The Left-Hand Path: Mentor

by T. S. Barnett

  Elton pressed his lips together instead of answering, and he took his phone from his pocket when it vibrated against his leg. He glanced across at Nathan, who was picking two or three vials and setting them aside on the bed, and he ignored the call. He could call Jocelyn later that evening when he had a moment alone. The last thing he wanted was his wife to have to listen to Nathan’s teasing, and he didn’t like his odds of coming away without being berated if she found out what he was really up to. He sent her a quick text message explaining that everything was fine and that he couldn’t answer but would be home soon, and he hoped that it wasn’t a lie.

  Nathan knocked on the bathroom door after a while, and Cora shouted at him when he opened it without waiting.

  “How is it?” he asked, not seeming to notice that the girl was curled up defensively in the water with her arms over her breasts. “Feeling any less curse-y?”

  “I feel like I’ve been sitting in a bath full of weird-smelling crap,” she said.

  “Sounds like hoodoo,” Nathan chuckled, and he crouched by the tub to check the mark on her collarbone despite her swatting at him. He frowned as he touched the burn in her skin. “No good,” he muttered. “Come on. Let’s try something else.”

  “Let me get out by myself! Just because you don’t care about being naked, some of us do!”

  Nathan laughed and raised his hands in surrender, shutting the door to allow her to dry off and dress herself. “You’re beautiful, my love; you’ve no need to be shy.”

  “I just don’t need you looking at my boobs!” she protested through the door. When she emerged, Nathan patted the bed beside him and chose a single vial of cloudy yellow liquid. Cora turned her face away when he unscrewed the cap.

  “Oh, God, what is that? It smells like pee.”

  “It is pee. Kind of. It’s Hartshorn water. Ammonia.”

  “Ammonia as in what’s in pee.” She leaned away from him when he tilted some of the liquid onto his fingers. “What kind of pee are you about to put on me? Hoodoo is stupid, by the way.”

  Nathan paused. “You know, I don’t know. They call it Buffalo Ammonia, but I really doubt it’s from an actual buffalo. I can promise you at least that it’s not mine.”

  “Oh, well that’s a relief,” she sighed, scrunching up her face as he moved aside her shirt and rubbed the mixture into her skin. She opened one eye to glare across the room at Elton. “This is your fault.”

  “I tried to tell him it was pointless,” Elton shrugged. “Nobody told him to put animal urine down your shirt.”

  Nathan leaned close to peer at her skin, muttering to himself as he traced the stubborn burn. Cora winced as the mark on her chest stung in response to his touch, but it stayed just as vibrant as before.

  “This is going to be tricky,” Nathan murmured. “We’re going to need pizza.”

  “Oh, can we please?” Cora agreed.

  Elton wanted to protest on principle, but his own stomach had been rumbling for hours, so he relented and allowed Nathan to call a local pizza delivery, though he argued with him and insisted on paying with real money when the boy arrived.

  Aside from the fact that Nathan was a killer and an extremely dangerous witch who smoked like a chimney, it was actually a very normal kind of an evening. They ate, and Elton sat up on the bed keeping watch while Nathan tried every spell he knew to try and remove the spell on Cora. Nothing worked, of course; it was the nature of the spell. When he gave up and let her get some rest, she dozed off with her head in his lap despite her efforts to resist sleep.

  After a while, she sat straight up in bed, screaming and clawing at the sheets—and at Nathan, who had the misfortune of still being at her side. He held her arms to keep her from scratching him and let her hide her face in his shoulder.

  Nathan tried a few more counter curses as she drifted off again, but eventually he fell asleep beside her. It was a long night, but every time Cora stirred or whimpered, he shushed her and held her hands. It didn’t seem like the behavior of a diabolical killer. Elton ignored the thought.

  He barely slept that night; even if Cora’s soft cries didn’t make him feel too guilty to rest, he couldn’t trust Nathan to behave himself. He only allowed himself a shower in the morning because his two supposed captives lay finally asleep under the rumpled blankets.

