The Left-Hand Path: Disciple

by T. S. Barnett

  “Just be careful,” Anne said. “I know you’ve said he’s one of the good guys, but that isn’t the story I’ve always heard about that family. And his kind of something big isn’t likely to be bloodless.”

  “If they were so terrible, why do you have that stuff? When we first came here, you guys both acted like you were it—you’re the supplier to go to.”

  The woman smiled faintly. “My family’s been in Salem for a long time, too.” She straightened and gestured to the door. “If you go out to the left, there’s a shop called Stitches’ Circle. Talk to Katherine; she’ll get you what you need to get weaving.”

  “Cool. Thanks, Anne.”

  “Let me know how the bone-throwing goes,” she called as the bell over the shop door signaled the young woman’s leaving.

  22

  Nathan was getting restless. When Nathan got restless, he got annoying. RV parks were clustered and privacy-lacking by nature, and Nathan had been making friends at every stop since they’d started their trip. He was usually satisfied to entertain himself—he would share drinks with a neighbor or yell at Elton to come out and help make s’mores over a campfire, but they’d been in Sacramento for a few days now without even the benefit of surrounding woods for the distraction of tree-climbing and skinny dipping. Even the blessedly quiet night he’d spent away from the RV, apparently at the apartment of a certain doe-eyed Chaser, hadn’t stopped him from complaining.

  “I want to do something,” he said for about the hundredth time, sprawled on the bench near their dining table while Elton sat on the bed with a book. His cheek pressed into the vinyl cushion as he traced the burned marks in the floor with one idle finger. “Cora hasn’t given us a lead in days. What is she doing? Do you think Mr. Proctor finally put her in his murder cellar?”

  Elton pressed his lips into a line without answering. Per Cora’s request, he hadn’t said anything to Nathan about her questionable crush or any of the panic-charged texts he’d received in the weeks since. He’d just repeatedly reassured her that she wasn’t crazy or stupid, but that Thomas was troubled at best, and he wasn’t the sort of project she should consider taking on. She’d seemed to accept his advice, but Elton knew that if he said anything at this point, Nathan was likely to scold them both for keeping secrets, and he just wouldn’t be able to bear that hypocritical a conversation.

  “Why do you hate him so much?” Elton asked instead. “You give him endless shit, and he’s only ever tried to help us.”

  “I don’t hate him,” Nathan scoffed. He turned over on his stomach and lifted his chin into one hand. “You have to care about someone to hate them.”

  “You sure tease him a lot for someone you don’t care about.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want him to feel left out.”

  Elton shook his head and tried to get back to his book, but a moment later, he jumped as Nathan appeared silently at his side.

  “I want to do something,” he said again, and Elton sighed and folded the corner of the page to keep his place. “Let’s do something.”

  “Like what? We’ve already found the man we’re going to send to Thomas, but there’s no sense in going after him until it’s time. Cora, as you said, hasn’t given us any leads. We could do with a little down time, if only to cool our trail. Do you want to just wander the streets looking for good deeds to do?”

  “Well, I wasn’t thinking of good deeds, precisely—”

  “Your kind of bad deeds get the attention of the Magistrate as well as the mundane police, and that’s not what we need right now.”

  “Then what about some neutral deeds? Heaven forbid some fun ones?” He sat at the edge of Elton’s mattress, forcing him to scoot closer to the wall. “When was the last time you had fun, darling?”

  Elton snorted. “You have enough fun for the both of us.”

  “Nonsense. Come on. Give me a hint. What does Elton Willis do for fun? Something has to put a smile on that face on occasion.”

  “Maybe silence? Haven’t had that in a while.”

  “Perhaps we should find you a new serial killer to obsess over. I’ll buy you a cork board and some pins and string.”

  “Funny.”

  “Something has to get that blood pumping, darling, other than vigilantism and murder. What did you do for fun as a child?”

  Elton stared flatly at him. “When I was a child, it was a good day if I had a full stomach and didn’t get any new bruises. I worked.”

  “Poor thing,” Nathan said, so sincerely that it made the blond uncomfortable. “Even someone like me had a childhood.” He leaned back on his hands. “When I was small, I had a thing called a whirligig. You’ve probably seen them—just a bit of flat wood, or sometimes a large button, and when you wound it up with the strings and got it spinning, it made a loud buzzing noise.”

  “Irritating people since birth, huh?”

  Nathan stared at him. “No one ever taught you not to open your mouth if you don’t have anything nice to say, did they?” He sat up and took the book from Elton’s hands, setting it aside on the table between the beds. “We’re going to find something that makes you happy, Elton. I want to see a smile on you that isn’t cynical. Things are bleak enough—and we’re lucky to have some time to spare. Let’s use it.”

  “Nathan, I don’t—”

  “Hush now. My suggestions clearly don’t align with your sensibilities, so you’ll have to help. We’ve been blessed with healthy bodies, magic at our command, and a free afternoon. Let’s spend the time, not just pass it. Tell me what you want to do.”

  Elton sighed. He didn’t want to tell Nathan the truth—that the only “fun” he’d had when he was younger came in the form of smoking in parking lots, collecting cash from street fights he’d helped organize or from restaurants his older brothers were “protecting,” spending nights in smoky bars playing poker or—he paused.

