Epilogue The Bane of My Existence #3
Now, an ocean apart, would she ever have the opportunity to say the word back?
A desperate yearning, a wretched longing, clawed inside her chest. Malachy had breathed life into a thousand new hopes and fears.
She worried that her tender hope had unfurled its possibilities like a flower bud just before the frost came.
How could this beautiful, fragile thing between them survive the distance?
Especially if she stayed in New Orleans.
Months ago, accepting Master Lakwa’s invitation had been easy.
But her reluctance to leave Malachy had since grown teeth.
They had only stolen moments together during the day, but at night he was all hers, to taste and explore and worship on her hands and knees until dawn kissed the horizon.
She loved the way his gaze would slide to her and linger; the quiet thrill, the private satisfaction, of knowing what his mouth had done, where his hands had been.
Even now, an hour later and half a world away, she felt the slickness, the delicious soreness, between her thighs like a lurid secret.
“You all right, hon?” Brigitte said, breaking her reverie. “Your cheeks are as red as an overripe peach.”
“I am also mighty curious about the nature of your relationship with Mr. Bane,” Lakwa said.
Cora felt like she was getting interrogated by the Tribunal again. “Malachy is…” The pair of open arms waiting at the end of a fall. The man I want to crawl inside and make a home in. The best thing that ever happened to me. “My boss.”
“Poor dear, workin’ for that snake in the grass.” Brigitte squeezed Cora’s gloved hand in sympathy. “Good thing you’re gettin’ some time away from him.”
A faint sense of death rippled where their hands touched.
Before Cora could pinpoint the sensation, Brigitte withdrew her hand and absently rubbed her swollen belly over the floral print dress.
With the silver threading her curly black hair and the lines radiating from her dark eyes, Brigitte appeared to be in her early forties, a decade younger than Lakwa. A later-in-life pregnancy, then.
Brigitte noticed Cora’s attention and gave a radiant smile.
“I’m expecting. Due on Halloween, the doctors reckon.
All my life I wanted a family, but God never blessed us with a child.
Every woman in my family had one daughter each and I been waitin’ on mine for over twenty years of marriage and nearly as many miscarriages.
This is the first time I made it past the first trimester.
” She beamed at her husband. “We’ll meet our baby girl soon, Sammy. ”
A cold lick of dread shivered down Cora’s spine.
Was the death whispering at the back of her mind, so faint she couldn’t identify its origin, worth mentioning to the happy couple?
Watching Brigitte hold her rounded belly and Lakwa fondly caress it, Cora couldn’t bring herself to say anything.
What if she upset Brigitte into another miscarriage?
Besides, if the Master Necromancer sensed nothing, it probably was nothing.
“Congratulations, Mrs. Lakwa—Brigitte. That’s wonderful.”
“Thank you, darlin’. I do hope you’ll be here for the birth. You ever been married yourself, honey? No? My, that’s a damned shame, pretty thing like you, unwed. We’ll have to introduce her to our people in town, Sammy.”
“Now, Brigitte, don’t go hitchin’ your cart before the horse. Ms. Cora’s just come to acquaint herself.”
“Don’t you get your britches in a twist, Sammy.” Brigitte turned to Cora. “Folks in New Orleans ain’t as highfalutin’ as they are in London, I reckon. We don’t look down on death magic here. We embrace it.”
Before Cora could collect her jaw from the ground and stammer a response, Lakwa asked her, “You like working for Mr. Bane? I must say, he’s so protective of you that I’m surprised he didn’t come himself.”
Cora choked on her sweet tea. Fortunately, Lakwa did not know that Mr. Bane had indeed come, and recently enough that it still slicked her thighs.
Blushing furiously, she was spared from responding by the arrival of maids bearing silver platters loaded with food both mouth-watering and unfamiliar.
The spread they laid out on the wrought-iron table was a feast fit for a king.
Cora piled her plate high and tucked in.
Between the sweet tea and beignets—fried dough and powdered sugar so soft and flaky it was like biting into a cloud—Cora thoroughly approved of the Southern sweet tooth.
Collard greens and okra, even swimming in butter, she could do without.
She ate several pieces of savory “co’nbread” dripping with honey, despite Brigitte’s laughing warning to save herself for something called “pee-can” pie for dessert, which Cora hoped was more appetizing than it sounded.
The gumbo, brimming with the carcass of unknown animals, she declined. Her refusal of Grandmama Faveaux’s family recipe was met by Brigitte’s crestfallen expression. Cora rushed to explain. “I don’t eat meat.”
