Page 12 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
“Abby’s not in today, so I’ll make you something,” I tell her. I don’t cook often, but I very rarely am bad at something once I decide to learn how to do it, and so I’m a dab hand in the kitchen. Cooking is chemistry after all, and I’m very, very good at chemistry.
Delphine just yawns a kitten-like yawn and steps into the knickers. I valiantly resist the urge to go over and cup her simply for the pleasure of cupping something that is now officially mine.
“I wonder if Saint wants something to eat too,” I say, trying to distract myself from Delphine’s body long enough to focus on the rest of the day.
“I think he left.” She yawns again. “I heard his car going off outside the window this morning, you know that rattle rattle noise it makes when you first get it going? A couple hours ago.”
St. Sebastian is definitely an outside cat. He comes and goes according to his own whims, on his own timetable, a solitary, wary boy who’s somehow all the more lovely and interesting for how solitary and wary he is. I don’t doubt that he left without telling Delphine and me. “Maybe he followed Poe and Auden to Exeter?”
“They went to Exeter?” Delphine asks, baffled. “Why?”
“To get levonorgestrel for Poe.”
Delphine just blinks at me.
“The morning-after pill,” I clarify.
“Oh,” Delphine says. Then, “Oh.”
I look at her, wondering what she’s thinking. What she’s feeling. It’s only been three months since she ended her engagement with Auden, and the thing that’s sprung up between him, Poe, and St. Sebastian in the last few months is . . . palpably intense. Even I feel a little jealous and I don’t have romantic feelings for any of them—nor have I ever. But if one of them was my ex-fiancé, even if I was the one who broke it off, I don’t know if I would be quite as calm as Delphine is being right now. I make a mental note to keep an eye on it, and then fight off the urge to smile because Delphine Dansey is mine to keep an eye on. And no matter how much it seems like a trick, no matter how scared or chary I am of it, I can’t lie to myself. I want to keep her, and now that I get to keep her, I want to keep her for a very, very long time.
Chapter Three
Proserpina
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Auden asks, glancing over at me. He has his glasses on today, and there’s the faint shadow of a beard coming up on his jaw, and it’s one of those moments when I see once again just how beautiful he is. Even unshaven and tousle-haired, even with smudges under his eyes from a night of drinking, fucking, and staring at a door that shouldn’t exist, he’s gorgeous in the way that Thornchapel is gorgeous. Like he’s walked right out of fairyland. Right out of the door behind the altar.
The door. I remember my nightmare again and shiver.
Auden notices. “I can pull over again,” he says.
I shake my head—a reflex. “I’m fine,” I say, which is not true, I’m not fine at all, but his perceptiveness and kindness are somehow more upsetting than if he were ignoring me altogether.
But when Auden looks over at me, there’s no irritation or pity in his face. He looks like he wants to pull me onto his lap and bury his face in my hair—which, honestly, is how he’s been looking at me all day anyway.
“I’m going to be fine,” I amend. “It was just so . . . it was so real.”
“And you said it was about Estamond?”
I look out the window of the car. My head aches a little bit—something the pharmacist says is normal after taking Levonelle—and I’m still so tired, even after the nap I took on the way back. With the narcolepsy, it doesn’t take much to knock me sideways. Allergy medicine or a string of early mornings or a stressful week at work—any of those on their own will do it. So Beltane night plus the effects of the morning-after pill? I feel like I could sleep for the next ten years and still wake up tired.
“It was,” I reply, and then I turn to him. “Do you think dreams can be true?”
“Certainly,” he states, steering his Land Rover as easily as a golf cart through a twisting village road with a narrow bridge at the end. “So much else has been true. Real. The drums. The door.”
“Do you think I could dream something that already happened?”
He glances over at me. “Do you think that’s what you did?”
I chew on the inside of my cheek. I didn’t tell anyone about the dream I had on the equinox, the one where I dreamed the future. It seemed so silly and small at the time—no one can dream the future, but if they could, what’s the use in dreaming a conversation that happens fifteen minutes from the present? But this dream, with Estamond and Esau and the shadow, it not only felt real but important.
It felt like a warning.
“I read that Estamond died in childbirth,” I say, “somewhere in the library. But in the dream, she—” I pause, searching for the right words, because suicide isn’t right, but neither is murder, even though Estamond’s mother was the reason Estamond had to die. “She sacrificed herself,” I explain. “In the thorn chapel. For the door.”
Auden frowns but doesn’t take his eyes off the road. Above us, branches lush with late spring make a tunnel of green and brown.
“The door—in my dream. It was there and it was open, and it had to be closed.”