  When the sound of running water entered the room, Nathan sat up in bed and pulled the blankets away from himself. As soon as the Chaser had shut himself in the bathroom, Nathan began to dig through the other man’s suitcase. Cora moved over into the warm space he had left, but the sound of the rustling papers was enough to keep her awake.

  She groaned as she sat up, not rested in the slightest due to her night terrors. Nathan has taken up a place on the other bed to inspect the Chaser’s files. She pulled herself out of bed and slumped over to the other, leaning against Nathan’s back with a heavy sigh. He chose three or four manila file folders and soon had then strewn across the bed, spilling papers all over the blanket.

  “What are you doing?” Cora asked, leaning to look over his shoulder as he flipped through the pages.

  “I knew he’d have something like this. If the Magistrate had a file on you, wouldn’t you want to see it? Handy to know what they know and what they don’t.”

  She left him to it, entertaining herself by looking through the envelopes of photographs tucked inside one of the folders. They were all pictures of Nathan—some old and grainy and clearly taken in secret, and others almost like vacation photos or portraits. He was documented at every stage of life. One of the black and white pictures was of him standing in front of the pyramids with a local guide and a camel, looking even younger than he did now. He must have been barely twenty, but she would have known him anywhere, now. He had the same sharp chin, the same dark eyes, the same grin.

  “You were a cute little guy,” she said with a laugh, but when she looked up at his face, she paused. He had a collection of papers in his hand, his brow furrowed as he studied them. He flipped back and forth between two or three pages, his lips turning down into a scowl. Before she could ask, he was up off of the bed and across the room, throwing open the bathroom door and causing a shout from the man inside.

  “What the hell is this?” Nathan asked as Elton shut off the water and glared at him around the barely opaque shower curtain. He shook the papers in Elton’s face without waiting for him to answer. “You kept this from me! You lied, Chaser.”

  “What is it I’ve lied about?” Elton took a towel from the rack and wrapped it around his waist, pushing his wet hair out of his face as he stepped out of the shower to face his accuser.

  “I have children,” Nathan growled, flicking the front of the paper as if to draw Elton’s attention to it. “And you knew.” Cora’s hands moved to cover her quiet gasp.

  Elton actually looked slightly guilty. He glanced between Nathan and Cora’s peeking face in the doorway. “I didn’t lie,” he objected. “You said you didn’t want them, so why should I tell you? If you’d cared enough, you’d know about them already, wouldn’t you?”

  “Why? Why keep this from me? Planning to use them against me in case I get away again? I told you the lich would come after families! What if it finds her?” Nathan looked down at the papers in his hand with what almost looked like helplessness. “Two of them are dead already. I never even knew.”

  Cora touched his arm, and he didn’t brush her away. Elton watched them with a feeling of supreme awkwardness and a surprising amount of guilt. Until Nathan had mentioned it, Elton had assumed that he’d abandoned his children without care, because Nathaniel Moore didn’t care about anything. He’d thought he was doing the right thing by not mentioning them, but the look on Nathan’s face proved otherwise.

  “I’m going to find her,” Nathan said after a moment, looking back up at Elton with a frown. “She needs to know that thing is out there, and she needs to know me.”

  Elton frowned at him. He should have locked his suitcase. But he couldn
’t have predicted this response. Who would have expected Nathaniel Moore to have paternal compunctions? Now he either had to go on a chase for a woman who would most likely not be pleased to see any of them, leaving behind a murderous lich, or risk losing Nathan completely. He let out a small sigh. “At least let me get dressed.”

  Nathan held his gaze for just a moment, then turned and left the bathroom with Cora in tow. She sat with him while Elton dried and dressed himself. Nathan looked down at the papers in his lap with a frown furrowing his brow. There was no picture, only a short page detailing the woman’s birthplace, parents, and last known location. Nathan snorted and tossed the papers away, letting them fall back to the pile on the bed.

  “They used the ingnas on Genevieve,” he muttered, “when she came to the States to look for me.”

  “That’s…the memory one, isn’t it?” Cora whispered, and Nathan sighed and gave a small nod.

