Saint tried to think about what should be said next, about what should happen next, but his thoughts weren’t here in London with this man who might be his father. They were at Thornchapel, they were with Auden.
It might not be true. Maybe it’s not true.
Oh God, what if it wasn’t true? What if these last four months could be forgotten like a bad dream?
We could be together again.
“So you don’t know who my father is,” Saint clarified. “It could be Ralph still.”
Freddie nodded slowly. “It could. But it could just as easily be me, St. Sebastian, and if it’s okay with you, I would like to know. I don’t know how many wrongs I can make right at this stage, but I want the number to be more than nought.”
Saint didn’t have to think long. He didn’t know Freddie well, and he didn’t know how much he needed a father at age twenty-five anyway. But he did need answers. He did want the truth.
Especially if the truth would bring him home to Auden.
“Yes,” Saint told Freddie. “That’s okay with me.”
And so a week later, as Saint sits in his cramped, sub-let flat in Bristol swabbing his cheek, he wonders if the possibility is enough. The mere possibility that he might not be Ralph’s son, that he is Delphine’s brother and not Auden’s. Does he really have to wait for proof to see Auden’s face again? He should—he should wait—but he can’t. He can’t. He finishes the swab, he packages it and drops it in the post where it will be mailed off to the paternity testing company, and then even though it’s already evening, he gets in his car and braves the fading light in order to find his way home.
Rebecca
On the night she saw the wren, it didn’t take Auden and Poe long to understand that something was wrong, deeply wrong with the door. She told them about the spread of the roses, she told them about the bird, she showed them the roselle and the violet crusty with dried blood.
She’d changed her mind about it, she explained as Poe bent over her leg in the kitchen and dabbed antiseptic on her thorn-bitten legs, as Auden stared at her with serious eyes and a grimly set mouth. It wasn’t safe, she told them.
It took him a moment to speak after she finished, but finally he nodded.
“We should close it,” he said.
“Thank you,” she replied, the relief of being believed almost as heady as the relief of knowing she’d have help.
Poe smoothed a bandage over Rebecca’s leg and looked at Auden. “I thought you wanted to leave the door alone?”
Auden ran his hand over his face. “I’ve already tried closing it before now.”
Poe stared at him in shock. “What do you mean?”
“Before you came back. I tried lighting fires. Singing. Dancing. The first time I saw it was Beltane, so I thought maybe . . . I don’t know, that there was a connection. But none of that worked, so I thought the next best thing was merely leaving it alone.”
Auden met his submissive’s eyes with a gaze both imperial and apologetic. “What Rebecca saw was specific to her and Delphine. I can’t risk—I won’t risk the people I love being hurt by this. We find a way to close it and stop whatever it’s doing. I’m sorry, but that’s my final decision.”
Rebecca sensed Poe had something to say about this, but the librarian merely pressed her lips together and resumed bandaging Rebecca’s legs instead. If Poe had been her submissive, Rebecca would have made her speak, but Poe wasn’t her submissive, and anyway, Rebecca had other things on her mind.
“I wish . . . ” Auden started, but then he paused, looking down at his fist where it was clenched on his thigh. “I wish the others were here. I wish I could call them back to me. Move them like how the trees move for me.”
“If you could bring people to you with the sheer force of your will, then you could also make them not be tits, and then we wouldn’t be in the position of having to call them back anyway.”
“Right you are, Quartey.”
“When? I don’t want to wait long.”
“As soon as Tally’s done,” Auden said. “The day he wraps up the dig, we go out there and close it.”
And so here they are, a week later. The last of the archaeological excavation is packed up, Tally has been feted with celebratory cocktails, and now there’s no one left but Poe, Auden, and Rebecca. Now there’s nothing left to do but go to the door, armed with fading sunlight and determination. Poe has a bulky bag slung over her shoulder which clanks as she walks. They all have torches.
The weather today seems to remember it’s still technically summer, and so it’s warm and dry as the three of them make their way out to the chapel. The breeze ruffles through the still-green leaves, and Sir James has plenty of furry things to chase along the forest path. Eventually he disappears, on the trail of something interesting, and Rebecca suspects he’ll be wet and muddy by the time he returns. Auden was extremely prescient in installing a dog shower in the mudroom when he renovated it.
“What’s our plan?” Poe asks as they enter the clearing. “If we try to close it and it doesn’t work?”
They’ve been talking in circles about this all week. The simplest way to close it would be to reach through the door’s opening, grasp the handle, and pull it shut. That’s what Freddie Dansey tried, and that was what rendered him unconscious. However, Rebecca doubts that they’ll be able to reach through the threshold at all, which she reminds them of.
“It makes no sense,” Poe says. “If flowers can come one way, why couldn’t you throw a stone the other way?”
They’re inside the chapel walls now, picking their way through the roses and the thorns. They all click their torches on, even though the sun has only just disappeared into the sheep-flecked hills on the rim of the valley. And while it doesn’t make much material difference to how much they can see, Rebecca senses that they all feel better with the torches on.
