Page 74 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
This is why you agreed. This is why the restraint is necessary.
Not only for Proserpina, but for St. Sebastian too.
For himself.
What had happened in the graveyard had made Auden bitter and St. Sebastian skittish; it had blighted the thing growing between them. And Auden doesn’t know how to remedy blight except to burn everything down and start over, and he doesn’t know how to start over without earning, which is what he’s trying to do now.
“I’ll see you in the library,” St. Sebastian mumbles before either Auden or Proserpina can say anything else, and then he’s gone.
Proserpina wriggles free of Auden’s hold, but once she’s on her feet again, she presses her face into his chest. “Tell me you’re almost done fixing the two of you. Please tell me that.”
God, if only he could go back to that summer, if only he could make the teenage version of himself hobble back to Thorncombe and tell St. Sebastian every single thing that needed to be said.
“I’m working on it, little bride,” Auden says with a sigh and kisses her temple. “I’m working on it.”
Chapter 23
Proserpina
Equinox
* * *
A curious thing happens to Proserpina that night.
After a dinner—where she updates everyone on what she’s discovered about Beltane—and after they reconvene in the library, she lays down on one of the sofas and falls asleep and dreams.
As dreams go, it’s a fairly boring one. It’s set in the library, late enough that the incorrigibly early-rising Rebecca has fallen asleep on the opposite couch and Delphine has dozed off in a nearby chair, phone in hand. The boys are seated on the floor by the fire, passing a bottle of scotch between them, and the fire’s mostly burned itself out. There’s no longer any real flames, just a reddish glow and the occasional lonesome pop cracking through the room, and most of the light comes from a lamp near Delphine’s chair, glinting off the bottle as they hand it around. Every few seconds, Sir James Frazer lets out a giant, put-upon sigh, until Saint reaches over and starts scrunching the fur at his neck. Contented, the dog stretches his paws out toward the fire, arches his back, and then falls fast asleep.
Auden and Saint are arguing about something—no, not something. About what she told them all over dinner. About Beltane.
“Hunting is out of the question,” Auden says. “Do any of us really know the first thing about it? Honestly know?”
“Poe said she thinks her interpretation is off,” Becket says. “There might not be any hunting at all.”
Saint is clearly still stuck on Auden’s early comment. “Don’t you go shooting, like, all the time? Isn’t that a requirement of Posh Club?”
“Shooting isn’t hunting,” replies Auden in a tone of crisp offense.
“But you’re killing things with guns—”
“Clay pigeons, Martinez. They look like plates. Would you like me to write to their little clay plate families? Send some fresh clay flowers?”
“Well, if we’re being frankly historical,” Becket says, “the hunting was probably done not with a gun, but with a bow and arrows.”
Saint and Auden both look at Becket in silence.
“Which is probably also out of the question,” says the priest. “I just thought I’d point it out.”
“We’re not going deer stalking,” Auden says firmly. “I don’t care what the villagers did in the Middle Ages.”
“It seems more Neolithic than medieval in origin,” Becket remarks—again unhelpfully, judging from the ensuing look Saint and Auden give him.
“I’ve seen bucks here in the woods,” Saint continues, as if Becket hadn’t spoken. “I don’t think it would be hard to find a stag.”
“Once again, I only kill clay,” Auden says in an exasperated voice. “I’m not killing a stag. Especially not for what we think a three-hundred-year-old book is telling us about a festival most people use as an excuse to fuck.”
“I don’t see what’s any worse about killing a stag for a ritual than killing it for sport.”
