The Left-Hand Path: Mentor

by T. S. Barnett

  “Elton, I have to tell you something,” she murmured, and he could hear the slight hitch in her voice.

  “What’s happened? Are you all right?”

  “I’m leaving,” she said quickly, as though she couldn’t wait to get the words out. Elton leaned against one of the columns holding up the porch roof, his heart turned to lead in his chest.

  “What do you mean, leaving? Where is this coming from?”

  “You’re never here, Elton,” she said in a strained voice. “You’ve been gone almost a week, and you don’t even call to let me know you’re all right. This obsession with that man—”

  “But that’s done with,” he cut in desperately. “I told you, I’ve found him; I’ll be home in just another few days, and then it’s all over.”

  “Until the next thing,” she sighed. “I barely see you anymore. We’re so distant now, I feel like I barely know you. I’ve already had the papers drawn up for our separation,” she went on. “I’m moving out today. I’ll leave my lawyer’s card on the counter. Just...go see him when you get back, and you can sign the agreement. I’ll handle everything else.”

  “Jo, you can’t be serious,” he whispered with all the fortitude he could muster. “Don’t do this. We can talk about it. I can—”

  “No. I can’t keep waiting to start my life, Elton. I want children,” she sighed.

  “So do I,” he answered in a hushed voice, turning his back to the front door.

  “When? I’m almost thirty. You keep saying we have to wait until you’re promoted, until you get a raise, until you do whatever other stupid thing you’ve decided is a prerequisite for starting a family.”

  “I just want us to have a good life, Jo. Please, don’t do this.”

  “It’s done,” she said. “I want this to be easy on both of us, Elton. My lawyer will let me know when you’ve signed the papers. I don’t want to talk to you again.”

  “Jo,” he said again, and she let out a small sigh. “You have to let me make this right.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Please. I love you.”

  “Not as much as you love your job,” she answered, clearly doing her best to keep her voice steady. Elton could hear a man’s voice in the background, but he couldn’t make out the words.

  “Who is that?” he asked. “Who’s with you?”

  “Never mind,” she said, but he asked again in a sterner tone.

  “Elton, I’ve...I’ve met someone else.”

  Elton couldn’t find his voice. A thousand thoughts ran through his head, counting the days he had spent traveling to talk to this or that witness, or the nights he had stayed holed up in the archives until dawn. Jocelyn had always been there when he got back—even if she had been long asleep. But he realized he couldn’t recall the last time they had dinner together.

  “How long has this been going on?” he asked finally, his voice strained.

  “Not that long,” she admitted after a moment. “You haven’t been here. It isn’t like—”

  “It’s been longer than a week, though, hasn’t it?” he pressed, and a long quiet passed between them. His mouth was dry, and he couldn’t bring himself to say anything more.

  ”Don’t make this worse, Elton. Please. Just sign the paperwork.” She disconnected the call, leaving him slumped against the wooden column with the phone still to his ear.

  Elton put his phone back into his pocket with mechanical stiffness and glanced back at the front door just in time to see Nathan and Cora scrambling away from their places pressed up against the screen. He let out a soft sigh, but he didn’t have the strength to be annoyed. He just took a seat in one of the plastic deck chairs and stared across the street at the desert, numb except for the knot in his stomach.

  He felt sick to his stomach. Jocelyn, his Jocelyn, had been seeing some other man while he was working. Someone else had been holding her, touching her, kissing her—he tried to push the thought from his mind. Why hadn’t she said anything before now? With a sinking feeling, he realized that she had tried. She had been trying all week to call and dump him.

  Not quite enough silence had gone by before he heard the slow creak and slam of the screen door, and he saw Nathan out of the corner of his eye, leaning against the wall of the house and lighting a cigarette. They passed a long while without speaking, only watching the sun creep toward the horizon, and then Elton pushed himself out of his chair and took up a place beside Nathan. Nathan glanced sidelong at him and offered him the open pack of cigarettes.

