Feast of Sparks

by Sierra Simone

  “Noooo,” Delphine answers, tucking her feet between my legs, making a face as the pressure twinges her bruises. “There’s no point. She’ll just tell me to stand up for myself, as if I’m not already doing my fucking best while they’re taping me into swimsuits and lingerie, and anyway, I’m not at a point in my career where I can throw a fit about some shoes hurting my feet.”

  But despite her quick, assured words, her eyes move over to the slim figure silhouetted by the fire.

  “Maybe you could still—” I start, but I’m interrupted, and it’s just as well. Who am I to give Delphine advice about Rebecca when Auden, Saint, and I are such a fucking mess?

  “St. Sebastian, thank you for finally joining us,” Rebecca says as Saint finally emerges out of the library’s shadows and into the circle of firelight. He’s taken his time getting a drink, and I half wonder, judging by the way his eyes cut over to the door and his teeth catch around his lip piercing, if he was contemplating escape.

  From the group meeting or from talking with me and Auden?

  Saint just gives Rebecca his normal half-lidded brood, and she sighs. It’s very close to a Delphine sigh. I think I was right to think that she still doesn’t entirely approve of Saint being in our circle. I haven’t forgotten what happened, she’d told me once about him.

  “I’ll just get to the point then,” she says, setting her glass of wine on the mantel next to Auden’s glass. “Imbolc night was a very powerful experience for me, and I think for everyone else here as well. I want to do it again.”

  “What, next year?” Auden asks.

  “No, you pillock,” Delphine interjects impatiently. “Didn’t you listen to any of the Imbolc planning we did? Look at any of the books? Obviously, Rebecca is referring to May Day.”

  “Beltane,” Becket corrects.

  “Beltane,” Delphine says. “First day of May. The next feast.”

  “Well, or the last day of April,” Becket says. “Actually, there is some debate about—”

  Rebecca raises her palm to stave the inevitable lecture. “Whatever we’re going to call it, I think we should do it.”

  “Yes,” Delphine says eagerly. “Yes, yes, and yes.”

  Saint’s voice is low as he speaks from the edge of the gloom. “Maybe we shouldn’t.”

  We all turn to him. “Why not?” Delphine asks, frowning prettily at him. “I saw you that night—the whole house heard you and Poe afterward. I know you liked it.”

  It’s too shadowy around Saint to see his flush, but I know it’s there anyway. “I don’t mean that I didn’t like it,” he says in a tight voice. “I liked it very much. But given what happened the next morning, maybe it’s a lot to ask. To go back there and do—well, whatever it is they used to do there.”

  This is about me. He’s trying to protect me.

  I’m not sure how I feel about that, how I feel about any of it, because do I want to celebrate another feast with my friends? Do I want to feel the air kindling with God and magic again? Of course I do. But am I ready to think about sex and fire and pain in the place where my mother’s been buried for the last twelve years? On the very ground that is now partially made of her?

  I don’t know.

  Yes, you do.

  I feel it again, the thing I felt after waking up in Auden’s bed. That tilled feeling, all loose and broken and new. After all, what is broken but another way of saying open? What is new but another way to say that the old you has died, your old hopes and dreams and beliefs, and now there’s nothing left to lose?

  Auden turns to me. “Is St. Sebastian right?” he asks. “Is this a lot to ask?”

  I think I could forgive him almost anything right now, just for the way he’s looked at me and asked. For cutting through the bullshit.

  “It’s a lot to ask,” I say. “But I want to do it.”

  “Poe,” Saint says. “You don’t have to. We don’t have to.”

  “But you want to,” Auden says, studying my face. He always knows when I want, as if my wanting is a color only he can see, a note only he can hear.

  “I think it might be healing,” Rebecca offers. “Healthy. To make new memories there.”

  “Yes,” I say. I might be ready to agree, but I don’t know if I’m ready to speak about it, about why the new memories should be made. About why this new Proserpina, all tilled and broken, can say yes.

  “We have more than two months to think about this,” Becket says reasonably. “There’s no need to decide for certain tonight.”

