“Really?”
“Really.” He kisses me again, deeper. “Can you feel how not-mad I am? Can you feel what jealousy does to me?”
And I can, I can feel it, a thick bar against my hip, and I abruptly need to be fucked, to feel Saint inside me and to know that I haven’t broken anything. But when I reach for him, he stops me and sighs. “We should try, remember? Restraint?”
Groaning, I slump in his arms. “I wish you and Auden would figure things out already.”
“Believe me,” Saint says. “Me too.”
Friday afternoon, I find Auden out by the maze, watching a team of men and women in yellow vests examining the statuary and taking notes on hedge depths. He has his arms folded as he surveys them, and predictably, Sir James Frazer is already sitting next to him, doggy ears perked and twitching at all the noise.
Auden’s brows are pulled together when I reach him, his long fingers tapping against his bicep in thought, but when he sees me, his sharp mouth hooks into a smile and his eyes hood the tiniest bit. His gaze drops from my face to my feet and then back up again, taking its time around my waist and tits and mouth.
“You are lovely,” he says. The words themselves are sweet, but his voice isn’t. His voice says I want you over my lap. His voice says You don’t even want to know the things I’m thinking about doing to you right now. “Were you a good girl this week?”
I blush—from his voice and from the memory of how I got on my knees for a priest in a very un-good-girl-like way—and my blush has him licking his lips. “Let’s go up to the house,” he says, in a low, seductive voice. “I need to kiss you.”
“Yes,” I breathe. Then, half a second later, “Wait. No.”
Auden’s eyebrow lifts. “No?”
“I mean—not no, I do want kissing, but we need to talk first.”
He studies my face for a moment and dips his head. “As you wish.”
We start walking in the direction of the house, but at the last moment, Auden takes my hand and pulls me toward the walled garden. The door with its peeling paint and rusted lock is half open, and when we walk through it to enter the stone-walled enclosure, it’s apparent that it hasn’t been tended to in a very long time. Tulips and hyacinths push against lavender stems only just beginning to soften and green, and pansies and primroses dot the overgrown beds like spatters of paint. In the middle, a fountain stands bone dry, stray leaves skittering around the bottom.
It’s somehow more beautiful than it was when I saw it as a child, and I pause in the center of it, watching the breeze toy with the chaotic tumble. Auden merely runs his hands through his hair and gazes around the garden in the same way that I gaze at a bookshelf full of fiddly pamphlets and maps needing to be scanned. Like he’s staring at a heap of work, which is heaped on top of too much other work, and a little bit of him is dying inside. Until, that is, his eyes land on a thicket of lavender and baby’s breath that have overrun their bed. Then a smile tugs at his mouth.
He catches me staring, and turns that irresistible smile on me. “I have fond memories of those flowers.”
I look at it again, wondering why. It’s a bed the same as all the others. “Did you play here as a child?”
“Well, yes,” Auden says, reaching out a hand to lead me over to the fountain’s edge, where we sit. From here we can see the entire north end of the garden, complete with a marble Leda and her amorous swan. “But my memories are a bit more recent. They involve a certain local librarian.”
“Saint?” I ask, and Auden’s smile grows a bit sharper. I see the tip of his tongue move over the edge of his teeth, as if he’s remembering a kiss. Or a bite.
“Yes,” he says, looking over at the lavender. “Our first kiss.”
“Will you tell me what happened? Someday?”
He turns back to me with a smile gone a little bitter. “It’s not a pretty story.”
“It might still have a pretty ending.” I hope. Please God, let it have a pretty ending.
Auden doesn’t acknowledge that last part. Instead he trains his hazel eyes on me. “What did you need to talk about?”
Okay.
Okay. Here it goes.
“I was with Becket earlier this week. He—he saw—” My voice snags around the words, and I don’t know why. Do I think Auden will be angry with me? Angry with Becket? If anything, I’m the one who should be angry, but the person who deserves my anger is dead . . .
