The Left-Hand Path: Prodigy

by T. S. Barnett

  The Left-Hand Path:

  Prodigy

  T.S. Barnett

  Copyright © 2017 Corvid House

  All rights reserved.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Christa and Emily for caring so intensely, and for just being the best in general.

  1

  Once you’ve been tortured by having someone dig around in your brain and turn your deepest darkest fears into an endless cycle of nightmares, listening to two grown men argue really shouldn’t give you a headache. Yet Cora’s temples throbbed as she sat on the sofa of Nathan’s hotel suite, watching him cross his arms and sigh like no one had ever been more put-upon. They had all taken a few days to hide out and recover, but it hadn’t been long before Elton had begun talking about action again—they needed to get moving. They needed to check out the people in his file, and they needed to find the couples Thomas had helped before the Magistrate did. The problem, apparently, was getting Nathan and Elton to agree on literally anything.

  “But a flight to New York is an hour and a half, and the drive is at least seven hours,” Elton said, not for the first time.

  “Not counting the time you spend waiting for said flight,” Nathan answered, tirelessly stubborn, “waiting for security, and customs, and then for a car once you finally get outside. Besides,” he went on slightly louder as Elton started to object, “you think they won’t be waiting for us when we land? There’s no room for changes of plans when you’re stuck in an airplane. The Magistrate will use the time we spend in line to find out exactly where we are and where we’re headed.”

  “You know, he does have a point there,” Cora cut in.

  “You see? Why don’t you trust the expertise of the one who’s been evading the Chasers for the better part of three centuries, darling?”

  Elton lifted his hands and let them fall back to his sides. “The faster we get there, the faster we can help these people. I’m not taking more than twice the time to get to them. Since when are you afraid of being spotted by Chasers?”

  “Matthew already isn’t answering his phone,” Thomas said, drawing the eyes of the others to where he stood at the back of the sofa, worrying the room’s phone receiver with both hands. “He always calls me when the people I send him are safe, but he didn’t call me about Lena and Michael. If he isn’t picking up my call, then something has already happened to him. We don’t have time to worry about ourselves.”

  “He also has a point,” Cora agreed, and Thomas glanced briefly down at her.

  “I vote we fly,” he said.

  Elton didn’t speak; he simply gestured toward Thomas and tilted his head at Nathan as though the choice should be obvious.

  Cora scooted to the edge of the couch. “I say fly, too.”

  Nathan let out an extended sigh. “I suppose I’ve been outvoted. I at least demand to sit beside Elton; his shoulder is the only one tall enough to sleep against.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Elton muttered under his breath, already moving to gather up their bags.

  “And I assume you’ll be relying on my glamours to get us through ticketing and security,” Nathan called after him.

  Cora laughed as she pushed to her feet. “Don’t act like we’re the delinquents here. Your way would have involved stealing a car.”

  “I hate to fly,” he sighed in response. “I don’t even like New York. It’s filthy, and the people there are grumpy and always in a rush. And they all care far too much about being from there, as if they had anything to do with where they were born.”

  “You’ll be okay.” She patted his arm and returned to the second bedroom to shove her new clothes into her luggage. Nathan had picked quite a few outfits for her, as well as the cute pale blue rolling suitcase itself. She was happy with his choices—and she could tell that Elton was with his own, too, though she knew he’d never admit it. The suits Nathan had returned with fit the ex-Chaser perfectly. He’d even gotten him pocket squares. Cora had seen the subtle lift of the blond’s eyebrows at the sight of them and noted the way his thumb ran over the soft silk. He’d gone straight from six months in jail to hunting Nathan again—it must have felt like a long time since he’d had the luxury of something like a pocket square.

  Elton had cleared his throat and fixed a reluctant frown on his face, but he’d still thanked Nathan, and he seemed satisfied with the cut of the jackets. Even Thomas’s new clothes suited him; Nathan could have had a career as a personal stylist if he hadn’t been so busy murdering people all this time.

