The Left-Hand Path: Prodigy

by T. S. Barnett

  Elton started a thorough search of the house with Cora following behind him, opening doors in search of an office or a study, but Nathan’s exploration began in the kitchen, where he helped himself to a banana and a leftover cheese plate from the refrigerator. Elton let out a silent sigh as he passed him, ignoring the half-eaten fruit the other man offered him a bite of on his way by.

  The office upstairs looked a little warmer than the rest of the house, at least. A separate door closed the space off from an adjoining room, making it feel almost cozy. The heavy wood desk and bookshelves were clearly well-used, and the rolling chair was pushed casually to the side as though someone had just gotten up from their work. A few papers littered the desk surface surrounding a closed laptop. Elton skimmed them and opened a drawer, crouching to flip through the green hanging files. Nathan finally appeared in the doorway with a pilfered bunch of grapes in his hand, and Cora took one and popped it into her mouth when he held them out to her.

  A noise from behind the adjacent door made them all freeze. Cora stopped mid-chew and shared a glance with Elton, who rose slowly to his feet so as not to jostle the file drawer. He moved to the door and leaned close against it to listen, but they didn’t have to strain to hear that there was someone moving in the other room. Nathan abandoned his remaining grapes on a bookshelf and wiped his hands on his jeans, then nodded toward Elton to indicate he should open the door.

  With a careful hand, Elton turned the knob and eased the door open just enough to look through. A woman stood in the bedroom with a pile of laundry in a basket beside her, carefully ironing a crisp white shirt. She looked young—definitely not over twenty-five—and she wore only a pale pink lace nightgown that was almost completely transparent over her breasts. She pushed a curly lock of auburn hair behind her ear as she worked, moving mechanically through the motions of ironing and hanging the shirt before moving onto the next.

  The blond’s brow furrowed as he watched the woman. She looked down at her task with too empty a stare, worked the folds of the shirt with hands that fumbled like they were just a little bit numb.

  Nathan leaned in with a hand on Elton’s shoulder to peer through the crack in the door. A frown pulled at his lips as he watched the woman, and Elton knew the other man could see the same thing he did.

  She looked up as Elton’s hand moved the door knob just enough to make a sound, and she tilted her head and squinted across the room at them, setting down her iron and moving to get a closer look.

  “Hello,” she said. She didn’t seem alarmed at having strangers in her house. She reached out and pulled the door wide open without hesitation, looking between their faces with wide, staring blue eyes. “Are you guests?” the woman asked, her voice soft and distant. When Elton looked into her face, her wide blue eyes seemed to look through him rather than at him. Her stare was too empty, her parted lips just a little too slack. He recognized the slow movements of her body and the faint numbness in the small hands that lifted to trace the lapels of his jacket. “I’m supposed to welcome guests,” she said, the words sounding hollow and rehearsed.

  “Instead of that,” Elton said promptly, edging by her to snatch a thin robe from where it lay on the floor and draping it over her shoulders, “why don’t you tell us your name?”

  The woman mechanically slid her arms through the lacy silk robe, the fabric still immodestly sheer despite Elton’s attempt to make her more decent. “Nichole,” she answered. She glanced through the doorway at Nathan and Cora, apparently recognizing that they weren’t going to accept her welcome either, and then she moved across the room to pick up a pile of discarded clothes from beside the bed. She didn’t even bother to tie the robe’s belt as she tidied up, too distracted by her chores to pay any more attention to the other people in the room.

  Cora stepped tentatively into the room beside Elton. “You said there was nobody here,” she whispered as the woman passed by them with arms full of laundry, humming a tuneless song. “Is she a reg? Enchanted maybe?”

  The blond’s brow furrowed. There was no doubt now that he’d heard the airy, compliant tone of her voice. He shared a frowning look with Nathan, then shook his head. “No,” he said.

  “She’s been given the ingnas,” Nathan added, and Cora pulled back in revulsion.

