The Left-Hand Path
Page 7
One book at the bottom corner of the shelf drew her attention. It was bound in pale, stained leather held together by thick, sinuous thread. Red lettering that she couldn’t identify marked the spine, and as she carefully plucked it from its place, the leather seemed to warm quickly under her touch. The pages were thick like handmade parchment; she took her time turning each one for fear of damaging it. It was handwritten inside in Hebrew and Greek, and the passages were interspersed with inscriptions of summoning circles, pentagrams, and various other demonic-looking things, but in the later pages, the handwriting was neater—slower, somehow, and each sheet bore a delicate, perfect drawing of an herb, flower, or cross-cut stone. She ran her fingertips slowly over the ink and found herself faintly smiling.
“What are you doing in here?”
Cora shrieked and scrambled to hold onto the book in her hands, scurrying back toward the wall on instinct. Thomas stood in the doorway, staring at her with a tight-lipped frown. She hadn’t heard him come up the stairs, and the door had made no sound.
“Jesus Christ,” she sighed, letting the book drop back into her lap. “You scared the shit out of me!”
“What. Are you doing. In here.”
“I wasn’t doing anything!” she countered, though she felt a little small under his stony expression. “I just wanted to see the books. You said you’d teach me, but then you just disappeared into the cellar like always!”
“So you broke into my room.”
“Well,” Cora started, the protest momentarily dying on her lips as guilt twisted her stomach. She did her best to crush the feeling and replace it with indignation instead. “What am I supposed to do? Just sit on my hands all day?”
A restrained sigh slipped from Thomas, but he didn’t raise his voice. “Do you even know what you’re holding?”
Cora quirked an eyebrow at him. “A...book?”
“That’s human leather.”
She recoiled instantly, the book falling from her hands and landing face down on the floor. “Oh, fucking gross, Thomas!”
“Oh, for—it’s also irreplaceable!” He reached down to snatch it up before it could settle on its bent pages and smoothed the parchment with his palm.
“Sorry!”
“Just get out.” His voice was a little more strained now, as if it was getting harder for him not to shout. “I said you could stay, but I didn’t say you could invade my privacy and go through my things.”
Cora stood slowly like a guilty child and took a few steps toward the door, but she lingered just inside the room. “You said you would teach me. What are you doing down there by yourself all the time, anyway?”
“Minding my own business, mostly,” he answered without turning around.
She sighed harshly and lifted her hands, letting them slap back to her thighs in exasperation. “Thomas, come on,” she said. “You were almost friendly last night, for a second. I want to help these people as badly as you do. Show me how. Please,” she added, trying to sound a little softer.
Thomas shut the book gently and went still. “You can’t do what I do, Cora.”
The young woman snorted at him. “Says fuckin’ who, man? What makes you so special? You’re human, aren’t you? So let me try!”
He didn’t reply right away. She could see the tension in his shoulders, but then it slowly eased, and he knelt down to set the book back in its place on the shelf. “I need to go into town for supplies,” he finally said. “You can help me carry them.”
“Help you carry—”
“We’ll get things that you’ll need, too.”
She blinked up at him as he turned to face her at last, her cheeks heating faintly. “Oh,” she said, hoping it sounded enough like a careless scoff. “Well okay then.”
“Now get out of my room. Let’s go.”
Thomas closed and locked the door behind them and led her down the stairs to the front door, scooping up a small leather satchel on his way and slinging it over one shoulder. He didn’t speak to her while they waited for their Lyft, or during the entire ride into town, but the driver had the radio on, at least, so it wasn’t completely silent and weird the whole way. The scenery was rocky, all steep cliffs and tall, gnarled trees that occasionally gave way to brief views of the distant waters of the Atlantic. It looked cold—a fitting landscape for the chilled winds that swept down the streets toward the town.
The car dropped them off at the end of a pedestrian street paved with red stones and lined with restaurants, shops, cafes, and even a couple of tattoo parlors. Cora walked a few steps behind Thomas in an attempt to take everything in, but he wasn’t slowing down for her. The only pause he took was to answer the greeting of a man in filthy clothes and pass him some folded money with a brief nod.
He finally stopped in front of a store with a flat concrete front, its windows hung with various runes made of twine and twigs in between bunches of drying herbs. A wooden sign above the window read “Witch City Wares” in black-burned letters, and a number of baskets sat in the windowsill. A tiny bell chimed as Thomas pushed the door open, and the scent of oils filled Cora’s nostrils as soon as she stepped inside. The lighting in the shop was dim, and the whole place was fragrant and cozy—candles of every color filled an entire shelf beside others lined with bottles of oils and stacks of incense, and glass cases formed the counter, stocked with jewelry and bones and stone runes and leather-bound books. Stacked baskets held feathers, wrapped sage, scraps of labeled wood and piles of sorted stones. It gave her the same sort of crowded, magic-filled feeling as Nathan’s old apartment used to, and she smiled and hugged her elbows to keep from touching everything in reach.
“Can we live here instead?” she asked quietly, but Thomas didn’t answer her.
