She touches his cheek, shaking her head a little. “You need it as badly as Poe and Delphine do. I’m not sure how you’ve gone this long, but we’ll get you all fixed up, and within a week or two, all of this—” she waves back at Poe’s door “—will be a distant memory.”
“God. Do you promise?”
He gets the definitive Rebecca nod for an answer.
“I promise.”
Chapter 28
For the second day in a row, I wake up to my phone ringing.
“Hello?” I mumble, sitting up and then shielding my face against the blaze of sunlight. The rain must be gone , I think. Maybe we really did bring in spring.
“Poe,” comes St. Sebastian’s voice. “You need to come to the chapel. Like right now.”
I yawn, stretching my shoulders and pointing my toes and feeling deep, deep parts of my body twinge with delicious soreness. I vaguely remember St. Sebastian kissing me on the lips and telling me he was going to the ruins to chop up the tree, but it was an event that immediately fell into the black hole of narcolepsy sleep.
“Are you calling from the ruins?” I ask. “Can you even get good service out there?”
“No. I’m calling from the edge of the woods. Please, Poe. Get dressed and meet me.”
His voice is grim when he adds, “It’s important.”
* * *
Within thirty minutes, I’m at the edge of the woods, where St. Sebastian is pacing. Without a coat, predictably.
“How are you not cold?” I ask, as we start mounting the path up to the clearing.
“Been chopping wood,” is the short reply.
“Why again?”
He runs his hand through his hair in a jerky movement that reminds me of Auden. “Because it needed doing. You know. If we wanted to use the chapel again.”
Again .
Last night was perfect, perfect and magical and everything I’d hoped it would be, and so why should we stop? Why shouldn’t we do another one?
Maybe for May Day, like Delphine had suggested. My heart tightens with excitement when I think about it.
“That was thoughtful of you,” I tell him. “Thank you.”
He bites his lip ring. “Please don’t thank me.”
“Okay?”
But he won’t elaborate, and eventually I don’t have enough breath to talk anyway, because he’s walking so fast that I practically have to jog to keep up.
“Slow down,” I puff as we reach the clearing’s edge. “I’m too short to keep up with you.”
He glances back at me without answering, and then keeps striding forward. I narrow my eyes at his well-defined back, deciding to be irritated no matter how good that back looks through the worn cotton of his T-shirt. I fail to see what could be so important that it’s worth dragging me out of bed and then jogging across half the estate—
Oh.
Holy shit.
St. Sebastian has clearly been hard at work this morning, and the entire length of the fallen tree is now stacked in charred, even chunks off to the side of the platform, which he’s left intact—presumably for future use.
Chopping all that wood is an impressive feat, but that’s not what has me stunned. It’s the altar itself. It’s what’s left of the serene, grass-covered hummock that we used just last night.
“The earth was so soft from all the rain that the tree displaced almost the entire mound,” St. Sebastian says of the muddy mess. “So after I chopped up the tree, I grabbed the shovel and thought maybe I could clear some of it away, you know. Just the worst of it.”
“Of course,” I say, approaching the former altar. “Smart idea. Was there anything underneath the mud?”
“Yes,” he says slowly.
My blood races fast and curious. “There was? Like the original church altar? Saint, that’s a huge deal!”
“I found something made of stone—I think it was the church’s altar. But . . . Poe—”
I’m to the altar now, ready to move around to where the most mud seems to have been cleared away so I can see the stone, but something in St. Sebastian’s voice stops me. I turn to face him.
He’s stopped a few feet behind me and he’s holding something out. Something small and colorful in his hand.
“It’s plastic,” he says, a little hoarsely. “So it didn’t—”
I take the little card out of his hand, and I’m about to ask him more questions—what it is and where near the altar he found it and why he looks so upset right now—but then I glance down, and everything in my body seems to rush up toward my head. My stomach, my heart, my blood—everything floating up and crowding my mind until I can’t breathe or hear or think.
From my fingertips, a happy, healthy, and alive Adalina Kernstow Markham smiles up at me. Probably the only woman in the Kansas State Licensing Bureau’s history to smile in her driver’s license photo, but there you have it. She was a smiler. Every picture of her on a dig was her covered in dirt and grinning up over some piece of pottery that looked like every other piece of pottery that she’d found. She’d only been in her mid-thirties when she left us, but even by that young age she’d had smile lines around her eyes and mouth.