  “You know,” Elton murmured as he reached out to take one from the pack, “my wife made me quit smoking.” He held the cigarette in his mouth and leaned forward to let Nathan light it for him, then pressed his back into the siding of the house and took a deep drag. “Shitty brand,” he said in a breath of smoke.

  “She left you?”

  “You heard.”

  “That’s rough. Did she say why?”

  “You really think I want to talk about this with you?”

  Nathan shrugged. “You probably want to talk about it with somebody, and I’m the only one out here.”

  Elton took another pull from the cigarette before answering. “Because of my work. I have to travel—of course I have to travel occasionally. I have to stay late at the office sometimes. But also you. I spent so long hunting you down, I guess I lost track of how much time I spent away from home.”

  “How much time are we talking about?”

  “Well, I’ve been with you for six days so far, and that was the first time I’d spoken to her since I left.” He let out a humorless chuckle. “I guess that was pretty standard for my trips.” He shook his head. “I did what I had to do to secure our future. If I hadn’t taken the assignments no one else wanted, stayed into the night to do all the paperwork my supervisor asked me to do—we wouldn’t be in nearly such a good place. If I worked too hard, it was because I wanted the best for her. If I stayed late, it was so that I could get ahead, so that I could get promoted and afford the apartment she wanted.”

  Nathan took a drag from his cigarette and held the smoke in for a moment before letting it out through his nose. “Well. You brought it on yourself, you know.”

  “Fuck you,” Elton grumbled with his cigarette in his mouth.

  “No, listen to me.” Nathan turned his head to look at the Chaser with a surprisingly stern frown. “You think I’m some kind of evil asshole because I do whatever I want all the time—granted, it doesn’t always end well. But if I had a woman I loved like that, she’d never spend a single second wondering if I loved her or not. I’d spend every minute with her, and we’d enjoy ourselves. We’d laugh, and we’d have sex, and we’d do whatever the hell we felt like. You miss out on the present by keeping your eyes on the future, Elton. You may have meant well, but your life isn’t your future. Your life is now. I’d never make a woman I loved feel the way you made her feel.”

  Elton stared over at Nathan in the fading evening light, his face momentarily illuminated orange by the burning end of the cigarette caught in his lips. “Well,” Elton said after a moment, “that’s actually pretty profound. Asshole.”

  “I have my moments,” Nathan chuckled. “Hang on,” he added, holding his cigarette between his lips as he pulled open the screen door and disappeared back into the house. Elton frowned around the corner at the sound of cabinets opening and closing, and he gave Nathan a scolding glare when the other man reappeared with a mostly full bottle of tequila and two small glasses.

  “What are you doing?” Elton hissed. “Put that back.”

  “You are a man in need of a drink,” he insisted. “She won’t notice. Or if she does, you can pay her.”

  “Pay her with what? I gave what money I had left to your needle-woman.”

  “Pay her with your body, then; I don’t care.”

  “Absolutely not. It’s theft, and I’m on duty, besides.”

  “Oh, piss on your duty,” he laughed. “I thought you said you were on holid
ay? You think I’m going to get you drunk and make a break for it? After all this time? If you believe that I’m honestly helping, then shut up and have a drink; if you don’t, then tie me up and kill the lich your damned self. Don’t you trust me?”

  “Not at all.”

  “One of these days, Elton, you’re going to hurt my feelings.”

  Elton hesitated, glancing warily between the glass and Nathan’s amused face. He refused to acknowledge the smug look it earned him when he lifted one of the glasses to his lips and tasted the tequila, savoring the heat on his tongue before the strength of the liquor made him cough.

  “That a boy,” Nathan chuckled, holding out his pack of cigarettes and lighting the end of the one Elton took. He tucked a fresh cigarette into his own mouth and lit it with the small flame in his palm. “So, Elton Willis,” he said in a cloud of smoke as he relaxed against the railing, “how do you grieve? Want to tell me about how you met her, or want to tell me why she’s terrible? Make guesses as to which of your acquaintances moved in on her in your absence? Maybe you want to forget her entirely?”

