by Augusta Li
Chapter One
COLE wondered how it had happened that he owned things but possessed nothing. His home, his property, and his hands and heart belonged to him, and yet were not his.
These silver-skinned maples, Scotch pines, hemlocks, ash, and rough-barked pin oaks had, until a few weeks ago, provided comfort to Cole with their familiarity and permanence. He knew those closest to the cabin quite well, the whorls on their trunks and the shelf moss skirting their bases memorable to his fingertips after three years of morning walks under the canopy of their branches. At night their leaves swished soothingly as he worked at his computer. They dropped acorns on his roof with muffled thuds, as if to draw him out of his reverie for a moment and remind him that he was a participant in the world outside of his head. He held a neighborly fondness for everything within a few miles of his home: the unpaved roads that led from the base of the mountain to his cabin at the top, the deer who ravaged his sunflowers and the gray squirrels who clogged his gutters with their winter provisions, and even the dead who rested behind the rusted fence in the square, eighteenth-century burial ground a quarter of a mile down the muddy path. The peeling marble markers, the names they’d borne eroded, had been abandoned long ago by everything but briars and woodbine. Cole, though, always paused a moment in greeting as he trudged through the predawn mist with his rust-furred Labrador, Vixen.
It was one of his sillier, more romantic notions, perhaps, but Cole had always felt a symbiotic connection with the other beings, whether animal, vegetable or spirit, residing on this patch of Pennsylvania mountain. He sensed their energies interweaving, forming a community. Though solitary, he’d never before felt as alone as he did now.
Tonight, he opened the thin wooden door to let Vixen out with trepidation. The trees, their skeletal branches black against the sooty, storm-pregnant sky, felt evil. He knew trees weren’t capable of malice, unless someone manipulated them or, more likely, his perceptions of them. A bone-hurting mist obscured the ground. He felt watched as he leaned his elbows on the rough-hewn railing of his small porch, beside the wood he’d gathered for the winter, and lit a cigarette. The dog sensed it too: malign eyes gazing down from the treetops and out from the clumps of withered bracken, and she shuffled close to the cabin instead of venturing farther out and rolling in the fallen leaves in her usual way. It was the worst kind of violation to have his sanctuary infiltrated, his kindred beings turned against him. The unnatural fog hid danger he sensed but couldn’t see. It wove around everything, clinging as if made from something denser and stickier than vapor. Already, a sickly damp had penetrated Cole’s dark jeans, sweatshirt, and socks.
“Leave me alone, Thorn,” he hissed, drawing smoke into his lungs as he spoke. “Leave us alone.”
In response, a gust of wind, so cold it stung his face, whipped through the trees and pelted him with dirt, dead leaves, and broken twigs. Vixen scrabbled up the wooden steps and pressed against Cole’s calf, whimpering with her tail between her legs. He knelt and stroked the dog’s velvety ears to calm her before letting her back inside. Her claws clicked against the pine floor as she hurried to her blanket beside the pot-bellied woodstove. Though he shivered, Cole remained on the porch, waiting for his guests. Irrationally, even egotistically, he felt his presence might help them arrive safely.
Twenty frigid minutes and four cigarettes later, a pair of headlights, small as fireflies, turned onto the road that led up the mountain. Cole watched the beams of light return color to the forest as they passed slowly, the vehicle’s tires certainly catching in the almost frozen mud. Finally the tan Ford truck stopped on the gravel patch beside Cole’s red Jeep. The driver, an athletic man with light-brown hair and a down vest over his long-sleeved T-shirt, stepped to the ground. Cole stomped out his smoke and hurried to embrace his friend.
“Gods, Bobby, I was so worried,” Cole breathed against the warmth of the other man’s neck.
“We’re here now,” Bobby said. He stroked Cole’s long black hair. Normally, Robert withheld displays of affection, even in private. The touch, along with Bobby’s overlong hug, showed Cole how anxious his friend felt.
“He tried to stop us, Cole,” said a third man, who’d just closed the passenger door and come around the front of the truck. The wind whipped his light shoulder-length hair out beside his face, and he rubbed his shoulders with gloved hands. Then he took Cole’s face in both hands and kissed him hard, desperately, on the mouth, letting his lips linger against Cole’s as he spoke.
