And the strangest thing is that Rebecca almost feels like indulging her. Right now with her pressed warm and lush against her side, with that mass of golden hair brushing against her cheek with faint whisper-scents of something expensive and floral, she wants to pet her and spoil her.
“Why aren’t you still in bed, Delphine?” she asks, trying to sound normal, trying to sound like she’s not committing the smell of her hair to memory.
“Sir James Frazer,” Delphine answers dozily. “He wants to be in the bed with Auden when it’s cold, and there’s just not enough room . . .”
“So you came down here, where there’s no bed at all?”
“Thought I’d—” a yawn “—come get—” another yawn “—some tea . . .”
With a sigh—she chooses not to examine how almost-content her own sigh is—Rebecca opens up her laptop and begins working, Delphine’s head on her shoulder the entire time. And within moments, Delphine is fast asleep.
When Delphine wakes up for the second time that day, she’s alone in the hall. Someone has tucked the big blanket around her and given her a pillow, and she notices that whoever did it also angled the space heater toward her and made sure to wedge a couple cushions between her and the glass, to keep the window from leeching away her hard-won warmth.
It must have been Rebecca. For some reason, that makes Delphine smile, thinking of Rebecca pausing budget calculations or parsing environmental impact studies so that she could tuck Delphine in. And then she thinks of Rebecca spanking Poe, of the slaps and cracks that echoed through the room, and her smile slowly fades. She digs her teeth into her lip, spreads her legs ever so slightly under the blanket. Just enough that she can feel the empty air against her swelling clit.
All this time when she couldn’t wake her body up enough to want sex, was it because she was wanting the wrong kind of sex? She’d been imagining something gentle and patient and sweet with Auden, and every time she imagined it, it felt like the imagining was more than enough, like she’d choke on it.
But she didn’t choke on anything when she watched Rebecca and Auden spank Poe, she didn’t choke on anything at all except how much she wanted to be Poe just then. How much she wanted just to cry and feel things and then have someone kiss her and tell her what a good girl she was.
She should ask Auden to spank her. That’s what she should do. That would be the sensible thing, and she knows he wouldn’t judge her for asking. In fact, after watching him spank Poe, she has to wonder if he wants her to ask, because the way he looked when he was spanking their friend was the way a sinner looks at the cross. Like salvation was just within reach.
But Delphine doesn’t go ask him, even though she knows he’s probably awake by now. Instead she takes a final peek around the hall to confirm that she’s alone, and then she moves her hands deeper under the covers and begins to rub herself.
When she closes her eyes, it’s not her fiancé’s voice she imagines, but a woman’s, and it’s not his hand cracking pain along her backside, but Rebecca’s. And when she’s finished, she’s limp and warm and full of questions she’s not sure she’s ready to ask herself.
She holds up her hand and stares at her engagement ring as it glitters in the faint, gray light.
She stares at it for a very, very long time.
It’s unthinkable that Abby should try to come in with all this weather, so the impromptu Imbolc planning committee fends for itself with cheese toasties and leftover soup. Auden brings the food into the library where everyone is clustered over the old ledgers and around fresh notebooks, and he has a moment looking at them when he feels something so powerfully right that his heart flips over inside his chest.
Maybe it’s the nostalgia of having everyone in one place again, or maybe the excitement of the ritual is starting to seep into his blood too, but whatever it is, he has the sudden and fierce urge to give them something, anything and everything, just to keep them all here like this, under his roof and nestled close. Even St. Sebastian.
Even St. Sebastian.
He thinks of Poe, of how her firm, plump bottom felt against his hand, and then he wonders what it would be like to do the same to St. Sebastian. To have the only person who ever hurt him worse than his father draped over his lap and trembling. Would he be hard?
Would Auden be hard?
Yes, yes of course he fucking would be, because everything he’s kept locked up inside of him is just spilling out now, tearing free of him, and it won’t be long before his tattered hungers make themselves known . . .
