Page 100 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
Just like it did then, eight years ago.
Flee. Death. Flee.
You have to run to live.
An explosion of noise from right behind me, and a scream nearly tears out of my throat, because all I catch is movement and size—and then Sir James Frazer bounds ahead of me. He scares up a protesting flutter of birds, which seems to startle him as much as it startled the birds, barks once at them, and then wheels back around and lopes past me, looking like the happiest dog in the world.
Not Auden.
Still safe.
I know these woods better than I have any right to, and so I can easily pick paths and tracks through them, even in the shadows, even over the tiny brooks and streams, through thickets and around random falls of wood and boulders bigger than my car. I’m agile, I’m fast, but still I can feel the work and burn of my muscles as I run, the drip and sheen of sweat. Each jump, each stride, each pound of a foot—they echo the crash of my heart, which echoes the drum still reverberating through the trees. The drum, which seems to grow louder and louder, seems to come from every direction, not just from the ruins, and are there more of them now? More than just one? As if the entire forest has come alive with drums and they’re pounding me on to my fate.
Run, they say, their voices thudding and relentless.
Run because he’s coming. The wild god is coming.
Sir James barks behind me again, and I cast a glance over my shoulder, the antlers moving with me as I do. And then I see him, standing at the edge of the dell I’ve just run through, his loyal dog prancing eagerly around him like a hound on a hunt.
I see him, but he’s not Auden, not now.
He is the wild god.
The Horned One.
The Thorn King.
Like me, he’s naked to the waist, and also like me, he’s gleaming with sweat, every muscle taut and tensed. Antlers twine out of his thick hair as if they’ve grown there naturally, as if he’s part stag for real, and I believe it now, with how proud and strong he looks as he pauses and surveys the small dell below him. The dell that belongs to him, because the whole forest belongs to him. Me included.
The drums pound as the Thorn King’s eyes meet mine, and he’s far enough away that I can only make out the barest sketch of his face. The powerful jaw and the high forehead and the long nose. The mouth that sometimes still seems too pretty, like a boy’s, although it’s not like a boy’s now. There’s nothing boyish about him—the wide shoulders and the muscular legs and those big hands, the hungry mouth and the erection stretching to his hip inside his jeans—they belong to a man. A god.
For a moment, we don’t move. Predator and prey, locked together in a single moment, sides heaving, blood hot, muscles tense. He lifts his chin ever so slightly, as if to scent the air.
Run, the drums urge. Run before your king. Run for the wild god.
I run.
The drums are everywhere now, they are in the trees and in the earth, they are in my chest and in my blood, and as I crash through the trees, I have the strangest sensation that Auden and I aren’t alone right now. That there are others, just out of sight, waiting and watching.
The air will grow thin and the veil between the worlds will flutter . . .
Down a steep slope I scramble and nearly fall, catching myself on my hands just before I hit the ground and launching myself back up, my feet digging into the soft, mossy earth as I tear out of there, aware with each beat of the ancient drums that the wild god wants me and that he’s close.
So close.
Sunlight strobes as we sprint through the trees, gold-dark-gold-dark, and each breath scissors in and out of me with bright, cutting blades. The antlers change how I run, how I hold my neck and head, the drums change my pulse, and the god behind me demands my heart, and I’m his and the forest’s and he’s so close now that I can hear his feet on the forest floor and I can hear his breathing over the drums.
Between the trees, the river flashes and glints, the same as it did when we were boys just learning each other, and I make for it with all the strength I have left. The drums urge me on, urge me to the elemental safety of the water, and for a minute I think I’ve lost him. I hear nothing as I skid down the bank, and there’s a chance I’ll survive this after all.
The god will return to his grove without my heart in his hands; I won’t be consumed by his no-longer-boyish mouth.
But it’s in the last few feet that I’m snared. As I’m about to leap into the shallow water, I’m caught from the side and thrown to the soft ground. I’m dimly aware of bluebells pressing against my back as the powerful form of my hunter crawls over me.
“Got you,” the god says, and he crushes his mouth to mine.
The drums are beating, beating, as if the hunt isn’t over, and it can’t be, I realize distantly, because the god isn’t finished with me just yet. Not at all.
The Thorn King lifts his head just enough to look at me. His pulse pounds at the hollow of his throat, and every tight line of his shoulders and arms and chest are a study in pure virility—the same when I look down his etched stomach to where his thick erection grinds against mine.