  “How could I forget her?” Elton scoffed, turning his head away to exhale smoke. “I love her.”

  “I wouldn’t have taken you for the melancholy sort.” Nathan sipped from his own glass and tapped a bit of ash from the end of his cigarette. “But you’d do best to move on from that sort of thinking. It didn’t sound to me like she was open to discussion on the issue.”

  “No,” Elton admitted softly.

  “Then think about what’s next for you, instead. I happen to know a certain apprentice who’s been making an inordinate amount of doe eyes at you, even with everything that’s happened.” He tilted his head to peek through the screen and make sure that Cora wasn’t listening, but she was curled up on the couch with her book, eyes drooping with every page. “Of course,” he went on, “if you laid a hand on her, I’d slit you from dick to chest. But I feel it’s important you know that you haven’t lost your appeal with the younger crowd.”

  “Thanks for the encouragement,” Elton muttered, draining his glass and holding it out to be refilled without another word.

  “Maybe after all this lich business is done, we can find somewhere to really drink. Olivia was a delight, but magic isn’t quite the same as picking up a lonely woman in a bar. I’d be interested to see your technique.”

  Elton snorted into his glass. “You actually think that I would go drinking with you on purpose and try to pick up women?”

  “Well it is almost my birthday. You’re forgiven for not getting me a gift.”

  “You were not born on Halloween.”

  “I was!” Nathan laughed. “Why would I lie about it?”

  “Because you want me to think you’re special.”

  “Elton, I think we can both agree that I’m special,” he teased. “If you need to get your mind off all of this, I am available. You can’t use your marriage as an excuse anymore.”

  “Even assuming that it wouldn’t be an incredible breach of protocol—and good sense—I’m not gay. Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “Gay,” Nathan scoffed. “It’s the twenty-first century, Elton. We don’t need to label ourselves.” He blew smoke into his empty glass and watched the swirling cloud for a moment.

  “Why were you in Arizona anyway?” Elton asked, purposely changing the subject. “If you were going to retire, why didn’t you go back to Haiti, since you seemed to love it?”

  “I thought about it,” he shrugged, refilling his glass. “Maybe I’d planned on it, when I got so old I was ready to die.” He took a sip of tequila and gave Elton a teasing smile. “Would you have come all the way to the island looking for me?”

  “I suppose I would have. I didn’t know you then—how was I to know you wouldn’t be worth the trouble?”

  Nathan laughed. “Such cheek. You’ve come a long way in the short time since you first darkened my door, Elton Willis. Cursing young girls, threatening shopkeepers, hiding precious fugitives from the Magistrate until you’re finished with them—you’re farther down my path than you realize.”

  Elton filled his own glass this time. “You’ve found this all very amusing,” he muttered. “There was never any risk of the lich coming after my family, was there?”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t think so,” Nathan chuckled. “How on earth would it know where to look?” The Chaser shook his head and drained his drink in a single swallow, reaching over to thunk the glass down on the porch railing. “Oh, don’t be cross,” Nathan grinned. “Think of all the fun we’ve had. You know, cursing young girls, threatening shopkeepers—”

  “That’s fun for you,” Elton pointed out with a sigh.

  “Come off it, Elton,” Nathan groaned. “Will you just admit that you’ve had a good time? If you’ve done all this and not even enjoyed yourself, then it was all for nothing.”

  Elton scowled across at him, stepping closer and opening his mouth to object. Nathan tutted at him before he could be scolded, and Elton looked down at him with an offended snort as Nathan put a finger to his lips to quiet him.

  “No more lies, Mr. Chaser,” Nathan chuckled. “Tell me why you do your job. Tell me why you came after me. Just say it out loud. Tell me you want the chase. Tell me you want to chase me.”

  Elton frowned as Nathan removed his hand, allowing him to speak, but for a long moment he said nothing. Then he sighed and reached past the other man to pick up his glass again. “I wanted to chase you,” he said softly, pointedly ignoring Nathan’s wolfish grin. He refilled his glass and took another drink without looking at him.

