Chapter Three
Proserpina
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Auden asks, glancing over at me. He has his glasses on today, and there’s the faint shadow of a beard coming up on his jaw, and it’s one of those moments when I see once again just how beautiful he is. Even unshaven and tousle-haired, even with smudges under his eyes from a night of drinking, fucking, and staring at a door that shouldn’t exist, he’s gorgeous in the way that Thornchapel is gorgeous. Like he’s walked right out of fairyland. Right out of the door behind the altar.
The door. I remember my nightmare again and shiver.
Auden notices. “I can pull over again,” he says.
I shake my head—a reflex. “I’m fine,” I say, which is not true, I’m not fine at all, but his perceptiveness and kindness are somehow more upsetting than if he were ignoring me altogether.
But when Auden looks over at me, there’s no irritation or pity in his face. He looks like he wants to pull me onto his lap and bury his face in my hair—which, honestly, is how he’s been looking at me all day anyway.
“I’m going to be fine,” I amend. “It was just so . . . it was so real.”
“And you said it was about Estamond?”
I look out the window of the car. My head aches a little bit—something the pharmacist says is normal after taking Levonelle—and I’m still so tired, even after the nap I took on the way back. With the narcolepsy, it doesn’t take much to knock me sideways. Allergy medicine or a string of early mornings or a stressful week at work—any of those on their own will do it. So Beltane night plus the effects of the morning-after pill? I feel like I could sleep for the next ten years and still wake up tired.
“It was,” I reply, and then I turn to him. “Do you think dreams can be true?”
“Certainly,” he states, steering his Land Rover as easily as a golf cart through a twisting village road with a narrow bridge at the end. “So much else has been true. Real. The drums. The door.”
“Do you think I could dream something that already happened?”
He glances over at me. “Do you think that’s what you did?”
I chew on the inside of my cheek. I didn’t tell anyone about the dream I had on the equinox, the one where I dreamed the future. It seemed so silly and small at the time—no one can dream the future, but if they could, what’s the use in dreaming a conversation that happens fifteen minutes from the present? But this dream, with Estamond and Esau and the shadow, it not only felt real but important.
It felt like a warning.
“I read that Estamond died in childbirth,” I say, “somewhere in the library. But in the dream, she—” I pause, searching for the right words, because suicide isn’t right, but neither is murder, even though Estamond’s mother was the reason Estamond had to die. “She sacrificed herself,” I explain. “In the thorn chapel. For the door.”
Auden frowns but doesn’t take his eyes off the road. Above us, branches lush with late spring make a tunnel of green and brown.
“The door—in my dream. It was there and it was open, and it had to be closed.”
“Why?”
Why. It’s the same thing I’ve been wondering since Auden calmed me down on the side of the road.
Why does the door have to be closed?
Why does it need a life to close it?
Why is there a door at all?
But then, why anything? Why is Thorncombe hung with garlands for May Day? Why did I have sex with five people in the light of the Beltane fire last night? Why did the man sitting next to me—the one with the Cambridge degree and swish job in London—chase another man through the woods and fuck him like a rutting stag? Wearing antlers the entire time? There’s something about the Thorne Valley that makes why the most necessary and also the most irrelevant question of all, because why do we do any of it?
“I don’t know why,” I finally say. “I don’t think Estamond really knew either, except she was—” I close my eyes for a minute, recalling the way the lantern light flickered over the midnight-colored roses around the door. Recalling the shadow. “She was scared of what was inside. She was terrified.”
Auden drums his fingers on the wheel, still frowning a little. “I suppose it’s possible that she didn’t really die in childbirth. It wouldn’t have been difficult for someone with influence or money to change the reported cause of death, especially if the actual cause were self-slaughter. That would’ve been shocking enough that a doctor would’ve helped Randolph keep the truth as quiet as possible.”
I think of Randolph in the dream—miserable and horrified by what Estamond had done—weeping and roaring as he gathered her to his chest. “She wouldn’t let him be the Thorn King,” I murmur. “She couldn’t let him die when she could take his place.”
“The Thorn King?” Auden asks. “Do I want to know?”
“I don’t think you do.”
“Tell me anyway.”
We’re in Thorncombe now, only a few minutes away from Thornchapel, so I tell him as quickly as I can about the rest of the dream. About the Thorn King and the torc and the song and the door and the Kernstows keeping watch over it all from their outpost in the hills. By the time we pull into the driveway, Auden looks so upset that I wish I hadn’t said anything about it.
I put my hand over his where it still rests on the shifter. “The Thorn King is an old story, Auden. Too old to touch us.”
He looks at me, something haunted in his green-brown eyes. “People could say Thornchapel is too old to touch us too, but we both know that’s not true.” He sighs as he turns off the car. “Sometimes the oldest stories are the most dangerous ones of all.”
When we get up to the bedroom, St. Sebastian is nowhere to be found. I check my phone to see if he texted us or the group thread, and there’s nothing. Both Auden and I shoot off quick messages to him, but there’s no immediate response.