  “Poor Gen. Why didn’t she tell me before I left? I could have stayed.” He shook his head. “Silly woman.”

  “Why did they do that? What had she done wrong?”

  “Gen wasn’t a witch, so it was against the rules for me to pursue her. Even more so for her to have a child, and then a child who’s a witch on top of that. Can’t have any of that pesky knowledge getting out, you know. Still, if she’d stayed in Haiti they probably never would have found her. They don’t have much of a presence there. But the report says she came to New Orleans to look for me. Asking around for someone like me was bound to draw their attention. Silly woman,” he said again. “But how was I to know?”

  “So even if you found her again, she wouldn’t know you? That’s awful.”

  “Well, she’s dead now, so it doesn’t much matter. The girl’s name is Adelina. The Magistrate took her from her mother when she was ten and sent her away to a school. The only other information in the report says she’s registered in New Orleans.”

  “So we’re going to New Orleans? I’ve never been.”

  “It’s a haven for dorche,” Elton spoke up from across the room as he straightened his tie. “The Magistrate there allows all manner of black magic to carry on.”

  “What Elton sees as black magic, some members of the Magistrate apparently recognize as tradition,” Nathan countered.

  “Animal sacrifice, spirit possession, blood magic, curses, selling charms to mundanes,” Elton listed. “It’s dangerous magic no matter how long people have been doing it.”

  Nathan didn’t seem in the mood to argue the matter further; he only opened Elton’s suitcase and swept all the paperwork into it with a grand gesture.

  “Mature as always,” Elton muttered, taking a moment to straighten the files before zipping the suitcase closed. “How do you propose to reach New Orleans? I’m not sitting in a car with you for that long.”

  “I thought I was the old one,” Nathan scoffed. “There’s a rumor going around that mankind has taken to the skies.”

  “And I suppose you expect me to pay for three airline tickets?”

  “No, Elton, I expect you to keep your mouth shut and look pretty while I get us on board for free.”

  Elton paused. Nathan was famous partly because of his talent for illusions. Fooling a passive onlooker or a shop clerk was one thing, but tricking people whose job it was to inspect paperwork took a bit more skill. He wondered how often Nathan actually paid for things. He didn’t like the idea of traveling by fraud, but it would definitely be easier than explaining to his wife why such a large chunk of money had been suddenly taken from their account. So Nathan and Cora packed their bags into the Jeep, and Nathan drove the three of them to the Tucson airport.

  Nathan got their tickets and led them through security without breaking a sweat. Elton drew the line at allowing him to buy himself and Cora snacks and touristy t-shirts from the gift shop, for which he got called a spoilsport.

  They had to wait some time for the plane, but Elton still ignored a call from his wife as they waited in the boarding area. He didn’t want to talk to her in front of Nathan; he silently promised to call her that night instead. Nathan began chatting up a man sitting beside them, smiling at him and talking in a low voice. Elton narrowed his eyes as he watched them, and after a while, the man excused himself with a guilty look on his face and disappeared down the corridor. Nathan waited a suspiciously short amount of time before he stretched his arms and promised to be right back, but Elton cut him off as he rose.

  “Sit down,” he said, and Nathan sighed at him.

  “I’ll only be gone a minute. Five minutes. Well, ten minutes. Fifteen minutes, maybe.”

  “Sit. Down,” Elton repeated with an authoritative frown.

  Nathan dropped back into his seat with a huff. “You never let me have any fun.”

  Cora laughed behind her hand, though her face was slightly flushed.

  As they boarded the plane, he was almost certain the attendant was going to recognize his boarding pass as the paper napkin it was, but she only swiped it under her scanner and handed it back to him with a smile.

  12

  The flight wasn’t very long, but Nathan still managed to fall asleep on Elton’s shoulder despite the Chaser’s attempts to lean away. Eventually he gave up and tried to ignore Cora’s quiet giggling. They waited through the two stops it for some reason required to get from Arizona to Louisiana, and as they exited the airport at New Orleans, Nathan took a deep breath and smiled.

  “Do you smell that?”

  “I smell jet fuel and taxi exhaust,” Elton muttered.