Auden takes my hand again, and then searches my face with that scouring gaze of his. Whatever he sees has him spreading his feet wide. “Sit here, little bride,” he says, nodding at the stone-paved space between his feet, and I obey without questioning him, which seems to surprise him a little.
“I thought you’d fight me about that,” he says, looking sweetly nervous all of a sudden.
“My ex had me sit at her feet whenever we weren’t in public,” I tell him, settling my skirt around my legs so the stones won’t catch on my tights. I look up at him and then affectionately butt the inside of his knee with my forehead. “You should trust your instincts. I feel better down here already.”
He lets out a relieved breath, confidence squaring his shoulders, and then he threads a warm hand into my hair. His cheeks are still the tiniest bit pink; his lashes still lowered a little. Bashful and powerful all at once. It’s enough to make me want to kneel adoringly at his feet forever.
“You can tell me anything,” he says softly, his fingers moving lovingly through my hair. “Anything.”
I lean my head against his touch, trying to summon my courage.
“You didn’t answer my question about being a good girl this week,” he goes on. “You know you have my blessing to share your body with any of us.”
I open my eyes and turn my face up to him. “Why?” I ask, still bubbling with guilt and doubt. “Why would you bless me for that?”
His eyes are better than entire gardens, entire forests, rich and bright and full of life, when he says, “Because I’ll bless you for anything, Proserpina, haven’t you figured that out already?”
I sigh. “I don’t deserve that.”
“If we deserved the blessings we got, they wouldn’t be blessings, they’d be results. And anyway, you do deserve it—you deserve my trust. You deserve for me to wish for your happiness. You deserve for me to earn you, and I consider seeing to your happiness part of that earning. And if seeing to your happiness means that I allow you to have your needs met when I’m gone, then really, any guilt you might feel about it is a strike against me and my trying to earn you.”
I squint up at him. “What?”
“I’m saying,” he says, tugging my hair so that my face is tilted all the way to his and he can kiss me, “stop feeling guilty about whatever happened and just tell me.”
His chiseled lips move warm and firm over mine until I open to him, and then he slips his tongue against my own for a quick, reassuring kiss before he pulls back to look expectantly at me. “Well?” he asks.
“Becket,” I say. “We fooled around.”
Auden just keeps looking at me, a slow hitch to his eyebrow saying volumes. You can do better than that, the eyebrow says. Try again.
“Becket fucked me with his fingers,” I say.
“Two fingers or three?” Auden asks, his eyes once again raking down my body. “Part your knees as you tell me.”
“Two,” I say, spreading my knees and feeling the cool air between my legs. My pussy is already aching.
Auden moves his foot under my skirt and casually rubs the top of his brogue against my cunt. “Did he rub your clit too?”
My teeth are practically chattering from the glancing pressure against my clit. My hips chase his foot and he gives me an amused look.
“Yes,” I pant. “He rubbed me.”
“And what did you do for him? Did you stroke him? Let him fuck that plush little mouth?”
His shoe rubs my pussy again, sending sparks of pleasure everywhere. “I blew him,” I manage to get out. “
He came down my throat in the middle of the church.”
Auden’s fingers are curled at his side, but I don’t think he’s angry. At least, the blaze in his eyes looks a lot more like hunger than anger, like he’s hungry for me, hungry to come down my throat too. “One day soon,” he says in a low voice, “I’m going to do the same thing. And you’ll stop wearing these fucking tights, so that I can take your cunt whenever I need.”
He drops his foot right as I think an orgasm might be within reach, and I moan in disappointment. Auden looks disappointed too, but also determined, planting his feet on either side of me and giving his erection an impatient tuck against his hip. “Soon,” he says. “But not now. You gave me something to do to earn you, and I’m going to do it.”
I think maybe I don’t care about that right now, or at least, maybe I think I can pretend not to care until Auden brings me off and then I can get back to caring—but then I remember Saint and me snuggled in the library and his careful restraint. Restraint that I initially requested.
