Feast of Sparks

by Sierra Simone

  It’s his feet I’m staring at when he finally notices me, shoving off the mantel and striding toward me with concern on his face. When he gets to me, he pulls me into a careful embrace—the embrace of a man who knows exactly what parts of my body don’t ache and sting.

  “I didn’t want you to wake up alone,” he murmurs. “But we had to get up when the police came, and I thought it was better to let you rest.”

  Rest. Even though I’ve just woken up after what has to be nearly fourteen hours of sleep, I could easily go back to bed. My body feels honeycombed with exhaustion, I feel weak and flimsy and tremulous, that tilled feeling again, and Auden’s chest is so firm when I rest my cheek against it. He’s so solid and warm and steady, and I want to be right here forever. Just here, without having to do anything, without having to think, the beat of his strong heart against my ear.

  I watch Rebecca move toward us, the jewel-purple silk of her blouse catching the soft light of the room as she walks, and when she gets to me, she puts a cool hand on the back of my neck.

  “How are you feeling?” she asks.

  My body sings pain to me, and my heart feels like it’s beating outside of my body, like if I walked outside right now, I’d feel each and every raindrop on fragile, vital flesh.

  I’m not numb.

  Not like yesterday. Not like in those gray hours after seeing my mother’s bones, where nothing meant anything and the very act of breathing felt surreal.

  Today, I am hurt and dazed and tired. I think something might have been irrevocably broken in me, some tender part of my soul crushed and ground into my mother’s grave.

  But I’m not numb. I’m alive.

  “I feel better than I did,” I say, and I mean it. The worst thing has happened, it’s torn through me and crushed me into the wet earth, and maybe I died too in a way. Maybe now I’m being reborn.

  Convivificat.

  I’m not very hungry, but the others convince me to eat half a banana and swallow down some whisky, and then I go to call my father. He answers on the first ring, as if he’s been waiting phone in hand for my call, even though it’s still fairly early in the morning in America.

  “Poe,” he says, and that’s all it takes. Tears choke me again.

  “Daddy.”

  I hear the sound of rustling and dog paws on his old kitchen floor, followed by the unmistakable sound of a sliding door opening and closing. I almost smile at the noise—familiar as childhood. It’s such a home sound, and my chest cracks from a sudden rush of homesickness. From wanting to hug my dad, to share a drink with him, to listen to his rumbling rants about university administration and grant funding.

  “They called me earlier. The police. I’m so, so sorry, sweetheart. I’m so sorry you had to see it.”

  “Will you come here?” I ask. “To Thornchapel?”

  There’s the sound of wind on the phone, like he’s standing in the open door as the dogs do their thing outside. February on the prairie is frigid and windy as hell right now, and I wonder what he must be feeling to want that cruel air on his face.

  “I don’t think it will help much,” he says finally. “The police seem to think that the forensic investigation will be brief. There’s only so much a medical examiner will be able to tell from her bones. Then the remains will be sent here, and we’ll bury her next to her parents.” A pause. “Where I’ll be one day.”

  “Daddy . . . ”

  “I’m not trying to be intentionally grim, Poe, it’s just the truth. It was the plan long before she went missing.”

  “Are you okay?” I ask. “I worry about you not coming here, about not being able to see you . . . ”

  A heavy, metallic whoosh and the sliding door closes. I hear the clicking and panting of dogs coming in from the cold. “I’ve had twelve years to think about this, to make peace with it. In a way, it’s a relief. It’s closure.”

  “But we don’t know what happened,” I protest. “Or why, or why she came here in the first place—”

  “I have guesses,” my father says darkly. “And they begin and end with Ralph Guest.”

  Ralph’s name is an ugly dart to the stomach.

  “You can’t think that he hurt Mom; you said he loved her.”

  A hollow laugh. “Do I think that Ralph Guest could have hurt the woman who left him? On Samhain? In the thorn chapel? Yes, Poe, I’d have to be an idiot not to think that.”

