Page 46 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
“Poe!” Becket says, coming forward to kiss my forehead and help me with my damp coat. “Hi, Sir James—yes, yes, I know, it has been a long time, it’s been a whole day—” His cooing to the dog is interrupted when Sir James bucks up to lick his face. Becket laughs, not seeming to mind at all, and there’s a happy twinkle in his blue gaze when he looks at me. “I’m still happy to take him off your hands, you know. I’m used to keeping him.”
“He helps me sleep,” I say, shaking some of the rain out of my hair. “And he barks at the renovation workers when they try to come into the library. I like that.”
Becket grins at that, giving the dog a scratch behind the ears. “So to what do I owe the pleasure of the visit then? If it’s not to return this wayward mutt?”
I sit down on one of the pews and smile up at him. “I was out and about and I wanted to see you.”
I can tell this last part pleases him, but he works to hide it. Instead, he teases, “Playing hooky, are we?”
“Something like that,” I say. “Have you ever been to the Kernstow Farm?”
He takes a seat in the pew in front of me, still scratching at Sir James’s ears as he thinks on it. “Maybe? It’s north of Thorncombe, right?”
“Right.”
He thinks for a moment later and then gives me an apologetic smile. “If I have, I don’t remember. I’m sorry.”
“My mother was a Kernstow, you know. I wanted to see where the family came from. I wanted to see . . .”
I trail off for a minute, not sure what I was going to say because I still don’t know what I hoped to accomplish with my little excursion, and Becket reaches down with his non-dog-petting hand to touch my hand. “Did you? See what you came to see?”
Sigh. “No. But I did find this engraved onto the hearth stone.” I pull out my phone, find the picture, and then hand the phone over to him. “I know you like all the history and everything around here. Does this look like anything you’ve ever seen before?”
Becket’s mouth parts the tiniest bit, like he’s surprised. “Yes,” he says slowly, “yes, I think I have. But not here.”
“Really?”
With a few quick movements of his long fingers, he pulls up an image search on my phone and then passes it to me. And then I’m just as surprised. Several images of an antlered figure sitting cross-legged fill the screen, most of them rendered in metal and most of them far more detailed than the hearthstone, but certainly the same as the hearthstone person. Most of the images are of artifacts in museums, and the small captions at the bottom tell me they’re from all over Europe.
“That’s . . . it. That’s the same person. Man? Antler-man?”
“A god, I think,” Becket says. “Or a priest embodying the god. Cernunnos is the name most scholars give him, although we really don’t know for sure. Modern worshippers call him the Horned One. Sometimes the Stag King.”
“The Stag King,” I repeat. Same as the Thorn King? “Do you remember if Dartham’s book mentions anything like that? Or the Record?”
“I didn’t have a chance to read ahead in either,” Becket says, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Stag King is mentioned in some capacity. Have you come across anything like it in your Beltane research?”
I blow out a sheepish breath. “I’ve been trying to catch up on the library work I fell behind on, and then they finished renovating the south wing of the house, so those of us living at the house have been trying to move everything out of the old wing so they can start work on it next.” I cover my face. “I’m a bad Beltane researcher.”
“We’ve got so much time,” Becket assures me, unaware of the lustful direction of my thoughts. “I didn’t mean to make you feel guilty.” He pauses, biting at his full lower lip for a minute. “How is everything going? With the investigation? I’m worried about you.”
It’s nice to have someone worried about me, and even when I’m lonely with only the dog for company, I have to admit that I’m very lucky. Three months ago, I only had an ex-girlfriend that I could wheedle into beating me on occasion. Now I have five friends who worry over me, beat me, fuck me, laze around the library and gossip with me.
“I’m doing okay,” I say, and I think I mean it. I think it’s normal to go from horny or sleepy or wearily satisfied at seeing a room all boxed up and ready to move to crying or numb or angry. It seems normal to me at least. “They’ve taken down the tape around the ruins,” I say. “There’s really nothing more they can do, they told me. They’ve searched as thoroughly as they can for a weapon or restraints or anything else of my mother’s and come up empty. They think maybe . . . maybe it was a hiker. Or possibly some locals, drunk and wild on Halloween. Unless someone steps forward with a confession, though, it’s impossible to say.”
Becket’s gone stiller and stiller while I’ve been talking, and for the first time since I’ve known him as an adult, he turns his head away as if he can’t bear to be seen. As if wrestling with some great and terrible reality.
“Becket?” I ask, reaching out to touch his elbow propped along the back of the pew. “Are you okay?”
He closes his eyes for a minute, his lips moving almost imperceptibly. Praying. He’s praying. And then he opens his eyes, and his stare is utter and bleak pain. “It wasn’t a hiker who buried your mother, Poe,” he says softly. “It was Ralph Guest.”
Pain and confused anger twist up from somewhere deep inside me, and I press the heels of my hands to my eyes, thinking of my conversation with my dad. Thornchapel is dangerous to Kernstows . . .
No. No, it’s too much. Too neat, too pat. A scorned ex-lover turning to murder to exorcise his pain? That’s television. That’s fiction.
See what you can dig up about what happens in the thorn chapel on Samhain. What the Guests have done since time out of mind there . . .
Goddammit, no. No.
