Coal to Diamonds (11 page)

“There’s no one left to make you behave,” Thorn said. “They’ve all gone.” He flicked his pointed tongue from one end of Cole’s jaw to the other, stopping at his ear. Cole shivered at the moist trail it left. “It’s just me now. I love you as you are, the dark as well as the light. And I won’t desert you. Ever. Do you believe me?”

“I guess so.”

Biting Cole’s lobe, breaking the skin, Thorn breathed through clenched teeth, “Cole. Do you believe me?” His voice betrayed the passion boiling inside of him. Being wanted like that, enough to make the reserved Darius Thorn display his lust, made Cole’s cock leak the first drop of precome just below his belly button. He circled his hips, erratically thrusting into open air.

“Let me see it,” Thorn said, rolling on top of his apprentice, nothing but his silk underwear separating their bodies. “Bring it out.” Cole knew Thorn meant the power caged inside him: the power and the malevolence.

Fingernails scraped along Cole’s ribcage. Scratches opened over his throat and heart. He thrashed, straining against his fetters. He wanted to seize Thorn’s hips and heave them against his own. When he tried to thrust his ass up against Thorn’s erection, Thorn lifted his body with a snigger. Cole spread his legs and brought his knees up along Thorn’s sides, dizzy with lust. He groaned with frustration as Thorn slipped away, moving his cock away from Cole’s crack.

Cole crossed his ankles behind Thorn’s back, trying to trap him. A stinging slap on his thigh made him let go. Thorn’s teeth, tongue, and nails continued to hurt and tease him, driving him closer and closer to the precipice. Everything throbbed: his pulse in his head, his aching cock, the bites and scratches covering his body.

“You want me, don’t you?” Thorn said savagely. “You want me to fuck you.” As a tease, he nudged Cole’s hole with the head of his cock. Just as Cole scooted forward, Thorn pulled away again and rested his penis beside Cole’s own.

“Yes!” Cole panted. “You’re driving me crazy!”

“Do you want it hard? Want me to make it hurt?”

“Yes!”

“Show me your power. Bring it out.”

As Thorn plowed his tongue into Cole’s mouth, Cole tried to induce the trance state that would allow him to tap his energies. He didn’t plan to show his teacher everything he had; he’d give him just enough of a taste to stop Thorn’s merciless taunting. He wouldn’t let out more than he could master. The distraction of Thorn’s tongue roving over his teeth and the roof of his mouth made it difficult to concentrate. Cole disengaged his own tongue and let it fall, still and passive. He compacted the frustration, gathered all of the unrelieved tension in his belly into a tight, white-hot ball between his hipbones. Comet-like bursts spread from this source down his legs and up through his chest. His skin warmed. Psychic flames skipped over the surface as if he were covered in gasoline. The more Thorn provoked him, the more energy Cole raised, transmuting his unrequited lust to raw power. His master rewarded him by finally removing his silk shorts and letting them crumple at the foot of the bed.

“Oh, that’s quite good.” Thorn groaned with satisfaction and rubbed his cock against Cole’s belly. The moist tip slid up and down the side of Cole’s penis, driving him further into a frenzy. “Give me more.” He grabbed both of their cocks in his hand, squeezed hard, and stroked them twice in unison.

Cole would have to be careful. He wanted Thorn so badly he’d lose control if he didn’t monitor the situation closely. But that was almost impossible with Thorn tightening his fingers around his shaft and Thorn smearing both of their fluids in circles over Cole’s crown with his thumb. Foot-tall flames danced around him, flaring higher than Thorn’s shoulders. Instead of the blue-tipped, orange fire he’d glimpsed with Cole and Bobby, this energy bloomed liver-dark at the edges and deepened almost to black closer to his body. Cole had suspected that Thorn was changing him, and now he saw how profoundly. Or maybe the blackness had always been within him, contained only by Cam and Bobby’s goodness.

“Fuck me, Thorn,” Cole panted. “Fuck me now.” The flames stretched toward the fabric canopy despite his attempts to damper them back. A charcoal smell told him his hair and nails smoldered.

“Are you bad?” Thorn asked, slipping his cock along Cole’s crack, over but not inside his asshole.

“Yes! Please—”

“Are you a malicious, evil man?”

“Yes!” He’d reached that pinnacle of lust and frustration where he’d say anything. He barely realized he spoke at all as he pushed against Thorn with all his might. In about half a minute, he’d burn through the ties that held him, flip Thorn on his back, pin him down, and sit on that sharp-looking cock until the whole thing sunk into his body. He’d ride him until he made Thorn come three times. “Now!” he growled.