  “You’re such a grouch. That smell is rum, and beignet, and the river, and chicory in your coffee.”

  “Are you sure you’re not just having a stroke?”

  “Elton, darling, was that a joke? Wonders never cease.” Nathan put his arm around Cora’s shoulders and grinned down at her. “This is a city where magic lives,” he said. “I wish we had more time to spend here, but I imagine Elton will hurry us along as soon as possible. Still, you’ll see what I mean.”

  “You really love this place,” Cora chuckled as he flagged down a taxi.

  “It’s my home away from home. Well, my second home. I have a lot of homes.”

  Elton sighed as he loaded his suitcase into the trunk of the cab. He had to rest his arm across the back of the seat and let Cora close against him to make room for all three of them in the back, but he politely ignored her timid glances up at him. He had gotten a voicemail from Officer Ramos letting him know of another body found just outside Phoenix. Now the lich was traveling—likely following Nathan’s trail. They really shouldn’t have come on this field trip.

  Nathan gave the driver the address that had been listed on Elton’s report, and they started into the city. There was no way of knowing how accurate the information still was, but Nathan wasn’t above contacting the local Magistrate if it meant locating his daughter.

  The house they pulled up to was in the Garden District, hidden by a low white fence covered in ivy. Elton paid the taxi driver with real money, and they gathered their bags and stood in front of the wooden gate.

  “Are you nervous?” Cora asked with a light touch to Nathan’s hand. “I mean, this is a big deal.”

  “Well, she either believed the Magistrate about me, or she believed her mother. Assuming her mother had anything complimentary to say about me after I left. We’ll see.” Nathan left his bag at Cora’s feet and approached the house, peering through the glass in the door for a moment before ringing the bell.

  The woman that answered had darkly tanned skin and inky black eyes, her long, thick curls pulled back from her face into a low ponytail that had sprung a few loose ringlets around her temples. She looked up at Nathan curiously, keeping one hand on the door.

  “Madmwazèl Adelina Bazelais?” Nathan began with a smile, and she tilted her head at him.

  “I am she. Can I help you?” she asked in a light French accent.

  “I apologize; I didn’t know I should have been looking for you. My na
me is Nathaniel Moore. Se te on plezi.”

  The woman stared up at him for a few long moments, her brow furrowed, and then she gasped and put a hand to her lips. “Me zanmi! Se ou!” She laughed and reached out as if to touch him, but she restrained herself and pulled her hands back to her chest. She looked past him at the two others standing in her garden.

  “Yo gen avè m,” Nathan said, and he turned back to wave them forward. Elton and Cora approached hesitantly, Elton carrying Nathan’s bag. Nathan gestured to them in turn. “This is Cora Daniels, sort of an apprentice of mine, and Elton Willis, a Chaser from the Magistrate.”

  Adelina’s smile faltered for a brief moment as she glanced to Elton, taking in his stoic face and neatly knotted tie. “I don’t often have visitors from the Magistrate,” she said with tentative politeness.

  “I’m here on personal business, ma’am,” Elton offered with a nod. “Purely a friendly visit.”

  “I hoped you would want to see me,” Nathan said, “but I don’t want to bring you any trouble. Eske gen yon bagay isit la li pa ta dwe wè?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, the woman shook her head and stepped back from the door to let them in. The inside of the house was warm and bright, all wooden furnishings and open windows. Adelina urged them to sit on the wide sofa and hurried into the kitchen, returning quickly with a tray full of iced tea. She sat beside Nathan and stared at him with wonder, reaching out to hold his hands in hers.

  They talked for some time without Elton and Cora understanding a word, seeming to do years’ worth of catching up in minutes. Nathan smiled, and Adelina laughed and touched his shoulder as though they’d known each other all their lives. It felt strange to see him being so gentle. Cora eventually leaned over to the Chaser at her side to whisper, “What is that they’re speaking? French? I didn’t know Nathan spoke French.”

  “I imagine it’s Creole,” Elton answered softly. Their conversation drew the attention of the others, and Adelina laughed as she glanced at them.