The Left-Hand Path: Disciple

by T. S. Barnett

  Cora was quiet for a while, but when she spoke again, Elton could hear the faint smile in her voice. “Okay. I’ll do my best. Thanks, mom,” she added with a soft laugh.

  “But just to be clear, you know he’s almost twice your age.”

  “Don’t worry; I know how to make him feel young again.”

  Elton grimaced and pulled the phone away from his ear for a moment, exhaling sharply through his nose. “Goodbye, Cora,” he said loudly, not waiting for a response before ending the call and dropping his phone back to the center console.

  “What was that about?” Nathan asked just behind his ear, startling him so badly he struggled to keep the RV in his lane.

  “Nothing,” Elton answered automatically. “Just asking about some breath work I’d mentioned.”

  Nathan stared at him, eyes narrowed and lips slightly pursed. “Mhm,” he hummed, but he slid into the passenger seat without further probing. “So where are we off to now?”

  Elton glanced sidelong at him. “Up for checking one more name off the list while we wait?”

  ***

  Cora sat on her bed with the blanket folded over her head like a veil, staring down at the phone in her lap. With her lips pressed tightly together, she puffed a sigh out through her nose and flung the blanket away, planting her feet on the floor and making for the hallway. She went downstairs in her pajamas and spotted Thomas halfway into the cellar already, but she took him by the back of his shirt to make him pause.

  “Cora,” he said, whirling and dropping the cellar door with a thunk as though he’d been caught. “I—spoke to some friends in BC, and they’re shipping the more difficult things that I need, so I should be—”

  “I’m not sorry,” she cut him off, and he stopped. “I’m not sorry I kissed you.” She looked up at him, doing her best not to fidget as she released his shirt. “If you’re uncomfortable, or you’re just not interested, then that’s fine, and you can say that. I’ll put my big girl panties on and get over it. But if you’re not not interested, then...I’d like to kiss you more. A lot more.”

  A subtle flush spread across Thomas’s cheeks and down his neck, and Cora saw his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. He looked down at the floor and rubbed a worrying hand across the short hair at the back of his neck, a few sounds falling out of him that might have been mistaken for the beginnings of words before he managed to make a coherent one.

  “Cora, I—I don’t do this sort of thing, and that’s by design. I...it’s no secret that I haven’t gotten over Claire’s death, and my situation now besides—it’s—complicated,” he finished, still not moving look at her. “You’re...you’ve been very kind to me, and I appreciate your help with everything, but I...personally, I...” He finally lifted his eyes to her face and let his hand drop back to his side. “Personally—I want that, too, and it frightens me. There are a hundred reasons why I shouldn’t, and I can’t think of a single reason I should that makes any sense except that...that I want to. And want just isn’t something that I get to—”

  She interrupted him by pulling him down by the front of his shirt and making the decision for him. He made a soft, startled noise against her lips, but she kept him close by snaking her arms around his neck, and he gingerly responded in kind, placing slow, hesitant hands on her sides. She held the kiss long enough for his heart rate to slow from panicked to mildly alarmed, and when she pulled back this time, she didn’t let him go.

  “I’m not asking you for anything,” she said softly. “You don’t need to be over Claire or change the way that you are. I like the way that you are. This doesn’t have to be complicated,” she assured him with a smile. “I’m already here. I’m going to keep on helping you with all the magic stuff. I just...want to be closer, I guess. If you want to.”

  Thomas seemed to hesitate, glancing between her eyes like one of them might have a better answer than the other. “I’m not sure I remember how to be close to someone.”

  She chuckled and stood on the balls of her feet to kiss his cheek. “I’ll help you remember,” she murmured close to his ear, enjoying the faint gape on his face as she finally released him. “So, your friends in BC?”

  “Uh. Oh. Yes. Yes,” he repeated, turning back toward the cellar and bending to lift the door again. “They should have the items I need here within two weeks. Can you have the cloth and incense ready?”

  “Easy.”