She used to laugh so much that strangers would compliment her on it.
I look down at her driver’s license and nothing makes sense for a minute. Why is it here , in the chapel, why is it covered in flecks of mud?
“It was behind the altar,” Saint says quietly. “My shovel caught the tip of it, and then I had to.”
“Had to what?” I whisper, turning back toward the mud.
“I had to keep digging,” he says. Sadly. “To see if there was more.”
I take a step and then another step, but I’m not even really sure where I’m going or why I’m going—except I do know, that’s the terrible truth, I do know where I’m going.
I do know why.
Saint didn’t have to dig deep. Less than foot down and a foot into what used to be the hummock of the altar, I see the pearled scatter of finger bones. Higher up, the deceptively graceful curve of an orbital bone and the unmistakable beginning of the dome of a skull.
A human skull.
Human finger bones.
My mother’s driver’s license trembles in my hand.
“No,” I say.
“The license was where maybe a coat pocket would have been,” he says softly. “Poe, I’m so sorry, I’m so fucking sorry.”
“No, ” I say again, louder this time. My voice doesn’t sound like my own—it’s garbled and broken and so high-pitched it sounds like a child’s. “No.”
“Poe . . .”
“They searched here,” I tell him, my voice still wavering and thin. “They searched here. They didn’t find her. She wasn’t here, this isn’t her—”
“Poe.”
“It can’t be her,” I say, I plead, and then I’m crying, so fast and so hard that my entire body is shaking with it. “It can’t be, I know it can’t. She can’t really be—”
I’m on my knees now, but I don’t remember falling there. I’m on my knees and Saint’s on his too, and he’s holding me, crooning something low in my ear, soothing me like you’d soothe a wild animal. He’s stroking my hair and rocking me back and forth and nothing is real, nothing can be real right now or ever, ever again.
“Shh,” Saint comforts me. “Shh.” And then he starts murmuring something I don’t recognize at first, until suddenly I do. It’s the Salve Regina—the closing prayer of the Rosary. One of those prayers Catholic children grow up with stitched into the background noise of life, one of those prayers so ever-present that I can’t even remember when I first learned it.
“Hail, holy Queen, mother of mercy,” he says, “Hail, our life, our sweetness and our hope.”
I know he’s searching for something, anything, to help me right now, even a prayer he doesn’t believe in. But it works. The familiar cadence of the words cuts through my hysteria the tiniest bit—I’m able to fill my lungs, able to feel
the cold mud on my knees.
“To thee do we cry, poor, banished children of Eve,” he continues, and I’m able to breathe again and again and again. I know this prayer, I’ve heard my parents pray it. I grew up praying it. I’ve heard Becket pray it.
I murmur the next part along with St. Sebastian, clutching my mother’s driver’s license tightly in my hand as we do. “To thee do we send up our sighs,” I say. I dare a look at the bones again, at where they peek out from the wet, rich earth. “Mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.”
Next to, and slightly above, the bones, I finally see the altar stone itself. Thick and gray.
I stop praying.
“Poe?” Saint asks, feeling me stiffen all over again. I don’t answer, because I can’t, because everything is suddenly gone from me—even the prayer, even the tears.
On the edge of the altar stone, on the side that would have faced the priest, is carved a single word in a very ancient hand. The carved letters are deep enough that most of them are still filled with mud, although Saint’s scraped the stone clean enough that the word is clear and legible, a word I’d be able to read even if I’d never seen it before.
But I have seen it before.
The word is in Latin.
All along, the answers to all my questions were right here at the thorn chapel’s altar. Buried and just waiting to be found. I turn my face into Saint’s chest so I don’t have to see that word anymore, so I don’t have to see my mother’s picture or my mother’s orbital bone or the grass that once covered my mother’s grave.
But it doesn’t matter. The word is seared into my mind just like everything else.
Convivificat.
It’s Only Just Begun. . .
Poe, Auden and Saint aren’t anywhere near done with each other yet, and Thornchapel has only just started to give up its secrets. . .
Find out what happens next in Feast of Sparks , coming this June.