“I’m not sure,” Rebecca finally answers Poe. “I can only imagine it’s something happening at the quantum level.”
“Not magic?” Auden asks. Rebecca notices a machete and a sledgehammer resting against the altar. The machete has been used: the path to the altar is wider, and the altar itself is currently free of roses. The sledgehammer looks shiny and unnicked, as if it’s just been purchased and hasn’t seen any work yet.
“Not magic,” Rebecca says.
“You’re only saying that because you don’t believe in magic,” Auden says.
“Everything looks like magic until you understand how it works,” Rebecca answers impatiently. “The stars, the weather, crops, diseases, earthquakes—for thousands and thousands of years, humans thought those things were just as magic as you think the door is now.”
“I didn’t say I thought the door was magic,” Auden says mildly. “I’m only pointing out that you’re dismissing the possibility out of hand.”
“And what evidence points to the door being magic and not a natural phenomenon that we don’t understand yet?”
“Its irregularity in appearing. Its interaction with people like Estamond. Its response to sacrifice. The way it knew you were watching when it showed you the wren’s death and gave you the flowers.”
Rebecca is about to counter this when she decides she can’t entirely. The memory of the wren’s screams are still too loud in her head.
She’s also decided she doesn’t care about why or how the door works. A first for her, maybe, a first in a life built around understanding the essential principles of the natural world. What she cares about is the door knowing Delphine. What she cares about is keeping Delphine far away from it.
She changes the subject. “Did you come out here earlier and clear away the roses?”
Auden shrugs. “It seemed like it would make it easier.”
“They’re farther out now,” Rebecca observes. “They’re almost to the front wall of the chapel. They’re growing faster than roses should.”
Auden only nods at this comment, as if he’s already noticed and come to the same c
onclusion.
“And the sledgehammer?”
“For in case nothing else works,” Auden says cryptically. Then: “All right. Are we ready?”
Rebecca steps up to the door with him. She’s past ready. Delphine may no longer be hers, she may never forget the ways Delphine has hurt her, but she’ll be good and goddamned before she lets a threat like this go unanswered.
The door can kill all the wrens and bloody all the violets it likes. Rebecca will never let it hurt the girl she loves.
Proserpina
After settling her bag on the ground, Proserpina runs her hands along the altar as Rebecca and Auden talk. It’s quite clear that roses covered it until just recently, since a few canes still cling to the sides, and dark petals drift along the top. She takes a minute to skate her hand over the convivificat carved into the altar—the very word that brought her here to Thornchapel—and then she takes another minute to remember that she’s standing on her mother’s grave. Or what was once her mother’s grave.
A grave made because someone thought her death necessary to close the door.
When Proserpina turns to the door, she doesn’t see the horrific scene that Rebecca saw. There are no carnivorous birds, no unnatural flowers. Just a clearing and the forest surrounding it. Just a twilit world of late summer beauty.
She reaches for the opening without thinking much about it. In fact, she thinks as much about reaching for the opening as she does about cracking open a book she’s found in the library. Like it’s the most natural thing in the world to ask her questions with her body as well as her mind.
Auden says her name and steps forward in a panic, but it’s too late. Proserpina’s hand is already there, already touching the unseen barrier between their world and the world of the door. She presses her hand flat against the barrier as Auden sags in relief.
“You’re okay,” he breathes. “Jesus Christ, you’re okay.”
“When Rebecca threw the rock at the opening, she said nothing happened to it,” Poe points out.
“A stone is rather less biologically complex than a librarian,” Rebecca says dryly. “I don’t believe our standard for safety should be: ‘but it didn’t hurt a rock.’”
Poe smiles, activating a dimple which she knows will disarm the two Dominants she’s with. “Even if our standard was Freddie Dansey, we’d still know I’d be okay. The worst that happened to him was sleeping for a day, and I do that all the time anyway.”
Auden comes up and pulls her tight to him with one arm around her waist, sliding his free hand into her hair and tugging her head to the side. “Just remember,” he murmurs into her neck, his lips moving over her skin, “that any risk you take is not a risk you take with yourself alone.”
He is cool and elegant as always, but clearly pissed, and his anger has her abruptly wet and shivering. She would love to kneel for him right now; she would love to feel the sting of his displeasure all over her bottom and breasts.
But instead he lets her go with a bite and a swift, thudding swat over her jeans.
“What does the barrier feel like?” Rebecca asks.
“I think you can feel it for yourself,” Proserpina says, moving aside to make room. “It didn’t hurt me to touch it, after all.”
Both Auden and Rebecca step forward, reaching out as she had a moment earlier. “It felt like cloth to me,” Proserpina supplies as she watches them. “Like a cloth strung tightly between the jambs.”
“A thin one,” Rebecca says. “Like butter muslin. There’s give to it almost. A flexibility.”
“It’s smoother than that,” Auden observes, running his fingertips along it one last time before stepping back. “Butter muslin would be rough, but this is more like . . . silk.”
“A veil,” Proserpina says after a minute. “That’s what the Record mentions. A veil between worlds.”
“A veil,” Auden repeats. It’s impossible to tell from his tone what he’s thinking.