  “Good. We’ll be on schedule. I’ll begin, then.” He put one foot on the cellar steps, then paused and looked back at her. “I don’t suppose...you know how to make black bread?”

  “I barely know how to make bread bread. But if Anne knows, I can know.”

  “I’d appreciate it. That’s all I’ll be eating until the ritual. Well—I’ll take care of the other, anyway,” he added quickly with a glance down the steps. “Thank you, Cora. I’ll..need to go into town a bit later, if you wanted to wait and go together.”

  Warmth bubbled up in her at the timid way he peeked at her, like he couldn’t quite make himself meet her eyes. “Sure,” she agreed, and he hesitated a moment longer, then hurried down the stairs and beyond the floor that smoothed as soon as he let the door drop.

  ***

  Down in the cellar, Thomas stood at his work table with both hands flat against the wood surface, leaning his weight into his palms and frowning. What was he thinking? Cora was so much younger than him, and so passionate and spirited—he shouldn’t consider doing anything that would bring her closer to a life like his. Closer to him, he corrected himself. They were in the middle of a crisis with the Magistrate, he was about to have to sacrifice a living human being, and the girl’s closest friends were on some kind of murder spree field trip—oh, and they were his old school roommate and Nathaniel Moore.

  Thomas bent over the table to lean on his elbows and put his face in his hands. People complicated things. Cora complicated things even more. But the way his heart had begun to race from the simplest of her touches, the heat under his skin when she smiled—when was the last time he’d responded that way?

  I’ll help you remember.

  He rubbed his palms vigorously over his cheeks, the motion vibrating his long groan as he rose. It was not the time for this sort of thing. It would never be the time for this sort of thing—not for him. He couldn’t draw anyone else into this life. He certainly wouldn’t do it to someone like Cora. And he couldn’t afford to get distracted now that he had this ritual to prepare for. No matter how soft her lips had been.

  Thomas gave one last huff, hoping to clear his head, and he tried to focus his attention on etching the correct markings into the candlesticks and vessel he would need for the ritual.

  By the time he emerged from the cellar, he had almost managed to convince himself that he’d blown the whole thing out of proportion, that he’d allowed himself to imagine more than had actually happened, and that he would be able to tell her in no uncertain terms that they needed to keep their distance from each other and remain cordial and no more. But when he pushed open the cellar door and saw her standing in the living room, her hair parted to hide the side still growing out and the strands of blue and black pulled into a messy bun at the back of her head, dressed for summer and smiling at him like she’d just been waiting to see him again, his stomach dropped. He wasn’t going to tell her any such thing.

  They collected the ingredients he still needed at Anne’s shop, thanked her for the black bread recipe, and took a detour into the grocery. Cora eyed him suspiciously during his conversation with the butcher, but she managed to hold her questions until they had walked out of the store.

  “Soo, why are you carrying a Tupperware of blood right now?”

  “It’s one of the requirements,” he answered simply. “In the time leading up to the ritual.”

  “To do what with?”

  He hesitated. “Well, to...to eat.”

  She stopped walking, and he made it a few steps ahead of her before noticing. “To eat?” she echoed.
/>   “It’s not as bad as it sounds. But it does have to be fresh every day.”

  Cora couldn’t hide her disgust, and she didn’t try. “That’s fucking gross, Thomas. You’re gross. Your magic is gross.”

  “I know,” he answered as she began walking beside him again. He started as she slid her arm through his, locking elbows with him while they walked to meet their car.

  “I once saw Nathan smear the inside of a gris gris with pulped up human heart and a mixture of his own semen and a stranger’s vaginal juices, so I guess gross is just how the best magic is, huh?”

  Thomas looked down at her in confusion, but she only smiled and hugged his arm a little closer.

  “So do you just, like, dunk your bread in that like olive oil, or what?”

  “I’ve only done this once before. I’m allowed to season it, but not with salt—not that it needs any more—and I can mix it with black beans, so that’s what I did. Last time, I tried having it raw, and cooking it on its own, and baking it into the bread itself, but...those were all pretty terrible.”

