Page 75 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
Auden doesn’t answer right away. “I just don’t see why killing has to be part of this at all,” he says finally. “Everything else about this ritual is happy. There’s flowe
rs and sex. We’re supposed to have a flowers-and-sex party with blood on our hands?”
“There’s always the ritual bath,” Saint says drily.
“Speaking as a priest,” Becket cuts in, “I think some sacrifice is necessary. I think wherever this tradition came from—the neolithic Britons or the Celts or maybe even the Romans—they would have seen it as necessary. Sacrifice is god-fuel.”
“Well, I’m not doing it,” Auden says. Stubbornly, arrogantly. “I don’t care how many triple goddesses it pisses off. Thornchapel’s had enough blood.”
“We don’t have to kill a stag to make a sacrifice,” Becket reminds him gently. “I was thinking more like . . . Lent.”
“Like we should give up fizzy drinks and crisps for Beltane?” Saint asks, puzzled.
“No, like we should think outside the box. Think non-lethally outside the box.”
There’s some silence after this, broken only by the pop of the fire and then a low whimper from Sir James Frazer, who, judging by the twitching of his massive paws, is having a very good doggy-dream.
“What about the rest of what Poe told us?” Saint asks. “The May Queen and the May King?”
The dream blurs a little at the edges here—much to Proserpina’s frustration, because she wants to know what they’ll say. She’d used tonight’s dinner to run through her meager Beltane findings, and there had been a lot of chatter afterward, but it was mostly Delphine clamoring happily for more salacious Great Rite details and Rebecca trying to hammer out specifics. She didn’t have a chance to ask Auden or Saint what they thought of it.
She strains to hear, thinking maybe if she could just scoot closer to the edge of the sofa, she could make out the low murmur of Auden’s voice. And then she finally hears him speak loud enough for her to hear, and he says:
“Hunting is out of the question. Do any of us really know the first thing about it? Honestly know?”
Proserpina blinks, confused, and then realizes she is really blinking, actually moving her eyelids. She’s awake.
“Poe said she thinks her translation is off,” comes Becket’s voice. “There might not be any hunting at all.”
What the hell?
Saint goads, “Don’t you go shooting, like, all the time? Isn’t that a requirement of Posh Club?”
Shooting isn’t hunting, Proserpina thinks dizzily, and sure enough, Auden says, “Shooting isn’t hunting.”
I dreamt this, she thinks, and then she thinks, but surely not. She’s never had a dream so vivid, so detailed, detailed down to the very words, to the very spits of the logs in the fire and the snores of the dog.
Maybe she dreamed it as they were speaking it—that would make sense. Except then how can she explain how she’s woken up to their conversation at the very beginning? If she’d been simply hearing them in her sleep and projecting it into her dream, then wouldn’t they be past this part of the discussion by the time she woke up? They wouldn’t be looping back to the exact thoughts, exact replies . . . exact pauses in speech.
Auden is making his joke about clay families now, and now Becket is being a little bit of a know-it-all, and Saint is making a case for killing a stag.
Sacrifice is god-fuel.
Thornchapel’s had enough blood.
And then Saint is asking, “What about the rest of what Poe told us? The May Queen and the May King?” and Proserpina has to sit up, she has to back as far away from sleep as possible. This has happened to her before, having had a dream so disorienting or disturbing that the thought of succumbing to sleep again seems like submitting to torture—but she’s never, ever had a dream that’s come true like this.
Immediately. Exactly.
It terrifies her.
“Ah, our sleeping beauty awakens,” Auden teases, but it’s gentle teasing. Proserpina still blushes some; she’ll never not be embarrassed at being caught sleeping when everyone else is awake. Well, almost everyone, she amends to herself with a glance over to Rebecca and Delphine, who are asleep exactly as she dreamed them.
She considers and just as quickly discards the possibility of telling the men about the dream. It’s still too close and unsettling for her to think about, much less talk about, and even if they believe her, what then? She’s told them before that she has vivid dreams, and this isn’t so much as a new talent as . . . a leveling up, say. Not really worth sending out a news alert. “You’re talking about Beltane,” she says instead.
“We’d just gotten to the Great Rite,” Becket answers at the same moment Saint says, “Come have some scotch.”
Both are invitations in their own way, and so Proserpina gets off the sofa and comes down to sit on the rug with them, accepting the bottle when Auden hands it to her.