  “But—”

  “You’re there, working in the library. See what that library will tell you about the Thorn King. See what you can dig up about what happens in the chapel on Samhain, and what the Guests have done since time out of mind there.”

  I almost tell him. I almost tell him about Dartham’s book and Imbolc and the things we did with thorns and fire, but I don’t. I can’t. He is my father, after all, and if he even has a hint of the kinds of rituals particular to the Thorne Valley, then he doesn’t need to know that his only child has taken part in them.

  Regardless, Dartham’s book was deeply vague about Samhain and I haven’t read any further in the Record of Thornechapel Customs, the book we used to suss out the details of our Imbolc ceremony. So I can’t say for certain what my dad is talking about, but I have the uncomfortable suspicion that it’s more than sex and cakes.

  This is too much, I think. Too much. Ralph Guest was horrible, terrible, an abusive man who left nothing but bitterness in his wake—but to suggest—

  “But the convivificat,” I say. “It was sent to me a couple months ago—after Ralph died.”

  “Anyone could have found that laying around and sent it,” he says. “It doesn’t have anything to do with your mom’s death.”

  “But it was the same word carved onto the altar!”

  “You should come home,” my dad interrupts. “Away from that cursed place. Away from Ralph’s son. Come home and we’ll bury your mother, and maybe we can bury Thornchapel too.”

  Leave Thornchapel?

  Leave Auden? And Saint? And the others?

  My entire body responds, my heart thumping like I’ve just scented danger. “I can’t,” I whisper. “I want to be here.”

  “Would you want to be there even if you knew that Ralph killed your mother?”

  “That’s not fair, that’s unprovable and irrelevant—”

  “What if his son tries to do the same? What if history repeats itself? Can’t you at least acknowledge that Thornchapel is dangerous to Kernstows?” His voice, which rose in passion and volume, abruptly cuts off, as if he feels like he’s revealed something.

  “You said being a Kernstow didn’t matter,” I say.

  “No. I said it shouldn’t matter,” he corrects, sounding very tired all of a sudden. “I couldn’t keep your mother safe from that place, but I can still protect you. Leave. Forget about the Guest boy and the library there and the ruins. Come home where you belong.”

  I belong here. I’m like St. Sebastian now, claimed by a place I shouldn’t have a right to call my own but I do. At some point, when I wasn’t paying attention, Thornchapel planted a flag in me and it said: mine.

  “I love you, Daddy,” I say. “I’ll call again soon. And when it’s time to bury Mom, I’ll be there.”

  And then I hang up.

  Chapter 10

  Eight Years Ago

  The next day Auden turned up at St. Sebastian’s house, but St. Sebastian was already waiting outside, reading a book on the front steps. Auden stepped forward until his shadow covered the pages, and when St. Sebastian looked up, Auden had a crown of July sun behind him.

  “What do you want to do?” St. Sebastian asked, standing up.

  “I don’t care,” Auden said. “Anything.”

  So they did anything.

  For the next week, they swam in Thornchapel’s pool, they hung out in the graveyard while the moon swung heavy and bright above them, Auden drawing at intervals while St. Sebastian watched in hypnotic silence. They roamed around the footpaths with baskets of fancy shit from the ho
use that some servant-type had packed for the teenage master, including bottles of wine they drank until St. Sebastian was giggly and effusive and couldn’t stop talking—which Auden liked very much.

  Auden liked hearing about his family back home in Texas, he liked hearing St. Sebastian explain why he said back home about Dallas when he’d been born right here in Devon, he liked hearing about the Martinez family’s huge backyard parties with piles of tamales and sopapillas and coolers of glass-bottled Cokes and sparkling lights strung between the trees. He liked hearing St. Sebastian’s voice itself, he liked the way he could discern the shapes and imprints of England and America and Mexico in the different words St. Sebastian spoke to him, like how the River Thorne sometimes showed the shapes of the stones at its bottom.