  “Wow. That’s amazing. It’s like everything you said just piled onto itself and became more and more disgusting the longer you talked.”

  Thomas let a quiet laugh escape him, and he found himself reluctant to let the girl beside him pull away when they had to climb into the car. That wasn’t good.

  ***

  The first two nights, Cora had audibly gagged and left the room during Thomas’s sole permitted after-dusk meal, which he had to admit was a reasonable reaction. Now, she sat adjacent to him at the kitchen table with her cheek leaned into her fist, watching him with eyes narrowed in morbid fascination.

  “This sort of shit is why you’re so skinny, you know.”

  Thomas glanced sidelong at her while he chewed, but he didn’t reply.

  “What does it taste like?” she asked, craning forward slightly to peer into his bowl.

  “Bitter,” he answered once he had swallowed. “And a bit coppery. It’s blood—I’m sure you’ve put a cut in your mouth before.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve never served it with beans,” she chuckled. “Is the bread okay, at least?”

  “It’s more than okay. Thank you.”

  She smiled, and he stared down at his meal to avoid looking at her face. Her smile had become hard to look at over the past couple of days—it hurt his stomach. And she’d taken to putting a hand on his shoulder and kissing his cheek when she left the room, which didn’t make things any easier. The night before in the study, she had picked up his empty cup for him, announced that she was going to bed, and then bent over him on the loveseat, her hand warm on his cheek as she left a lingering kiss on his lips. He’d watched her go without being able to form a thought coherent enough to answer the cheerful “good night” she threw over her shoulder. He’d struggled to get any sleep even more than usual.

  “Well, when this is done and you don’t have to fast anymore, we can go get you, like, an entire box of donuts or something.”

  He snorted softly. “I actually hate sweets.”

  “What? Who hates sweets?”

  Thomas didn’t look up at her. “Claire owned a small bakery back in Vancouver. When I first met her, I went every day—made some excuse or another, just to see her. She always had some new experiment for me to try, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her I didn’t like them. I put on ten pounds in the first couple of months we dated,” he said with a faint smile. “So I wasn’t fond of sweets before, but now I really don’t want them ever again.”

  “That’s adorable.” Cora sat up a little straighter and propped her chin on her knuckles instead. “She sounds like she was a really great person.”

  “She was.” Thomas took another bite and swallowed it down, barely grimacing anymore. “She didn’t deserve what happened to her. None of them do.”

  “Well, that’s why you’re eating blood beans, right? So we can try to stop that kind of thing. We can at least help a lot of people. I just wish there was more I could do.”

  “You do plenty,” he assured her. “You’ve located dozens of people for us over the last months. Any lives saved is more than most people can say they’ve done.”

  “Thanks, Thomas,” she said quietly, and he finally looked over at her. “It’s hard to remember my part here when I’m around people like you, and Nathan, and Elton—you’re all so talented, and I think about how long it took Nathan to teach me even to levitate a glass of water,” she finished with a chuckle.

  “You don’t give yourself enough credit. You started later than any of us. And your scrying—Moore can’t do that. Neither can I. All I do is make bad decisions that end with me having to eat blood for dinner.”

  Cora snorted out a laugh that made his heart constrict uncomfortably. “I do have ‘not having to eat blood for dinner’ going for me.” She watched him for a moment, then put her hands on the table and pushed up to standing. “I’m going to have a shower.” She let her hand trace his back from one shoulder to the other as she passed behind him, pausing to bend and touch a kiss to his cheek before making her way up the stairs.

  She was beginning to make the “no impure thoughts” part of his restrictions increasingly difficult—which was a new and unpleasant complication for him.