Shit.
I look up at Auden, my almost-lover, my bashful, powerful baby Dom, and struggle to remember anything that isn’t a list of reasons why I should give myself to him entirely.
“I love when you look at me like that,” he murmurs. “I feel it in my blood. In my bones.”
Bones.
The moment—strung with heat and guilt and power—goes cold in an instant. “Auden—”
“Sir.”
“Sir, Becket and me—that wasn’t the only thing I needed to talk to you about.”
A faint line appears between Auden’s eyebrows, and I can tell he’s trying to puzzle out what I’m going to say before I can say it. Hopeless, because who could puzzle this out? Who could even conceive of it?
“Becket thinks your father killed my mother,” I say. I manage to make it through the first part of the sentence with a steady, emotionless voice, but it wobbles a little on the word mother, and before I know it, my face is cradled in Auden’s hands and he’s leaning his forehead down to touch mine.
“Tell me everything,” he says, and so I tell him everything, the entire story. Becket and the body on Samhain, what my father said to me about Guests and Kernstows. And when I finish, Auden’s gorgeous lips are parted in horror.
“Are you angry with me?” I ask, needing to know. Needing to know if Ralph has the power to come between us, even months after his death.
Auden swiftly kisses my forehead. “Never. My father is the monster, no one else.”
“Do you think . . . Do you think that he could have really done it? I keep trying to think of ways for it not to be true . . .”
Auden shakes his head after a minute. “I don’t want to be believe it, Poe, because I don’t want a murderer’s blood coursing through my veins, but—” He lets out a sharp breath and kisses me again, more for himself than for me, it seems. “There’s no way it’s not true,” he finishes unhappily. “If Becket truly saw him there with a body, then we have to accept the most likely explanation. When is he telling the police?”
“Tomorrow.”
“They’ll want to know why he didn’t say anything earlier.” Then Auden sighs. “They’ll need to look through my father’s things. I’ll make sure they’re available, as well as myself for another interview.”
I turn my face into his knee again. “Why do you think he did it?” I ask in a miserable mumble. “Could it really have been a Thornchapel ritual?”
Strong hands haul me up into his lap, and I’m held tight against his chest. “I don’t know,” Auden says. “I don’t know.”
It’s late in Kansas when I call, but my father doesn’t seem to mind. Especially when I update him on Becket’s story.
“Dad,” I ask, staring out my bedroom window to the dimming horizon beyond. “Are you going to tell the police what you were doing that summer?”
My dad sighs, and I can hear clinking, like ice in a glass. My heart tugs unpleasantly, thinking about him all alone with only the dogs and his students’ homework for company. “I haven’t decided if it’s relevant.”
“You made it sound like it was.”
“There’s . . . layers. Layers to Thornchapel. Like in one of your mother’s digs. We never got to the oldest layer, and I never wanted to.”
“I know about the rituals,” I say. “The feasts.” It’s on the tip of my tongue to add that I’ve done them, that I’ll do another, but then a blush burns my face and my throat dries up.
Nope, still not ready to tell my dad about Imbolc or the next orgiastic rite we’re planning. It’s hard enough probing him for details about the rites he did. And obviously, I’m not missish about these things in general, but when it’s your own parent?
Ugh.
“Then you should know how dangerous they are,” my father says sharply. “They seem like games, like pantomimes, but they’re not.”
“Fine, sure. Fine,” I say. “You keep alluding to all these dark secrets Thornchapel has, but then you won’t just tell me. You won’t tell me what they are, you won’t tell me what you were doing here that summer, you won’t tell me why Mom came back—”
“I’m not going to tell you because I don’t want you to think you can fix it. I don’t want you to try.”
“Fix what?” I demand. “Try what? How do you know I’m not already trying?”
“Are you trying something?” my dad asks, alarmed.