  “I used to play a lot of pool,” he said, and Nathan brightened. He slapped Elton on the knee and hopped to his feet.

  “Then let’s play pool. I won’t even cheat, and I’m terrible at it, so you ought to enjoy yourself.”

  It didn’t take much searching to find directions to a pool hall. The building was low, long, and windowless, and the inside was just like the places Elton remembered—dim and lit with red, with a dirty bar along one wall and a long row of pool tables filling the space opposite. A “No Smoking” sign had been nailed to a post at the end of the bar, but it was spotted with defacing burn marks, and a cloud of smoke floated just under the ceiling, fed by trails from half a dozen cigarettes in ashtrays at the edges of tables.

  “Will this do?” Nathan asked, and Elton found himself faintly smiling. He couldn’t count how many nights he’d spent in a hall like this one, drinking beer he was too young to have and smoking cigarettes he’d been given by older men, betting a little money with Li Jie and the other boys his age. Elton had gotten good enough that they could sometimes hustle strangers and split that money, too. As strange as it was, it might have been the only time that he’d really felt like a kid. He’d been free and on his own, with cash in his pocket and the thought of the filthy apartment waiting for him far from his mind.

  “Yeah,” he said. “This will do.”

  Nathan, as it turned out, was actually pretty awful at pool. Either that, or he was pretending for Elton’s sake, but the blond caught the frowning and irritated teeth sucking that suggested otherwise. Elton had rolled his sleeves up in the warm room, and his beer dripped condensate on the thin carpet with every drink he took. His shoulders relaxed for what felt like the first time in months as he held his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and bent over the table, lining up his shot with the weight of the cool, lacquered wood in the space between his thumb and forefinger. Once or twice, Nathan bumped the back of Elton’s cue with his own as he was trying to shoot, resulting in a trail of scraped chalk on the green felt surface of the table, but once they were three beers in, Elton only laid his forehead on the edge of t
he table with his stick still in position, and he laughed.

  “I think you’re cheating,” Nathan said, tapping the ash from his cigarette into the closest tray. “Hiding a grounding in your cheek?”

  Elton scoffed out a chuckle as he rose. “Why should I need to cheat? You’ve sunk more of my balls by accident than you have your own on purpose. What are we, five games to nothing?”

  Nathan held his cue in both hands and leaned on it to watch the other man. “I’m glad to see you like this, darling. It’s almost like you have a real personality.”

  “Fuck off,” Elton said, reaching for his beer to take another drink.

  “I mean it. Everything I’ve learned about you has led me to believe that you’ve done nothing but run yourself ragged from the age of twelve onward. You’ve certainly only been focused on the task at hand as long as I’ve known you. A man can’t live like that—not for very long, anyway.”

  “I’ve made it all the way to thirty-five,” Elton countered, pointing an argumentative finger at the other man from around his glass.

  Nathan smiled at him and bent to take his own shot. “You know, I’ve been thinking about what you said on the way to Mexico City. About proving your worth.” He struck the cue ball, but the second ball he managed to hit bounced harmlessly away from his target pocket. He sighed and straightened again to take a drink from his own glass. “I’d like to hear more about that.”

  “Why? I’ve had too much to drink to do quid pro quo.”

  “Oh, you don’t need any more answers from me, darling. I’m one of the oldest stories there is—a young man given everything throws it all away for the sake of adventure, then spends the rest of his life getting into trouble and hating the government. I’m only interesting because of my body count, that’s all.”

  Elton hesitated, lowering his cue stick back to the floor. “I don’t think that’s true. You’re—” He stopped, then focused his attention on the table and bent over it with a frown. “You’re Nathaniel Moore,” he said once he wasn’t looking the other man in the face. “You’re the most powerful witch in the Magistrate’s record, and the Magistrate keeps very good records.” He snapped his chosen ball into the pocket and circled the table to line up his next shot, pushing his hair back into place with a rake of his fingers. “You could do anything with the kind of magic you have, and instead you use it to steal things and set fires. At least, that’s what I thought when I met you. But that’s not true at all.”

  “Oh?” Nathan watched the blond sink another striped ball.

  “Well. You do steal things and set fires. And you act like that’s all you care about, but you wouldn’t still be here with me if you weren’t interested in making things better. You wouldn’t have spent three months living in an RV and hunting down fugitives to rescue if all you really cared about was yourself. You want the Magistrate to protect people like it should and stop coming between families. You care because it’s happened to you and you don’t want it to happen to anyone else. And I think it’s an act that you say you don’t like people knowing your name without being afraid of you,” he added as he lowered his stick to the table again, but this time the ball hit the corner of the pocket and ricocheted off course.

  “You’re onto me,” Nathan chuckled. “My innermost secrets exposed.”

  “You’ve got too many people who care about you for you to be a complete asshole.”

  “Is that so?” Nathan took a drag from his cigarette and exhaled the smoke away from the table. “And you, darling? Shall I count you in that precious number?”

  Elton frowned into his beer and swallowed another mouthful.

