The Left-Hand Path: Mentor

by T. S. Barnett

Nathan shrugged and stepped into the cold water, hissing as it poured over his shoulders and chest. “This is a learning experience, my love,” he called out through the open bathroom door. “Just enjoy it.”

  “Learning experience? How much am I learning sitting around and watching you sleep?”

  “Well, at least you’ll know your colors,” Nathan chuckled, and Cora sighed at him and turned off the television. He gave himself a quick scrub and dried off, pushing his damp hair into place and checking his face in the mirror. “If you’re so worried, we can have a little lesson this morning. How do you think our friend is going to try to find me?” He looked for a toothbrush and realized he hadn’t packed one, so he used Cora’s instead. She caught a glimpse of this invasion in the mirror by the television and spun to accuse him of being gross, but instead remembered that he was still very naked and put her hands over her eyes.

  “How am I supposed to know what spell he’s going to use?”

  “We discussed seeking spells. I know it’s a nice view, but don’t get distracted.” Nathan spit out toothpaste and walked past Cora’s covered face to find some clothes.

  “Uh, it started with F?”

  “No credit for half answers.” He slipped on a pair of dark jeans and dug in one of last night’s shopping bags for a fresh shirt. He settled on a soft, dark red V-neck.

  “Two words,” Cora mumbled. “For...ugh, you told me I was saying it wrong. Foricc? Foricc sóer.”

  “Gold star. You can uncover your eyes now.”

  She peeked out between her fingers to ensure he wasn’t teasing her, and then she dropped her hands. “So what do we do with that information?”

  “Why don’t you see if you can find him first? Get the willow from my kit.”

  Cora hesitated briefly before walking over to Nathan’s duffel bag and retrieving his leather satchel of supplies. He sat on the dresser and lit a cigarette while she stared into the open kit and chewed her lip. “Which one is the willow again?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he laughed. “Forget it.” He checked his watch, which now looked very large and old-fashioned on him. “You need your own kit anyway. Let’s take a bit of a field trip.”

  “To where?”

  Nathan hopped down from the dresser and opened the door for her, reaching out to flick his cigarette ash onto the sidewalk. “I have an old friend who might still be in town. We can pay him a visit.”

  He started up the Jeep once she was on board and sped down the road, leaning forward and wiping at the dirty windshield with his hand. He only succeeded in smearing it, so at a stop light, he unbuckled his seat belt, put the Jeep in park, and stood up to look over the top of the glass. “I cannot believe how ridiculous Yuma is,” he muttered. “I’d forgotten. Why did I come here?”

  “We live here,” Cora reminded him.

  “But just look at this,” he grumped as he dropped back into his seat. “This is why I stopped driving. We’re on the corner of 4th Avenue and 4th Street. How do people live like this? Are the streets East-West and Avenues North-South, or is it the other way around? I can’t remember. We’re looking for Main Street, but don’t be deceived; it’s a ridiculously small street. Doesn’t live up to the name at all.”

  Cora was able to direct him to Main Street, at least, but she didn’t know the shop he was looking for, so she still had to listen to him complain about the town’s inconvenient layout. Finally, they went through a quaint roundabout with a fountain and some haphazardly-placed rocks and desert plants in the center, and they spotted a shop with a small wooden sign hanging over the sidewalk. Cora leaned out the side of the Jeep to get a better look. The sign was painted with blue and white rings that looked eerily like a staring eye, and below it, the words “Allan’s Apotropaics” in simple blue letters. She’d been through the little downtown street countless times in her life, but somehow she didn’t think she’d ever seen the shop before.

  “What’s an apotropaic?” Cora asked once the Jeep came to a stop at the side of the street.

  “Generally, anything used to turn away evil,” Nathan said in a breath of smoke. “For example, the nazar,” he added, pointing up to the sign. “To protect against the evil eye.” He stamped out his cigarette on the sidewalk and cupped his hands to the glass to try to see into the shop. “For these purposes, a supposedly witty bit of alliteration.”

  Cora leaned back to examine the dirty building. “It doesn’t look open.”

  “Allan doesn’t really like visitors,” he mumbled in response as he stepped back to inspect the building.

