A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel #1)(48)

Rebecca is walking slightly ahead of me now, peeking around a corner and then doubling back to take the last turn we saw. “Labyrinths are not the same as mazes,” she says as we walk along her new route.

“I know!” I say, wounded that she would think I didn’t know that. “It was interesting is all. The possibility that there’s been something in this spot for over a thousand years, maybe even with the center in the same place—”

Rebecca stops right in the middle of the path and I almost run into the back of her.

“With the center in the same place,” she echoes, staring straight ahead, as if she’s seeing something I can’t. “Ah. Of course. A labyrinth. Like a turf maze, maybe, or paved.”

“Well, the book didn’t say what the labyrinth looked like, just that there was one—oh.” Rebecca’s pulled her iPad out and she’s started making notes for herself. “Has that helped? Did I help?”

She looks up at me with one eyebrow arched high. “Given that I still have the entirety of the design and planning to do, and given that I’m still the one who had the idea to begin with, I’d say the help was limited.”

“Pleeease?” I wheedle.

She sighs at me bouncing on the balls of my feet, but there’s a distinct smile pulling at the edges of her mouth. “Okay, fine. You helped.”

I beam and she rolls her eyes and mutters something like subbie, although I can’t hear for sure. But I don’t mind, either being a sub or purring under her praise. Who doesn’t like praise? Surely even Dominants do. And she’s smiling anyway.

She and I decide to make it to the center before we head back, and when we step into the silent, hedge-lined enclosure, I feel the same dazzling air of mystery I did as a child. There’s something about the statue, Adonis and Aphrodite, this mortal man clutching his goddess, something tragic, erotic, timeless.

Something hiding even deeper secrets underneath.

“I want to go there again,” I say, kneeling near the fountain to see—ah, yes, it’s still there, still like I remember. A narrow notch only two feet wide between the fountain’s base and the statue’s plinth, disguised from almost every angle by the crescent shape of the fountain’s basin, which nearly wraps completely around the plinth itself. In the slow-brightening light, I can barely make out the steep steps that lead downward.

“I’ve been once since we were kids,” Rebecca says, joining me by the fountain. “Five years ago. I was staying the weekend with Auden, and we went out there together. Just to see it.”

“And?” I ask, facing her. I want her to tell me that it was magical, alive, filled with fairies, and maybe there was a conveniently dropped letter from my mother explaining why she left her child and her husband and if she’d ever come back.

“It was lovely,” Rebecca says, “but it was wild too. The grass was so tall you could barely see where you stepped, and it was so still that the air itself felt thick. Like you could suspend things in it, like you could grab hold of it.”

And then Rebecca—confident, left-brained Rebecca—shivers, the few braids she’s left out of her low bun dropping in front her face as she does.

“It felt like it wanted something,” she says quietly, tucking the braids back. “Like it was waiting.”

“Waiting?”

She gives a quick nod, looking away, but her expression as she looks away isn’t one of sheepish admission. It’s determined. Watchful.

“It was waiting for me to do something. I didn’t know what—I still don’t know what. But I feel like I’m about to find out.”





Chapter 15





The others leave for London, they come back. I play in the library the whole time, happy and sleepy and sadly still horny—but the last can’t be helped, so I take the edge off when I can, and try not to think too much about Auden and Saint when I do.

I mostly fail.

At night I dream more dreams of fire and pain and sex.

I dream about a door that doesn’t exist.

On a Friday afternoon, just after Auden and Delphine and Rebecca arrive in their usual formation of good looks and Keats references, and just before the clouds begin emptying their bellies of snow, Saint touches my arm in the library.

I nearly jolt out of my chair.

“Jesus Christ,” I say, my hand to my heart and trying to remember how to breathe again. And then I glare up at him. “What the hell?”

Saint’s lips tip at the corners. “I thought surely you’d hear me come in. You must have been completely absorbed.” He nods toward the book I was reading.

I have a moment—a Rip Van Winkle moment I’m very familiar with as a narcoleptic and also as an avid reader—when I realize a lot of time has passed. I’d carried this book over to an armchair and started skimming so I could give the highlights to Delphine, because I knew she’d be interested, and somehow that skimming turned into two or three obsessive hours. It’s dark now, the only light coming from the single lamp I’d turned on before I sat down, and snow has started dancing down outside.

“It’s, um, a book about Imbolc.” And then I add, because I am aware that not everyone has fallen down the Thornchapel rabbit holes I have, “it’s an old seasonal holiday, on the same day as—”