Door of Bruises (Thornchapel Book 4) Read online

  Door of Bruises

  Sierra Simone

  Copyright © 2020 by Sierra Simone

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Design: Hang Le

  Cover Image: Vania Stoyanova

  Cover Models: Austin Taylor Simon

  Editing: Erica Russikoff of Erica Edits

  Contents

  Content Warning

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Within Thy Wounds Hide Me

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Suffer Me Not To Be Separated From Thee

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  In The Hour of My Death Call Me

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Author’s Note

  Not Ready to Leave Thornchapel?

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Sierra Simone

  About the Author

  Content Warning

  This book contains themes of ritual murder and ritual suicide in a religious context.

  This book also has a character who experienced sexual violence in the past; this violence happens off page, before the events of the story, but is referenced in Chapter Seventeen.

  Here and there,

  king and door,

  cup and spear,

  corn and war.

  Proud and wild,

  there he bleeds.

  Thorn and rose,

  tines and king.

  —Thorne Valley folk rhyme, source unknown

  Prologue

  It took him a long time to find the chapel, coming from the wrong direction. A few hours at least, striking from the unnamed lane, which branched off an obscure B road, and then straggling through open moorland until he found a pair of standing stones at the edge of the property, like an ancient stile.

  Only when he walked through the stones did he see it properly—the manor house with its glinting windows, the trees in their autumnal riot of scarlet and orange and gold. The strangely dark roses that were crawling everywhere.

  And the chapel. The chapel.

  He hadn’t been able to stop dreaming of it. Couldn’t stop thinking of it. When he prayed, it curled in his mind like candle smoke.

  He had to come back.

  His parents would be furious with him, he knew, for taking his Nanna’s car; even the famously indulgent Hesses drew the line at grand theft auto, especially when at home he only had a learner’s permit, but he truly had no choice. It was either take the car and drive to Thornchapel, or burn alive with a yearning he didn’t understand.

  He was called.

  And now here he was.

  It took some time to work his way down to the heart of the valley, especially with the roses, which were guarded by razor-sharp thorns and which snagged at his pants and coat as he pushed his way to the chapel. He stopped between the trees before he got to the clearing, something like awe and alarm together filtering through his blood.

  There was a door.

  There was a door where there hadn’t been a door before.

  And it was open.

  The zeal flared in him, making everything blurred and dreamlike.

  The door.

  The rest of your life is through that door.

  He took a step forward—only to freeze as he realized he wasn’t alone. There was someone else in the chapel—a man—a man who was on his knees in front of the altar. The man was wearing a torc

  around his neck, and while Becket watched, the man lowered his head and wept.

  Becket knew who he was.

  Dislike and fear ran cold fingers up his spine. He’d seen the man hurt Auden earlier this year—a backhanded strike right to the face—and he’d seen how the man controlled the other adults, sometimes with venom and sometimes with charm. He had no doubt the man would hurt him if he knew Becket was there—in fact, he had a knife dangling from one hand, a pale knife that looked to be very, very old. As if the man had come here to do violence anyway.

  Becket swore softly to himself, his gaze going to the door. The zeal whispered to him, plucked at his sleeves, entreated him on.

  The rest of your life is through that door.

  Becket wondered if he could get to the door anyway.

  But then a woman burst into the clearing, running, dark hair tousled from the wind and her clothes creased as if from travel. There was something small and white in her hand, like a folded piece of paper.

  Her voice carried from the ruins as she called out to the man—she was relieved to have found him, but her distress was palpable. His voice raised to match hers, and though Becket couldn’t hear what he said, he could hear the pain shaking in the man’s voice.

  It was the pain of someone with nothing left to lose, Becket thought, and he suddenly felt scared for the woman. He stepped closer to see, and both adults whirled at the noise—eyes scanning for him.

  He ducked just in time, but then when he raised back up, he saw something horrifying, something that sent adrenaline flooding through him—a bright, chemical buzz to mingle with the beautiful blear of the zeal—

  The man was trying to kill the woman.