“My car wouldn’t start. The engine is completely dead,” the blond man, Cameron, continued. He held Cole’s face like it might be stolen. “I just had it inspected, but—”
Cole raised his hand and the other man fell silent. “Cameron, shh. Come inside,” Cole said. “It’s freezing and”—he looked over his shoulder, at the few trees close enough to be illuminated by his single-bulb porch light—“and I don’t think we should talk out here.”
A ridiculous idea, that the log walls of his hunting cabin-turned-residence could shield their voices from who listened, Cole knew, but it felt better once they were seated together on the tartan sofa in front of the stove. Cole opened the little iron door to get a view of the flames. The three of them huddled in silence for a long time, watching the fire devour the pine logs and listening to the occasional pop and hiss of evaporating pitch. Cam pulled a goldenrod afghan from the back of the couch and wrapped it like a shawl around his shoulders before edging closer to Cole and resting his head on Cole’s shoulder. Bobby, though he sat erect and stretched his hands casually toward the hearth, pressed his knee against Cole’s leg. None of them wanted to speak about what was happening, as if to verbalize it would cement it into reality. They wanted to sit silently and pretend they were about to play cards and have a few beers, as they would any other night. Cole, though, knew better.
“How about I make us a drink,” he offered, “and you can tell me what happened.”
Cam shuddered when Cole stood and withdrew the warmth of his body. The blond man balled the dog-smelling blanket under his chin and said, “I’ve had this chill I can’t get rid of. It’s like there’s ice cubes in my blood.”
“Something warm, then,” Cole said, trying to stifle the worry in his voice. “There’s coffee.”
“Why don’t you make it Irish?” Bobby said, moving to the edge of the couch to drape his muscular arm over Cam’s shoulders and pull Cam back against his chest.
“Right.” Cole walked to the end of the rectangular room he called the kitchen, though no wall separated it from the seating area by the fire. He opened an unvarnished cupboard door and set three mismatched mugs on the chipped tile counter by the sink. For want of a liquor cabinet, Cole had lined the shelves and windowsills with bottles, most of them less than half full now. They looked lovely in the late afternoon, when the western light shone through their burgundy, amber, rose, chartreuse, or nut-brown contents. Tonight, though, the glass bottles looked cold and hard, and their contents appeared as black as poison. Cole selected a single malt, the good stuff, as life could be short, and poured a generous amount into each cup. He finished by adding a splash of powdered creamer to his own cup and a ton of milk and brown sugar to Cam’s. Ten feet away, the other men whispered close to each other’s faces.
After distributing the drinks, Cole crouched by the limestone platform that held the stove with Vixen. As much as he wanted to wedge himself between Bobby and Cam, to feel their heat and solidity, he felt unwelcome. What had they been discussing that couldn’t include him? He would have to be the one to question them, to frighten them, to draw blood.
“Tell me,” Cole said.
Cam looked pleadingly at Bobby, and the larger man picked up on his cue. “Cam called me and told me about
his car. I went to pick him up and on the way”—he took a generous swallow of his coffee and winced at the alcohol burn—“it was weird. Tree branches kept blowing in front of me on the road. I know it’s windy, but some of them were as big around as lamp posts.”
“How many times?” Cole asked.
“Three. Too many to be coincidence, don’t you think? The last one put a dent in my front fender. I had to get out and drag it to the side of the road. I felt like there was something in the bushes. Watching.” Now Bobby looked to Cam to continue the story.
Cam held his mug so that the edge rested against his small, round chin. Layers of shaggy, flax-colored hair covered his forehead, the ends brushing thick lashes the same shade. Beneath them his eyes, pond green with gold flecks like sunlight on water, went unfocused as he scryed into the steam. Cam had the keenest inner sight, both Cole and Bobby knew. Patiently they waited for Cam to speak in the dreamy, monotone way that meant he’d seen something.
“He is watching. He sees us,” Cam said, still staring unblinkingly into the shimmering column of mist. “He’s standing in his upstairs hallway, watching us in that dirty, cracked mirror outside of his study. He’s reaching out, toward the glass. Oh gods, he’s going to touch my forehead!” Cam closed his fist around a splinter of wood the size of a child’s fat crayon, smooth from years of rubbing, which he wore on a cord around his neck. His coffee cup broke in his other hand, the ceramic splitting into three nearly equal pieces. Hot liquid poured into Cam’s lap, and he leapt to his feet with a shout, his trance as demolished as the cup. The shattered mug hit the floor and fractured into more small shards that bounced across the planks. Vixen, her fur bristling, growled at the debris. All of the color, even the wind-chapped pink, drained from Cam’s face. Cole went for the dustpan and broom.
