Page 55 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
“Fix what?” I demand. “Try what? How do you know I’m not already trying?”
“Are you trying something?” my dad asks, alarmed.
“No, Dad, we’re not trying anything, just—”
“I’m not making the same mistake with you that I made with your mother that summer,” Dad cuts in, sounding angry and afraid. “I indulged her curiosity, I trusted Ralph, I believed him when he said there was a way to shut the door, and look where that got us!”
I blink. “A way to shut the door?”
There’s silence on the other end, and I intuitively know that my dad didn’t mean to say what he just said. Whatever it means.
“Dad? What door? What did Ralph say?”
“Come home, and I’ll tell you,” my dad says.
I huff. “You just want to lure me home and then you’ll try to convince me to stay home once I’m there!”
“Well, yeah,” says my dad, as if this is obvious.
“And you won’t just tell me now? You won’t tell me anything?”
My dad exhales. I hear the ice clink in his glass again as he takes a drink. Finally he says, “I’ve been down this road before with your mother. She wanted to learn about Thornchapel, and the more she learned, the more she needed to learn, until she was so deep inside Thornchapel and its secrets that she couldn’t claw her way free. The secrets there are poison, Poe. They will eat you alive.”
“You won’t even tell me why you came to Thornchapel in the first place? How you met Ralph? The other parents? Was it for your work? Her work? I found a picture of all of you, and there’s a torque, and—”
“No.” My father’s voice is granite. Unyielding. “No. No more. When you are home safe with me, I’ll tell you everything. Until then, no more.”
I know that voice, I know he means it, and anger simmers in my blood.
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
A silence. “I’ve got to go. I’ll be home for the funeral when they’re done with the investigation.”
I can tell my dad doesn’t want to leave the call on such a bitter note, but it’s also obvious neither one of us will budge a single bit, so we exchange tense I love yous and end the call.
I throw my phone on my bed as hard as I can when I hang up. How dare he hold knowledge about my own fucking mother hostage? How dare he use information as leverage? It would serve him right if I found exactly what it was that he and my mother and Ralph were doing, it would be so satisfying to discover it without him . . .
Of course.
I don’t need him.
I don’t need what he knows. I’ll find it on my own, and in the meantime, my friends and I will have an amazing Beltane, and prove unequivocally that Thornchapel isn’
t poison. That it’s perfect, and there’s no need for me to come home, because I’m already here.
Chapter 17
Eight Years Ago
“Damn it, St. Sebastian, hold still or I’ll have to tie you down.”
St. Sebastian mused on whether or not this threat was supposed to be an actual deterrent, but decided to hold still anyway. At least as best he could. “It tickles.”
Auden’s sigh could be heard over the wind and the leafy rustle it made as it tugged through the trees. They’d picked the old Methodist graveyard because hardly anyone ever came here, and also because it was only a wooded slope away from the River Thorne and they’d inevitably end up swimming in this heat. But Auden had wanted the light as he worked today.
And even though it’d only been two weeks since they started spending time together, St. Sebastian had already learned not to argue about the light.