No. God, no, what is happening to him? Of course he won’t do that, he’s stronger than that. He has to be.
He finishes delivering the food to the gratitude and cheers of all, and then he murmurs something about finding his own laptop before he strides out of the room to collect himself.
To the tower he goes, his frozen aerie, and he sits on a trunk and shoves his face in his hands, his sides heaving. He can’t stop this ache, this need, for two people who are not the one person he is supposed to ache for, and it’s killing him. He has to burn it out of himself somehow, dig it out if it won’t be burned, and soon. He refuses to hurt Delphine, he absolutely won’t do it; she’s the last person in the world who deserves that after all she’s been through.
And yet . . . and yet when he thinks of Poe’s soft mouth yielding under his, of feeling her squirm in his lap with her mewling little cries while her cunt grew wetter and wetter . . .
With a groan, Auden gives up. He slides the clasp free of his trousers, zips them down, and hooks a thumb in the waistband of his boxer briefs to allow his cock to push free. He doesn’t play games with himself—he never does—but he imagines making Poe play games with him. Imagines spanking her until she’s wet and crying, and then pushing her off his lap so he can pin her to the floor and push his cock into her pussy. He imagines St. Sebastian there too, imagines Saint’s soft lips around his dick, the metal ball on his lower lip stroking against his shaft while Poe watches . . .
He’s about to erupt . . . he can feel that point of no return just within reach—
There’s a creak on the stairs; a man’s hand appears on the railing and then a head full of ink-dark hair—
It’s too late. Auden’s erection gives a thick, swelling throb just as St. Sebastian fully emerges into the tower, and cum pumps in hot, fast spurts all over his fist. Pulse after pulse of it, dripping from the plump tip and then to his fingers, and while he comes, he can’t help stroking himself a little bit more, can’t help the quiet grunts that tear out of his throat from the sheer fucking relief of it all.
St. Sebastian looks like a man who’s just fallen into a trap, like any movement could mean some bitter and untimely end, and Auden can’t help but savor it a little as he rides out the last few squeezes. He wants to see St. Sebastian at the edge, at the limits of his endurance, and then he wants to see St. Sebastian ragged and thrashing with the need to come. He wants to be the one to ease that need, but he also doesn’t know what that means because he hates St. Sebastian, he’s hated him for years—
Holy fuck.
St. Sebastian no longer looks like he’s trapped, or if he does, he looks like he’s decided that this trap is the only place he wants to be for the rest of his life. He’s stepping forward now, one heavy, booted foot after the other, his lip ring tucked between his teeth and his eyes tormented in the snowy twilight of the room.
And then he kneels in front in Auden, his knees between Auden’s light brown brogues and his hands sliding up the insides of Auden’s thighs.
Holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck.
St. Sebastian gives Auden one last look—a look Auden can’t even begin to interpret, a look he’s not even sure if he wants to interpret—and then lowers his warm mouth to Auden’s still-thick shaft and gives it one long, lingering pass with his tongue.
Auden hisses, all control gone, all reason gone, nothing left but thorns. “Yes. Do it. Fucking do it.”
Saint’s tongue moves a
gain, warm and wet, lapping up everything Auden had spilled, as if it’s too precious to waste, too treasured to let drip onto a dirty floor. His lips are somehow firm and soft all at the same time—plush and silky and yet still a man’s lips, still a man’s mouth—and that lip ring, it’s everything, it’s fucking everything, Auden can feel it along his shaft and against the creases of his fingers when Saint kisses his hand clean, he can feel it along the creases and tucks of his testicles when Saint kisses those clean too. He threads his clean hand into Saint’s hair and shoves Saint’s mouth even harder against him; he lets out a feral groan when Saint sucks his too-sensitive cock into his mouth. He feels himself swelling hard again—he could keep Saint here just like this, he could fuck Saint’s pretty mouth and then he could reward him with callous pets and pleasures until Saint came too, and it would be revenge and lust all tied together—
No.