  Nathan called the lobby for a car to the airport, and all four of them piled into the SUV with their things. None of them spoke during the drive, not willing to involve the reg driver in their drama, but Cora noticed Thomas staring out the window with an anxious furrow in his brow and his hands balled into fists on his knees. She couldn’t imagine how guilty he must have felt. She almost wanted to squeeze his hand and tell him there wasn’t anything he could have done against the cuimne, but she didn’t think he would appreciate the gesture.

  Once they were on the sidewalk outside the terminal entrance, Nathan paid the driver with a scrap of paper from his pocket and sent him on his way. Cora barely felt the pangs of guilt anymore. She didn’t like stealing or cheating people, but they just had more important things to worry about.

  Cora rolled her suitcase to her feet and glanced at Thomas while Nathan and Elton gathered their bags. “So why did these people want to go to New York instead of somewhere far away, like Russia or something?”

  “The Russian Magistrate is even worse than ours,” Thomas muttered. “I never send people there. Slovakia or elsewhere in Eastern Europe, maybe.”

  “Where do you send people? I don’t know anything about the way the other Magistrates are run.”

  Some places in South America are fine. The Caribbean. Australia. They’ve loosened their laws on ‘fraternization’ lately, but it’s still iffy. Western Europe is too closely tied to North America; they share resources and extradite suspects. Mashriq-Maghreb is in upheaval in general, so I wouldn’t send anyone there for a while. I’ve sent a few people to Southeast Asia, but language barriers can be an issue—and in China and Japan, sometimes a white couple can draw more attention than they want. I’ve sent others there before, though. But New York is a good stopover, wherever they’re going. It’s busy. It’s crowded, there are constantly people coming and going through customs, and the local Magistrate is understaffed and overloaded. Matthew has been a reliable partner so far. If he’s not checking in, then he’s in some kind of trouble.”

  “So are there just secret Chasers everywhere, checking people for magic at airport gates and stuff? I’ve never noticed anything like that.”

  “It’s not that bad, yet,” Elton said from behind them, “but we can’t ignore the possibility that they’ll expect us to try to leave.”

  Cora jumped when she turned to look at him. Nathan—or at least, she assumed it was Nathan, since he now appeared to be a middle aged Hispanic woman thanks to his glamour—was passing a casual hand over the blond’s face, and right before Cora’s eyes, a ripple like a distorted reflection passed over the taller man. Then he wasn’t Elton anymore—he was a brown-skinned 40-something with a nicely-trimmed beard and a handsome pair of horn-rimmed glasses.

  “Cute,” Cora laughed, already waving her hand at Nathan while Elton scowled at his reflection in the window. “Do me; do me! Make me a hunky boy.”

  The woman smiled down at her with Nathan’s amused grin, and when his fingertips brushed her face, she felt a cold sensation wash over her. She shut her eyes against the feeling, then immediately moved to the polished window when she opened them. Nathan had chosen a tall, tanned form for her, with bro
ad shoulders, a tight-fitting sweater, and a slouchy green knit cap tucked around her ears. She touched her chest and stomach with both hands. She still felt like herself—those were definitely her boobs—but despite the smooth softness of her own belly, her reflection had impressive abs when she lifted her shirt. It was a slightly disorienting effect.

  “Hunky enough?” Nathan’s feminine voice asked over her shoulder. “I can go hunkier.”

  “Super hunky,” Cora said, then startled herself with the deep sound of her voice and covered her mouth with one hand to stifle the laughter that followed.

  “I’m glad you’re both having such a good time,” Elton muttered, his own voice sounding strangely scratchy.

  “You’ll be thankful for this step when we walk right by your old Chaser friends,” Nathan answered with a scolding tone intensified by his new motherly shape. He moved to Thomas, changed him into a lanky teenage girl with long dark hair and a silver ring in one nostril, and then urged him over toward Cora.