  The knife was between them, and she was trying to grapple the man away from her, she was desperately trying to keep him from stabbing her…

  Becket didn’t have to think, he didn’t have to decide. Someone was in danger and he could help, he had to help. He would help.

  He launched himself from the trees and over the wall, meaning to tackle the man to the ground, meaning to stun him long enough for the woman to run.

  He would never know, in the years to come, what his mistake was. A mistake of trajectory, perhaps, or of speed. Or maybe it was the zeal, which always muffled his earthly senses at the expense of his spiritual ones. What Becket Hess would know—and remember—was the slam of his body into another’s.

  The sound of puncture.

  And the slick crimson of blood spilling into the earth.

  Chapter One

  Auden

  Eight Years Ago

  Once upon a time, when I was seventeen and full of crimson misery and livid hurt, I came upon a flower in the thorn chapel.

  It was a rose. A rose so darkly and deeply red that it looked black in the weak light of the frozen midwinter day. And all around it was stone rimed with frost and dead vines caught with small, cheerless snowflakes, and it shouldn’t have been there, roses didn’t bloom in midwinter outside, roses didn’t bloom surrounded by ice and snow.

  Certainly not roses that looked like that, like a freshly turned bruise.

  We’d arrived at Thornchapel the previous night, and already my family was miserable without the necessary distractions
of London. My mother was drinking, my father was at turns distant and beastly, and I missed St. Sebastian so much that it felt like someone had cinched my heart with razor wire and doused it in petrol. I burned alive for the boy who’d left me.

  The boy who left me after I quite literally bled and broke for him.

  So I hated him, and my parents, and I hated the world, the entire world, and everything in it, Thornchapel and St. Sebastian most of all. But hatred for me has never been simple, just as love has never been simple—not at least since I kissed two people in front of the grassy forest altar and grew a heart of thorns to replace my heart of flesh.

  My hatred looked like this: a fervor that would have rivaled a saint’s, an antipathy akin to worship. A reverence—a vengeful carnality that bordered on the sacred.

  I hated most of all that he wasn’t here.

  With me.

  Where he belonged.

  I hadn’t meant to go to the chapel that morning; I hadn’t meant to go anywhere at all. I just knew I couldn’t endure another moment inside the house with my unhappy parents, with my newly healed bones that still twinged sometimes, with the knowledge that there was no beautiful, dark-eyed boy waiting for me in the village. And so even though I despised Thornchapel in general, I put on a coat and scarf and a battered pair of boots and thought maybe I’d kick along the kitchen garden paths for a few minutes, just until I was too cold to remember how much I didn’t want to be inside.

  But once I stepped out onto the terrace, my choice was made for me. The maze, shrouded with snow and a hazy morning mist, beckoned, and then once I was in the maze, the center beckoned, and once I got to the center—once I saw Adonis and Aphrodite in their doomed embrace, dormant rose canes crawling over the base of the statue and twining over their feet—I knew I had to go to the chapel. I didn’t want to, I didn’t even decide to, truthfully. It simply happened. One minute I was staring up at Adonis, who seemed blissfully unaware that he’d soon be mangled by a boar and his death commemorated with broken pots and dead lettuce, and the next I was walking down the stairs and into the dark tunnel that led out to the woods.

  The chapel looked much as it had when I was twelve and I was married by the altar. Although the grass was no longer emerald and the roses were no longer blooming on the walls, thorns still crawled everywhere. The altar still huddled at the far end of the ruins and the broken walls remained broken, remained home to blackthorn clumps and the lingering sloe berries caught in the frost and now quite dead.

  But unlike then—when the clearing had been full of happy summer sounds, birds and bees and the distant chatter of the river—all was silent. The birds gone, the river choked with ice, the blooms for the bees long since withered and rotted away. If the thorn chapel was a flowering and a festival of life in summer, then in winter it was a tomb. A church of hush, a chancel of lack.

  Mist clung to the standing stones and drifted through the arched opening where a window had once been. It gathered around the snow-powdered altar, and it swirled around my feet like water as I pushed deeper into the clearing.