Auden stands in the middle of the room, looking puzzled. “I wonder where he went. He didn’t have to work today.”
“Maybe his uncle called him in for something,” I say, sitting on the bed and then curling up on my side. Which is a mistake, because the moment I do, I feel my eyelids grow heavier, like I’m one of those baby dolls whose eyes close when you lay them flat.
“Maybe. Or maybe he went to get things from his place?” Auden asks. Then he nods, as if just speaking it aloud has made it so. “I’m sure he’ll be back soon.”
“Mmhmm,” I say, my eyes all the way closed now.
The bed dips as Auden sits next to me. He kisses my cheek. “You look good in my bed.”
I manage a sleepy smile at that. “I know.”
“You should sleep, Proserpina. The chemist said you might want to rest.”
“Mmm.”
“And when you wake up, St. Sebastian will be here and we’ll all be together.” Auden sounds a little uncertain though, and without opening my eyes, I find his thigh and squeeze.
“Go find him,” I mumble. “You won’t be happy until you do.”
He sighs. “You’re right. I’ve managed to wait eight years, but suddenly I can’t stand wasting another second. You’ll be okay here? I don’t want to leave if you might have another bad dream.”
I wave him off, already nestling into a pillow. “Go find your boy-toy and let me nap in peace.”
I hear him laugh a little to himself, and then I’m folded into soft, expensive blankets. A final kiss on my temple and then he’s walking away. “Sleep well, little bride,” he tells me, and his voice is so full of possessive affection that I’m smiling as I fall asleep.
I don’t sleep long.
I’m jolted awake by my phone ringing, and I fumble for it in that just awakened what the fuck is happening and why is everything so loud panic as I sit up. Sir James Frazer is a dog croissant at the edge of the bed, and the only response he gives is a single rotated ear, which he rotates back to its usual spot the moment I slide the accept button on the phone and the ringing stops.
“Proserpina. It’s Dad. Is this a bad time?”
“No, Dad, it’s not, I just—”
Was napping because I just took the British equivalent to Plan B?
Am tired because I spent the night having sex with five different people in the one place you never want me to be in?
“I had a heavy lunch and needed a nap,” I lie instead.
“Are you taking your medicine?” he asks. “Every day? And you know you have to follow a schedule; sleep hygiene is the most important—”
“Yeah, Dad, I know,” I grumble, feeling like a teenager again. Nothing irritates me more than him trying to help me manage my own fucking brain. And then I try to remember that he loves me and that’s why he worries. I soften my voice. “What’s up?”
The pause before he answers my question should have told me, but I’m still sliced open when he says, “The detective sergeant working on your mother’s case called. They’ve . . . finished. Whatever it was they needed to do, they’re done now.”
“Done?”
“They didn’t find enough evidence in Ralph’s things to say with real certainty it was him, although the detective believes it was, as I do. But with him also being dead, there’s not much more they can do. So. It’s over.”
“Oh,” I say. And then that’s it, I can’t say anything more, because even though I should’ve expected this, even though I did expect it, I didn’t realize that the investigation ending would feel so strange. Finalizing somehow. Closure without being closure at all.
“They’re sending her home,” Dad says quietly. “In two weeks. The funeral will be late June; I wanted sooner, but the headstone won’t be ready until then, and I thought since it’s already been so long, it wouldn’t matter if it was a bit longer and she could be laid to rest with her name over her grave.”
His voice thickens the slightest bit, like he’s holding back a deep misery. “She spent so many years in unmarked ground, you know? I couldn’t bear to put her back into the earth that way. I couldn’t do it.”
“Dad, it’s okay,” I whisper. “You don’t have to explain it to me. I understand why.”
He lets out a heavy breath. “I know, I just—I don’t want you to think that I’m stalling or that I don’t care. I care about it more than anything, and that’s why I need it to be right. I failed her so badly, Poe, more badly than you’ll ever know, and I’ll never have a chance to fix it. The only thing I can do is give her back the dignity Ralph took from her when he buried her in that cursed fucking place to begin with.”
Chapter Four
St. Sebastian
The light has shifted in my mother’s office, casting a framed picture of Richard Davey into shadow and throwing warm squares of sunlight onto the paper-covered floor. I kick away a metal box that I always trip over in here and then slide onto the floor, sifting idly through nearby papers with unseeing eyes.
My mind is full of Auden. Of the sun gleaming along his bare chest and the tines of his antlers as he chased me through the forest. Of him pinning me to the soft, bluebell-covered earth and kissing me until I couldn’t breathe.
Anything I want from you is mine.
He knew. Even then he knew, which of course he did. He was desperate afterwards, wild with something that wasn’t the forest, but was all Auden instead.
Nothing tears us apart again.
Never again, because I won’t survive it.
Swear it to me.
And I did. I did swear, because what would ever compare to belonging to Auden Guest? What force of history or nature could ever match the force of him? The tousled-haired, asymmetrical-smiled, public-schooled, artsy, cruel, elegant magic that was Auden Guest?