“It’s okay,” Bobby said, hurrying to his feet to barricade Cam in his arms. He was tall enough that he could rest his chin on the top of Cam’s head. “Keep a hold of this.” Bobby closed his hand over Cam’s fist and the talisman at the center. Then he turned to Cole. “What do we do now?”
Of course it fell to him. Cole had been the first to become interested in magic. The grandmother who’d raised him had been a hedge witch. Four other widows completed her coven: plump Mrs. Capelli, Mrs. Abernathy, who told the best stories, Mrs. Bentley, and her sister Mrs. Ross. They gathered weekly to put up peaches, or make spaghetti sauce or cherry preserves. In a circle, hunched over the cook pot, grinding herbs and seasonings in the mortar and pestle, they moved through the steam with a grace betraying their years. Cole had sat in the corner of the kitchen with a book while the women let him sample their concoctions, complaining that he never filled out. Later, they sent him to bed and then sat around the round table, or in the garden, playing cards.
Cole’s grandmother refused to plant her herb garden until the waxing May moon, and brewed bitter potions for little Cole when he was sick. Most of her recipes now sat in a wooden box beside Cole’s toaster. She’d kept a marble goddess, headless and winged, on the dresser in her room, beside the statue of Saint Patrick. Next to her heart, beneath her clothing, she’d worn a triskele pendant. Every night until she died at eighty-six, old Mrs. Riley, who’d given her bastard grandson her last name, left a fresh bowl of water and a crust of bread on the doorstep for the pixies.
In sixth grade, Cole began buying paperbacks at the local bookstore that taught things like astrology, numerology, and candle-burning. He’d spent hours after school reading about Persia, Egypt, Greece, and the Vikings in the library. With the help of the outdated computers at the school, he researched the world’s arcane traditions, discovering plenty of like-minded souls in cyberspace. Some of them even offered to teach him or include him in their organizations. Cole, never quick to join anything, and clever enough to sense exploitation in some of the offers, ignored them and continued on his own. He read all he could find on the ceremonial magics, but they seemed overly complex and, frankly, like too much work to his twelve-year-old mind, so he focused his experimentation on the Earth traditions. When he became friends with Bobby and Cam the next year, he taught them what he knew. Through the long summer months, when the thick, waxy leaves of the white oak hid Bobby’s tree house from his mother washing dishes by the window of the house below, the three boys sat in a circle on the floor amidst stolen cigarettes and pilfered Playboys, lighting green candles for money and red for love. They practiced reciting spells from ten-dollar books by flashlight. They analyzed their dreams. Cam guessed best the symbolism of snakes, locked doors, flight, or falling.
When the gemlike flame of summer faded and the leaves curtaining their haven curled at the tips and turned blood red and brittle, they pooled their allowances and bought a Ouija board. They focused their energy into their clumsy adolescent fingers, crowded and sweating on the plastic dial. Cole had been best at making it move, and making them all shriek and dive into their sleeping bags. With chalk from the school blackboards, they drew intricate sigils on the tree house floor, placing a certain flower here, a specific incense cone beside, and a colored rock there. It had been delicious fun… until it started to work.
Cole had been the one, who knew, just knew, without any New-Age manual, how to turn a predicted dusting of snow into a crippling blizzard, so the boys could stay at Bobby’s house and play video games instead of taking a math test. The other two boys had followed his frenzied lead, stabbing into a block of ice and drizzling the shavings down from the oak limbs, but only Cole knew the archaic names to call. They had discovered gnosis, the trance-like state that allowed them access to power, though they hadn’t known the name back then. When a cheerleader called Cam a fag, it had been Cole’s idea to steal a Barbie doll from Bobby’s sister, mar its smooth face with a red marker, and send the girl to the winter formal with a face full of weeping pimples as big as peas. Cole had felt triumphant, for the first time in his life not powerless, for the first time a contributor to the world and not its victim. The spell’s success frightened the other two boys. After that Cole caught them glancing at him out of the corners of their eyes, or whispering about him, wondering if they should be afraid of his skill and intuitive knowledge. Maybe they were afraid of him now.
