Page 127 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
Auden’s eyes darken even further as he watches.
“Not at all,” he finally says. “It’s only that I have no alternative but to be stubborn when my choices are so few.”
Somewhere outside the garden, Sir James barks, and then Auden sighs. “Inside, St. Sebastian. Let’s tend to our wayward priest.”
Chapter Thirty
St. Sebastian
I wake early Lammas morning.
It’s a Sunday, and normally we’d all be getting up to go to Mass, but we went yesterday evening instead, and so the house is utterly still. I don’t even hear Sir James Frazer pacing around, waiting to be let out. Poe is very asleep next to me, but it’s a restless sleep, with flickering eyelids and quick, stuttering breaths.
She’s dreaming.
I wonder if it’s about the door.
Normally I’d be tempted to wake her up. She’s naked and flushed from the simmering canicular heat that never seems to abate, even at night. We’ve all been so worked up lately, so tense and irritable and horny, and I don’t think a day’s gone by without my mouth between her legs or her plush thighs wrapped around my hips. I’ll never know why the heat makes me want to be hotter, but even now, with my skin warm and clammy, I long to press my skin against hers. To draw a nipple into my mouth and suck until she moans herself awake, to toy with her pussy until she’s wet and pushing me on my back to mount me.
But I don’t do any of that. Not this morning.
I slide out of bed and walk to the window, looking out over the slope of the estate, down to the trees lining the rocky seam of the river. It’s well past dawn, but what’s outside could hardly be called morning; thunderheads are hovering above, frowning and heavy and flickering every so often with lightning. Through the cracked window, Thornchapel is a hushed world, with only a faint stirring in the trees and the occasional growl of thunder to give it life.
I’m grabbing my clothes before I even know I’ve made the decision.
A few minutes later and I’m outside, striding across the terrace and down the shallow steps to the soft grass, still dewy enough to hiss against the sides of my boots. I make my way down to the secret path that leads out from the ruined maze and follow it to the thorn chapel.
The woods aren’t dark and they’re not light either. They’re steeped in a strange stormlight, a fraught, electric gloom that makes it feel like anything could happen, like nothing is real. Like this one handful of hours belongs to another time, another world, and I am a guest in it, I am privy to a moment meant not for ordinary things, but for whispers and auguries and secrets.
It’s the kind of morning that could make me believe in something, make me believe in almost anything. If you told me ghosts were real, fairies were real, that saints could be shot full of arrows and still live, I’d believe it all, I’d believe every word you spoke when the light was like this. When the air itself was laden with strange knowledge.
Snatches of thunder—muffled and distant—roll through the trees, and the branches and leaves stir intermittently with the petulant wind. It tugs at my T-shirt as I emerge into the clearing, it tugs on the roses and leaves and branches covering the thorn chapel. The tall grass waves against the standing stones, like a restless sea of green, and far above Reavy Hill, lightning crackles in the sunless sky.
Why am I here?
I don’t have a good answer to that. Auden doesn’t want anyone out here on Lammas or any other holiday, and it’s not like there’s anything out here for me today anyway. No fire, no magic, no Poe.
No wild god.
But here I am, roaming around the grounds like I used to do, long before I knew I had any kind of genetic claim to this place, stepping through sloe-laden branches and over stray rose petals to the cloistral area inside. I have no plan, I have no agenda. I just feel like here is where I need to be right now. Like if the world itself is going to thrum with possibility, then I should be in the one place where I know anything is possible.
Anything.
The breeze stirs again, and there’s a quick flash of light from over the hills. The shadowy stormlight is even stranger here, inside the chapel, curling in the corners and in the hearts of the roses and limning the broken outlines of windows.
The exposed altar stands at the far end, cryptic and forbidding.
There’s no door behind it. I don’t know why that relieves me.
I don’t know why that disappoints me either.
But even before I see the big dog jump to its feet and bound over to me, I think I know why I came, why I knew I needed to come.
As I dutifully scratch behind Sir James Frazer’s ears, I search the chapel and finally see him sitting against one of the few bare stretches of wall, a sketch pad in his lap and his leather bag propped open next to him, spilling out pencils and erasers and other types of artistic detritus I can’t even begin to identify.
Of course he’s here. Of course he’s waiting for me.
“Ah, St. Sebastian,” says Auden, looking up at me. His eyes are magnificent in this light. As otherworldly as the forest around him. “I knew you’d come.”