Oh God, oh no. No, no, no.
“Saint,” Auden says hoarsely, pushing him away, “stop, fuck. Stop.”
Saint looks up at Auden from his lap, his lips swollen and his eyes darker than anything Auden’s ever seen, and Christ, he’s so handsome and so pretty and it’s not fair, it’s never been fair that St. Sebastian Martinez could be his undoing when St. Sebastian also could hurt him so much, so fucking much.
“I can’t do this,” Auden manages. And he’s about to say, I can’t hurt Delphine, when St. Sebastian gives a jerky nod and gets to his feet in an equally jerky movement.
“I know,” St. Sebastian says. He sounds hurt, and not in the way Auden’s fantasized about hurting him. He sounds hurt in a way that makes Auden hurt too somehow, and then he’s gone before Auden can say anything to fix it.
He’s gone, and Auden is alone in the tower with nothing but thorns in his chest and the memory of Saint’s lip ring on his skin.
Chapter 18
Six Days Later
“Gotcha.”
There’s plenty of light here on the second story of shelves, and so when I finally find what I’m looking for, I don’t bother to climb down to one of the tables with their lamps to look at it, I stay up here on the balcony.
The book is mid-eighteenth century, quite small, but the printing is clear and straight, and the handsome leather bindings show expertise and care. There’s only one word tooled onto the spine, Thornechapel, but the title page reveals that it is indeed the book we’ve been looking for: A Record of Thornechapel Customs, including the Consecration of the May Queen, Stories taken from Ancient Sources and Explicated Herein.
Dartham’s chief source.
Delphine and the others did their best scanning through Estamond’s ledgers this last weekend, but reading old, faded Copperplate is tricky work unless you’ve had practice, and it finally fell to me to finish combing through the entries. It took me almost a week to find the entry itself, and after figuring out Estamond’s shelving system—a system that could kindly be called eccentric—it only took a half hour of hunting to find it hidden in the upper stories, wedged between guides to monastic gardens.
I prop my shoulder against the side of the shelf while I carefully page through the book. It only takes two pages to find mention of Imbolc and the other feasts Dartham complained about, and it looks like there’s a fair amount of detail for me to sift through. Deciding that I should go down to the table after all, I’m about to close the book, and that’s when I see the handwriting.
On a page depicting the now-familiar scene of a woman standing in the chapel ruins with a lantern, there’s a caption that says, “The consecration of the May Queen on Beltane night.”
And someone has crossed out Beltane in one decisive stroke, and written Imbolc instead. The m has an extra hump in it, as if whoever wrote it was in a hurry. I think of Estamond’s signature in her ledger and smile. It had to have been her.
But interestingly, the word Imbolc is underlined with a different pen—a blue ballpoint pen. A modern pen. There’s also an exclamation point after, pressed into the paper in the same blue ink, slanted and emphatic.
Stop seeing your mother’s ghost everywhere, I chide myself. This can’t be her handwriting; there’s simply no way for you to tell.
But I can tell for certain that I’m not the first person since Dartham to find this book, and I still can’t help the weird spike of intuition that the last person to find it was my mother.
As if enervated after the storm, winter has retreated into the shadows of trees and the cover of night. The days have grown milder as the week goes on, and eventually the swells and drifts of snow are melted into a cold, gloppy mud.
I’m slogging through it now in my blue rubber boots, the Consecration book tucked securely in my coat pocket and my thoughts racing. Racing through the much more explicit description of what kind of wedding rite the lord of the manor and the bride are supposed to perform.
Not just the promise, but the consummation—not just words, but flesh.
The bride and the lord are supposed to fuck. During the ceremony.
There at the altar be made a bride by thorns was what Dartham had said. And there’s a hot, tight feeling between my legs as I recall reading what the Consecration author had described, and God, if it were up to me, if it was to be me holding the lantern and walking toward Auden . . .