  “Very true,” Rebecca responds.

  “Although I think we need to be honest with ourselves about what we’ve done,” he says.

  That sends a new stillness around the room.

  “Becky,” Delphine says. “I don’t think any of us have pretended that we didn’t have a sex party in the rain.”

  “I don’t mean the sex,” he says, and he says the word far too comfortably for a man who’s supposedly given it up. “I mean what we woke up.”

  Goosebumps pebble my arms and something thrums hard enough in my chest to make my teeth and funny bones ache. I know the minute he says the words aloud, that he’s right, that he’s speaking the truth.

  We left the chapel. But the chapel didn’t leave us.

  “I don’t know what to call it. I would say God, but if this is God, then this is him at his most elemental. It’s like we ripped down a curtain in the ruins, we tore back a veil. And now all of us are feeling what always exists behind that veil, and I don’t know if that’s the way it’s supposed to be or not. With Mass, with sacraments, I know how it’s supposed to feel, how it’s supposed to work—I studied it. I learned from two thousand years of texts, traditions, unbroken chains of thought and worship. But this? We know nothing about how it works, how long it lasts, if it will ever stop.”

  “Which, by your logic, means we don’t know if another ritual will feed it or not,” Auden comments, taking a drink of scotch after he speaks. “What if we do this Beltane and everything we’re feeling now gets stronger?”

  “And what are we feeling now?” I ask him. Ask the room. “Magic? Wonder? Need? Pain?”

  When I say need, a ripple of discomfort moves through the room and no one seems to want to meet anyone else’s gaze. It seems I haven’t been alone in my chapel-sparked lusts.

  “Yes,” Auden replies after a minute. “If you feel need, then I must feel it a thousand-fold. If you’re suffering, then I’m being torn apart. And yet, there’s something inside me, like . . .” He shakes his head, as if there’s no word for it. He presses a palm to his chest, his large hand over the place I know shields the warm beat of his heart. “Thorns,” he says. “It always felt like thorns. Ever since the wedding in the thorn chapel when we were children. They hurt—they always hurt—but after Imbolc, something changed. Like I grew into them or they grew deeply enough into me that the hurting finally made sense.”

  In the shadows, St. Sebastian shifts, as if Auden’s words are physically moving through him.

  “So I ask you all again,” Auden says, turning and looking at all of us in turn. “What if we do this thing at Beltane, and we’re more in thrall to it than ever? What if it changes? What if it changes us?”

  His words fall across the room like rain, and the hush that follows is the hush that precedes a storm.

  But then I ask the only thing that can be asked, the only question that matters. “What if we need to be changed?”

  Another hush, broken only by the fire popping and the snores of Sir James Frazer.

  “What if we do,” Becket says. “What then?”

  Auden’s eyes—nothing more than dark glitters in the mostly fire-lit room—meet mine and stay there. “Then we do it. Then we do more. We follow this thing till its end.”

  “Samhain,” Becket says. His voice sounds dry. And . . . scared? “Imbolc, Beltane, Lammas, Samhain. The Celtic year is a circle, and so Samhain is the end . . . and also the beginning.”

  “I like the symmetry
,” Rebecca volunteers.

  Delphine’s feet wiggle in my lap and then she makes a sad noise, as if she’d already forgotten about her bruises. “I’ll never say no to more of these,” she adds.

  “So we’re committing,” Saint clarifies. “We’re not just saying we’re going to do Beltane, but two others as well?”

  “Don’t you want to know?” I ask, tearing my eyes away from Auden’s to look at him. “Don’t you want to know what happens if we do?”

  “I always want to know,” he says. “But knowing isn’t the same as doing the right thing.”

  “How philosophical,” Auden says, not sounding very impressed.

  Becket shoots Auden a quelling look. “I think the two are closer than we give them credit for,” he says.

  “Wait, so is this us agreeing?” asks Delphine. “Are we doing this? Oh, please say yes. It’s been such a long week, I’d love something happy to think about when I fall asleep tonight.”

