Page 91 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
“Poe is the library Domme,” Becket notes.
“Does that make Saint the library sub?” Rebecca asks, retucking her long legs underneath her. Delphine follows the movement with the avidity of a bunny waiting to see if the thing it’s just spotted is danger or food. Of course, Rebecca is both; she’s safety and edgy, sexual threat, and that’s probably why her little blond bunny has been looking so happy since the equinox.
I glance over to Auden, who’s already gazing at me with his arms crossed and his mouth in an imperious tilt that I now know means he’s feeling possessive. He’s pleased too, although I can only catch his pleasure in the rare flash of his dimple as he surveys his friends chattering and jostling around his table, and in the warm look I sometimes see him giving me and Saint (along with a concurrent flex of his hands, as if he’s itching to pull us both close.)
Maybe tonight, I think. Maybe tonight’s the night.
More than a week ago, Auden found me in my box-stacked bedroom and asked if he could tell me a story. A story about a beautiful, wild boy who belonged to the forest and about the other boy who wanted to love him and hurt him too. Auden told me about the graveyard—about how he’d stayed so Saint could run—about how when he woke up, both eyes nearly swollen shut and his sinuses filled with blood and his chest crushed—his first thought was he’s okay. He’s safe.
I kept him safe.
And then Rebecca’d found him because she’d gotten to Thornchapel early and she’d gone roaming around their usual hangout spots to find him, and then he didn’t remember much, except that even in the harsh, antiseptic air of the hospital, he clung to his pain like a gift. It was a gift if it meant Saint was safe. It was precious and beautiful, and he’d give any amount of pain all over again, he’d give his entire life, if it meant he could keep the people he loved safe.
But then Saint had left, he’d gone to America, and Auden’s pain changed into something else.
Heartbreak.
Auden told me about the money, about discovering that Ralph had been paying Jennifer Martinez over a thousand pounds a month for nearly eight years by that point, and how he’d put a stop to it, knowing it was unkind, knowing it was foul play, and being so angry and desperate to see Saint again that he didn’t care.
All this he told me while I sat on my bed and he knelt on the floor in front of me. It should have been wrong, to have him there, especially now when we were just forming our Dom-sub relationship, and even more especially since he was a baby Dom, and still stepping into himself. But it felt natural and
even necessary to have us positioned like this, as if he was a supplicant coming to a queen or a penitent confessing his sins to a saint.
As if he was a king kneeling before a priestess to receive a blessing.
And when I threaded my hands through his soft brown hair and he closed his eyes, I had a dizzy, blur-edged feeling of doing the same thing before, a déjà vu so powerful that I had the sudden, unnerving fear that if I pressed too hard on it, I’d find myself somewhere else entirely.
Someone else, even.
But the moment had passed, and then Auden had stood up and kissed me in the way he’d taken to kissing me since Imbolc, which was so full of feeling that I could feel his entire body trembling as he kissed me, and was also so searingly greedy that I always ended up breathless and clinging to him for support—as if it wasn’t enough to have my kiss, he also needed to have my breath and balance too.
And after that confession—and the smaller, sweeter confession of how he’d pleasured himself and Saint in Saint’s bed—I thought surely it would be soon. Saint had forgiven Auden, and certainly Auden must have forgiven Saint, and what was there left to wait for?
“I want him to admit something to me,” Auden told me the next day when I asked him this very question.
“Admit what? After everything the two of you have done to each other, what is there left to concede?”
Auden shook his head, looking at me with regret and resolve. Whatever it was he asked of Saint, he wouldn’t relent on it. So, once again, we’re in limbo.
Limbo with each other, limbo with my mother’s murder—as the police have re-interviewed all of us and taken boxes of Ralph’s things to sort through, but still haven’t given us any conclusive answers. Limbo even with Beltane, which so far is only a mess of antlers, fire, and sex, with so much left undecided.
With a mournful sigh as I acknowledge the possibility that I might not get fucked tonight, I look back at the pictures. Maybe we’ll break our rules anyway, like we did Easter night when Auden commanded Saint to eat me out. The thought makes me squirm—happily. Yes, maybe that will happen again . . .
“It can’t have always been this, though?” Saint is currently standing next to Becket, looking puzzled. “This feels so easy. And nothing about Thornchapel is easy. Ever.”
“Maybe it was a real hunt once upon a time,” Becket murmurs, eyes sweeping over the pictures. “The May King would hunt the herd’s stag for real—the chase and the danger and the death were all truly there. But then it gradually changed into a race. A game.”
“So killing the stag would have been the point?” asks Saint.
“Those poor baby deer,” sighs Delphine.
“A stag isn’t a baby,” Rebecca says. Delphine just sticks out her tongue at this, which seems to distract Rebecca sufficiently from correcting Delphine further.
Saint is still poring over the pictures. “There has to be a deeper origin to it. It can’t just be strapping on antlers for an elaborate game of tag.”
“I like tag,” Auden says to nobody in particular.
“Poe, what do the books say about the hunt again?” Saint asks. “Does it sound like it was a game back in the Record’s time?”
