But I don’t do any of that. Not this morning.
I slide out of bed and walk to the window, looking out over the slope of the estate, down to the trees lining the rocky seam of the river. It’s well past dawn, but what’s outside could hardly be called morning; thunderheads are hovering above, frowning and heavy and flickering every so often with lightning. Through the cracked window, Thornchapel is a hushed world, with only a faint stirring in the trees and the occasional growl of thunder to give it life.
I’m grabbing my clothes before I even know I’ve made the decision.
A few minutes later and I’m outside, striding across the terrace and down the shallow steps to the soft grass, still dewy enough to hiss against the sides of my boots. I make my way down to the secret path that leads out from the ruined maze and follow it to the thorn chapel.
The woods aren’t dark and they’re not light either. They’re steeped in a strange stormlight, a fraught, electric gloom that makes it feel like anything could happen, like nothing is real. Like this one handful of hours belongs to another time, another world, and I am a guest in it, I am privy to a moment meant not for ordinary things, but for whispers and auguries and secrets.
It’s the kind of morning that could make me believe in something, make me believe in almost anything. If you told me ghosts were real, fairies were real, that saints could be shot full of arrows and still live, I’d believe it all, I’d believe every word you spoke when the light was like this. When the air itself was laden with strange knowledge.
Snatches of thunder—muffled and distant—roll through the trees, and the branches and leaves stir intermittently with the petulant wind. It tugs at my T-shirt as I emerge into the clearing, it tugs on the roses and leaves and branches covering the thorn chapel. The tall grass waves against the standing stones, like a restless sea of green, and far above Reavy Hill, lightning crackles in the sunless sky.
Why am I here?
I don’t have a good answer to that. Auden doesn’t want anyone out here on Lammas or any other holiday, and it’s not like there’s anything out here for me today anyway. No fire, no magic, no Poe.
No wild god.
But here I am, roaming around the grounds like I used to do, long before I knew I had any kind of genetic claim to this place, stepping through sloe-laden branches and over stray rose petals to the cloistral area inside. I have no plan, I have no agenda. I just feel like here is where I need to be right now. Like if the world itself is going to thrum with possibility, then I should be in the one place where I know anything is possible.
Anything.
The breeze stirs again, and there’s a quick flash of light from over the hills. The shadowy stormlight is even stranger here, inside the chapel, curling in the corners and in the hearts of the roses and limning the broken outlines of windows.
The exposed altar stands at the far end, cryptic and forbidding.
There’s no door behind it. I don’t know why that relieves me.
I don’t know why that disappoints me either.
But even before I see the big dog jump to its feet and bound over to me, I think I know why I came, why I knew I needed to come.
As I dutifully scratch behind Sir James Frazer’s ears, I search the chapel and finally see him sitting against one of the few bare stretches of wall, a sketch pad in his lap and his leather bag propped open next to him, spilling out pencils and erasers and other types of artistic detritus I can’t even begin to identify.
Of course he’s here. Of course he’s waiting for me.
“Ah, St. Sebastian,” says Auden, looking up at me. His eyes are magnificent in this light. As otherworldly as the forest around him. “I knew you’d come.”
“Happy birthday, dickhead,” I say, sitting down next to him. Sir James spins in circles and then does the same, huffing like it’s some kind of unbearable dog burden to have to nap at a moment’s notice. “I thought you told us not to come to the thorn chapel today.”
Auden selects a pencil from his bag and then bends over his pad, his hair falling over his forehead. “Are you accusing me of hypocrisy on my own birthday, St. Sebastian?”
“You deserve it.”
His eyes don’t stray from his work, but a small smile tugs at his mouth. “Maybe.”
“Why are you out here?”
“Because I knew you’d come out here,” he says mildly, reaching for another pencil. “And because I was up early. I had trouble sleeping.”
Because Poe stayed with me last night. I wonder if he misses her as much as I do when she’s sleeping with him. It’s nonsensical to miss her when she’s only a wall away, but there it is.
We should have been a three. Not two variable sets of two.
I look down at what he’s sketching. It’s the thorn chapel, of course, but only the far end. The altar, the crumbling, rose-decked wall behind it, the dark clouds pressing against the trees behind all of that. And set in the wall, surrounded by roses that Auden’s currently coloring a red so deep it’s nearly black—
“That’s the door.”
Auden nods. I look up at the wall, which in real life is a bank of stone and untidy blackthorn studded with bright blue berries. And then I look down at the sketch. There, the penciled door rises above it all. Its top arch is pointed, its planks fitted with dark metal. It looks like a door that would belong in a medieval chapel.
“Is that what you think it looks like?” I ask.
“It’s what I know it looks like.”
“But shouldn’t it look older?” I gesture at the altar. “Dr. Davidson’s book said that the altar predates the chapel, predates even the standing stones.”
Auden follows my gaze over to the altar. “You think the door and the altar are the same age?”
“Or the door came first. And the altar was built in front of it.”
I get another smile. “I thought you didn’t believe in the door, St. Sebastian.”