  “How can he run a shop if he doesn’t want anyone to come in?”

  “He’s owned it for some time. I don’t imagine he pays rent anymore. Besides, he caters to a very specific clientele.”

  Nathan moved over to the wooden door and tugged on the knob, but it only made an upset creaking sound and barely budged. He pulled it again with a firmer grip, and it came loose and left a puff of dust in its wake as it swung open. He poked his head into the blackness of the shop but looked back at Cora when she took a tight hold of his hand. He tilted his head toward the door and grinned at her for encouragement, and together they stepped over the threshold into the shop.

  “Allan?” Nathan called, peering through the darkness. Only pinpricks of sunlight shone through the room, the beams illuminating the clouds of dust the two had created simply by entering. “Hello,” he tried again, but again he received no answer. “Can’t see a damn thing in here.” With Cora gripping his hand, he moved down an aisle to the window and pulled open the heavy curtains preventing light from entering the shop.

  A figure of a man leapt up from its crouch in the corner, shielding its face from the sunlight and making a monstrous hissing sound, and Cora screamed. The man stopped mid-hiss, his hands mimicking claws, and he laughed as she tucked behind Nathan and hid her face in his back.

  “I’m just fucking with you, girlie,” he said with a smile, showing pointed canines. “What can I do for—” He paused, seeming to notice Nathan for the first time, and then he laughed and ran a hand over his shaved head in disbelief. “Is that Nathan? Holy shit! I haven’t seen you in ages, man; you’re looking good. Keeping fit and whatnot.”

  “You know me,” Nathan chuckled as he shook the other man’s hand, and he gently shook Cora’s vice grip on his other hand to urge her out from behind him. “Cora, this is Allan. He’s a bit of a prick.”

  “Hello,” Allan said without arguing the insult.

  Cora leaned around Nathan’s shoulder and stepped out at his coaxing, giving the other man a small nod. “Sorry,” she said awkwardly.

  “We need to set her up with some things,” Nathan began. “The usual—garlic, wild rose, hawthorn—”

  “Fuck off, Nathan,” Allan snorted.

  “She needs a kit. I can carve her a bracelet if you have the makings.”

  “Sure, sure. Let me gather some stuff.” Allan disappeared into the depths of the shop while Nathan pulled open the rest of the curtains, flooding the room with sunlight. He hopped up to sit on the counter and pulled a plastic ashtray closer to him.

  “Are you ever not smoking?” Cora asked. She walked through one of the aisles in the cramped shop, lightly touching a row of jars filled with liquids she couldn’t identify. “That’s why you needed an oxygen tank, you know.”

  “And it’s why I’ll need one again,” Nathan agreed. He patted his pockets with his cigarette in his mouth and swore, then settled for making a small flame in his palm and lighting it with that.

  Allan reappeared carrying a small chest, and he sat it on the counter beside Nathan. “Should have everything you need in there. Various things. You know what you’re looking at.”

  “Got a knife?”

  Allan slipped the silver blade from his belt and offered the handle to Nathan, who took it without looking up from the chest. He dug through the bits of wood and stone, picking out a dozen small chunks and setting them aside. He paused to look up at Allan with a
suggestive lift of his eyebrows, and the other man muttered a quick “Right, of course,” then produced a small box from under the counter. Nathan lifted the lid and smiled, holding his hand briefly over the collection of human finger bones before choosing two for his collection.

  Cora paused in front of a large jar and peered closely at it. The liquid inside was tinged green and murky, but she couldn’t tell what was being contained until a slithering form wriggled and twisted against the glass. She jumped backwards and nearly toppled over an incense display.

  “Easy on the goods, dear,” Allan called after her. He turned back to Nathan with a chuckle and lowered his voice. “Where’d you find this girl? You’re not...you know.” He made an obscene but obvious gesture.

  “No, I’m not,” Nathan assured him as he sorted through his little pile of rough cut beads. “She helped me. Might have saved my life. There’s a Chaser after me.”

  “What else is new?”

