Page 86 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
“No one’s here,” his mother said. “When you didn’t answer your phone, I went everywhere looking for you—even Thornchapel—but no one was there but the cook and she said she hadn’t seen you or Auden all day. I only just happened to look up from the road and see—”
Her voice broke here, and St. Sebastian didn’t need to be a parent to imagine what she must have felt seeing him sprawled so quiet and still in the grass. He didn’t have to look at her face to know it was filled with a fear and a heartbreak that would tear him in two just to look at.
“Who did this?” she whispered, voice tearful and fierce. “¿Quien le hizo esto a mi hijo?”
St. Sebastian rolled his face into her shoulder, smelling home and safety, smelling Texas and family and laughter all the way across the ocean. For a tired moment, he thought about saying nothing. Not to protect them, but to protect himself from the inevitable consequences of exposing them. Probably the police would do nothing—God knew Billy and Lee got away with everything else they did—and all St. Sebastian would get for his trouble would be another beating.
But it wasn’t only him that got hurt, and that gave him an angry sort of courage. They’d done this to Auden, his Auden, Auden who bit his lip until it bled, who wanted to bend him over a bed and strap his arse with a belt—and yet put himself in the path of kicks and blows for St. Sebastian’s sake.
It was more than he could bear.
He told his mother.
And then later, at the hospital, he told the doctor and then the policewoman who came to take his report. He begged them all to find out what happened to Auden—if he was alive, if he was nearby, if he’d been injured. Before they’d left the graveyard, St. Sebastian had made his mother help him back inside the stone walls to check—pointlessly, he knew—for signs of Auden. There was nothing. Nothing but disturbed grass, the splintered corpse of his phone, and a sickening smear of blood near the wall.
He doubted Billy and the others would have finished with Auden and then helped him back to Thornchapel, like mates helping a friend who’s had too much to drink back to bed. And it seemed impossible to St. Sebastian that Auden could have left under his own steam—would have left without St. Sebastian or without at least trying to help St. Sebastian.
The only plausible explanation seemed to be that they’d killed Auden and tried to hide the body, and it took his mother, two policeman, and later on, a dose of something in his IV that made him too woozy to think properly for him to stop crying, to stop pleading and pleading with them to just make sure Auden’s okay.
“I’ll make sure,” his mother told him repeatedly, and he didn’t believe her, even after the flush of whatever benzo they’d given him.
But she did make sure. At some point the next morning—it was bright through the windows, bright enough to slice into St. Sebastian’s brain like a knife made of photons—his mother held his hand and told him Auden was alive and someplace safe.
“So he’s not hurt?” St. Sebastian asked, with desperate hope. “He’s okay?”
She gave his hand a squeeze that was so gentle and so very, very adult that St. Sebastian already knew what she was going to say next.
“He’s not okay just yet,” she said carefully. “He was hurt pretty badly. A broken arm, a cracked rib, and a broken nose. Lots of contusions and cuts and bruises. No concussion thankfully.”
St. Sebastian closed his eyes. He did have a concussion—a mild one, along with a broken rib—but he would have taken so much more pain and breaking if it would h
ave meant Auden didn’t have to suffer.
Why didn’t Auden just run like I told him to?
Why didn’t I stop running sooner?
“Do you know why I named you St. Sebastian?” Jennifer asked after a minute. She was still holding his hand, but her other hand was plucking at his blanket and hospital gown, trying to make everything pleated and neat.
“You told me it was because you got to visit his tomb, with the big Giorgetti sculpture on top.”
“That was part of the story. But not the beginning.” St. Sebastian felt the thin hospital bed mattress dip as she leaned forward on an elbow so she could straighten the pillow under his head. He was used to this from her—fussing over his hair or his clothes, making sure he was eating enough even when their kitchen sometimes held hardly anything to eat. It made him feel small, but in a way that felt good and safe, in a way that made him feel cared for and loved. So he didn’t mind the little pluckings and smoothings and straightenings as she talked.
“My cousin still lives in Mexico City, and she is one of many who revere and honor Santa Muerte. You know Santa Muerte?”
There was a lot of Santa Muerte on DeviantArt, but St. Sebastian didn’t tell his mother that. “She’s the patron saint of death.”
A hum, both agreement and disagreement. “She is more like…death itself. But she welcomes everyone to her table—the people the Church doesn’t always welcome with open arms, like the lonely and the poor, and the women who love women, and the men who love men, and those who have to fight to live as the men and women they truly are, no matter how the world sees them. And she welcomes those who love everyone, St. Sebastian. Like you.” Her voice was soft during this last part and she squeezed his hand again.
His nose stung and his eyelids burned and he had to swallow, his throat was so tight. How easy it was to forget sometimes that he always had his mother, that she loved him fiercely and with everything she was, that she supported him—that two years ago when he stammered out that he thought that he maybe—possibly, sometimes—liked boys as much as girls, she did nothing but sweep him into a tight hug and promise him he was always safe with her, that she was the proudest mamá in the whole world, and whomever he loved, she would love them too, they would be her children too.
But after yesterday, he could never forget. He could never forget that safety was a gift to which he would never be entitled, and it made him so angry and scared and also desperate to hold on to his mother and never let go. He rolled to his side, eyes still closed, and tucked her hand against his face, not caring if she felt the tears seeping out of his eyes or not.
She seemed to understand, and her voice took on a more soothing tone, a singsong of storytelling that he remembered from his childhood, while she told the story of Santa Muerte and how he got his name. “The Vatican doesn’t like Santa Muerte and neither does your abuela. ‘Good’ Catholics aren’t supposed to venerate her. But it seems to me that Santa Muerte is speaking to people in the way the Church has sometimes forgotten how, and is that not what God is supposed to do? Speak to his people through his saints and angels? The old Catholics used to worship Sophia as God’s wisdom incarnate—why don’t we do the same with death? Death, which is the heart of life? Death, which God took into himself, which he wedded to his body, for our sakes? The heart of God’s love for us was forged in death. Is that not something we should consider beautiful?
“But back to your name. Santa Muerte is also sometimes called Santa Sebastiana. Do you know why?”
St. Sebastian just shook his head against her hand.