  Auden especially liked prying secrets free of St. Sebastian, and the day he prized free St. Sebastian’s reluctant admission that sometimes—well, okay, always and all the time—he wished he could see Proserpina Markham again, Auden had thrown back his head and laughed, the arch of his neck indecently strong and tempting as he did.

  “Me too,” he’d said, laughing still. “Do you think she’d have both of us if she came back?”

  St. Sebastian couldn’t even imagine what she was like now. “I don’t know.”

  Auden’s laughter had quieted then and he’d looked down at his hands. “The memory of her is like . . . ” And then even the articulate Auden failed to find the words, although St. Sebastian knew what he meant. The memory of her, even from when they were kids, was enough to outshine every other girl they met.

  “It’s haunting,” Auden finally said. “She’s haunting.”

  “Yes,” St. Sebastian agreed.

  “Is it weird to talk about this with me?” Auden asked then, sounding genuinely curious. “Does it make you jealous?”

  The answer was that everything about Auden—everything he did and said and was—made St. Sebastian jealous, but he couldn’t say that, so he just said, “It’s nice to know I’m not alone.”

  “In being weirdly obsessed with Proserpina or being bisexual?”

  It was the first time Auden had said anything about being queer, and he said it with an easy confidence that both relieved and disgruntled St. Sebastian. As adept as he was at talking to his friends online, he still felt clumsy and oafish even skirting the topic in real life, and here was Auden just tossing out the word like of course it was an option, of course there was no sense talking about it euphemistically.

  “Both?”

  “Hmm,” Auden said. And then he turned to St. Sebastian and grinned. “It makes me jealous, you know. I think if Proserpina ever came back and chose you, I’d die with jealousy on the spot.”

  “I don’t think you would.”

  “No?”

  “I think you’d just try harder.”

  Another laugh. “Maybe so.”

  And then St. Sebastian, as usual, wasn’t sure how to feel. For all he’d learned—that Auden was definitely bi and not just sending mixed signals, that he also missed Proserpina—he felt like somehow he knew even less.

  After all, it wasn’t the usual start to something more than friendship, with the both of them being preoccupied with someone else. The same someone else. Right?

  But the days went on, unusual or not, talking and drinking and learning.

  St. Sebastian learned that he liked everything about Auden, liked all the things he also hated. The wealth, the posh accent, the magazine-worthy clothes, the education so expensive St. Sebastian could have bought a house with what it cost. He liked hearing Auden talk about light and color and form, about composition, about why this artist was a genius and that artist was a hack, and he liked hearing Auden talk about other people. (If Auden had one sin other than arrogance, it was that he could be gossipy when baited into it—but the gossip was always supremely delicious, because it was infused with that uncanny perception Auden had.)

  Most of all, St. Sebastian liked that Auden seemed to make the very air around him crackle with possibility, like Auden’s existence so electrified the molecules of the air that it sent them bashing around at higher speeds than usual. Like Auden carried embedded in himself some new, undiscovered physical law that wasn’t gravity, wasn’t magnetism, but something made of the two and more. When he was around Auden, he felt a thrilling and boundless future waiting for him, as if just over the next rise, he felt like he could almost grasp at how all the messy and separate parts of himself would one day knit into something real and valuable and powerful.

  Auden had that effect on everyone, he noticed. The clerks at the shops, the pizza delivery boy, the well-heeled parishioners at the abbey masses. They were all drawn to him, animated beside him, made more beautiful and more interesting just by being near him.

  There was a word for that, and St. Sebastian had read too many fantasy novels to call it charisma or charm.

  He wouldn’t say the word to himself during the day, but at night—at night after a long day of drinking and walking and swimming and laughing—he’d admit to himself that he knew exactly the word for what Auden was. He knew the thing that made this pretty-eyed boy different from every other pretty-eyed boy with too much money and enviable fluency in Latin.

