Epilogue The Bane of My Existence #2
I confess now to a sin I committed against you long ago, though you do not remember my betrayal. I have carried this weight upon my shoulders and now set it upon yours. Please forgive me.
Against your wishes, in violation of your trust, I saw the evil in the so-called Queen of Rot that you were blind to, and I attempted to rip that evil out at the root.
But the Necromancer has grown a new shoot that I fear will strangle you.
It is because of me that the Tribunal intervened where you could not.
It is because of me that your memories were siphoned.
Pray that you never remember. This guilt has lived inside me, taking on a life of its own though mine has ended.
I tell you this now, my friend, for I hid something of the Queen of Rot’s in your home, in the room sealed behind an Intentions Lock.
Something that certain people would do anything to get their hands on.
It is the Necromancer’s diary. Abominations are contained within its pages.
You must ensure it does not fall into the wrong hands.
Beware of Cora. She is more than she seems.
Malachy crumpled the Death Parchment in his shaking fist. A swarming panic obliterated his thoughts.
Ghose. The Ruination Stone. Magic-draining Sephrinium. The Queen of Rot’s diary. Cora.
Evil.
Memories of the Queen of Rot had been ransacked from his mind by the previous Master Memnomancer, and evidently at Lazlo’s behest. While the knife of the betrayal registered between Malachy’s ribs, he did not yet feel the accompanying pain. Why had his memories of this Necromancer been siphoned?
Master Virgil Carpathia’s parting words outside the Roman quarry floated through his mind.
Malachy traversed home to his library and opened a Bible for the first time in decades, searching for the verse Matthew 13:39.
The words he read were far from comforting.
“And the enemy who sowed them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels.”
Malachy recalled Ghose’s words before the Ouroboros trap closed around him in the mists of Purgatory: “The abomination will always die at the age of thirty.”
Cora had not registered Ghose’s final words, but Malachy had, and they had haunted him. Every prediction the late Master Chronomancer had made had come true. Malachy’s heart broke at the thought that Cora had less than six months until her thirty-first birthday on the Winter Solstice.
Beware of Cora. She is more than she seems.
Needing answers, Malachy traversed upstairs and sprinted down the second-floor hallway to the locked room at the end. He threw open the door and searched through the Profane relics and forbidden treasures, combing through every inch of the room for a diary he could not find.
The Queen of Rot’s diary was missing.
New Orleans, July 1921.
“Welcome to New Orleans, honey,” said Mrs. Brigitte Lakwa. “Can I get you some sweet tea?”
Southern hospitality was as slow and unhurried as the drawl of their accents.
New Orleans stretched until the two words melted into a languid Nawlins.
Cora wondered if everything, from words to manners, relaxed in this sticky heat.
She dabbed sweat off her forehead with an already saturated handkerchief.
Summer in New Orleans was its own particular kind of hell.
The hot, soupy air was more suited to drinking than breathing.
She didn’t need a mirror to know her hair was a damp, curling mass currently defying the laws of gravity.
When Master Samuel Lakwa had greeted her at the portal door, he had claimed she was lucky to arrive during the cool of the evening.
If this oppressive humidity was considered tolerable, she was daunted to find out what daytime was like.
A hot cup of sweet tea was the last thing Cora wanted, with the rivers of sweat coursing under her regrettably long-sleeved black dress. Insulting the Master Necromancer’s wife, however, was not the best start to a weeklong visit. “Yes, sweet tea would be lovely. Thank you, Mrs. Lakwa.”
“Oh, call me Brigitte, honey. Lord in Heaven, you hear that accent of hers, Sammy? Like a cool, fresh breeze off the Atlantic.”
Cora longed for such a cool breeze. Humidity pressed in on her like the clammy palms of a stranger. She dabbed her forehead again to no effect.
Still, New Orleans was an adventure. With the Tribunal’s Portal Key, Cora had for the first time in her life left behind the gloomy soot and endless bustle of London for a new city bursting with life.
What little she had glimpsed of New Orleans from the tinted windows of Lakwa’s personal motor car had been charming.
The city was permeated with its own sultry magic.
The Lakwa’s home was a stately mansion in the Garden District, with ornate wrought-iron balustrades on wraparound porches and black shutters against blush-colored brick. Grand oaks lined the gravel driveway, their sweeping boughs garlanded with silvery Spanish moss.