It’s quickly apparent that they can’t close the door the easiest way—by reaching through the doorway and pulling it closed.
Auden then tries his next idea. Setting his torch on the altar, he pulls a small knife from his pocket and uses the tip to prick his thumb. He lets the blood drip onto the threshold of the door.
“What’s this?” Rebecca asks.
He shrugs, his attention on where the blood is dripping onto the stones that make up the bottom of the doorframe. “All that talk this summer about Estamond’s sacrifice and John Barleycorn—I don’t know, I thought maybe a little blood would do the trick? It seems to respond to that sort of thing.”
Proserpina would have assumed the same—she does assume the same—but she and Auden are both wrong, it seems. Auden’s blood is now spattered all over the threshold and nothing has changed. The door is still open.
He puts the knife away and then gestures for Proserpina to part her lips. He slides his thumb past them and rests the injured pad atop her tongue.
“Suck,” he orders, and she does, relishing the copper-salt taste of him, relishing the look of faint relief that flits over his face as the throbbing in his thumb abates. After a minute, he pulls his thumb free, but he gives Poe a look she interprets to mean she’ll be cuffed to his bed the minute they get back to the house.
“Well,” Rebecca says. “What next?” She’s pacing around the door, probing at the wall surrounding it as if searching for weaknesses.
“I pulled some of Thornchapel’s books about superstitions,” Proserpina says, taking her bag and setting it on the altar. “There are some old folk customs meant to protect people from gates to fairyland—or later on in the tradition, doors to hell. I gathered some of the supplies this week, although I’m not sure exactly what to do with all of them. Or if they’re even worth our time to try.”
Auden scrubs at his hair in that Auden way of his and offers the two of them a what-the-hell kind of smile. “Seems reasonable enough to try anything we can. If we opened the door using old rituals, surely they might also help us close it?”
So they go through everything in Proserpina’s bag.
They drench the jambs in holy water. They hang the architrave with an old iron chain Poe found in a potting shed. They string the doorway with red yarn. They cast salt on the doorway and all around the altar too.
They bury a small figure made of ash wood in front of the door; they hang the yarn with rowan berries; they smear the juice of the rowan berries on the lintel, jambs, and threshold. They even turn their clothes inside out and walk backwards from the altar to the door, an old trick for becoming invisible to fairies.
None of this works.
The door remains as it is. The clearing just past it remains silent and empty too. It’s almost fully dark now, and all they’ve accomplished is festooning the door with random crap and turning their clothes inside out.
Poe expects Rebecca to look displeased about this, to look grumpy that they’ve done a bunch of silly things for nothing, but when she catches sight of Rebecca’s face, it is not irritated or peeved, but panicked.
“Auden,” Rebecca says. “We have to shut it. I don’t care what we have to do, but I can’t stand the thought of it just here and open and waiting. If things can pass through it, if it knows Delphine...”
“It knows you too,” Auden answers, looking over at his friend. “Are you so little concerned with your own safety?”
Rebecca’s face and voice are completely earnest, completely serious. “She comes first for me. Always.”
Auden’s eyes flick over to Poe, but she doesn’t think his thoughts are mirroring Rebecca’s words, not entirely. Because while he’d do anything to keep her and St. Sebastian safe, she also knows he’d do anything to keep the others safe too. So that Delphine is in danger is enough for him.
It’s enough for Proserpina too, it’s only that . . . well, okay, she doesn’t know exactly why she has reservations about closing it. She shouldn’t have any reservations at all. In fact, she should hate the do
or for all it’s taken from her and her family. But she doesn’t. And she feels like she’s missing something obvious about it. Some answer that she read in a pamphlet or came across in a book, but she can’t remember exactly what it is.
Auden takes a few minutes to readjust his clothing, offering Poe pleasant glimpses of lean muscles and a firm ass, and then with his clothes righted, he takes the sledgehammer from the side of the altar and approaches the door.
Unease curls in Poe’s stomach as she watches him, and a stiff wind seems to pick up in the chapel, blowing past the roses and ruffling their hair. Poe can’t tell if the wind is some kind of admonition or encouragement, or if it’s merely mirroring the intensity in Auden’s face as he lifts the hammer and swings it at the side of the door.
There’s a crack of steel on stone, and Proserpina feels it in her teeth when it collides. The noises reverberate through the chapel and throughout the trees, and they all stand still as Auden drops the hammer to look at the place on the frame he struck.
There’s no change. Even though he swung with enough force to scar the face of the hammer, the stone is unchipped, undented, uncracked. Auden could have tied a red yarn bow around the stone for how much effect the strike had.
He looks back at Poe and Rebecca. Poe wants to say something, she wants to stop him, but she’s not even sure why she wants that, she’s not sure what reason she has, except that she thinks there’s an answer somewhere and it’s not this.
But what about Mom? she thinks. What about the laughing archaeologist who used to hunt for fireflies with her in the backyard? Who read her Greek myths and Bible stories and let her sleep in the big bed when she had bad dreams?
Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4) Page 13