Add Feast of Sparks to your TBR now!
Author’s Note
Thornchapel exists in a peculiar and otherworldly eddy in my brain, and therefore you will have noticed a couple of the creative liberties I have taken in order to place Thornchapel at the heart of these six characters.
Firstly, Thorncombe—along with the River Thorne and the Thorne Valley—do not exist and have no direct models, although I’ve pulled inspiration from the Dartmoor villages, woods, and moors I’ve visited, and tried to be faithful in the details, if not the structure. Thornchapel itself is the brain-baby of a few different muses: Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, Cotehele House, and Lanhydrock House (the last two are both in Cornwall) and while the chapel ruins are constructed from pure fancy, the processional stone row leading to the chapel’s entrance is modeled after the Merrivale stone rows in Devon.
Secondly, I’ve taken some freedom around the celebrations and rites celebrated during Imbolc and St. Brigid’s Day. Imbolc is not necessarily associated with handfasting, and its association with fertility is less, ah , obviously libidinous than Beltane’s, but Thornchapel is its own little world, and therefore I’ve given it unique customs. Also sexier ones.
Thirdly, Poe’s experience with narcolepsy is directly cast from my own, and therefore is only a very limited view of the symptoms and secondary symptoms narcoleptics live with. It’s a complicated and misunderstood disease (might I add, also a very annoying disease), and I’m fully embracing the chance to make Poe’s narcolepsy something sexy, destined and powerful, since in my own life, it’s rarely these things.
Acknowledgments
Some books are too difficult for me to even trace the barest shape of my debts, but I’ll try—
This book would not be here without the tireless work of Serena McDonald, Melissa Gaston, Candi Kane, and Ashley Lindemann. Not only do they keep the lights on while I disappear to work, but their patience and encouragement kept me going through the bleak winter months of grappling with the hardest book I’ve faced yet.
I owe a huge debt to my friends and betas—Julie Murphy, Ashley Lindemann, Nana Malone, and Vanessa Reyes—who helped me talk through this book and frame the characters and environment respectfully. I also want to thank the incredible and incredibly gifted Robin Murphy for lending me her thoughts, wisdom, and library when it came to Thornchapel’s magic and ritual processes.
I’m beyond grateful for Nancy Smay and Erica Russikoff for their editing prowess and insights into story and language—and also how thoughtfully and kindly they talked me out of circles of artistic despair.
Another big debt is owed to Natalie C. Parker, Tessa Gratton, Sarah MacLean, Nana Malone, Becca Mysoor, Kennedy Ryan, Kayti McGee, Jana Aston, and Jean Siska, for encouragement, craft advice, late-night texts, or listening to me fuss along the way. Also all the Gatlinburg retreaters, ST authors, and DHI authors who form a collective of powerful, community-driven women. Thank you.
To my agent team—Rebecca Friedman, Flavia Viotti, and Meire Dias—thank you for all the time and energy you put into Sierra both at home and internationally. I couldn’t do it without you!
And finally, my biggest debt is to all of you, my readers. I count myself indelibly blessed to be able to create such weird little stories and have you let me. Thank you for indulging my latest foray into the wilds of my carnal imaginings, and thank you for joining me.
Also by Sierra Simone
Thornchapel:
A Lesson in Thorns
Feast of Sparks
Harvest of Sighs
Door of Bruises
Misadventures:
Misadventures with a Professor
Misadventures of a Curvy Girl
Misadventures in Blue (Coming September 2019)
The New Camelot Trilogy:
American Queen
American Prince
American King
The Moon (Merlin’s Novella)
The Priest Series:
Priest
Midnight Mass: A Priest Novella
Sinner
Co-Written with Laurelin Paige
Porn Star
Hot Cop
The Markham Hall Series:
The Awakening of Ivy Leavold
The Education of Ivy Leavold
The Punishment of Ivy Leavold
The Reclaiming of Ivy Leavold
The London Lovers:
The Seduction of Molly O’Flaherty
The Persuasion of Molly O’Flaherty
The Wedding of Molly O’Flaherty
About the Author
Sierra Simone is a USA Today bestselling former librarian who spent too much time reading romance novels at the information desk. She lives with her husband and family in Kansas City.
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www. thesierrasimone.com
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