Page 54 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
I think maybe I don’t care about that right now, or at least, maybe I think I can pretend not to care until Auden brings me off and then I can get back to caring—but then I remember Saint and me snuggled in the library and his careful restraint. Restraint that I initially requested.
Shit.
I look up at Auden, my almost-lover, my bashful, powerful baby Dom, and struggle to remember anything that isn’t a list of reasons why I should give myself to him entirely.
“I love when you look at me like that,” he murmurs. “I feel it in my blood. In my bones.”
Bones.
The moment—strung with heat and guilt and power—goes cold in an instant. “Auden—”
“Sir.”
“Sir, Becket and me—that wasn’t the only thing I needed to talk to you about.”
A faint line appears between Auden’s eyebrows, and I can tell he’s trying to puzzle out what I’m going to say before I can say it. Hopeless, because who could puzzle this out? Who could even conceive of it?
“Becket thinks your father killed my mother,” I say. I manage to make it through the first part of the sentence with a steady, emotionless voice, but it wobbles a little on the word mother, and before I know it, my face is cradled in Auden’s hands and he’s leaning his forehead down to touch mine.
“Tell me everything,” he says, and so I tell him everything, the entire story. Becket and the body on Samhain, what my father said to me about Guests and Kernstows. And when I finish, Auden’s gorgeous lips are parted in horror.
“Are you angry with me?” I ask, needing to know. Needing to know if Ralph has the power to come between us, even months after his death.
Auden swiftly kisses my forehead. “Never. My father is the monster, no one else.”
“Do you think . . . Do you think that he could have really done it? I keep trying to think of ways for it not to be true . . .”
Auden shakes his head after a minute. “I don’t want to be believe it, Poe, because I don’t want a murderer’s blood coursing through my veins, but—” He lets out a sharp breath and kisses me again, more for himself than for me, it seems. “There’s no way it’s not true,” he finishes unhappily. “If Becket truly saw him there with a body, then we have to accept the most likely explanation. When is he telling the police?”
“Tomorrow.”
“They’ll want to know why he didn’t say anything earlier.” Then Auden sighs. “They’ll need to look through my father’s things. I’ll make sure they’re available, as well as myself for another interview.”
I turn my face into his knee again. “Why do you think he did it?” I ask in a miserable mumble. “Could it really have been a Thornchapel ritual?”
Strong hands haul me up into his lap, and I’m held tight against his chest. “I don’t know,” Auden says. “I don’t know.”
It’s late in Kansas when I call, but my father doesn’t seem to mind. Especially when I update him on Becket’s story.
“Dad,” I ask, staring out my bedroom window to the dimming horizon beyond. “Are you going to tell the police what you were doing that summer?”
My dad sighs, and I can hear clinking, like ice in a glass. My heart tugs unpleasantly, thinking about him all alone with only the dogs and his students’ homework for company. “I haven’t decided if it’s relevant.”
“You made it sound like it was.”
“There’s . . . layers. Layers to Thornchapel. Like in one of your mother’s digs. We never got to the oldest layer, and I never wanted to.”
“I know about the rituals,” I say. “The feasts.” It’s on the tip of my tongue to add that I’ve done them, that I’ll do another, but then a blush burns my face and my throat dries up.
Nope, still not ready to tell my dad about Imbolc or the next orgiastic rite we’re planning. It’s hard enough probing him for details about the rites he did. And obviously, I’m not missish about these things in general, but when it’s your own parent?
Ugh.
“Then you should know how dangerous they are,” my father says sharply. “They seem like games, like pantomimes, but they’re not.”
“Fine, sure. Fine,” I say. “You keep alluding to all these dark secrets Thornchapel has, but then you won’t just tell me. You won’t tell me what they are, you won’t tell me what you were doing here that summer, you won’t tell me why Mom came back—”
“I’m not going to tell you because I don’t want you to think you can fix it. I don’t want you to try.”