They sat on the back veranda overlooking the lavish gardens to catch the evening breeze. Breeze being a rather optimistic word for the swelter pressing down like a wet woolen blanket.
The tender sweetness of magnolia blossoms and fragrant kiss of oleanders scented the evening air thick with the chorus of droning cicadas, chirping crickets, and the slow gurgle of the Mississippi River.
And over the murmuring river came the whining drone of a million mosquitoes, waiting outside the protective ring of citronella candles like an invading army laying siege.
Brigitte Lakwa handed Cora a sweating glass of chilled sweet tea.
Iced tea was a novelty to Cora, and a welcome one.
She took a tentative sip. It was deliciously cold and syrupy sweet; one granule of sugar away from turning into a solid.
Cora approved. She drank down half the glass before coming up for air.
Brigitte laughed an easy laugh, belly-deep and slightly hoarse. “Poor thing, wiltin’ like an English rose. You get used to the heat, don’t you worry.”
“Is summer always this hot here?”
Another belly laugh. “Honey, July ain’t summer.
It’s a warning. Come August, it’ll be hotter than blue blazes and you’ll be rememberin’ this mild night fondly.
Good thing you didn’t turn up an hour earlier, when we were expecting you.
Figured you’d run into a lick of trouble on your way to New Orleans. How was your trip?”
Cora glanced at Master Lakwa before answering. Telling his human wife ‘other than feeling like my insides became my outsides while I traversed thousands of miles through a magic portal’ would not be a welcome response.
Lakwa both spared and surprised Cora when he said, “After all these years, traversing with Portal Keys still twists my stomach ten ways to Sunday.”
Cora shot Brigitte a quick, startled glance. Mrs. Lakwa was unfazed by her husband’s open discussion of secret magic. This was far from the first time Master Lakwa had violated the mage secrecy mandate. The Covenant did not apply to its enforcers, apparently.
“It wasn’t too bad,” Cora said carefully. “I’ve gotten more used to traversing with Malachy.”
Lakwa’s head tilted at her use of her boss’s first name.
His dark sunglasses flashed in the fading light.
Even as the sun at last mercifully sank below the horizon, and maids lit lanterns on the veranda and along the garden path, he kept his sunglasses on.
Beneath the dark lenses, his gaze felt ponderous.
“That so?” Lakwa said in his smooth, deep voice.
Removing his top hat, he ran a hand over the shaved dome of his head, gleaming ebony in the lantern’s glow.
In his fine black tailcoat, he was the portrait of a Southern gentleman, relaxing with a glass of rum and a pungent cigar as the night unfurled.
“Has Mr. Bane traversed you to many places?”
His tone was casual but the look behind those dark lenses was pointed. Cora paused, worried she would reveal too much about the nameless thing between her and Malachy, too new and fragile to be called a relationship.
“Malachy has traversed me around London mostly. He’s been, er, busy.” Spending most of the year under arrest by the Tribunal you sit upon, she left unsaid.
“Malachy Bane.” Brigitte rolled the name around her mouth like an unpleasant taste. “That Irishman thinks the sun comes up just so he can hear himself crow. He was here just last week with his fancy suit and subtle threats.”
Cora’s brows rose. Mal’s cryptic note—Out of town for a few days.
Yours, MB—now made sense a week later. He had cleared her path to New Orleans, cutting off potential sources of harm with the subtle blade of blackmail, the poisoned needle of coercion.
And he hadn’t told her. Annoyance and affection warred within her.
“Threatening the Master Necromancer himself, can you believe it?” Lakwa gave a good-natured chuckle. “The arrogance of that portal mage never ceases to amaze me.”
Cora’s mouth fell open at Lakwa’s candidness before his human wife. How many mages had the Master condemned to death for the same carelessness?
“I saw the devil in those dark eyes of his, Sammy,” said Brigitte. “What’s your relationship to Mr. Bane anyhow, Cora?”
The first word to rise out of Cora’s tangle of emotions was the last word Malachy had spoken before she left his office: love.
There had been love in his eyes, love in his deep voice, love in his arms that wrapped around her in a fierce embrace.
Her heart had been full to bursting, like a symphony shoved into a music box.
She felt a weightless tumult in her stomach whenever he said that exquisite word, love.
How wondrous that someone, let alone the most dangerous man in London, loved her, loved all of her, even her darkest, most hidden places.
She carried his love like a torch inside her, illuminating her from within in a warm radiance.