Scare? It was like St. Sebastian was learning safety for the very first time. His mother and her family kept him safe in so many separate ways, but this—this—this was his spirit finding its home, this was being seen in his wholeness, in his complicated, contradictory entirety and being worshipped for it.
If there was fear, it was necessary; if there was pain, it was savored. He could no more be scared away from this sketching, drawling, entitled prince than he could change the stars in the sky.
“Never,” St. Sebastian breathed. “You’ll never scare me.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Auden said.
He took St. Sebastian’s wrists in his hand and pinned them above his head, and his hips pinned St. Sebastian’s to the ground, rolling hard, hard enough that St. Sebastian knew he was going to come soon and he didn’t even care. He would have died if Auden stopped, he would have died right there in the lavender.
“Kiss me again,” St. Sebastian pleaded. He searched Auden’s face—flushed, half-lidded—he felt Auden’s thick erection grinding against his own, the seams and zippers and buttons of their pants sending near-heavenly frissons of pain to dance through St. Sebastian’s nerve endings along with the pleasure. “Kiss me again and never stop.”
“God, how many times have I wanted to hear you say just that?” Auden murmured, lowering his mouth again. This kiss came with more—with depth and tongue and stark, cruel possession. Auden would let nothing stop him from searching every part of St. Sebastian’s mouth—he used his free hand to press a thumb against St. Sebastian’s throbbing, bleeding lip and he pulled the lip down and opened St. Sebastian to him even more. And with all of Auden’s weight on him—chests pressed together, and stomachs and cocks—and with lavender in the air and the fountain trilling in the background, St. Sebastian thought maybe it would be good if he died after all, because surely life never got any better than this. Surely this was heaven and anything other than being kissed into the fucking ground by Auden Guest would be hell.
“Promise me,” Auden said raggedly as they parted in a wet, breathless gasp. “Promise me you’ll say when I scare you; promise me that you won’t run away. I couldn’t bear it if you ever ran away from me.”
“I promise,” St. Sebastian said, feeling his chest crushing in with something heavier and better than the weight of Auden’s body. It was the weight of what Auden might feel for him, and fuck if it didn’t fire St. Sebastian’s blood hotter than any liquor, drug, or thrill he’d ever tried. “I promise I won’t run away.”
Auden’s forehead dropped to his and his hips stilled, even though St. Sebastian could feel the incontrovertible proof that Auden hadn’t come yet. Even though St. Sebastian was only two or three more thrusts away from coming himself.
“Auden?” he whispered, hoping he hadn’t done something wrong.
Somehow, Auden seemed to know his fear, in that way that Auden seemed to know things he had no right to know. “Shh,” he hushed St. Sebastian, tucking St. Sebastian to his chest as he rolled off to the side. “You haven’t done anything wrong. You’re perfect. You’re perfect.”
Together they laid in the crushed flower bed, Auden’s arms tight around him, and his face nestled into his strong, warm chest. Auden’s heartbeat filled one ear, the splashing of the fountain filled the other.
If magic was real, like it was in the books St. Sebastian loved so much, then this was it. This was the very thread and pulse of magic, this moment here in the shimmering, sweet-herbed garden of Thornchapel, burrowed in the arms of its master.
“I have to have this,” Auden said, almost apologetically. “I’ve wanted this for so long . . . I can’t rush through it.”
“Kissing me?”
“No,” Auden said.
“Then what?”
“Holding you,” Auden said simply, and for a very long time, neither of them said anything else at all.
They kissed again once more that night, a kiss without blood, but not without pain, because the slightest pressure from Auden’s mouth sent hot spikes of pain through St. Sebastian’s abused lower lip.
He loved it.