“No, Dad, we’re not trying anything, just—”
“I’m not making the same mistake with you that I made with your mother that summer,” Dad cuts in, sounding angry and afraid. “I indulged her curiosity, I trusted Ralph, I believed him when he said there was a way to shut the door, and look where that got us!”
I blink. “A way to shut the door?”
There’s silence on the other end, and I intuitively know that my dad didn’t mean to say what he just said. Whatever it means.
“Dad? What door? What did Ralph say?”
“Come home, and I’ll tell you,” my dad says.
I huff. “You just want to lure me home and then you’ll try to convince me to stay home once I’m there!”
“Well, yeah,” says my dad, as if this is obvious.
“And you won’t just tell me now? You won’t tell me anything?”
My dad exhales. I hear the ice clink in his glass again as he takes a drink. Finally he says, “I’ve been down this road before with your mother. She wanted to learn about Thornchapel, and the more she learned, the more she needed to learn, until she was so deep inside Thornchapel and its secrets that she couldn’t claw her way free. The secrets there are poison, Poe. They will eat you alive.”
“You won’t even tell me why you came to Thornchapel in the first place? How you met Ralph? The other parents? Was it for your work? Her work? I found a picture of all of you, and there’s a torque, and—”
“No.” My father’s voice is granite. Unyielding. “No. No more. When you are home safe with me, I’ll tell you everything. Until then, no more.”
I know that voice, I know he means it, and anger simmers in my blood.
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
A silence. “I’ve got to go. I’ll be home for the funeral when they’re done with the investigation.”
I can tell my dad doesn’t want to leave the call on such a bitter note, but it’s also obvious neither one of us will budge a single bit, so we exchange tense I love yous and end the call.
I throw my phone on my bed as hard as I can when I hang up. How dare he hold knowledge about my own fucking mother hostage? How dare he use information as leverage? It would serve him right if I found exactly what it was that he and my mother and Ralph were doing, it would be so satisfying to discover it without him . . .
Of course.
I don’t need him.
I don’t need what he knows. I’ll find it on my own, and in the meantime, my friends and I will have an amazing Beltane, and prove unequivocally that Thornchapel isn’
t poison. That it’s perfect, and there’s no need for me to come home, because I’m already here.
Chapter 17
Eight Years Ago
“Damn it, St. Sebastian, hold still or I’ll have to tie you down.”
St. Sebastian mused on whether or not this threat was supposed to be an actual deterrent, but decided to hold still anyway. At least as best he could. “It tickles.”
Auden’s sigh could be heard over the wind and the leafy rustle it made as it tugged through the trees. They’d picked the old Methodist graveyard because hardly anyone ever came here, and also because it was only a wooded slope away from the River Thorne and they’d inevitably end up swimming in this heat. But Auden had wanted the light as he worked today.
And even though it’d only been two weeks since they started spending time together, St. Sebastian had already learned not to argue about the light.
“I fail to see,” Auden said, amused, “how this can make you squirm more than me biting you.”
“I squirmed plenty then too,” St. Sebastian replied, meaning to sound surly but instead sounding wistful. “I could show you, you know, if you bit me again. For comparison’s sake.”
Auden chuckled above him and then made a reprimanding click. “Stop flirting. I need your breathing even if I’m going to make these lines straight.”
St. Sebastian was on his stomach in the grass, his head pillowed on his arms and his torso completely bared, and Auden straddled his hips, Sharpie in hand, turning St. Sebastian’s back into art. Art that St. Sebastian couldn’t see, but could feel—and feel excruciatingly—the cold, wet tickles like a licking tongue all over his ribs and shoulders and down to the base of his spine, where Auden paused his work to dip his head and kiss the little dimples there until St. Sebastian was whimpering into the grass.
“I have a surprise for you,” Auden said, after abandoning the dimples and resuming his work.
“Mm?” St. Sebastian said, all his words gone after the dimple-kissing.
Feast of Sparks Page 17