He seemed immune to the shop’s charms; he made his way to the counter without a word and retrieved a silver dollar sized wooden coin from the pocket of his cardigan, which he set gently on the counter between himself and the woman attending the register. The visible surface of the wood showed a carving like a flower made by a compass, which drew a sharp inhale from the older woman behind the glass counter. She looked down at the coin with an uneasy frown on her lips, then looked back up at Thomas without fully raising her head. She spared a glance at the few other customers wandering the shop before she spoke in a low voice.
“Where did you get this?”
“It’s a family heirloom,” Thomas said dryly.
“Is that so,” the woman murmured. She took a step closer to the counter and tilted her head at him, spilling a few heavy locks of loose blonde curls over her shoulder. “Haven’t seen one of you here in a long time. We’d started to think you were all dead.”
“Not yet. Can I buy from you?”
“From what I have, sure.” The woman’s pale eyes flicked over to the young woman at Thomas’s side and narrowed faintly. “Who is this?”
“She’s mine,” Thomas answered easily. “Show me what you have, please.” Cora looked up at his profile, a little taken aback by how easily he claimed ownership over her, but she let it go without comment.
“This way,” the woman said. Thomas tucked his token back into his pocket and followed the woman around to the back of the shop, through a door and up a set of narrow wooden stairs. They waited while she unlocked the door at the top with a sturdy iron key, and Cora squinted in the faint light of the single wire-strung bulb hanging from the ceiling. A few silk-covered tables filled the room, the black cloth sprinkled with various herbs. The room felt colder than the rest of the shop despite being upstairs, and Cora got the distinct feeling that she shouldn’t touch anything.
“What are you looking for?” the shopkeeper asked, and Thomas scanned the covered tables as though he could tell what lay underneath the silk.
“I need the lónchi, and the machaíri me mávri laví. Hemlock and mercury. Do you have animals?”
Cora narrowed her eyes at him uncertainly while the woman pulled back one of the cloths to reveal a narrow silver kn
ife and matching spadelike blade. “Animals?” she whispered.
“I can get them,” the shop owner answered. “What do you need?”
“Magpie. And black cat. No stipulations.”
Cora reached up to tug on the sleeve of his sweater. “What do you need animals for, Thomas?”
He didn’t look at her. “Can you have them to the house by tonight?”
“I should be able to.” She turned from him to carefully wrap his chosen blades in herbs and spare silk and handed him the bundle in exchange for the money he passed to her. “Do you mean the house I think you mean?”
“It hasn’t moved.” Thomas tucked the cloth wrapping into the bag at his hip, then urged Cora back down the stairs and slid the satchel from his shoulder and handed it off to her. “Here. You’re helping.”
She took the bag automatically, glancing down at it for a moment before opening her mouth to protest.
“Now what do you need?” he asked, cutting her off before her argument could begin.
“Oh.” She paused near the counter, holding Thomas’s bag in both hands. “I don’t...really know, I guess.”
“Well what is it that you do? What’s your specialty?”
She pursed her lips. “I guess...I don’t have one? I know some things that I learned in school, and Nathan gave me my bracelet.” She lifted her wrist to show him the charms around her wrist. “So I can do some things he’s taught me. I’m getting pretty good at healing poultices. And Nathan was trying to get me to learn divination. He said I had a knack for it, but...I don’t know.”
“Divination is a rare skill. If you really do have a knack, you should nurture it. What have you tried?”
“Nathan had me use a candle and a mirror, and then a lake. The lake worked pretty well, but...I think it backfired somehow.” She peeked around at the other shoppers nearby before looking back at him. “It didn’t go well afterward; put it that way.” She wasn’t willing to talk about Chasers and forest monsters out loud in public, even in a Salem witch shop.
Thomas nodded without pressing for detail. “A lake is a good choice, but not very practical.” He leaned slightly to look around her and slipped past to reach a far shelf. He chose a flat obsidian disc, only about four inches wide, and handed it to her. “This is a scrying mirror. It serves the same purpose as the lake or the candle, and I can treat it to make it more effective for you.” Without waiting for a response, he turned from her again and began to pick out an assortment of herbs, oils, and stones, which he placed on the counter. Cora recognized most of them from her poultices and tonics but couldn’t name the purpose of them all.
She set down the scrying mirror and began to dig in her purse for her money—she wouldn’t try to glamour a witch shop—but she barely had her wallet in her hand before Thomas had paid and the woman behind the counter was packing up their purchases. Cora hesitated, wanting to protest that she wasn’t a child who needed things bought for her, but Thomas wasn’t even looking at her. He had offered to get the stuff in the first place, she guessed.
“Thanks,” she said instead, and she thought his face was just a little less grim as he handed the bag off to her. She happily carried Thomas’s bag on her shoulder and the shop bag in one hand as she followed him out, and she walked with him to the end of the street to wait for their car.
Rolling forward and backward on the balls of her feet, she stared at the side of his face for a while before speaking again. “So, are we going to talk about how weird it was in there?”
“It wasn’t weird.”