I shrug, looking away from him and into the storm-shadowed forest. It’s so hard to be close to him sometimes. So hard to see his smile and not think of what it felt like to have his foot on my chest, his drawings on my skin, his footsteps chasing after mine as we ran through the trees.
“It’s the kind of morning where I don’t care what I normally believe.”
I’m not worried about whether he understands what I mean or not—I know he will. And he does.
“Yes,” he says. “It is that kind of morning.”
And then he lifts his hand over his sketch and starts working again.
“They didn’t have doors in the Neolithic,” I say after a long minute. I stretch out my legs and lean against the wall too, tangling my hand in the grass next to me. “It would have looked different then.”
“I would suppose so,” Auden says, a bit distractedly. He’s filling in more details around the altar, using a few different shades of gray to capture the look of the weathered stone. “Maybe it would have been a breach in the air itself. A gateway without the gate.”
“But to where?”
“I don’t know. Poe says in her dreams of Estamond, even Estamond herself doesn’t know. Although Estamond did believe that local stories of being abducted into fairyland came from the door.”
“There’re stories like that all over the world, though. Do you think that means there’re doors all over the world?”
Auden contemplates this. “It certainly seems possible.”
“So maybe this door isn’t special.”
I don’t know why I say that. I of all people think that Thornchapel is the best and most interesting place in the world, for no other reason than I love it. Just by being associated with Thornchapel, the door is important to me.
“It’s undoubtedly special,” Auden disagrees, flicking a glance up at me from underneath his lashes. “Because it’s ours.”
And he’s right.
He continues his work, and I watch him, feeling strangely restless as I do. It should be soothing, reassuring, doing t
his thing we did when we were sixteen. Him drawing, me watching, the summer heat settling in my bones as I lounge next to him.
But instead I feel like I did when I was sixteen, which is gashed and ragged with wanting him. Wanting his mouth on mine, his body against mine, his fingers wrapped around the part of me that aches for him so, so much. I watch him while he draws like I’ll be allowed to have him if only I look hard enough. If only I memorize perfectly the fine cut of his jaw and the graceful, aristocratic swoop of his nose. If only I can recreate in my mind the faint lines on his forehead as he works, the infrequent blinks, the impatient flicks of hair out of his face. The firm, almost sensual wrap of his fingers around his pencils, the balance of abandon and precision in his movements as he draws. The sound of his breathing against the breathing of the hovering storm, as if they were one and the same.
I’m playing with the ring on my thumb as I watch, spinning it in slow circles, wishing it was him playing with it instead. Wishing it was another kind of ring on a different finger. Wishing that I wasn’t so painfully, excruciatingly aware of how it will never, ever be a different kind of ring.
“If you don’t stop looking at me,” says Auden after a while, “I’m going to do something about it.”
“You don’t like being looked at?”
Auden sets down his pencil and puts his hand over where I’ve been fiddling with my ring. “I like being looked at too much,” he says.
Our eyes meet, and I think the weight of his hand over both of mine is enough to press me right into the earth. Like I’ll be pushed through the grass and the dirt and the rocks and right into the molten heart of the planet just by the gravity of his touch.
“I like looking at you too much,” I admit in a whisper.
His eyes drop to my mouth, then to my throat, then down to where his hand covers mine. The thing between us is like a storm all on its own, a storm that won’t break, that can’t break. It can’t ever, ever break, and yet if it doesn’t, I think I might die from it.
Auden’s voice is soft when he speaks. “We’ve been good, St. Sebastian. Haven’t we?”
Those words are like brands on my heart, like silk sliding over my cock. My entire body erupts in goosebumps.
“Yeah,” I say, the word coming out like gravel. “We’ve been good.”
The tip of his finger finds the family crest stamped onto my ring and rubs over it slowly, slowly. I think of the mercies and cruelties that fingertip has given me. Caresses that curled my toes and bruises that made me thrash.
I never understood the phrase ignorance is bliss until now, I always thought it better to know, it should be better to know . . .
I wish I didn’t know now. I wish I knew nothing about it. I wish he would thread his fingers through my hair and kiss me like I was his, because I would still be his if I didn’t know the truth. We’d be in paradise together instead of in hell alone.
If you’re already in hell, why not be there together?
You could trade longing for guilt and loneliness for shame.
But then at least you wouldn’t be apart.
I know it’s for my sake that he forbears. I know it’s because he loves me that he keeps his love hidden away.
But what about me? For whose sake am I doing this?
Mine?
My mother’s?
I don’t know anymore. And I still know it’s wrong to want him so much, but I can’t stop, and maybe if I gave in—just once—just a little—just enough to feel better—
Auden’s eyes lift back up to my mouth, and I know he’s looking at my lip piercing, I know he’s imagining taking it between his teeth and tugging.
I know he’s remembering what it feels like on his cock.
“This is hard,” he says. “It’s always hard, of course, but right now, all I want is to—”
He stops before he can speak aloud whatever it is that’s tormenting him.
