sofa between Elton and Thomas. “Well?” he said, not seeming to care that he hadn’t actually asked anything.

  “Well what?” Elton answered.

  “Well, where are we going tomorrow? Haven’t you decided?”

  “Were we supposed to be deciding that?” Cora said.

  “I think,” Thomas spoke up, “that if I’m remembering correctly, the cuimne seemed to be working backwards from the present. Lena and Michael were targeted first because they were still in the country, but also because they were the most recent—the ones first in my mind. If that’s the case, then the next people should be Joel and Hannah. They’re in Miami.”

  “Miami?” Cora repeated. “They didn’t leave the country either?”

  “Hannah had a relative there that offered to help get them settled. She didn’t want to go somewhere completely unfamiliar, so they just ran and kept quiet. I told them it was a riskier option, but Joel was determined that he could live like a reg. At least outside the house.”

  “There’s actually someone in Miami I wanted to look into,” Elton said. He paused to flip through his notes and tapped the page when he landed on the one he wanted. “Rafael Maduro. Fifty-four years old and owner of Maduro Ropeworks. There aren’t many details here except contact information and instructions that Chasers are not to approach or investigate the factory except under the express order of the Magister Officiorum.”

  “The what?” Nock asked from across the room. She sat on the floor with her elbows on the coffee table and frowned up at Elton. “I never could keep all this witch shit strai
ght.”

  “Ooh!” Cora piped up, interrupting before Elton could answer. “I know this! I actually know something! They drilled it into us at school. The Magister Officiorum is the leader of the state or the province or whatever. They only report directly to the Council. So like Massachusetts will have one big boss. But Boston will have a Magister Plebum, and so will other parts of the state. They’re the more local overseers. Then under them, there’s a head Chaser for each region or city. Their actual name is Exsecutor, but I don’t know if anyone actually calls them that. Then there are the Chasers—the Insecutors. Definitely nobody calls them that, though.”

  “That’s a lot of Latin,” Nock snorted.

  Nathan chuckled. “Omnia dicta fortiora si dicta Latina.”

  “Meaning what?” the goblin asked.

  “Everything sounds more impressive in Latin.”

  “Miami seems like the logical next stop,” Elton continued, refusing to let the conversation get too far off track. “Thomas has people there, and we can look into Maduro. Two birds with one stone.”

  “I’ll give you the last address I have for Joel and Hannah,” Thomas said, and Elton nodded.

  “We’ll take care of them.”

  Nathan stretched his arms over his head, stifling a yawn. “Glad that’s taken care of. I quite like Miami.” He pushed to his feet and looked down at Nock. “It’s gotten late. Shall we to bed, beloved?”

  “Yeah,” the goblin answered in a laugh. “That’s happening.”

  “Worth a try.”

  “Uh-huh.” Nock stood and stepped into her bedroom, reappearing with a blanket and a couple of spare pillows, one of which she threw directly at Nathan’s face. “There’s a perfectly good couch for you to sleep on. With clothes,” she clarified, jutting an accusing finger in his direction. “The last thing I need is to come out here and see your dick before I’ve even had my coffee.”

  “What about after your coffee?” Nathan countered with an easy smile, but the goblin only scowled at him.