  “You think these rituals are about happiness?” St. Sebastian asks at the same time as I say, “I don’t know how happy they’re going to be.”

  Delphine pouts at us. “They make me happy. You’re all such curmudgeons; how can you all be so grim about lighting a big fire and having sex?”

  “Well, we don’t know what the Beltane ritual involves yet,” Becket points out.

  She waves her hand. “Details. It’ll be sexy and fun and who cares about whatever words we have to say or circles we have to walk? It’s all the same, really. Say some words at the same time, move all at the same time, do something that makes chemicals surge through our brain. Voila, un rituel.”

  Becket looks pained, and to spare us all the priest explaining the modality of ritual, I say quickly, “I think we’re all agreed, right? Beltane and everything else? Samhain or bust?”

  “Samhain or bust,” Delphine repeats, her mouth twitching around the expression. “I like it.”

  “Yes,” Rebecca says, “I’m agreed.”

  “Me as well,” Becket says, although he still looks like he dearly wants to complicate Delphine’s ritual theory.

  “I’m in,” St. Sebastian says, and Auden just nods, knocking back the rest of his whisky in one go and then dropping his glass carelessly on the mantel.

  “Okay, then,” I say. “Then we’re doing this.”

  Chapter 14

  St. Sebastian

  Present Day

  * * *

  At some point, Becket turns on his music, and the conversation moves from rituals to gossip about people I’ve never been rich enough to meet. I’m mostly grateful for the shift, although there’s an old, familiar bitterness at being on the outside of their world. A bitterness soothed somewhat by seeing that Poe is just as lost as I am at picking apart the Olivers from the Tobys and that she also has no idea whether the Plum they’re laughing about is the name of a girl or maybe someone’s pet.

  She drifts over to where I’m leaning against the edge of one of the long tables, and then she perches herself atop it. She’s short enough that her legs swing off the floor after she’s sat, and the hem of her tweed skirt pulls higher on her thighs, which are covered in bright yellow tights. It takes more control than I knew I had to keep myself from stepping between her legs and sliding my palms up those tight-covered legs. Sliding under her skirt and finding the soft place where her thighs join her body, pressing in with my thumbs until she squirms against me. Tearing a hole in those tights and then pumping into her right here on the table. Riding her while I’m still in boots and jeans, feeling her curvy arse and hips overflow my hands as I hold her close for fucking.

  “. . . now is as good a time as any,” she’s saying, and I force myself away from my needful thoughts. I adjust my rigid length as subtly as I can.

  “Sure,” I say, although I’m not sure what I’m agreeing to.

  Her answering beam almost makes it worth it, even after I realize what she’s going to go do. “I’ll go grab Auden then. We’ll talk now and get things settled.”

  I only nod, even though I want to shout. I want to crush her to my body and force my way under her skirt and then fuck her for Auden to see. That’s what I want right now. Not to talk. Not to confront the obsidian wall of Auden’s hatred again after bruising myself against it so many times over the years.

  Poe slides off the table, her skirt lifting enough as she does for me to make out the shadowed cups of her arse cheeks, and I let out a low breath. Fuck. I’m going to have to wear out my toy again tonight.

  Delphine and Rebecca are arguing about whether or not Alistair and Verity (whoever they might be) are still engaged, and Becket has run to fetch another bottle of wine. Which means it’s fairly easy for Poe to pull Auden over—not that I think she’d have to try too hard in any circumstance. The way his eyes follow her as she leads him into the shadows is beyond possessive, beyond hungry. Intense and cruel and avid. Worshipful, but the kind of worship that necessitates a rope tied around the ankle because at any moment you’ll be struck dead by the very thing you came to adore.

  “Let’s go back here,” Poe says, canting her head toward the very far nook in the shelves, the one next to the windows. And like the children of Hamelin, we follow our piper without prompting, right into the cool darkness where the air smells like books and where the moody music Becket put on is muffled and faint.