  Magic.

  It sounded foolish, even at night and in bed alone when St. Sebastian allowed himself to think about it, but sometimes foolish things were true. Sometimes the unbelievable happened even though it shouldn’t.

  Whether he knew it about himself or not, Auden Guest was magic.

  And when St. Sebastian was around him, he felt like he was magic too.

  Chapter 11

  St. Sebastian

  Present Day

  * * *

  It’s a strange week.

  Rebecca, Auden, and Delphine decide to forgo their weekly pilgrimage to London, and instead we hole up at Thornchapel like we’re having the bleakest house party of all time. Although, it’s not that bleak, not truly, because together the five of us can coax smiles out of Proserpina—and even a laugh once, courtesy of Delphine regaling us with the latest Instagram-influencer drama, something involving denim vests and mushrooms.

  Becket and I have our jobs to attend to, and so we’re in and out of the house more than the others, but at night, we both bunk down in the library, huddling under blankets on the sofas while the fire crackles itself to sleep. I don’t sleep in the same bed as Poe again—or Auden—and they aren’t sleeping in the same bed as each other, either. As if the night we shared has driven the three of us further apart instead of closer together.

  What am I talking about? There’s no as if. Of course it wedged us further apart, because it peeled away all the pretense and exposed the raw and inevitable truth. Auden will never forgive me, and I’ll never stop needing him to. And in between the mess he and I have made of each other is Proserpina, the woman we both want more than anything.

  What was the M for?

  For mistake, St. Sebastian. For mistake.

  Fuck. How can it hurt so much? Still?

  For her part, Proserpina is quieter than normal, less communicative and expressive than I’m used to, but she’s still the most fascinating thing in the world to me, and I still watch her face and lips and body language as if I’ll be made to test on it. She’s sad, she’s tired, and yet, her sadness and tiredness aren’t all of her. Every now and again, I catch glimpses of something else in her eyes—something young and fresh and determined—and I see something being born underneath all that grief. Something new.

  I only hope I can be a part of it.

  “Can I see your house?” Poe asks one morning.

  It’s been a full week and half since the bones were found, and since the rain had finally eased back into a pale gray lid over the valley, she’d asked if I wanted to take a walk before I had to go in for my afternoon shift at the library.

  We don’t go near the ruins—though the bones have been removed and placed in the custody of the pathologist, the thorn chapel is still ad
orned with flapping crime scene tape—and so we walk into the village instead. Past my ratty mess of a house.

  Her request makes me defensive, shuttered. “It’s not like Thornchapel, Poe. It’s a piece of shit.”

  “But it’s your piece of shit,” she replies. “And I didn’t grow up in a castle either. I want to see it because I want to know more about you.”

  It’s hard resisting those green eyes, curious and searching, prettier than the chapel ruins in high summer. But I still try, valiantly, since I still have some pride left, no matter how tattered or weak.

  And because I truly don’t understand why she wants to know more about me, the boy as ratty and depleted as his house. I’ve never been good at anything but reading and remembering. “It’s a mess. A real mess. I haven’t changed anything since my mother died.”

  Yes, she knows all this, I’ve already admitted to her once early on that I’d put my life on hold to return to Thorncombe. I traded college for shelving books and fixing Augie’s accounts, traded friends and family for near-utter isolation. Like my mother, I’m tied to Thorncombe whether I like it or not.

  But it’s one thing to admit after a drink in a dark pub, and another thing to see in the unfriendly light of a winter day; I’m embarrassed at what Poe will find inside my house, at what she’ll make of my life. A still life stiller than any bowl of fruit.

  “Have you ever considered going through your mother’s things?” she asks. As though it’s as simple as going through a dresser drawer and keeping only the socks that spark joy.

  “No.” I feel myself retreating, resisting, throwing up walls between her ever-present curiosity and my natural inclination to burrow into the stillness inside myself where I feel safest.