  Thomas finished his unsatisfying meal and cleaned up the kitchen, then took his turn in the shower, brushed his teeth thoroughly to get the metal taste out of his mouth, and settled in his bedroom to recite his required prayers. If he stayed upstairs and didn’t go to the study, his day would be easier. He wouldn’t have to pretend to read while Cora sat beside him, her head on his shoulder or her back pressed against his arm so that she could curl up with her own book on her half of the loveseat. And he wouldn’t have to hold his breath every time she shifted. Maybe he should go back to the way things had been when she’d first decided to stay—just keep locked in his room or in the cellar and limit contact with her as much as possible. That had been much easier.

  He had determined to do just that when he heard a soft knocking on his door. He opened it to find a pajama-clad Cora in the hallway, smiling up at him.

  “I didn’t figure you were sleeping yet,” she said. “Can I talk to you about something?”

  Thomas took a step back to let her in, though his instinct was to urge her into the hallway instead. She crossed the room, fingertips skimming the spines of his books, and she lingered near his nightstand to speak.

  “I wanted to ask you about this ritual,” she said. “About...what you need to do. With the person Elton is bringing.”

  Thomas frowned, hesitant to get any closer to her. “Yes?”

  “Are you okay with it? With killing someone as an offering like that, knowing what’s going to happen to them?”

  He glanced at the floor with a subtle shrug. “It’s the best plan I have.”

  “That’s not really what I asked.” She moved toward him and took him by the hand, urging him to sit beside her on the edge of his mattress. “I guess I just...wanted to make sure you knew that just because you can do this, it doesn’t mean you have to. And just because Nathan and Elton have given up on being good people, it doesn’t mean you have to do that, either.”

  “Cora, I’m...doing this because it’s the right thing. I think it’s the right thing. If this one person’s death can put a stop to what the Magistrate is doing, if there’s even a chance, then I’d rather do it than keep waiting around and hoping that some other person Elton murders is going to be the one to end it.”

  Cora’s expression softened, and she pulled his hands into her lap and squeezed them tightly. “It’s still a lot to ask of you.”

  “No one asked it of me,” he corrected her gently. “I offered. And I’m willing. I can do what needs to be done. What’s the worst that’s going to happen to me?” he added with a dry chuckle. “My soul is in about the worst place it can be already.”

  “Thomas,” she sighed, scooting closer to him so that she could press a plaint
ive hand to his chest. Her touch felt hot even through the fabric of his shirt, and he looked down at her hand and back up into her eyes uncertainly. Suddenly the fact that she was here, in his room, sitting beside him on his bed, was a very important detail that wouldn’t have mattered a week ago. “I don’t want to be the only one worrying about you, okay? Worry about yourself a little, too.”

  “I—” he started, then paused, taking a moment to swallow the quickening heartbeat threatening to creep up his throat. She needed to go. “I’m really fine. I’m not going to enjoy it, but I can get it done. Don’t worry about me.”

  “I do anyway,” she said with a soft smile. He felt her fingers curling slowly against his shirt. “But if you’re sure, then I’ll keep doing whatever I can to help. I’ll make all the bread you can eat and incense you can burn, and I’ll make that cloth sheet-sized if you need it.”

  A faint smile tugged one corner of his lips, and he lifted his hand to cover hers. “Thank you,” he said, not trusting himself to say anything more.

  Cora stood without releasing his hand, seeming reluctant to break from him. “Good night, Thomas,” she said in a quiet voice.

  “Good night,” he answered. He tensed reflexively as she leaned toward him and pressed a long kiss to his mouth, his grip on her hand tightening. Her still-damp hair smelled of her floral shampoo, and he felt the soft brush of her exhale against his cheek. When she broke the kiss, she stayed near enough that he could hear her breathing, hesitating an inch from him and watching his eyes. He couldn’t bring himself to move; he only watched her eyelashes touch her cheeks as she brushed another light, testing kiss over his lips. She retreated just enough to look him in the face, nervousness written on the crease in her brow in a silent question he couldn’t hope to answer. She touched her lips to his once more, and Thomas found his fingers in her hair, allowing himself to accept the heat of her kiss. Once she let a soft, appreciative sound hum against his lips and opened her mouth to him, he was lost.