Coal to Diamonds Read online

  “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.

  CHRISTMAS 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 fl
oor 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.

  As he searched the rooms, Cole realized just how little of Darius Thorn the house contained. He possessed no photographs, subscribed to no magazines. None of his belongings felt personal. It was more like they’d been chosen by a decorator than by the home’s owner. Cole’s golden-brown fingers skipped over folded mint-green placemats and copper-bottom cook pots as he made his way through the surreal dim silver of the kitchen toward the enclosed porch. It felt more like perusing a department store than a person’s residence. Nothing, not even the expensive overcoat swaying on the brass hook, held any of the essence of Cole’s teacher.

  In the cold of the mudroom, among the hedge trimmers, broken flower pots and plastic watering cans, Cole unearthed a large cardboard box hidden beneath a moldy black tarpaulin. Opening the lid, he discovered a collection of old objects that looked like they’d been through a fire: bits of ceramic charred black, old brocade fabric, dry-rotted and singed at the edges, odd-shaped lumps of melted silver, confetti of crumbling, scorched paper, and even the head of a porcelain doll with its chin cracked, its white skin sooty, and its hair melted. Inches of ash and charcoal waited beneath the rubble. Cole filled an empty fertilizer bag with several handfuls of the debris and then returned the box to its original location.

  The walk to the cabin took Cole three hours. When he arrived, the sky had turned to a soft blue that bled to champagne pink along the tops of the mountains: a spring morning. A pile of things he’d left behind, books and clothing, mostly, sat at the foot of the porch steps awaiting the garbage truck. For a moment Cole considered rifling through the stack, to see if he’d find anything he might like to keep, but in the end he walked past. Inside he found his table, his dishes, and his bottles of liquor gone. A layer of dust covered the countertops, floor, and the top of the woodstove. The old couch remained in front of the hearth, and its presence triggered a flash of images in Cole’s mind: glistening naked bodies entwined in pleasure. The stab he felt surprised him, unused as he was to the sensation. He paused a moment, his palm on the plaid upholstery, before continuing back down the hall to the bedroom.

  As he’d known he would, Cole found a wooden chest behind a loose board. He brought it out, knelt, and flung the lid open. Carefully he lifted a blue-and-white nylon jersey from within. Unfolding it, he read “Forester” above a large embroidered “34.” He lifted it to his face, inhaling, hoping for a ghost of Bobby’s scent, but found only a slight mustiness. Next he removed a newspaper article that read, “Local High School Production Earns Attention of Big-City Talent Scouts.” There in black and white was Cam, his perfect adolescent body swathed in a tight, sequined leotard as he portrayed Ariel in The Tempest. Cole couldn’t resist petting Cam’s paper cheek. His finger smudged the ink. Beneath the paper, he found one of the peacock feathers that had adorned the young actor’s locks during the performance. Last of all, he picked up a ream of paper held in a red plastic binder: the draft of his first novel.

  Returning to the fireplace, Cole set his things and Thorn’s on the floor by his knees. He opened the iron stove door. The cabin’s owners had removed the wood and kindling, but Cole no longer needed fuel to conjure a flame. He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, a lemon-colored blaze roared to life. The fire grew, embers spiraling up the chimney. Cole heard a scuffling, and chips of creosote rained down a moment before a brown bat, no longer than his thumb, crashed on the floor of the stove, disturbing the pyramid of fire, making the flames fan out like a flower opening. The creature screeched. Without thinking, letting his intuition reign, Cole reached into the inferno and plucked the bat up in his fist. Fur smoking, it beat its wings feebly against its bonds. With a hard, quick squeeze, Cole slayed it. Blood splattered and pooled on the floor, and with his opposite pinky, Cole copied the symbols flashing through his mind onto the limestone hearth in scarlet. He worked furiously, his fingers flying, the way an inspired mathematician scribbled equations across a board. Panting, he returned his sacrificial victim to its pyre, where the little corpse sizzled and smoked.

  Since he had only the roughest outline of a spell planned, Cole let his thoughts go quiet and his body fall still. Soon the magic filled him and his limbs moved and his lips spoke without his intent, directed like a marionette on a string. First he held the candles over the fire, softening the wax into a single, soft, malleable lump. He worked it in his hands, forming a ball. Then he began to knead the scorched things he’d found in the box into the mixture: the sharp pieces of broken crockery, the bits of metal and scraps of paper and cloth. Black ash colored the putty, turning it from sallow cream to murky, inconsistent gray. When he’d finished, Cole set the bizarre batter on the iron top of the stove, so it would remain warm and pliable.

  He gently lifted the piece of crumbling newsprint with hands steady with purpose and flickering with power. With a last look at Cam’s youthful, smiling face, Cole whispered, “Baby, where are you?” before crumpling the article into a ball and surrendering it. For all Cole knew, he might have beheld the image of his friend for the last time. He ripped a strip of fabric from the sleeve of Bobby’s football uniform and wrapped it snugly around the wrinkled paper. Lastly, he ripped a few pages from the beginning of his manuscript and looked down at the block letters, remembering the worlds he’d forged, the people birthed from his mind. They’d meant so much once. Now he shredded the pages into strips, securing them around the other relics he’d saved only to obliterate.

  Holding the wad of memories in his fists in front of his heart, Cole closed his eyes. It hurt giving these things up, hurt like his heart being wrenched from his chest, but as Thorn had shown him, sacrifice held great power. Cole also knew that by relinquishing these articles
, he was giving up a large part of himself. When he set them to burn, as he would do very soon, he would burn away much of his identity, of the Cole who loved and created. But he would rise, phoenixlike, from the ashes, a new and different being, stronger, harder, a diamond from coal. He would sacrifice his former self to his evolving self, cull away the mortal pieces, and offer them up to his god-form. Conjuring the fire in his belly, Cole directed it up the sides of his waist and down his arms, while at the same time squashing the clump of fabric and paper between his palms. In his mind’s eye, he saw a sphere of black flame surrounding his hands as he concentrated on his endeavor, losing awareness of the walls around him, the floor beneath his legs, the world outside, the past and the future.

  After a span of time that Cole couldn’t calculate, he opened his eyes and looked down. The bits of paper and scraps of nylon had not been incinerated, but transformed. The materials had compacted into a hard round mass the size of a golf ball. Veins of shimmering color, like blue gray and pink striations in marble, covered the surface. A faint but constant heat radiated from the small orb.

  Quickly, Cole folded the sooty wax from the top of the stove over the sparkling ball, covering it. Then he sculpted the concoction into a lumpy cylinder, vaguely human-shaped, and placed the desiccated doll’s head on the top. Visually his model looked nothing like Thorn, resembling more a primitive canopic jar or a grisly Russian nesting doll with a fat belly and wide base. But in essence he had made Darius Thorn. The blackened ceramic jutted out along the sides in prickly triangles, just like his teacher’s dark aura. All of the spirit of Thorn had been unmistakably encased in the clumsy-looking portrait. Satisfied, Cole lifted it, noting the deadly heat pulsing inside, and carried it back to the bedroom. Before he placed what he’d made safely behind the loose board, where the curse would be undisturbed by the cabin’s future tenants, he lifted it level with his face and kissed the doll head’s cracked and misshapen lips. Tenderly he stroked the crinkled hair and whispered, “Good-bye, my love.”