The Left-Hand Path: Mentor

Chapter 1

Nathan's place always smelled nice. The apartment was just as crappy as Cora's, but Nathan had lived there long enough to still have a lot of the old wooden furnishings that had been replaced during the so-called renovation. The floors creaked, the doors didn't quite shut properly, but there was always some incense or oil burning in the kitchen, filling the little apartment with the scent of sage or jasmine. 

She still knocked when she arrived at his door, even though he always let her in without even asking who was there. He knew it was her without looking, probably because he never had any other visitors, but she didn't want to risk tripping over one of his traps by trying to come in unannounced. She'd had her feet burned before by the powder he'd left in the entrance. She opened the door and shouldered it back into place behind her with a bit of a shove. 

"Did you do your homework?" Nathan asked without looking up from the blocky television. By the time Cora got home from her job at the restaurant, he had already finished his soap operas and had moved on to Judge Judy. He sat hunched in his worn recliner, a glass of room-temperature water on the small table beside him and the faint hiss of his oxygen tank audible under the voices from the television.

Cora didn't know how old he was, precisely, but the deep lines in his face and his thin, arthritic hands covered in liver spots told her

that he was old enough to be lonely and grateful for her company. She was happy to spend the afternoons with him, even if all they did was watch small claims court on television. It was better than going home and listening to her mother shout at her all night.

"I always do my homework," she said with a smile.

"That's debatable. Show me your ogham," he said, peering up at her with dark, watery eyes.

Cora reached into her battered canvas purse and offered him a notebook full of lines and scratches that made no sense to her outside of what Nathan had assured her they meant. Apparently it was some kind of old Irish script. Nathan said it wasn't the only form of spell writing, but it was what witches were normally taught in school, at least in Western countries. What he did was different—every spell she'd seen him make had involved bags full of things like graveyard dirt, red pepper, or spider webs. He had even had her grind up the bones of a black cat in a mortar and pestle once because he wasn't strong enough to do it. She hadn't asked where he'd gotten them.

"I have been practicing, you know," she assured him.

"I believe you." His faint smirk was familiar to her by now. He always pushed her, and he never let her slip in her studies. In a lot of ways, he seemed very boring. During the day, he sat around watching General Hospital, eating frozen meals, and staring out his window at people moving through the parking lot. But he also wore a thin gold hoop in each ear and a carved gold bangle on his left wrist, a strange mirror to the bracelet of strung magic tokens he kept on his right. The dull collection of carved wood, stone, and bone was clearly the more treasured item, as the gold was dingy and looked quite aged.

He seemed to be eccentric and average all at once, with his slow days and quiet voice in contrast to the aging signs of a more outlandish youth. He had a sense of humor that seemed to come and go with his mood, but it was the more tangible hints that she wondered about. The faded, bluish tattoo on his forearm and the single alligator tooth he wore on a leather strap around his neck interested her the most. She had asked him about the necklace once, but all he would tell her was that it was a gift from an

old friend. She sometimes wondered how he'd ended up a lonely old man in a crappy apartment, but he wasn't really the type to talk about his past. He'd never mentioned any family, and he certainly didn't seem to have any friends.