They agreed to meet the next morning, and St. Sebastian loped home, mussed and grinning and erect. He barely managed to say hello to his mother before he climbed the stairs two at a time to get to his room, where he could finally relieve the ache Auden had made in him. Where he could grip himself and think wild, happy thoughts about the moment—surely tomorrow, surely soon—when Auden would do this to him or he could do it to Auden. And after he came, he only had a few moments of reprieve before he had to jerk off again. And then another time before he could finally relax enough to get to a fitful, sweating sleep filled with dreams so filthy and so real that St. Sebastian had to pull his own sheets off the bed and shove them in the washing machine when he woke up.
That next morning came bright and hot, and St. Sebastian was out of bed and dressed when Auden came knocking.
Jennifer Martinez poked her head out of the small nook that served as her writing office while St. Sebastian jumped down the stairs, grabbed an apple from a bowl in the kitchen, and went to the door.
“Is it the Guest boy again?” she asked, her quiet voice cutting across St. Sebastian’s noisy, excited thoughts.
St. Sebastian stilled, his hand on the knob. On the other side of the frosted panes, he could see Auden’s profile—sculpted and handsome even through the blur of the glass. Behind him, his mother waited patiently for an answer.
He turned to face her. “Yeah. Auden.”
She smiled then, the sad half-smile that all parents of young people come by naturally. “I hope you’ll be careful,” she said softly. “Some people just aren’t meant to fit together, St. Sebastian.”
St. Sebastian bristled. At both her actual words and their subtext. “I’m not trying to fit with anyone. I’m just being me. I’m just hanging out with him, okay?”
She shifted then, one foot to the other, and her smile faded into something so serious and so uncertain that St. Sebastian nearly forgot about Auden Guest on the other side of the door. “Mijo, listen,” she said, shifting again and then swallowing. “The Guests are different. They are different from us, and I don’t want to see you get hurt. Stay home today, baby. Tell this boy you have to stay home, and then don’t see him again.”
It was the most earnest and pleading thing she’d said to him in years—this was not Jennifer Martinez giving him hell about talking back to teachers or getting restless in church. This was not her getting on his case about cleaning his room and staying away from Uncle Augie’s sons when they went out to make trouble.
This was her asking something, almost begging for it, and on any other day, St. Sebastian would have given his mother the moon if she asked. The moon and stars and light itself.
But it was today, and Auden Guest was waiting for him, and she was asking the one thing he couldn’t ever, ever give, which was to stay away from magic itself. Magic wrapped up and humming in the chest of a beautiful boy with a crooked grin and fingers that itched to hurt and worship him.
St. Sebastian went over and kissed her on the cheek. She smelled like Texas somehow, she smelled like the idea of home—sunshine and metal and fresh-snipped herbs. “It’ll be fine, Mamá,” he told her. “We’re just hanging out like we used to when we were little. No big deal.”
She looked like she wanted to argue, like she wanted to give him lots and lots of reasons why it was a big deal, why he was still little to her and needed to listen, but he just gave her another quick kiss on the cheek and bounded back to the door before she could.
He was out in the sun with Auden before she could stop him, and he was already halfway down the road, with Auden’s hand predictably tugging on a belt loop, when he heard a distant smash.
They were close enough to the Crown and Thorn that St. Sebastian shrugged it off as a random pub noise, and continued walking, stealing glances at Auden at the same time Auden was stealing glances back and then grinning shy
ly at each other. There would be more kissing today. It was as certain as the sun pouring through the big summer leaves, it was heating the very air with potential.
And back at the house, Jennifer Martinez sank to the floor, buried her face in her hands, and wept at her own weakness, her own sins and secrets. She wept because Thornchapel would eat her son, and she hadn’t done enough to save him.
Chapter 13
Proserpina
Present Day
* * *
Gold-green forests.
Dark earth, bright bluebells, glittering river.
