Page 27 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
“You should come home,” my dad interrupts. “Away from that cursed place. Away from Ralph’s son. Come home and we’ll bury your mother, and maybe we can bury Thornchapel too.”
Leave Thornchapel?
Leave Auden? And Saint? And the others?
My entire body responds, my heart thumping like I’ve just scented danger. “I can’t,” I whisper. “I want to be here.”
“Would you want to be there even if you knew that Ralph killed your mother?”
“That’s not fair, that’s unprovable and irrelevant—”
“What if his son tries to do the same? What if history repeats itself? Can’t you at least acknowledge that Thornchapel is dangerous to Kernstows?” His voice, which rose in passion and volume, abruptly cuts off, as if he feels like he’s revealed something.
“You said being a Kernstow didn’t matter,” I say.
“No. I said it shouldn’t matter,” he corrects, sounding very tired all of a sudden. “I couldn’t keep your mother safe from that place, but I can still protect you. Leave. Forget about the Guest boy and the library there and the ruins. Come home where you belong.”
I belong here. I’m like St. Sebastian now, claimed by a place I shouldn’t have a right to call my own but I do. At some point, when I wasn’t paying attention, Thornchapel planted a flag in me and it said: mine.
“I love you, Daddy,” I say. “I’ll call again soon. And when it’s time to bury Mom, I’ll be there.”
And then I hang up.
Chapter 10
Eight Years Ago
The next day Auden turned up at St. Sebastian’s house, but St. Sebastian was already waiting outside, reading a book on the front steps. Auden stepped forward until his shadow covered the pages, and when St. Sebastian looked up, Auden had a crown of July sun behind him.
“What do you want to do?” St. Sebastian asked, standing up.
“I don’t care,” Auden said. “Anything.”
So they did anything.
For the next week, they swam in Thornchapel’s pool, they hung out in the graveyard while the moon swung heavy and bright above them, Auden drawing at intervals while St. Sebastian watched in hypnotic silence. They roamed around the footpaths with baskets of fancy shit from the ho
use that some servant-type had packed for the teenage master, including bottles of wine they drank until St. Sebastian was giggly and effusive and couldn’t stop talking—which Auden liked very much.
Auden liked hearing about his family back home in Texas, he liked hearing St. Sebastian explain why he said back home about Dallas when he’d been born right here in Devon, he liked hearing about the Martinez family’s huge backyard parties with piles of tamales and sopapillas and coolers of glass-bottled Cokes and sparkling lights strung between the trees. He liked hearing St. Sebastian’s voice itself, he liked the way he could discern the shapes and imprints of England and America and Mexico in the different words St. Sebastian spoke to him, like how the River Thorne sometimes showed the shapes of the stones at its bottom.
Auden especially liked prying secrets free of St. Sebastian, and the day he prized free St. Sebastian’s reluctant admission that sometimes—well, okay, always and all the time—he wished he could see Proserpina Markham again, Auden had thrown back his head and laughed, the arch of his neck indecently strong and tempting as he did.
“Me too,” he’d said, laughing still. “Do you think she’d have both of us if she came back?”
St. Sebastian couldn’t even imagine what she was like now. “I don’t know.”
Auden’s laughter had quieted then and he’d looked down at his hands. “The memory of her is like . . . ” And then even the articulate Auden failed to find the words, although St. Sebastian knew what he meant. The memory of her, even from when they were kids, was enough to outshine every other girl they met.
“It’s haunting,” Auden finally said. “She’s haunting.”
“Yes,” St. Sebastian agreed.
“Is it weird to talk about this with me?” Auden asked then, sounding genuinely curious. “Does it make you jealous?”
The answer was that everything about Auden—everything he did and said and was—made St. Sebastian jealous, but he couldn’t say that, so he just said, “It’s nice to know I’m not alone.”
“In being weirdly obsessed with Proserpina or being bisexual?”