  “What?” she breathed. She watched the other woman breeze by again with a fresh laundry basket under one arm. The rumpled sheets she placed it on and the small video camera on a tripod in the corner suddenly made her sick to her stomach. “The guy we’re looking for—he did that to her?”

  “More likely he had someone do it for him,” Nathan said.

  “And now he’s—he’s using her for...ugh,” Cora trailed off, unable to finish the thought. She hugged her own elbows and tried to swallow the bile rising in her throat.

  Nathan’s voice was softer than usual. “This is a low you don’t often see, I admit.”

  Elton moved forward to catch the woman’s eye, Nathan and Cora hanging back to give them space. When he spoke her name, she looked at him curiously but didn’t pause in her task, unfolding another shirt and laying it flat over the board.

  “Nichole, do you live here?” he asked, and she nodded without looking up from the iron. “How long have you been here?”

  She hesitated, a slight frown tugging her lips as though she was struggling to think. “A while,” she said at last.

  “Where did you live before this?”

  “The factory.”

  “The factory,” Elton echoed. He moved slightly closer to the ironing board, watching Nichole’s hands work mechanically over the shirt. “Rafael Maduro’s factory?”

  “Mhm.”

  “People live there?”

  “Workers,” she said. “In the rooms. The bosses don’t live there.”

  “In the rooms? Like dorms?” He frowned when she nodded. “But you live here. You don’t work at the factory anymore?”

  “Just...here,” she answered. “I came—I came a while ago. Rafael brought me. He said I was too p—too p—too pretty,” she finished, stumbling through the words. A subtle frown creased her brow as though she didn’t like repeating them.

  “Is it good work at the factory?” Elton asked more quietly. He didn’t want to get her worked up.

  “Hard,” she corrected him. “I hurt my...hand.” She paused and lifted it to show him a deep scar running alongside the edge of her palm and down to her slightly bent pinky finger, then returned to her work. “Others hurt worse. Food is bad. There were b-bugs. Bugs in the sheets. Always.”

  “If it’s bad, why don’t the workers leave?”

  The woman grew pale, and her hand stilled with the iron still pressed to the board. “No,” she said. “You can’t.”

  “Can’t?”

  She shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut and gripping the iron so tightly that her fingers trembled. “Can’t run. They catch you, they always catch you, and then—and then screaming, and then they come back broken, or they don’t come back.”

  The shirt under the iron began to smoke, so Elton gently pried her clenched fingers away from the appliance and set it aside. Nichole tucked her hands under her armpits and hunched her shoulders as though she could shrink away from the memory.

  “You can’t run,” she said again, her voice a trembling whisper.

  Elton looked back at Nathan with confusion on his face, but the other man only shook his head and gave a small shrug. Cora moved instinctively to the woman’s side and put a comforting hand on her shoulder.

  “What now?” she asked. “We can’t just leave her here.”

  Elton hesitated under Cora’s stare. “If we take her with us, Maduro will know someone was here before we even get to the factory.”

  “So fucking what? If we leave her, he’s going to come back here and rape her again. She’s a prisoner.”

  “What do you suggest we do with her if she leaves with us? She can’t just tag along; she’ll be in even more danger than if she stayed h
ere.”

  Nathan leaned forward with his hands in his pockets, drawing their attention with a lift of his eyebrows. “Aren’t you both forgetting to ask Nichole what she wants? You can’t claim to liberate the girl by making her choice for her.”

  Cora visibly cringed with guilt. She turned to the woman, who was still trembling faintly under her hand, and took in the bruises on her arms and neck. “Nichole,” she began in a soft voice, offering a small smile when the woman’s pale eyes turned on her. “My name’s Cora. This is Elton and Nathan. We’d like to help you, if you’d let us. We can take you somewhere safe. Do you...like it here? Or would you like to come with us?”

  The redhead perked up, seeming glad to be distracted from thoughts of the factory. “I like having a bed,” she said. “And the...food is good. I clean. That’s not bad.” She paused, and her eyes flicked back to the disheveled sheets behind her. “But s-sometimes Rafael is—rough. I think...I think it would be good to go somewhere I don’t—where no one hits me.”