  “No; this one’s good. I could tell. He would have taken me in if it wasn’t for her, and she’s completely clueless, so I’m showing her the ropes. Adopted,” he added as an explanation, and Allan nodded.

  “I’m standing right here,” Cora called from the aisle, “and I’m not deaf.” She moved closer to them, inspecting a bronze talisman she had found hanging on a hook at the end of the aisle. She looked up at Allan. “What about you? Are you a witch?”

  “Allan is a vampire,” Nathan said simply, and the other man looked mildly put out at the missed opportunity to make up a lie.

  “What, really?” Cora dropped the amulet back on the shelf and stepped forward to look into his face. “I didn’t know vampires were real! But you were in the sun! You can be in the sun?”

  “‘I didn’t know vampires were real,’ she says, and then she thinks she’s an expert on who can go in the sun and who can’t,” Allan chuckled.

  Nathan looked up from his careful job carving a tiny chunk of rosewood, smirking around his cigarette. “You can probably safely assume that most of the things you think you know about the supernatural aren’t true, my love.”

  “Clearly,” Cora agreed with a soft laugh. She thought briefly that she ought to be afraid to be standing three feet from a vampire, but it was hard to find him frightening when Nathan treated him like a friend. “So how do you guys know each other?”

  “Funny story, actually,” Allan said. “How long ago was it, Nathan?” He shrugged, and Allan waved him off so that he could return to his work. “Ages. We were actually in a bar one night, and both of us were trying to pick up the same girl.”

  Cora’s lips twitched down into a faint frown. “Do you mean pick up romantically, or were you going to...you know.” She mimicked his hiss and clawed hands.

  “Well, obviously,” Allan laughed. “She wouldn’t have been any better off with Nathan, mind. He was looking a bit elderly at the time.”

  “I decided to let Allan have her. I didn’t much like my odds of getting any decent years out of someone a vampire had their eye on.”

  Cora’s brow furrowed. “Well, that was gentlemanly of you.” It was a strange adventure she was on. She was just glad that Nathan had decided to take care of her instead of using her for some extra years.

  “Come here,” Nathan called to her, holding out an open beaded string. Cora offered her arm to him so that he could test the bracelet, and he clicked his tongue as he tied it around her wrist. “You need bigger hands,” he muttered. “Not many spells on this. We’ll get you another one when you’re more advanced. A necklace maybe.” He sat back on the counter, tapping his cigarette against the rim of the ashtray, and he nodded to her. “Give it a shot.”

  Cora gingerly touched her new bracelet, tracing the markings on each rough bead. “What are these? Are these ones bones?” She looked up at him with a grimace. “What are they from?”

  “Magic isn’t neat, Cora. It’s dirty, and it’s messy, and it’s exhausting. You take the power you can get.”

  “From bones? I thought you were teaching me things I’d learn in school. Do they give people bones in school?”

  “Well, no. That’s a special gift from the School of Nathan.”

  “Great. I don’t know what these spells even are, you know.”

  Nathan took one last drag before putting out his cigarette and hopping down from the counter. He held her hand and turned her bracelet on her wrist, blowing his smoke away from her face before naming each of the spells. They were all of the standards she’d been studying—levitation, starting fires, seeking. She even recognized most of the ogham. “You know how to read, sort of,” he chuckled. “Think of this as a practice bracelet. It’ll do for now.”

  “And why do I need it, again? Are these magic beads?”

  “Magic beads,” Nathan muttered, shaking his head. “Your birth parents should be ashamed for what they left you to. At home, you used tokens, didn’t you? These are the same, only they’re always with you. The power is in the word itself, and you need only have the will to use it. But humans in general don’t seem to have very much willpower, so we need to ground ourselves, ground our words. That’s where the objects come in. Every kind of thing has its own properties that are useful or obtrusive to magic. Knowing all the attributes just takes study and experience.”

  “Where did you learn it all?”

  “I went to school,” he said simply.

  “In Yuma?”

  Nathan laughed. “Yuma? Haven’t I told you how old I am? Yuma didn’t exist when I was in school. Well, I suppose the area existed. People probably even lived there. But there were hardly any white people, so I don’t think it counts.” Cora gave him a disapproving frown that lessened slightly at his teasing smirk. “I went to school in Lancaster.”