  “That’s all I needed to hear.”

  They stood quietly together until Teresa’s pickup pulled into the sandy yard beside the Jeep, and she climbed down from the cab carrying plastic bags full of takeout boxes. Elton put his cold cigarette butt down on the porch railing for careful collection later, and he stepped down to take some of the bags while Nathan hid the glasses and depleted bottle back in the kitchen. Cora stirred at the sound of the cabinets closing in a rush, scrambling as though she hadn’t been slowly losing her grip on the book in her lap.

  “My boss wouldn’t let me leave without food for you people once he heard I had guests. Be grateful.”

  “We are, of course,” Elton said, and he held the door for her and helped her take the food from its boxes.

  Teresa made herself a plate and headed for the hall without any intention of staying to share a meal with them. “I only have one guest room, and the girl gets it,” she paused in the doorway to say. “She looks like she needs a good night’s rest. You two can fight over the couch.”

  “Dibs!” Nathan called out with a raised fork. Elton sighed but wasn’t prepared to argue with him.

  “Just clean up after yourselves and get an early night,” Teresa said. “We’ve got a hike in the morning. By the way,” she added, “I’m pretty sure that Hawikku isn’t somewhere you can go whenever you feel like, so I hope you don’t mind the potential for trouble. I’m not getting arrested for you, so try not to start any shit.”

  “I live for trouble,” Nathan said with a grin, and Elton shushed him.

  “We won’t give you any problems, Teresa. Thank you.”

  “Any more problems, you mean,” she snorted, and she vanished down the hall and shut her bedroom door behind her.

  The three of them ate their dinner without fuss, although Cora had to be prevented from drooping her face into her bowl more than once. Elton helped her from the table when she swayed, and she clung to his shirt as he half carried her into the guest bedroom.

  “Try to rest,” he whispered, slipping the rough woven blanket up over her. “We’ll be right outside.”

  “Thanks, jerk,” she murmured in return. She stopped him with a hand on his sleeve when he tried to pull away. “Sorry about your wife,” she said as she looked up at him.

  He hesitated. “Thanks,” he answered softly, not knowing what else to say. She let him go, and her face was buried i
n the pillow before he could even shut the door.

  Elton cleaned the dishes and put away the leftovers while Nathan sat at the table and blew smoke out the kitchen window. “You could at least go outside,” Elton scolded him, which reminded him to fetch his cigarette butt from the porch. He finished up the dishes and dried his hands on a towel hung over the oven door handle, then rolled down his sleeves and lingered in the doorway.

  “You should get some sleep,” he said, but Nathan shook his head.

  “I’m a bit of a night owl. Don’t worry, Mr. Chaser,” he added with a grin, “I’m not going anywhere. And I promise not to draw on your face while you sleep.”

  Elton hadn’t considered that a worry until Nathan said it. He eyed him warily on his way into the living room, but he had no real reason to believe that Nathan would do anything unexpected—at least until the lich was dead and the prospect of returning to the Magistrate became more real. He was almost predictable in his unpredictability. Elton settled on the couch, rationalizing that Nathan lost his preference privileges by being the last to bed, and he pulled his jacket over his torso as a makeshift blanket.

  In the middle of the night, the entire house was awoken by Cora’s screaming, and Elton and Nathan were both on their feet in an instant, though Nathan quickly brushed aside the Chaser and took his place at her side.

  Teresa appeared in the bedroom door in pajama pants and a tank top, scowling into the room at the two men. “What the hell’s going on in here?” she snapped. “What have you done to her?”

  Nathan held Cora’s shaking shoulders and glanced at Elton to pass the question on to him.

  “She’s cursed,” Elton said quietly, as though preventing Cora from hearing the words would lighten the spell on her.

  “Cursed? Why the hell didn’t you say anything? Maybe I can break it.”

  Elton urged her gently out of the room and shut Nathan and Cora inside. “The curse can’t be broken except by the one who laid it,” he said, “and that’s me.”

  “You? Why would you do that? What could she possibly have done? What kind of curse is it?”