  Cora looked up at Elton with a defiant frown on her lips. “See?”

  “I’m not unsympathetic,” Elton sighed. “But the question stands. What do we do with her? We already know Maduro is protected by the Magistrate; even if we could report this without drawing attention to ourselves, she’d be sent right back here. She can’t travel with us—we’re constantly on the move, and not to sound harsh, but she clearly needs taking care of.”

  “What about Thomas?” Cora shot back. “He could help her, right? He knows lots of people.”

  Nathan gave a soft sigh through his nose. “You lot are severely infringing on Nock’s hospitality.”

  “All right,” Elton said sharply, quieting the conversation. “We can’t argue about it all day. We’ll take her back to the hotel for now. We’ll call Thomas,” he added with a glance at Cora, “and see if there’s anything he can do. If not...we can reevaluate.”

  Cora smiled at the woman beside her. “Would you like that, Nichole? You want to come with us? Our friend can help you, and you won’t have to do the kinds of things Rafael makes you do ever again.”

  A skeptical frown creased Nichole’s brow, and she looked Elton up and down with a certain degree of wariness. “I don’t know you.”

  “I think our girl has a healthy mistrust for men in suits,” Nathan said. He nudged Elton in the arm to urge him backward and stepped in between the girl and the imposing blond. “You don’t have anything to be frightened of, dear,” he said with a bright smile, and he offered Nichole his hand. “Say the word, and whatever life you choose for yourself will lie before you.”

  Nichole hesitated, but then she slowly smiled, and she reached out to take Nathan’s extended hand. “Okay,” she said. “I want to go.”

  “Then let’s see about packing your things, hm?” He smiled at the girl’s nod and let her lead him out of the room.

  Elton returned to the office to continue his search while Nathan helped the young woman gather up what belongings she had. He found a few notes about shipments, new workers, and the “processing” of said workers—Maduro made little secret of the fact that he brought in young people from wherever he could get them. There were emails arranging pickups, hiring factory guards and discussing their schedules, and a number of other messages that Elton recognized as euphemisms for illicit exchanges. He copied down anything that looked helpful, and once he was satisfied and the girl was packed and dressed in more street-appropriate attire, they left the house as quickly as they had come.

  As soon as they stepped outside, Elton held out one arm to stop the others from following him. At the end of the driveway, he spotted the black nose and bullbar of a police car blocking their exit at the gate. The pair of uniformed officers were around the corner before he could speak a warning, but he heard Nathan’s low, gleeful chuckle behind him as the mundanes began to shout commands at them.

  “Be good,” Elton said through gritted teeth. Nathan was already brushing by him, an assuring hand flattening against the taller man’s lapel to ease him backward.

  There was no hesitation, no tension in his step as he moved out of the doorway and onto the pavement. Elton knew there was a bright smile on the other man’s face, but as Nathan lifted his hands in surrender, the bracelets on his wrists seemed to slip in slow motion, and the soft clink they made was like a warning bell in Elton’s ears. In the next moment, both uniformed men were flipped upside down, dangling from an invisible hold around one ankle that left them flailing for pavement that was suddenly out of reach. Their guns were ripped from their hands and dropped to the driveway with a clatter.

  “Nathan, stop,” Elton called. A chill touched his spine at the teasing smirk on the other man’s lips as dark eyes glanced over his shoulder.

  “You don’t want trouble from the reg cops, darling,” he said. His gaze snapped front again as he heard the click of a radio, and then the officer gave a pained shout, his arms twisted too far behind his back and his radio hitting the ground by his gun.

  “Now, now,” Nathan purred, drawing near to the struggling officer. His partner seemed frozen in shock—he only stared as Nathan approached and softly patted the glaring man’s quivering cheek. “If you can’t be civilized, whatever shall I do with you?”