  “Where the hell is Lancaster?”

  “Pennsylvania.”

  “And when was this?”

  Nathan let out a sigh as he glanced to the ceiling, pondering. “I started there…hell, I can’t even remember the name of the place. There were only about a dozen of us. I started when I was fifteen, and that was the year they freed the slaves. Well. It was the year they said they freed the slaves, but really what they did was think about considering not letting any new slaves into the state maybe, and not declaring anyone new a slave, but still keeping all the ones they already had, of course. So that was, what. 1780.”

  “1780?” she repeated, as though she hadn’t heard. “You were fifteen years old in 1780.”

  “Or something like that. I did tell you it’s been a couple hundred years. My memory of that time is what you might call foggy. Anyway, this isn’t helping you learn. Try a simple one.” He turned the bracelet gently on her wrist until he found the bead he wanted, and he picked up her other hand to place it over the wood. He kept his hand over hers and opened his palm between them. “Remember this one? Sorche.” The ball of light appeared in his palm, shining pale and blue onto Cora’s uncertain face until he snuffed it. “Now you.”

  Cora kept her fingers on the bead when Nathan removed his hand, and she took a slow, deep breath in an attempt to focus. It had taken her months to learn how to levitate a glass, and she had only once barely managed to start a fire big enough to light a candle. Even what Nathan called simple spells were frequently beyond her reach, but she tried. She repeated the word like a child imitating an angry adult—the tone was right, but the effect was less than intimidating. A sputtering appeared above her palm, a small spark, but no real light.

  Nathan hit her firmly on the back to force her to stand up straight, and he held a hand there and pressed his palm to her heart to keep her in place. “You’re more powerful than that, Cora,” he told her. “You have to have confidence in yourself. You are the inheritor of an incredible tradition. A great gift. With training and practice, there won’t be anything in this world that’s closed to you. Nothing you can’t do, nothing you can’t have. Any goal you can imagine is within your reach. But you do have to reach for it.”

  Allan gave a sl
ow clap behind them and wiped away a fake tear, but Nathan shushed him and looked down into Cora’s eyes.

  “Try again.”

  Cora stared back up at his dark eyes, her lips turned down into a pensive line. Then she looked back at her hand and said the word again. She sounded like what she was—a young woman with a promising future and a powerful mentor to lean on. The glow that formed in her hand reflected her confidence, and she looked up at Nathan with a bright smile.

  “Not bad,” he said, giving her a light pat on the shoulder. “Later we’ll try that seeking spell. But now let’s get some food, shall we? Not you, Allan. Your table manners are atrocious.”

  “No argument,” the vampire laughed. “Let me know if you go out tonight. It’ll be like old times. You can buy girls drinks for me to make up for all the merchandise you’re taking with you.”

  “I’m good for it,” Nathan promised, already leading Cora toward the door. He paused to look back over his shoulder. “If you do happen to see a Chaser asking after me, point him in the right direction, will you? We’re having a bit of a hunt.”

  “Of course you are. Take care of him, Cora.”

  “I will,” she smiled, shaking her hand as the light went out and following Nathan out the door.

  6

  Nathan’s meal of choice was fast food, which shouldn’t really have surprised Cora, but did. If she’d been asked to imagine a villainous sorcerer on the run from some cream-of-the-crop witch hunter, she would have pictured a Disney villain—dignified and high class, with a glass of expensive wine and an evil-looking pet cat. Nathan, on the other hand, had buffalo sauce on his chin and was dipping his fries in his milkshake. At least he had the sneering sarcasm down.

  She felt slightly queasy at the amount of food he ate and more than once had to refuse his offers to share. She wondered if using the spell to make himself young also kept him from getting fat.

  “Heard from your parents at all?” he asked her between bites, and she stopped with a fry halfway to her mouth.

  “Uh, only sort of.” With everything going on, she hadn’t expected him to care about her situation. But he had heard enough of her rants about her parents and her home life to know what she had left behind by coming with him. “They probably won’t care that I’m gone until they notice nobody’s gone grocery shopping.”