  “Now, you children behave yourselves,” Nathan said with a smile. He picked up his duffel bag and hooked one thin arm around Elton’s larger one. “We don’t want to miss our flight.” Elton glanced down at their linked arms and back up at Nathan’s face, reluctantly allowing himself to be led through the sliding glass doors.

  Thomas and Cora trailed slightly behind as they entered the airport, but after a few steps, Thomas tapped her on the shoulder and gestured toward her baby blue suitcase with his eyes. She blinked down at it, noting Thomas’s simple black one and the apparent mismatch their glamours had created. She took his meaning and swapped suitcases with him with a short laugh. She thought he almost smiled, too.

  As they drew near the ticketing counter, Thomas moved up beside Nathan, his girlish voice low as he glanced around the crowded hall. “You aren’t afraid the Chasers are going to see through your glamours? Four is a lot to keep up at once.”

  Nathan let out a ringing laugh, keeping step beside Elton until their little group stopped at the end of the ticketing line. He was still chuckling as he lowered his bag to the floor to wait, but he paused when he caught Thomas still staring anxiously at him.

  “Oh, you’re serious,” he said, and he offered the man-turned-teen an indulgent smile, as though he couldn’t be expected to know any better. “No, dear. Not at all.”

  Thomas didn’t seem convinced, but he kept quiet while they wound their way toward the front of the line. There seemed to be regular flights to New York, and Nathan didn’t bat an eye at convincing the woman at the counter that their paperwork was in order. He chatted with her quite merrily and thanked her with a smile, his hands full of boarding passes as he shooed his glamoured family on their way.

  “Just like that?” Thomas asked, and Cora laughed softly beside him.

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  They waited in the security line, none of them quite as anxiety-free as Nathan seemed. Cora eyed the metal detector warily, as though it might secretly be a magic detector, too, but they all passed through the check without incident. It was only once they were headed toward their terminal that the back of her neck started to tingle. As they walked the long corridors, the crowd around them seemed to thin. Every corner they turned made for fewer suitcase maneuvers through bustling people, until Cora looked around and found that they were the only travelers whose footsteps echoed on the tile floor. She couldn’t see a single other human either behind or in front of her. Even the stalls along the hall seemed to have been abandoned by the airport employees. That wasn’t normal.

  Elton had noticed it too—even with his new bespectacled dad face, Cora could see the suspicion in his furrowed brow. He glanced at his companions at the same moment that a cool, prickling sensation passed over Cora’s skin, and her hand instinctively reached out for Nathan’s arm as the glamour melted away from them.

  “I did warn you,” Nathan murmured, his gaze at the far end of the hall. He stopped walking, and the others stopped with him. There were people there, on their cell phones and dragging suitcases, all of them looking as if they wanted to head down the corridor. Every time they approached, they paused, then turned around in confusion. They kept trying, and they kept stopping—a growing bottleneck of befuddled travelers who couldn’t quite seem to make it around the corner.

  “You also said your glamour would get us by them,” Elton bit back, but Nathan lifted his hands in a helpless shrug. Cora squinted up at him. She wouldn’t put it past him to let them be seen on purpose just to prove a point about the benefits of driving.

  She recognized the subtle shimmer in the air ahead of them, keeping the mundanes harmlessly away from the newly-empty space. Someone had put up a barrier. A man and woman appeared just inside the faint distortion, both focused intently on the waiting group ahead of them. Cora glanced backward and spotted two other men approaching them from behind.

  “Chasers,” Thomas hissed, voicing the truth they all knew.

  Elton’s eyes cut sideways toward Nathan, and he spoke under his breath as he slid his folio of talismans from his breast pocket. “Too much of a scene, and we won’t be able to get on our plane.”

  Nathan only acknowledged him with a slight sigh through his nose. “I hear you, darling. Cora,” he added without moving his eyes from the Chasers ahead. “As soon as they’re unconscious, those barriers are going to fall. Replace them.”

  “Got it.”

  Cora’s heart raced as she caught the male Chaser’s eyes on her, but she shifted her feet to better find the ground beneath her. These people didn’t frighten her. She couldn’t let them frighten her. Nathan trusted her and relied on her—and Lena and Michael were waiting.