  I rest back against the bookshelves, folding my arms across my chest, as Auden leans one shoulder against the stone edge of a massive window. Even with us leaning and slouched, Poe is still so much shorter than us, reminding me of how precious she felt cradled between us that night, how fragile and yet also so vital, her petite size balanced by those generous curves, which even now are straining at her sweater and skirt. I bet if I lifted that tweed hem right now, I could see how those tights stretch and pull across her indulgently luscious arse.

  I have to grab my own bicep and squeeze, just to let off the steam a little. Auden notices, an eyebrow arching ever so slightly, a quirk to his wide, sharp-edged mouth, as if he wants to ask but won’t.

  Which is fine, because I don’t want to answer.

  “So, I think—” Poe starts, then stops, taking a breath and pressing fingertips to her mouth while she considers how she wants to start. With the tendrils of dark hair escaping her bun to frame her delicate jaw and caress the ivory elegance of her nape, she looks every inch the scholar.

  “You think we should talk about what we did the night after Imbolc,” Auden says for her when she still hasn’t spoken. He brought a fresh drink with him, and he takes a swallow now, his eyes never leaving hers. “We should acknowledge that we all went to bed together after I helped Rebecca beat you, and maybe this is when you’ll tell us that it was a mistake and can never happen again?”

  There’s no telling if his words are bitter or relieved or some combination of both, because Poe interjects, a little hotly, “I’m not going to say any of that.”

  Auden’s already arched brow arches the tiniest bit higher.

  “It would never be a mistake going to bed with either of you,” she says, so full of surety and sweetness, that I feel undeserving even breathing the same air as her. How can she be so certain, so honest, and yet she is, she’s always been, dreamy and clear all at once. “And I obviously want you to play with me again. I understand why you haven’t, in light of . . .” Here her unwavering bravery does waver the slightest bit, and I know it takes some effort to push the words out. “In light of finding my mother. But it helped me, that night, it was the best thing you or Rebecca could have done.”

  “Good,” Auden says. “We wanted to help.”

  “But you want to do more than help, right? You want to earn me.”

  At that, his eyes hood ever so slightly and his lips part. “Yes,” he says finally. “I’m going to earn you.”

  “I want you to,” she says, “but you need to know that I don’t want Saint any less because of it.”

  “You want to pursue something with both of us. Con
currently.”

  Auden’s voice isn’t angry or hurt, merely guarded. I hate him guarded. I’d rather have him baiting me, fighting me, choking me against a wall while I shudder in ecstasy. I’d rather have him as he so rarely lets himself be—which is wild, wicked power incarnate.

  “No,” Poe says softly. “I want something with all three of us. Concurrently.”

  Auden tries to speak. Fails.

  Looks helplessly at me, as if we’ve finally found something to be allies about.

  “Look, I know that there’s something between the two of you. I had to pull you apart in the driveway my first day here. I know that whatever happened, St. Sebastian started it, and Auden, you finished it. I know that you say you hate each other, but even now, I bet you’re both hard, just from being around each other. Just from watching how St. Sebastian’s jeans mold around his hips and thighs, Auden. I’ve seen you looking all night. And Saint, I’ve seen how you’ve been watching Auden drink since dinner. Like his lips on that glass are the thing you’ll think about when you go home and get off.”

  My cheeks burn, and I have to look away from her. Am I really that transparent?

  Oh God, has Auden really been looking at my body?

  Pleasure curls in my chest, followed by doubt. Poe has to be wrong, Auden has more control than that, and any moment he’ll correct her—

  “You think because I want to fuck St. Sebastian, that I want to be in some kind of three-way relationship with him?” Auden asks incredulously.

  “I’m right here, you know,” I remark, trying to sound aloof and unbothered, like I’m not gratified by the first part of his sentence and wounded by the second.

  Auden’s eyes—nothing but shards of glittering shadow this far from the light—move over to me. “I always know,” he says. “Remember?”

  I always see you.

  How I’ve cradled those words in my mind over the years, polished them with thought and desperate self-reassurance, that once upon a time Auden Guest saw me and wanted me. Once upon a time, we almost lived happily ever after.