Page 37 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
It’s too shadowy around Saint to see his flush, but I know it’s there anyway. “I don’t mean that I didn’t like it,” he says in a tight voice. “I liked it very much. But given what happened the next morning, maybe it’s a lot to ask. To go back there and do—well, whatever it is they used to do there.”
This is about me. He’s trying to protect me.
I’m not sure how I feel about that, how I feel about any of it, because do I want to celebrate another feast with my friends? Do I want to feel the air kindling with God and magic again? Of course I do. But am I ready to think about sex and fire and pain in the place where my mother’s been buried for the last twelve years? On the very ground that is now partially made of her?
I don’t know.
Yes, you do.
I feel it again, the thing I felt after waking up in Auden’s bed. That tilled feeling, all loose and broken and new. After all, what is broken but another way of saying open? What is new but another way to say that the old you has died, your old hopes and dreams and beliefs, and now there’s nothing left to lose?
Auden turns to me. “Is St. Sebastian right?” he asks. “Is this a lot to ask?”
I think I could forgive him almost anything right now, just for the way he’s looked at me and asked. For cutting through the bullshit.
“It’s a lot to ask,” I say. “But I want to do it.”
“Poe,” Saint says. “You don’t have to. We don’t have to.”
“But you want to,” Auden says, studying my face. He always knows when I want, as if my wanting is a color only he can see, a note only he can hear.
“I think it might be healing,” Rebecca offers. “Healthy. To make new memories there.”
“Yes,” I say. I might be ready to agree, but I don’t know if I’m ready to speak about it, about why the new memories should be made. About why this new Proserpina, all tilled and broken, can say yes.
“We have more than two months to think about this,” Becket says reasonably. “There’s no need to decide for certain tonight.”
“Very true,” Rebecca responds.
“Although I think we need to be honest with ourselves about what we’ve done,” he says.
That sends a new stillness around the room.
“Becky,” Delphine says. “I don’t think any of us have pretended that we didn’t have a sex party in the rain.”
“I don’t mean the sex,” he says, and he says the word far too comfortably for a man who’s supposedly given it up. “I mean what we woke up.”
Goosebumps pebble my arms and something thrums hard enough in my chest to make my teeth and funny bones ache. I know the minute he says the words aloud, that he’s right, that he’s speaking the truth.
We left the chapel. But the chapel didn’t leave us.
“I don’t know what to call it. I would say God, but if this is God, then this is him at his most elemental. It’s like we ripped down a curtain in the ruins, we tore back a veil. And now all of us are feeling what always exists behind that veil, and I don’t know if that’s the way it’s supposed to be or not. With Mass, with sacraments, I know how it’s supposed to feel, how it’s supposed to work—I studied it. I learned from two thousand years of texts, traditions, unbroken chains of thought and worship. But this? We know nothing about how it works, how long it lasts, if it will ever stop.”
“Which, by your logic, means we don’t know if another ritual will feed it or not,” Auden comments, taking a drink of scotch after he speaks. “What if we do this Beltane and everything we’re feeling now gets stronger?”
“And what are we feeling now?” I ask him. Ask the room. “Magic? Wonder? Need? Pain?”
When I say need, a ripple of discomfort moves through the room and no one seems to want to meet anyone else’s gaze. It seems I haven’t been alone in my chapel-sparked lusts.
“Yes,” Auden replies after a minute. “If you feel need, then I must feel it a thousand-fold. If you’re suffering, then I’m being torn apart. And yet, there’s something inside me, like . . .” He shakes his head, as if there’s no word for it. He presses a palm to his chest, his large hand over the place I know shields the warm beat of his heart. “Thorns,” he says. “It always felt like thorns. Ever since the wedding in the thorn chapel when we were children. They hurt—they always hurt—but after Imbolc, something changed. Like I grew into them or they grew deeply enough into me that the hurting finally made sense.”
In the shadows, St. Sebastian shifts, as if Auden’s words are physically moving through him.
“So I ask you all again,” Auden says, turning and looking at all of us in turn. “What if we do this thing at Beltane, and we’re more in thrall to it than ever? What if it changes? What if it changes us?”
His words fall across the room like rain, and the hush that follows is the hush that precedes a storm.
But then I ask the only thing that can be asked, the only question that matters. “What if we need to be changed?”