A man with antlers twining from his hair stands in the midst of it all, tilting his face to the sun. Sweat glistens in the hollow of his throat, along the sculpted lines of his tight stomach. Loose trousers hang from his trim hips, showing off the muscles low on his belly and the golden hair arrowing down from his navel. Power radiates through him and hunger too. He looks like Auden—he could be Auden, except when he drops his face to survey the forest clearing, I see that he’s not. He has the same hazel eyes, the same high cheeks and forehead, but his mouth is fuller, his nose and jaw more rugged, and the hair that waves around the antlers and curls down towards his shoulders is flaxen, not light brown.
Somehow I know he’s a Guest. A Guest from very long ago.
A sudden crashing noise through trees has him leaping away, as if giving chase, and I can feel exhilaration moving through him, and determination, and . . . lust? I run after him, making it to the river in time to see him wrestling another man to the ground.
“Got you,” he says in Auden’s voice, and it is Auden now. He slants his mouth against the mouth of the struggling man underneath him, and the man bucks against his kiss. He is done running. He’s been caught.
Voices rustles from the trees around me, and drums pound, drums like on Imbolc night.
The wild god, the woods whisper. The Thorn King.
The Thorn King? I think, knowing I should remember why that’s important.
When the door opens, the trees whisper, the Thorn King must come. When the door opens . . .
What door? I try to ask back, but it’s a dream, and my lips won’t move, my words won’t leave me. What door?
But the trees are silent, and just as I’m about to ask again, I wake up with a violent start.
“Ah, shit,” I say, looking at the afternoon sunlight diffusing through the library windows. There’s a piece of paper stuck to my face from where I laid my head on the table to rest for just a moment. Of course, just a moment turned into a few hours, and now I have a neckache from sleeping wrong, plus I’ve wasted half my workday napping. A familiar zing of self-loathing passes through me, chased quickly with excuses. You can’t help it, you haven’t been sleeping well, you didn’t ask to have narcolepsy.
I’ll have to work through the evening to justify the nap; even if Auden and I are . . . something, that doesn’t mean I can forget that he’s also my employer. I’m being paid for a job, and the job isn’t falling asleep over a pile of rare books.
God, that dream though. What a mind-fuck. The wild god?
Just a dream thing, Poe.
With a sigh, I look down at the paper that was stuck to my face. I wasn’t even really working, truth be told, I’d been glancing through the Record again, in a fussy, desultory kind of way, as if I expected answers if I glared at the pages enough.
I’d been looking at the Imbolc page in particular, and had idly copied down the caption that had been annotated by Estamond. “The consecration of the May Queen on Beltane Imbolc Night!”
I rub at my cheek now as I examine it, hoping I don’t have ink smudged on my face.
Consecration.
Imbolc Night.
I look at the added underline, look back at the book, and then look at it again.
“Poe, you’re so stupid,” I breathe, pushing away from the table and then darting up to my room. Within a few minutes, I’m back down in the library with the convivificat note, looking at the impressions in the paper. The LC, underlined. The s-e-c-r-a-t-i-o-n. I’d wanted proof that my mother had seen this book?
Here it is, in her own handwriting: the last bit of IMBOLC, capitalized and underlined for emphasis. The end of the word consecration.
I stare down at the note, equal parts happy to have some kind of answer and agitated that I might never have more answers. Like who sent the note? And fucking why?
But for the first time in a long time, I can shake off the gloom and hurt those questions raise, and peer down at the note with a more objective lens. Because if my mother had seen the Record, then maybe that’s enough to know that our parents were doing something in the thorn chapel, something a lot like us. My father won’t tell me, and both Delphine and Becket are too nervous to ask their own parents, especially Imbolc. I think they don’t want to hear that their parents did the same thing.
And when I asked Rebecca if she’d ask her father, she’d merely trained those gorgeous dark eyes on me and said in a mild tone, “My mother doesn’t live on a different continent because my father is brilliant at communicating, you know.”
I will get answers from my father one day. He promised he’d tell me everything in person. But until then, this is enough to guess at what our parents did.
Now if we could only find out why.