  “Stop it,” Elton said again. “They’re just doing their jobs. Let’s get out of here.” He waved behind him to urge Cora ahead, hoping that her presence would remind Nathan to behave himself. She took his hint, leading Nichole by the hand and edging around the perimeter of the hanging men. Once she was safely outside the gate, Elton followed, touching Nathan lightly on the elbow to draw his attention from the sweat dripping down past the officer’s hairline.

  “Leave them,” he urged, and Nathan pursed his lips as though skeptical of the idea, but he relented and settled for keeping the two men aloft as he followed Elton down the driveway.

  Cora and Nichole were already in the back seat of their stolen car when Nathan and Elton reached the doors. Elton climbed into the driver’s seat, taking note of Nathan’s subtle gesture before opening the door and trusting that he was releasing the captured policemen. Nathan opened the car door beside him as he started the engine, but before the other man could sit, both officers appeared around the corner, guns in hand. One of them fired, cracking the windshield a foot to Nathan’s left, and the backlash was instantaneous. With just a flick of Nathan’s wrist, the police cruiser flipped upwards into the air and slammed upside-down back onto the street, the bodies of the two men disappearing under the crumpled roof. Cora screamed, barely muffling the sound with both hands pressed tightly over her mouth.

  Nathan slid into the passenger seat with a light sigh, tutting under his breath as he prodded a finger into the hole at the center of the web of cracked glass.

  “What the fuck was that?” Elton snapped, and the other man looked over at him without a trace of warmth in his black eyes.

  “I don’t take kindly to being shot at,” he answered flatly. “Now let’s get a move on. That’s enough attention for today.”

  Elton squeezed the steering wheel until his knuckles went white, but he pulled out onto the street and drove away from the scene without further argument. Cora didn’t move her fingers from her lips for some time. Nichole watched out the window as though she wasn’t bothered in the slightest by the sudden double murder—or perhaps she hadn’t noticed. The girl just sat with her arms around her packed bag, blissfully unaware of what had just happened behind them. Cora couldn’t take her eyes off of the back of Nathan’s head. It was unnerving how purposeful and immediate his wrath had been and how leisurely he now lit a cigarette and cracked the window to let out the smoke. It was easy to forget sometimes, when he was encouraging her, teaching her, speaking softly to her, that he wasn’t wanted by the Magistrate for being such a good mentor.

  Cora took a deep breath and pushed the thoughts aside. She didn’t want people to die—not anyone, really, and especially not reg cops who were just going about their day�
�but she knew she wasn’t going to change Nathan’s nature. She would just have to try to rein him in a little bit, like Elton did. At least with the violent things. And try not to think about the crushed corpses they’d left underneath the police car.

  She tried to ask Nichole more questions as Elton drove their stolen car back toward the hotel, but the girl wasn’t easily focused. She couldn’t tell them how long it had been since the horrible spell had been cast on her, and any inquiries about her time at the factory only led to more stuttering and wild eyes. Something very wrong was happening there.

  Nichole didn’t question why they abandoned the car and had to walk the last few blocks to their room, or why they were in a hotel at all, or why these strangers were trying to help her. She smiled at them with a blithe, fluid expression that made Cora feel sick. Had Maduro done this to her, or was he purposely preying on the Magistrate’s victims? They needed more information—but either way, somebody had to do something about him.

  Nathan was already mixing a Four Thieves tincture across the room, asking Nichole in a gentle voice to pass him this or that ingredient, and Cora kept to the other side of the room with Elton. Thomas picked up the phone within a few rings when she called. She explained the situation as succinctly as she could, careful not to express the horror of Nichole’s circumstances in too loud a voice.

  “Jesus Christ,” Thomas sighed when she was finished. “How bad is she?”

  “Compared to what?”

  “I mean, is she lucid at all? She speaks to you; she walks on her own?”

  “Yes as far as the walking and talking, but as for being lucid…” Cora dropped her voice and turned her back on her companions, her free hand hugging her middle. “She’s really not all there, Thomas. She seems like she’s somewhere far away. Maybe that’s best, considering what she’s been through. But Nathan is making her something that should help a little.”