  “You know why we’re here,” the female Chaser said as she and her partner paused a safe distance away.

  Elton didn’t give anyone time to reply. He pulled one of his talismans and blew it from his hand with a sharp puff of air, and the paper shot forward and snapped across the woman’s mouth with such force that she stumbled backward. Her partner called out a binding spell that Nathan countered with a dismissive word, his next gesture sweeping the man’s legs out from under him and slamming him upward into the high ceiling. Cora didn’t see him drop; she turned as she noticed Thomas retrieve his totally-not-a-wand from the front pocket of his bag and lift it in front of him to draw a quick sigil in the air.

  “Quassate eum sis,” he said, his voice calm and flat and his face emotionless. One of the men snapped backwards just like the guard at the jail had, collapsing to the ground with his back arched and jaw gaping. The still-standing Chaser sidestepped his partner’s trembling form with a look of horror on his face, but he recovered quickly enough to push Thomas to his knees with a binding. Cora freed him before he could bend too close to the floor and moved to help him up by the elbow.

  The Chaser took a step closer to try again, and Thomas gave a flick of his wrist, drawing an invisible line down the other man’s body.

  “Rogo patiminī eum,” he murmured. His target immediately halted, hands quaking, and he began to slap and scratch at his own arms, his panicked cries echoing in the corridor as his body twisted at the spine. His wrists seemed to go out of joint, his legs buckling under him and his head jerking to one side, all the while frantically clawing with misshapen hands at whatever invisible attacker still cut the skin of his chest.

  “Do you do any magic that’s not scary as shit?” Cora asked, but Thomas only shot her a silent sidelong glance.

  Cora glanced up at the end of the hall behind the fallen and quivering Chasers. The barrier was failing—she could see through the shimmer more clearly, and a man dragging a suitcase got a step through. She lifted a hand and forced the warmth from the bracelet at her wrist up her chest and through her mouth as she called, “Frisdúna!”

  The blue light of her spell made a wall across the open space at the end of the corridor, blocking the mundanes from entering. She didn’t know what spell it was the Chasers had used to keep them confused and una
ware—she just hoped there was enough of it left over to keep the oblivious travelers from becoming too interested in the horror show happening on the floor in front of them.

  She turned to check on the other two Chasers, keeping her hand extended toward the barrier she built, but Nathan and Elton seemed to have the matter well in hand. The woman was bound hand and foot by a thousand thin threads the same yellow color as Elton’s talismans, one marked paper still fastened securely over her mouth, and the man was crumpled upside down in a newspaper stand at the edge of the hall, the lights on the shelves flickering as the Chaser’s legs slumped heavily forward over his torso.

  “I thought we were going for unconscious,” Elton muttered, and Nathan gave a small shrug.

  “He’s probably not dead. And why am I getting a scolding?” He gestured to the Chasers Thomas had struck to the floor. “At least mine isn’t having convulsions.”

  Elton’s gaze snapped to the two twitching Chasers behind him. His eyes narrowed faintly at the sight, but he didn’t seem shocked by the state of the men who had crossed his old friend. He just looked over at Thomas and gave a small, silent sigh.

  Cora stretched out her other hand and replaced the barrier at the far end of the corridor, feeling the pull of magic through her limbs like two cords stretching her arms in opposite directions. She wouldn’t be able to hold the barriers forever.

  “You guys have a plan from here, I hope?” she asked, interrupting any further scolding Elton might have had planned.

  “There’s a bathroom there,” Nathan pointed out, nodding toward the stick figures marking the entrance. “Drop them off, put them to sleep, and be on our way. We’ll be well in the air before they’re missed.”

  Elton apparently agreed. He moved to the newspaper stall and pulled the probably-not-dead Chaser free, lifting him over his shoulders with a soft grunt and carrying him toward the men’s room. Nathan scooped the bound woman up under her knees and shoulders and tutted at her when she struggled.