“All right, wicked, wicked little Cole,” Thorn said with an infuriating calm. He walked forward on his knees until he straddled Cole’s chest. As Cole watched, he rubbed lube that caught the firelight over his erection in the slowest, most teasing way he could, smiling down at Cole’s flushed face the entire time. But when he pressed Cole’s knees to his shoulders and wrenched his legs apart, it was urgent, violent. “Are you ready?”

Robbed even of speech by his lust, Cole just groaned. Thorn spread his cheeks and pushed inside him with no pretense of gentleness until Cole felt his coarse pubic hair against his sensitive skin. Cole squealed at the tearing sensation. They moved against each other furiously, the flames expanding past the edges of the bed. Cole’s balls slapped against his lover’s stomach. Skin met and parted with damp, rapid smacks like enthusiastic applause. A film of sweat formed where Cole’s calves met Thorn’s gaunt shoulders.

“All of it,” Thorn hissed. Cole opened his legs further and bent his spine up toward Thorn, letting Thorn penetrate him more deeply. The older man laughed. “No, not that! All of your power. Let me see it.”

Then they heard something outside. Thorn paused inside Cole to listen. Someone pounded against the door of the house beside theirs. Both knew that, for the third time that week, their neighbor had come home drunk and been locked out by his wife.

“Carol,” the man wailed in a drunken slur. “Open the door, you goddamn bitch!” His boot met the wood. Soon the neighborhood dogs joined the cacophony. “Bitch! Whore! Open up!” the man chanted again and again.

“Asshole,” Cole said, angry at being interrupted.

Thorn started fucking him again with long, slow strokes that found just the right place inside. He stroked Cole’s cock with a lube-slicked fist.

“Unlock this door, you dirty slut!”

“Why don’t you shut him up?” Thorn breathed.

“N-No. Not that.”

“Why?” Thorn picked up speed. The headboard slammed against the wall and the drapery swished. “Why waste all this delicious power we’ve raised? Teach the people of this town some respect. They’ve mistreated you all of your life. Set them to right.”

“I’ll kill you if you don’t let me in this house, whore!”

“Cole, shut him up.”

It was hard to think about anything but his impending orgasm, but Cole released the massive store of energy with a shout. Thorn spoke the truth; they all deserved it. Thorn wouldn’t look at him with fear or disgust after Cole had done the deed. What was to stop him? “
Teleute
!” he called, and the burning ball burst forth. At the same time, he came across his stomach so hard he feared he’d pass out. He screamed again, and the drunken man’s voice ceased. Only the braying of the dogs broke the night’s silence. One by one they were scolded by their owners and went back to sleep. Cole felt the life force extinguish, like a candle’s flame pinched and fizzled between his finger and thumb. Exhilarated, terrified, drunk on magic and power, he trembled as his cock leaked out the last of his release. He felt so overloaded with sensation that he wanted to cry. He also wanted to shout and jump up and down like a star athlete. Thorn continued to stroke him, drawing him closer and closer to the edge of what he could endure. When Cole thought he’d lose his mind from the intensity of it all, Thorn bucked forward and filled Cole’s ass.

The orgasm drained Cole’s excess energy, and he felt relaxed, satisfied, and sleepy. Thorn untied him and stretched across his chest. The lake of semen squished between their bellies. “And how did that feel?” Thorn asked.

Fucking Thorn amidst that cloak of magic, orgasming until he almost blacked out, his power swooping down like a bird of prey, wielding the guiltless power of a god—

There were no words for it. He’d reveled in killing and nobody would try to make him regret it. Cole’s body trembled to the core. He giggled, touching Thorn’s hair lightly. He laughed and laughed with the delight and abandon of a child. Tears streamed down his face. Giddy, feeling almost drugged, he gasped for air and then laughed some more. Thorn hugged him tightly and joined in. Cole laughed more in that quarter of an hour than he had in all the rest of his life combined. Finally, he fell asleep smiling, chuckling softly now and then at his dreams.