Do it, I want to say. Whatever it is, just do it to me, please, please, please.
And for a moment, I think he might. His eyes are hot on my mouth and his hand curls tight over mine, and I see the Thorn King in his face, I see the god who runs through the trees, and I wish he would kiss me, grab me, fuck me. Make it so I have no choice. Make me feel his love, make it inevitable, and then I can have it both ways. I can be made to have him and I can have the hating him for making me.
But Auden is too wise or too cruel for that.
He pulls away, his hand lifting off mine, fitful lightning flickering through the clouds as he does.
My entire body mourns the loss of his touch, and not for the first time or even for the millionth, I hope hell is real and I hope Ralph Guest is there. Not just for what he did here in the thorn chapel, for what he did to my mother and Poe’s mother, but for what he’s done to me and Auden now. For the future he stole from us, for the love we can’t share because we never had a choice about sharing his blood.
Auden drags his hands over his face. “Everything I want is wrong,” he says, sounding unhappy.
Maybe it is.
But . . .
“I want it too,” I whisper.
“That’s what makes it so hard.”
“Yeah,” I say. I almost want to add I’m sorry, to let him know that I appreciate what he’s given up for the sake of my soul. That I appreciate the gesture even more because everyone knows I don’t even really believe in souls at all.
But I do know that the St. Sebastian who was my mother’s son is slipping away bit by bit, day by day. And I’m terrified of waking up one morning and seeing a man she’d be ashamed of, a man roistering and carousing inside her greatest fears.
Don’t see him again.
Don’t see him again.
How could she have known, though, what she was asking? How could she have known that my heart was already curved and notched to fit perfectly against his?
The wind kicks up a little, fluttering the pages of Auden’s sketchpad. He watches it dispassionately, staring down at the sketched depiction of the altar and the door as the paper rustles and flaps in the breeze.
“Do you think we’re cursed?” he asks. “That the Guests are cursed for what they’ve done here?”
I suppose he’s thinking of us. He’s thinking of his father and his neglected mother, who lived and died in her unhappiness. He’s thinking of Randolph, who according to Poe, watched Estamond die here and who later watched all his children die.
But I look around at the ruins—lush and carpeted with roses and berries and thorns—I think of the majestic house, the river, the hills, the everything else.
“I don’t know. There is a lot to being a Guest that isn’t cursed. Maybe Becket would say that they’re—or we’re, I suppose—blessed.”
“I don’t care what Becket says,” Auden replies sharply. “I want to know what you think.”
“Why?” I ask. “Why does it matter what I think? Curses aren’t real.”
“But what the Guests have done here might be real. And if that’s real, then wouldn’t it leave some kind of . . . imprint? Some sort of stain?”
He’s looking at the real altar now, and I follow his gaze, thinking about it too. What people might have done here for centuries and longer.
Here and there, Poe’s father had said. King and door.
“What do you think it was like?” asks Auden quietly. And I know he doesn’t mean watching something like that, I know he doesn’t mean witnessing it. I know he means doing it. He means being it—being the Thorn King. Striding up to the altar with the torc around your neck, knowing death was only moments away.
I hate the look on Auden’s face just now, like he’s already walking up to the altar himself, like he’s already preparing to be slain. His eyes are wet and bright, and there’s color high on his cheeks, and his breathing is fast, so fast.
Every curve and line of him has gone completely taut, like he’s rigid with anticipation and fear.
“Auden,” I whisper. “It’s not going to ha
ppen again. It’s never going to happen again.”
“But what if it does?”
“It’s not,” I repeat firmly. “I won’t let it.”
“What if it’s supposed to?” His hands twist into the grass, like if he holds himself hard enough to the ground, he’ll be safe. Safe from the ghosts of his ancestors’ sins. “What if it’s the only way?”
I stare at him. “Are you listening to yourself? Killing someone is never the only way, especially not for a fucking door.”
“Right,” he says.
“A magic, invisible door,” I clarify, to highlight exactly how ridiculous this is. But also to shake him out of this, because it sends shivers of unease dancing down my spine. I suddenly hate him looking at the altar, I hate him looking at the empty space where a door could be.
It can’t have him, I think. It’s not allowed to have him too.
I won’t allow it.
And it doesn’t matter what I actually believe about doors and sacrifices and kings; it’s the kind of morning when I’ll believe anything anyway.
What matters is that I do think people have died on that altar.
What matters is that I will never let Auden Guest be one of them.
I get to my knees and crawl over his legs, meaning only to come between him and the altar, to break his view and block the uncanny tableau behind me, but once I’m there, once I’m straddling his thighs, every thought and intention in my mind slowly fizzes away, like fireworks on a pond.
“Hi,” I say, stupidly.
He peers up at me, the wind ruffling his hair and his ivory T-shirt. Because he’s Auden Guest, he can’t even wear T-shirts like the rest of us, and he’s wearing some wide-necked linen blend that probably costs as much as ten normal shirts. His shorts too—lemon yellow things made for boats and picnics and private lunches in Lake Como.
Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3) Page 38