“It wasn’t weird? What was that thing you showed her? Why did she know you and where you live? What was all that ‘we thought you were all dead’ talk? What’s your deal, really? You are human, aren’t you? You’re not some secret monster who throws people in their murder cellar?”
A soft, sharp exhale that could almost have been mistaken for a hint of laughter escaped Thomas as he dropped his head slightly. “Yes. I’m human.”
“So then what?”
“I told you before—the name matters to some people. My family has lived here a long time. That’s all.”
“I guess that’s an answer. Most importantly, though, why do you need a knife and a black cat, Thomas?”
His thin frown returned, and he didn’t answer.
She edged closer to him and leaned in to whisper, “Is this demon stuff?”
Thomas snapped his gaze over to her. “It’s definitely not something we should be discussing here.”
Cora retreated under his glare and made a show of zipping her lips, which didn’t seem to amuse him. She stayed quiet on the drive back to the house, only greeting and thanking their driver, but as soon as they were back inside the creaky old home, she set their new supplies on the sofa and returned to her questioning as though there hadn’t been a solid half hour break.
“Elton said you summon demons,” she said.
Thomas walked past her and took his bag from the sofa, but he didn’t walk away from her this time.
“Is it true?”
“Yes,” he said after a moment’s hesitation. “Sort of. Really it’s only one.”
“He said it’s really dangerous.”
“Not for me.”
“Why not?” She took a seat on the sofa to listen. She left enough space for him, but he didn’t move to join her.
“I...have an arrangement with it.”
“An arrangement?” She frowned up at him. “Nathan uses that word. Does this demon possess you, too?”
“Not yet,” Thomas answered in a softer voice. He fidgeted with his bag as though it required his attention just to keep from meeting her gaze. “But someday, I suppose. In a way.”
“What does that mean? Is this a sold your soul to the devil situation?” she asked with a quiet laugh that died in her throat at the weary frown deepening on Thomas’s lips.
“Yes.” He took a short breath and finally turned his head to look at her. “I made a deal. In exchange for the abilities and knowledge the demon has given me, it gets...whatever is left of me when I die.”
“That’s crazy,” Cora breathed. “So have you...I mean, could you do the sort of thing Nathan does, if you wanted to? Become young again?”
“I doubt it would let me.” Thomas shook his head. “I have the time that I have. Thirty years—that’s how long I have to use these gifts. No more, and...no less,” he added, returning his eyes to the bag in his hands.
“Thirty years?” she echoed. “That’s it? Like, thirty years exactly, or...”
“June 14th, 2036.”
Cora sat back on the couch and stared up at him, mouth open in disbelief. “Thomas, I’m...I’m sorry.”
“It was my decision.”
“But still—”
“I told you because you asked, not because I wanted your sympathy,” he cut her off.
Cora watched him for a few beats of silence, chewing her bottom lip. It was bad enough to do the dangerous things that they did all the time, not knowing when something was going to go wrong and you might end up in a Magistrate cell or at the end of a noose, but to know the actual day of your death, and to know that some terrible spirit was waiting for you to fall into its open jaws—she couldn’t imagine.
“So,” she started quietly, “let me help. How I can. Teach me to help you.”
Thomas peeked back up at her, brow furrowed, but he seemed softer now. “Even knowing what I do?”
“I want to help you make the most of it. More work gets done with two, right?”
The faintest smile may have touched one corner of his lips as he nodded. “All right. But there’s a lot you need to know before you can enter the cellar. It won’t be pleasant while you’re down there. There are risks. You need to be sure that you’re prepared to do as I say—or I can’t guarantee your safety.”
“Jesus,” Cora murmured. “It’s that intense, huh?”
“Yes. So you need to be committed. I won’t blame you if you change your mind.”
“The last couple of days don’t bear that out.”
“Do you want help or what? Don’t be a shit.”
Thomas snorted softly and took a few steps toward the hidden cellar door before pausing. “First—are you on your period?”
She halted mid-step behind him. “What?”
“You won’t be able to enter if you’re impure.”
“My period makes me impure?” When Thomas only shrugged, she sighed. “No, I’m not.”
“When did you have sex last? Recently?”
Cora narrowed her eyes at him in suspicion. “Are you kidding me right now? Is this to get back at me for saying I needed your semen?”
He gestured toward the cellar. “I don’t make the rules, Cora.”
“How is this possibly—” She stopped and let out a quick huff, then lifted her hands in brief surrender before returning them to her hips. “Fine. Okay. No, I’m not on my period, and I guess the last time I had sex was...a couple weeks ago, maybe?”
“More than nine days?”
“Yeah, for sure.”
Cora expected some sort of reaction to the information that she’d been to bed with someone so recently—maybe judgment that she didn’t seem to be in a relationship, or at least curiosity about whether her partner had been one of her traveling companions, but Thomas only nodded and said, “All right. You’ll still need to be cleansed, but this is a good start.”
“Glad I’m not too impure to be around your demon,” she scoffed.
“You will be glad once you’re down there.” Thomas checked his watch and glanced back toward the closed cellar. “We’ll do it tonight. I need time to prepare. Can you behave yourself for a few hours?”