But it’s not going to be you, I remind myself. I’m a pervy little sex monster, and the ritual described in this old book is exactly the type of thing I’m hardwired to find delicious. Being bathed and groomed and robed, married to a tall stranger by firelight and then claimed in front of everyone—
It’s not going to be you.
It’s supposed to be Delphine. Delphine being claimed by firelight, by the man she’s going to marry anyway. I try to ignore the lance of pain that goes through me as I imagine watching the two of them together, fucking and rutting by the altar. It’s paired with an equally potent lance of arousal, and I want to shake myself.
Why am I so messy? So eager? I feel like an overgrown garden, lush and crowded, rioted and jumbled, except instead of leaves and roots and petals, I’m jealousy and hunger and pain and thrill.
All the bitter and all the sweet, all mixed together.
I keep walking and I force my mind back into reality. Or whatever counts as reality here at Thornchapel, where six educated adults have decided to act out an ancient winter ritual for six entirely different reasons. And the reality is that the bride is going to be Delphine.
Even so, everyone will need to consent to taking part, even as a witness. If it was necessary for us all to consent to being present for a short spanking, then it would definitely be necessary for a ritualistic deflowering, and oh my God, never mind about reality, this can’t be reality, why am I even thinking through this?
For a moment, I almost consider not telling the others. I could pretend I never found the book, and we could move forward with the ceremony as we’d planned. Just some lanterns and some cakes, with a few stilted phrases read aloud in between.
Just the game we thought it was going to be.
But the librarian in me feels firmly that they deserve to know. Information is information, after all, and we can decide as a group whether we want to do anything with that information or not. Probably not, considering exactly how lurid and impossible that information is, but still. I won’t make that choice for anyone else. I can’t.
Anyway, I’m already halfway to the chapel ruins, and I don’t want to have taken this long, muddy walk for nothing.
When I get to the clearing, the others are there, standing next to the stone row that leads to the chapel and arguing about something. Sir James Frazer is circling around the clearing, shoving his nose into every clump of grass he can find.
“. . . just because it’s there doesn’t mean we have to use it,” Auden is saying.
“It’s there to be used,” Rebecca argues. “It’s been there to be used for close to four thousand years.”
“And why wouldn’t we use it?” Delphine demands. “What a s
illy thing to say, Auden, really.”
Auden looks up at the sky for patience. “I’m the one being silly?” he mutters to himself. The others ignore him.
They’d all come up from London first thing this morning, and so they’ve already changed into their “let’s go hunting with the dogs” clothes—even Becket. Saint’s the only exception, in his usual boots and jeans. He stands apart from the group, not wearing a coat, and scowling. Even Sir James Frazer gives him a wide berth.
“Ah, Poe,” Becket says as I approach. “Did you have a nice walk up here?”
“I had a muddy walk,” I grouse. “My boots are about five pounds heavier than when I started. Saint, aren’t you cold?”
“No,” is the short reply.
“It’s supposed to rain tomorrow night,” Rebecca says to me, “so I think the mud is here to stay.”
“We should add umbrellas to the list,” Delphine says.
Auden makes an apologetic face. “Delph, it’s going to be hard enough walking with lanterns and our supplies, we can’t add umbrellas too.”
“Rain ponchos then,” she counters.
“God help us all when you start planning the wedding,” Saint remarks, and it’s an innocent enough—if sarcastic—joke, but Delphine stiffens at it, her full lips pursing together in a frown.
“They haven’t even set a date yet, so there’s nothing to plan,” Rebecca cuts in, and it’s hard to tell from her tone of voice whether she’s defending Delphine, accusing Delphine, or just annoyed we’ve gotten off topic.
Delphine frowns even more.
Auden is frowning too, not at Saint or Rebecca, but at his fiancée and her troubled expression.
I decide to change the subject. “Did you guys figure it all out?” I say, gesturing to the stone row and the church. They came out here about an hour ago to assess the ruins and plan out the physical part of the ceremony, and it looks like they’ve also carried in a few bundles of firewood and a tarp.
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