Nothing would or could, and so I swore never to leave him, but how could I have known? How could I have guessed this, of all things? And now I’m alone in my dead mother’s office, too numb to be as furious with her as she deserves, too shocked to start fixing the things I need to fix. There’s nothing but this crushing weight on my chest. Nothing but the acute knowledge that nothing will ever be good again.
That I can never be Auden’s again.
I feel—I feel wrong. I feel dizzy and floaty and infected with something that’s so much worse than loneliness that I don’t even know the name for it.
From my mother’s office down the hall, I hear the front door click and swing open. No knock. No calling through the mail slot. No hesitation.
Truth be told, I only have five friends in this world, and only two of them wouldn’t bother to knock. But before I can wonder if it’s Proserpina or Auden, Auden’s voice fills the house like a low, silver mist of clipped consonants and relaxed vowels. I hate it, I hate that voice right now, and for once it’s not because it’s a reminder of a way I’ll never be, but because it’s so horribly, heartbreakingly happy.
Auden sounds happy.
“I thought I’d help you come pack your things—if that is what you’re doing here; Poe thought maybe Augie called you in.” Footsteps move through the hall, a graceful but powerful-sounding gait. Without my permission, my mind conjures up images of Auden’s thighs: the way they reveal themselves in the occasional pull and stretch of his tailored trousers; how they look naked—long and athletic and dusted with brown hair, the kind of hair that feels rough on your cheek when you rub your face against it.
“Also my firm is having a party in two weeks, and I’m bringing you and Poe as my dates,” Auden goes on. He’s coming closer to the door to the office and I should stand up, but I can’t. I can’t. I want to touch my brother’s naked thighs, and the memory of rubbing my face against them has desire twisting hot and knotty in my belly, and I can’t stand up.
“Don’t worry about the tuxedo either,” he says, very close now, almost walking past the office without seeing me because there’re no lights on and it’s silent and I’m on the floor. “I’m having one done up for you, and I’m quite serious about you being a date, I’m keen to show you off, you know—”
His sentence breaks off as he catches sight of me sitting on the floor. His brow furrows with worry as he steps inside the office. “St. Sebastian?” he asks. “Is everything okay?”
I look up at his face, cast in the glowing light of a May afternoon. Wind blows through the tree next to the window, sending a pattern of leaf-shaped shadows dancing over his high cheekbones and sculpted jaw. He looks like magic now; he looks like a wild god even in tailored trousers and the brogues he considers his casual brogues—as if there’s any discernible difference between any of his fancy leather shoes.
His glasses are tucked in the collar of his long-sleeved henley—a shirt I’m sure is one of those deceptively ordinary bits of clothing that actually cost hundreds of pounds—and they hang there with just enough weight to pull down the collar and reveal the full glory of his throat, which is a throat I could spend forever kissing. It could be the throat in an anatomy textbook, in an art reference book, that’s how perfectly molded and shaped it is, and when he swallows—as he’s doing now, looking down at me—I can see the elegant strength of its inner workings, this confluence of air and blood moving inside him.
I drop my eyes.
I can’t look at his magic face or his artful throat. They’re no longer mine to look at. He’s no longer mine to look at, because he’s no longer mine at all. He is nothing to me but forbidden now, he can never be anything more than one of the deepest and oldest sins.
And he lied to me.
He lied to me.
To get what he wanted, because God forbid Auden Guest not get what he wants.
He squats down, trousers perfectly hugging every part of his hips and ass and thighs, a gorgeous watch on his gorgeous wrist, and he has everything I never had, money and grace and a world-class education, he has Thornchapel and the easy confidence that comes with knowing exactly who you are and where you’re from.
“St. Sebastian,” he repeats, reaching out to tug at my lip piercing with his thumb. And
I hate him so much right now. Not because he lied to me—although I hate him for that too—but because his eyes are so open, so honest and so clear. And his voice, that cool patrician voice, is warm. Warm for me.
A thought comes, as horrible as it is penetratingly possible:
What if this is a lie too?
What if the warmth, the honesty, the way he kissed me and held me last night—what if it’s all some kind of awful trick, the biggest deception of all? What if he only wanted me as a prerequisite to having Poe? What if he blames me for Ralph’s sins, for being living proof that his father was a shitty and disloyal man? What if I was always, always right, and there was never a world where Auden Guest could love a poor, sullen boy like me?
I push his hand away from my mouth, even though my lip twinges a little at the loss, and I scramble to my feet, feeling an ugly, sick twisting everywhere in my body. Everywhere that isn’t pulled tight with yearning, that is.
And in my belly, the two mingle together until I can’t pick them apart.
He straightens up too, pressing his hands to the wall on either side of my shoulders so fast that I can’t dodge away, and he crowds into me, his brogues trapping my boots inside them. His perfect mouth hovers just over mine.
“If you ever slap my hand away from your god forsaken mouth again,” he says slowly, “I’ll shove you to your knees and fuck that mouth until you cry. Am I understood?”
I hate how my body reacts to that; I hate how my body kicks to life at his cruelty.
Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3) Page 5