Since Cole’s feet had been the first to touch that forbidden path, and his hands had grasped those of his friends and pulled them along, they now looked to him to be their guide again. He’d also been the first to meet Darius Thorn and go to his bed. Bobby’s evenly colored brown eyes bored into him insistently, like ivy infiltrating the mortar between bricks. Cam shifted his weight from the ball of one foot to the other, never letting go of the wooden charm he wore.
Cole stood and twisted his waist to make his back crack. He felt much older than twenty-eight. Before he spoke, he downed his drink, which was straight whiskey toward the bottom. “First,” he said, “we need to protect ourselves. We need to block him out, so he can’t see or hear what we’re doing. Then we can plan.”
The bulb beneath the plaid shade on Cole’s desk strobed. Bobby and Cam disappeared and reappeared in rapid bursts. His computer switched on and then off. Cam jumped at the beep when it restarted.
“What do we need to do?” Bobby asked.
BOBBY and Cam stood naked on the square of bare earth between Cole’s cabin and the woods. They neither hugged themselves nor huddled together, but waited, bravely exposed. Cole was proud of them. Their bodies, fleshy and soft, clashed hard against the emaciated sharpness of the bare branches, stripped berry fronds, and foot-cutting frozen ground. They looked as out of place as blooming roses would have this time of year, between Thanksgiving and Christmas. They seemed to Cole just as lovely and vulnerable.
Cole finished arranging the things he’d brought from the house on a cloth at the bottom of the porch steps and went to join the others. “The smaller the area, the less energy it will take to seal and maintain,” he told them. “Try not to go more than a few feet from the cabin. Go around the cars, though. We might need them. Are we re
ady to start?”
Bobby nodded, and Cam whispered, “Yes, Cole.”
Cole retrieved from the stairs a shot-glass-sized vial of oil. He’d made it in the early spring, on the night of Ostara, the spring equinox, just before Bobby and Cam came back to him. Infused with bitter nettles, rose hips, lily of the valley, and the thin March sun, it warmed his palm. A tiny shard of opal floated near the bottom, for protection. After letting a few drops trickle onto the fingertips of his left hand, Cole knelt in front of Cam. Chilly, jagged rocks bit his bare knees as he touched the knob of bone above Cam’s big toe. Then he leaned forward and pressed his lips to the creamy skin of Cam’s perfect dancer’s foot.
“Bless your feet that tread the sacred path,” he said.
He rose to his knees, anointed his fingers again, and touched the seam in the center of Cam’s scrotum. He ran his hands over the V of muscle that stretched from Cam’s hipbones to his groin. His fingers left glistening trails. Cam was so perfectly proportioned. Every bend and curve flowed into every other with the grace of a slow river. Cole rested his palms for a second over the trail of dandelion hair on Cam’s belly. Then he lifted Cam’s cock, shrunken by the cold, and let the head balance on his lower lip. Cam inhaled and instinctively touched the back of Cole’s head. Cole opened his lips a fraction more, so that they encircled Cam’s cock when he kissed it. He couldn’t resist tapping the slit with the tip of his tongue before he broke away. Most of the books he’d read suggested saying something about fertility at this point, but it never seemed appropriate, so he just whispered, “Bless you here.” Forms of fecundity existed beyond creating more humans, and Cole had long ago forsaken the so-called wisdom in New-Age manuals.
Cole stood and took both of Cam’s hands. He held them in front of his chest and kissed each of his knuckles. “Bless the hands that hold the wand.”
For several moments Cole looked into Cam’s forest-pool eyes, beautiful and awe-inspiring in the way only nature can be. Then he touched Cam’s lower lip with the oil, took his cheeks in both hands, and kissed him on the mouth. Cam’s lower lip, trembling from the cold, slipped between Cole’s lips. Cole swept his tongue across it, and then he withdrew his mouth. But he leaned in again, nipping at the coral-colored bow of Cam’s lips a second, and then a third time. Cam relaxed his jaw, and Cole wanted nothing more than to kiss him deeply, but it would have to wait.