Page 26 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
Not like yesterday. Not like in those gray hours after seeing my mother’s bones, where nothing meant anything and the very act of breathing felt surreal.
Today, I am hurt and dazed and tired. I think something might have been irrevocably broken in me, some tender part of my soul crushed and ground into my mother’s grave.
But I’m not numb. I’m alive.
“I feel better than I did,” I say, and I mean it. The worst thing has happened, it’s torn through me and crushed me into the wet earth, and maybe I died too in a way. Maybe now I’m being reborn.
Convivificat.
I’m not very hungry, but the others convince me to eat half a banana and swallow down some whisky, and then I go to call my father. He answers on the first ring, as if he’s been waiting phone in hand for my call, even though it’s still fairly early in the morning in America.
“Poe,” he says, and that’s all it takes. Tears choke me again.
“Daddy.”
I hear the sound of rustling and dog paws on his old kitchen floor, followed by the unmistakable sound of a sliding door opening and closing. I almost smile at the noise—familiar as childhood. It’s such a home sound, and my chest cracks from a sudden rush of homesickness. From wanting to hug my dad, to share a drink with him, to listen to his rumbling rants about university administration and grant funding.
“They called me earlier. The police. I’m so, so sorry, sweetheart. I’m so sorry you had to see it.”
“Will you come here?” I ask. “To Thornchapel?”
There’s the sound of wind on the phone, like he’s standing in the open door as the dogs do their thing outside. February on the prairie is frigid and windy as hell right now, and I wonder what he must be feeling to want that cruel air on his face.
“I don’t think it will help much,” he says finally. “The police seem to think that the forensic investigation will be brief. There’s only so much a medical examiner will be able to tell from her bones. Then the remains will be sent here, and we’ll bury her next to her parents.” A pause. “Where I’ll be one day.”
“Daddy . . . ”
“I’m not trying to be intentionally grim, Poe, it’s just the truth. It was the plan long before she went missing.”
“Are you okay?” I ask. “I worry about you not coming here, about not being able to see you . . . ”
A heavy, metallic whoosh and the sliding door closes. I hear the clicking and panting of dogs coming in from the cold. “I’ve had twelve years to think about this, to make peace with it. In a way, it’s a relief. It’s closure.”
“But we don’t know what happened,” I protest. “Or why, or why she came here in the first place—”
“I have guesses,” my father says darkly. “And they begin and end with Ralph Guest.”
Ralph’s name is an ugly dart to the stomach.
“You can’t think that he hurt Mom; you said he loved her.”
A hollow laugh. “Do I think that Ralph Guest could have hurt the woman who left him? On Samhain? In the thorn chapel? Yes, Poe, I’d have to be an idiot not to think that.”
“But—”
“You’re there, working in the library. See what that library will tell you about the Thorn King. See what you can dig up about what happens in the chapel on Samhain, and what the Guests have done since time out of mind there.”
I almost tell him. I almost tell him about Dartham’s book and Imbolc and the things we did with thorns and fire, but I don’t. I can’t. He is my father, after all, and if he even has a hint of the kinds of rituals particular to the Thorne Valley, then he doesn’t need to know that his only child has taken part in them.
Regardless, Dartham’s book was deeply vague about Samhain and I haven’t read any further in the Record of Thornechapel Customs, the book we used to suss out the details of our Imbolc ceremony. So I can’t say for certain what my dad is talking about, but I have the uncomfortable suspicion that it’s more than sex and cakes.
This is too much, I think. Too much. Ralph Guest was horrible, terrible, an abusive man who left nothing but bitterness in his wake—but to suggest—
“But the convivificat,” I say. “It was sent to me a couple months ago—after Ralph died.”
“Anyone could have found that laying around and sent it,” he says. “It doesn’t have anything to do with your mom’s death.”
“But it was the same word carved onto the altar!”
