Chapter Twenty-Seven
St. SebastianPresent Day
Originally Beltane was a festival of fire.
The fires called in sympathy to the sun; they burned bright against air grown too thin to hold back the other world. Couples jumped over the fires to pledge troths, people brought the flames back to their own houses to k****e their hearths, and the smoke was used to purify the animals before they were driven to summer pastures.
And in the darkness just outside the fire’s ring, the people f****d.
Beltane was primal and earthy, but it was also ecstatic, complex. A little dangerous even, as it was one of two feasts where the veil between worlds thinned and fluttered and sometimes drew aside. The fires weren’t only about animals, and the f*****g wasn’t only about babies. It was about facing the da
