Chapter Twenty-Eight
St. SebastianPresent Day
“Nervous?” Auden asks me quietly as he closes the door behind us. Poe’s gone ahead to the thorn chapel, along with Delphine and Becket, and so we’re the last ones to leave the house.
I look down at the antler headdress in my hand. “Yes,” I say. “You?”
Sir James prances impatiently around his master’s feet, and Auden gives him an absent thump on the shoulder. “Yes. I’m nervous too.”
We walk down the shallow steps leading to the lawn, but instead of veering to the right for the hidden path, Auden walks for the maze. “I thought we’d go the old way today,” he says to me as Sir James trots happily ahead. “It seems fitting.”
“Because of Beltane?”
He doesn’t answer right away, but it seems like a thinking silence and not a stony, “shut u