  “You said I was your friend,” Nathan pressed, a teasing grin on his lips. “Am I your best friend, Elton?”

  He snorted as he set down his glass. “Best out of what, two?”

  “So that’s a yes.”

  Elton sighed. “Yes, Nathan, you’re my best friend out of both my two friends. Take your shot.”

  “You changed the subject,” Nathan said, moving to the end of the table so that he could aim properly. He was letting the topic drop, but Elton could see the satisfied smirk on his face. “Shall I do you, then, since you’ve seen through me so well?”

  “Do me what?”

  “I think that you fell into criminal trouble because it was better than the alternative. Absent father?”

  Elton only shrugged, but Nathan took it as confirmation.

  “And your mother—drugs, or liquor? My guess is drugs, since you’re so adamantly opposed. Am I right?”

  “Sure.” Elton put out his dying cigarette and leaned over to accept Nathan’s wordless offer to light him another.

  “And I assume she had a revolving door of shitty boyfriends, or maybe just one really awful one?”

  “Bingo,” Elton answered around his cigarette. “See? I’m not so complicated, either.”

  “But I am interested in your talk about worth,” Nathan said. He leaned his hip against the side of the table and looked up at the blond rather than continuing the game. “You’ve spent a lot of time being told you’re worthless, haven’t you? By your mother, by boyfriends, by reg police or by Chasers, by your instructors at the Academy, possibly even by superiors at your home office. You wanted to prove them all wrong.”

  “I told you that,” Elton said, hiding his frown by turning his head to exhale smoke.

  “But what changed, then, when you came to my apartment in Yuma? When you agreed to hunt the lich with me and then didn’t bother to bring me in at all? I think I know.”

  “I don’t like this anymore. Are you going to play?”

  “In a moment, darling; in a moment.” Nathan hopped up to sit on the edge of the pool table, holding his cue stick in both hands in front of him and tilting his head up at Elton. “I think that you’d built up so much of me in your head, this nefarious witch on the run whom only you could ever subdue, that you just knew was the best that ever was—that when you met me, and I judged you as the man I saw before me and treated you as such, as a talented and keen-minded witch implacable and determined enough to ruin your life looking for me...” Nathan shrugged and gave a soft laugh. “I hope you realize you’ve never had to prove your worth to me.”

  Elton stared at the floor rather than look into the dark eyes that watched him. “Yes,” he said at last, but he still couldn’t bring himself to look up. “I know that.”

  “Good,” Nathan said cheerfully, and he slid from the table and turned to aim his shot. “I’m glad we at last understand each other, darling.”

  Elton leaned against the hightop table holding their drinks and watched Nathan roll the cue ball almost directly into the left side pocket without even touching any of the other balls, and he allowed himself a soft smile.

  23

  Thomas emerged from the cellar to a quiet house, which was unusual. He could almost always hear Cora wherever she was—humming in the kitchen, heel tapping against the end of the loveseat as she swung it while she read—but now he couldn’t hear anything. He paused in the living room, listening, and then a dull thump and a voice that might have been cursing sounded from above him, and he snorted. He turned the corner to find the attic ladder drawn down, so he climbed it enough to see in and scanned the shallow room until he spotted her on a pillow scavenged from her bed, leaning over the aged hand loom to pick free a mistake she’d made.

  “Cora?” he called, and she jumped with a soft shriek.

  “Jesus,” she laughed. “I’m gonna put a bell on you.”

  “It’s late. Have you eaten?”

  “Not yet. I wanted to at least get this stupid thing as wide as my hand before I stopped, but I’ve only made it as far as my middle finger. Which, coincidentally, is the one I want to use most while trying to work this stupid thing.”

  “I could get the cloth from somewhere else, if it’s too much trouble.”

  “Oh no—I’m doing it, now. Now it’s personal. This thing’s tasted my blood; I’m not letting it off
easy.”

  “Then I’ll make something to eat. I’ll have to start fasting soon, so I thought it might be nice to have a good meal first.”

  Cora looked over her shoulder at him. “You want me to help?”

  “I’ll manage. You work on getting that cloth to narrow gauze length.”

  “Shut up,” she grumbled, but she had a smile on her face as she returned her focus to her work.

  Thomas left her to her weaving attempts and made his way to the kitchen. He gathered up the ingredients he’d bought with this meal in mind and set about chopping vegetables, enjoying the rhythmic sound of his knife on the cutting board. Cora had been different these past few days. She would get closer to him than she ever had before; she sometimes casually touched him, and she sat beside him on the loveseat in the evenings rather than remaining in her own chair. When she’d fallen asleep against him in the study, it had taken everything in him not to panic. He wasn’t used to having people around at all—not for more than a day or two when he had couples in transit, anyway—and having a young woman in the house who seemed to be growing steadily more comfortable with him was another level of invasion entirely.

  He set the meat and vegetables to cooking in the fireplace, passing a sliver of spare chicken on to a begging Herman, and cleaned his knife to slice the fruit that would serve as the only dessert he was capable of making. He heard Cora come down the attic stairs, so he expected it when she entered the room, but he didn’t expect her to approach him and press her cheek into his shoulder on the pretense of examining his progress.