C
HRISTMAS
and the New Year passed unobserved by Cole and Thorn. The house next door was abandoned and closed off, awaiting sale. Long gray days stretched into weeks. Rain fell instead of snow, gradually eroding the mounds of ice the plows had pushed into heaps along the sidewalks. In some of the yards, patches of yellow grass could be seen through gaps in the coating of white. Winter had lost its sparkle; the snow had hardened and acquired a dirty crust. Around the village, the post-holiday depression hung like a cloud. The residents went through the motions of their lives, sleepwalking to work in the frosty mornings and stumbling home with the groceries at night. Even the children lost their fascination with the snow and trudged to and from school with stooped shoulders, resembling the igloos and round-bellied men they’d built, now caving in on themselves with the coming warmth. With the festivity of the holidays past, nothing remained to anticipate but the coming of spring, and it felt very far off.

Cole spent his days reading Thorn’s ancient books, learning to understand Babylonian and Greek. His master insisted he study traditional magical methodology, to understand its principles, even if he didn’t plan to put them into practice. Usually Cole rose around noon and took his place in the velvet armchair beside the parlor window. Sometimes he let his tome lay open in his lap and watched the street outside. Sipping coffee, he stared for hours at the people coming and going. The habit of reaching beside his right hip, where his wand would have waited, while less frequent, hadn’t abandoned him. The memory of what he’d given up lived in his muscles and skin as much as his mind. His tongue craved the flavor of Cam’s sweat, the place between his shoulder blades, the hard warmth of Bobby’s chest. His fingers, when the despair started to seep in, instinctively clutched for the comfort of the oak stick. When they closed around nothing, hopelessness washed over Cole, and he sat staring sightlessly at the gray sky, without even the ambition to lift his head.

But like a man who’d lost one of his senses and been compensated by the sharpening of the senses that remained, other pleasures grew sweeter to Cole in the wake of those that had been taken. He and Thorn held their ceremonies almost every night, and the power they produced multiplied each time. By now Cole could shatter a board and send a person walking up his porch steps flat on his belly from many blocks away. If the skittering feet of a squirrel troubled his studies, it fell to the ground, fur smoldering. When he sat at Thorn’s desk, in front of his computer, he found he could no longer care about his work. The struggles of his characters felt trivial; his prose came clumsily. Stripped of the ability and desire to create, he reveled in destruction. Vengeance, the punishment of those who’d harmed him or his lovers, had always pleased him, but he’d never delighted in pain and death as he now did.

One night, when the first coiled yellow buds weighted the branches of the forsythia in the yard, Thorn rolled off his apprentice and untied Cole’s wrists, which he’d bound to Cole’s ankles. The outline of their bodies had been burned into the parquet floor of the dining room. As the older man sat up and stretched his lank arms over his head, Cole contemplated Thorn’s destruction. He considered it without the malice or fear that had possessed him when he’d sat at breakfast in his cabin, so long ago. Thorn’s death seemed a mere academic problem, detached from grief or judgment. Like a soldier reminiscing about a lost victory, Cole could, in retrospect, see every misstep the three of them had made.

“Why the sad expression, love?” Thorn asked, running a pointed nail along Cole’s jaw to his chin.

“Thinking,” Cole said.

“About them?”

“They’re getting fuzzy. I can’t remember exactly how Bobby stood, how Cammy’s lips curved.”

“You don’t need them. They left you. Look how strong you’ve become.”

“I wonder if they’re together. I hope so.”

“Cole, who cares? If you want me to, I’ll get you new boys to play with. As many as you’d like.”

“No.” Cole decided, as the other man stood and stabbed at the remains of their chicken dinner with a serving fork, that Thorn would die. The realization seemed to Cole inevitable: the sun would set, the moon would rise. As he began to plan, he neither wished his lover gone nor felt sadness at the coming loss. Thorn’s destruction would be a way to occupy his hours, a test of his newly sharpened tools. No longer could Cole protect, or create, or love, but he could, and would, tear down. He could sow the seeds of Chaos, and let them bloom as they would.

That night, Cole lay awake among the tangle of aubergine bedclothes. Beside him, Thorn slept, not with the slack jaw and languorous distorted limbs of most, but on his back with his arms folded over his belly. He looked as though he’d only just closed his eyes. Staring down at his deliberate features, Cole searched his heart a final time for any signal not to proceed. Finding nothing, no emotion at all, he crept quietly from beneath the sheets and crossed the chilly room. He dressed in the hall, and then paused in front of the study, staring at the dawn-muted colors of the pillows on the floor, waiting to see if they, or the low-hung chandelier, evoked within him a flicker of nostalgia: longing for good times past or ire over former slights. When nothing ignited, he twisted three of the cold-brittle tapers from their holders, stalked softly down the stairs, and found his boots beside the back door.