A few days later, after the London group returns back to Thornchapel, Rebecca calls a group meeting in the library.
We’re all full from dinner—tender rare beef and surprisingly luscious beet salad—and ready for drinks. For the first time since Saint found my mother, I enjoyed eating again. I’ve also been working in earnest this week, craving the mind-numbing distraction of cataloging and scanning again, and so when I go into the library tonight, it’s with the satisfying sense of having worked hard this week and made tangible progress.
At least I can still get work done. At least I have my friends. Have Saint and Auden . . . whatever that means.
I meant what I told Saint earlier this week, and I do want to bring whatever’s between the three of us out into the open—although Saint’s response was less than encouraging, and only served to feed the unhappy conclusion I’d already reached. Had reached the night Auden had Saint fuck me in his bed.
If all three of us can’t be together . . . then maybe none of us should be together.
My body clenches in protest at the thought, going tight and wet and achy. Or tighter and wetter and achier, because I’m always hard up for it now, it seems. Even in the fog of tragedy, of this new Poe I’m growing into, I’m thrumming with need. More than I ever have been before, and the dreams I’ve been having . . . bonfires and orgies in the whispering trees and more of those men chasing each other through the trees, catching and pinning each other to the soft forest floor and claiming their due . . .
Well, the dreams are not helping.
They’re not helping at all, in fact, which means I’m going to have to either get more creative with my already embarrassingly frequent masturbation schedule or hope that Auden and Saint are willing to set down their grudges in the name of kinky sex.
Better order a vibrator, Poe, because that last one isn’t going to happen.
I catch Saint’s eye as we walk into the library. He worked for his uncle again today, it being one of those sporadic times when Augie needed an extra set of hands, and so he’s freshly showered, smelling like soap and woodsmoke, wearing jeans so broken in that the soft denim cups the taut cheeks of his ass and the strong lines of his thighs. Auden couldn’t stop staring as we moved from the dining room across the hall. Hell, neither could I.
But now when Saint’s gaze snags mine, I give him a meaningful look and subtly nod my head toward Auden. Talk later? the nod asks. I get a small scowl, but he eventually nods back.
Good. We’ll get some booze in us, and then I’ll lay it out for them.
“Is there an agenda for this meeting?” Auden asks, only half-dryly, as we spill into the room. The fire’s already been lit, and Sir Ja
mes Frazer is already on his favorite rug in front of it, his massive body curled into the tightest ball possible and his nose tucked under his tail.
Rebecca gives him a you’re very funny look. “Given that this is your house, it really should be your job to call the meetings.”
“Becket is the oldest,” Auden points out, wandering over to his customary spot by the fireplace. “Maybe he should.”
Becket, having had some manner of youth group earlier in the evening, is still in his collar and swirls his glass of wine with a small smile on his face. A smile that says no way in hell am I getting roped into this spat.
My own whisky in hand, I settle on one of the sofas with Delphine, who turns so she can plop her feet in my lap. Her toenails are painted a cute pastel purple—echoing the deep purple bruising around her toes and the top of her foot. When she sees me looking, she shrugs. “Two photoshoots in a row this week. The heels didn’t fit either day.”
I knew that Delphine occasionally modeled—usually for boutique designers who focused on plus-size fashion, but lately she’d inked a few deals with more established brands that were trying to advertise their more inclusive lines. I’d seen the gorgeous pictures on her Instagram, had left heart-eyed emojis all over them. Never once had I considered how shitty and grueling the process of looking beautiful could be. I certainly didn’t think it would involve bruises.
“It’s a new kink,” she says, waggling her feet in my lap and then wincing.
“Has Rebecca seen them?” I ask quietly, so that no one else can hear. I’m not sure exactly what Delphine and Rebecca are—I know they spent Imbolc night together, but since then, there’s been a careful distance between them—but I do know that Rebecca would have strong feelings about any kind of harm done to Delphine’s body outside of a kink scene.
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