The Southerners looked as though Cora had just confessed to ritualistic child sacrifice. “Why, whatever for, honey?”
“I can, er, taste how the animal died.”
Lakwa sat back and steepled his fingers. “It’s true, then. Your connection to death is immersive.”
Apparently, Necromancy was not a forbidden subject in front of his wife nor at the dinner table.
“That’s one word for it,” Cora said.
The Lakwas exchanged a look. Propping an elbow on the table, he leaned forward. “While I don’t suffer the same sensitivity, I reckon it must be difficult for you, to feel it all so keenly.”
Cora blinked. The meal was all but forgotten as she gazed at her own reflection distorted in his dark glasses.
In thirty years alive, no one had ever expressed sympathy for her death sense, let alone another Necromancer.
Curiosity lit a fire inside of her. Finally, she had someone who could answer a lifetime of questions. Someone who could understand.
“You can’t taste death, Master Lakwa, but can you feel it? When you touch people?”
He gave a solemn nod. “That I can. A great and terrible burden it is, to know the unknowable. You don’t vent it from time to time, it’s liable to eat you alive.
Before I met my Brigitte, I was a downright downer.
Gloom and doom everywhere I looked. But now”—he caressed his wife’s swollen belly— “I’m bringing more than death into this world.
My advice to you, Cora? Everything’s an uphill climb when you go it alone. ”
She thought of Malachy, sheened in sweat and smiling a private smile. If she trained under Lakwa, would Malachy still be waiting for her in months? In a year?
“It’s certainly felt like an uphill climb, Master Lakwa. All these years, I’ve tried to—” She cut off with a hesitant glance at Brigitte.
“Oh, don’t worry yourself, sugar.” Brigitte batted away centuries of Covenant-mandated secrecy with a wave of her hand.
“I’ve known about death magic long before Sammy here came into my Grandmama’s shop, somber as a black cat at a funeral.
My Grandmama, Mary Catherine Faveaux, practiced Voodoo in public and Necromancy in private.
I still run her shop in the French Quarter.
I’ll take you some time. We cater to more than tourists. ”
Cora reeled. She had gone from never meeting another Necromancer to being surrounded by them and their descendants in the span of an evening.
Maids cleared away their plates and replaced them with the promised “pee-can” pie, chopped nuts and syrupy molasses in a buttery crust, heaped with scoops of fresh-churned vanilla ice cream already melting in the evening heat. Cora was full to bursting by the time she swallowed down a second slice.
Master Lakwa kept his sunglasses on as the sky darkened and stars bloomed.
“Doctor says I gotta wear these damn things day and night now,” he said, noticing Cora’s attention.
“Light sensitivity runs in my family. I’m slowly going blind like my daddy and his daddy before him.
Just the cards I was dealt. Well.” He slapped his hands on his thighs, which Cora took as the Southern signal for the end of a meal.
“I best be gettin’ my beauty sleep.” Brigitte ignored Cora’s outstretched hand and folded her into a warm embrace. “Oh, come here, before I get so big around I can’t.”
The same faint sense of death rattled when they touched. Cora’s smile felt wrong as she bade Brigitte goodnight and watched her waddle off to bed.
Ever the gentleman, Lakwa offered Cora his arm and escorted her inside. The Master Necromancer was favoring one side as they mounted the wide steps. “These old bones don’t recover as fast as they used to,” he said. “I was injured during all that commotion in Rome.”
Her eyebrows rose. Cora had not seen Lakwa during the demon attack on the Tribunal compound, before or after they had trapped Ghose in an endless loop in Purgatory.
The stately mansion was even grander inside.
Silk wallpaper and lush carpets. Heavy furniture covered in ornate vases bursting with magnolia blossoms. Dark wood polished to a mirror shine.
Floorboards creaked underfoot as they made their way towards a gentleman’s parlor overflowing with book-laden shelves and stiff furniture.
The deeper they went into the house, the more Cora felt the wisp of a lingering presence, like a puff of grave-cold breath on the back of her neck. She shivered.
“Anything the matter, darlin’?”
“I just felt something… odd.”
Lakwa’s dark glasses flashed as he nodded sagely. “That’ll be the ghost, I reckon.”
Cora stopped dead in the middle of the parlor. “Ghosts are real?”
He tossed his head back and laughed, a deep, resonant celebration that rumbled from his chest and filled the room. The fan clicked overhead, stirring the stagnant air.