  I had the strangest feeling that the chapel wanted me to come inside, that I was meant to in some way. Like the mist and the snow and the silence had all been waiting for me, that it had all arrayed itself in solemn panoply for me, and now I was supposed to receive it and to participate. To take it into myself somehow.

  Which was a translucently ridiculous idea.

  And yet I couldn’t seem to test my own scorn by stepping inside.

  I wandered around the outside of the chapel instead, hearing only my own breaths and the crunch of my boots in the frozen grass, and heard nothing either to dispel or inflame my unease.

  It wasn’t that I was afraid to go inside, I told myself. It was only that I didn’t want to. Why would I? The fallen walls of the chapel hid nothing of its insides from view, I already knew everything that was in there anyway. There was no point in standing in there and remembering the day I’d never forgotten in the first place, the day when I changed. When everything changed.

  A heart of thorns to replace a heart of flesh.

  That’s when I saw the rose.

  It was growing from inside the chapel, its vines twisting up from someplace right behind the altar and up the back wall. And here, where the stones had crumbled down enough to see over, the rose peeked above the edge, impossible and alive.

  It was midwinter today, it was cold enough that even the hills seemed to shiver under the merciless December wind. All the other roses were dead—along with the flowers, the trees, the grass. Everything was dead. Everything except for this.

  It was the most beautiful thing I’d seen since I last saw St. Sebastian’s eyes.

  I was curious. I was compelled.

  Again, my feet moved without my willing them to, and again I found myself drawn onward, as if I’d been meant to take these very steps from birth. I walked around the walls and standing stones to the front of the chapel and—knowing both my resistance and my eagerness were equally contemptible—went inside.

  It was not as if a veil had been drawn over the world outside the chapel. It wasn’t as if I stepped inside the chapel and the silence deepened or the mist thickened. No, the chapel wasn’t like that, it wasn’t a discrete and bounded space the way it ought to have been. It was more like a cathedral, like a Levantine temple, with a diffusion of holy spaces branching and expanding from one central, sacred locus. The temple in Jerusalem had its Holy of Holies protected by an outer sanctuary, which was protected by courts, which were protected by chambers, which were protected by walls and gates, and so too did the thorn chapel have an altar protected by walls, which were gated by standing stones, which were guarded by the snow-dusted trees.

  And so I cannot say that any one threshold made a difference to what happened next, and I cannot even claim to know what thresholds I crossed and what they meant. But I do know this: all of Thornchapel is a threshold of sorts, and when you are there, you are one too. I became a gate, a tabernacle, and an altar. A holiness of lanky limbs and angry lust, and a hallow of ink-stained fingers and unmet needs.

  The mist seemed to part for me as I approached the altar and the impossible flower behind it, and I skirted around the spot where I once kissed Proserpina and St. Sebastian, I skirted around the snowy heap of the grass-covered altar, and I came before the wall. If it had been a proper chapel, a proper church, the entrance would be at the west and the altar to the east, but the thorn chapel was not a proper church, and so the entrance was at the south and the altar was to the north. Which meant this early in the morning, the rose was not only framed by the old stone but also by the morning-dark woods. The rose seemed to draw shadows to itself, seemed to be in a light all its own, which was not a light at all, but a sort of murky umbra that made me think of graves and thunder, of walking alone in the fog-laden dark and hearing something move behind me.

  It was fear that I felt, but it was an awakening too, a recognition, like I’d been waiting for this, just as it had been waiting for me. Like I was about to complete something I’d started five years ago with flower petals stuck to my face and St. Sebastian and Proserpina’s mouths on mine.

  I tugged off my glove and reached for the rose.

  There are many fairy tales that begin like this, with this moment right here, and perhaps I should have known better, perhaps I should have stopped myself. Perhaps I should have waited, come back on another day when the light was less strange and the mist had gone. Perhaps I should’ve understood that the need and hunger in me were only fed by this place, and nothing here could ever, ever soothe me—at least not until I had my St. Sebastian back.

  But I was seventeen and I didn’t want to be soothed. I wanted to hurt, and I wanted to throb, and I wanted every possibility in the world to lay itself bare to me, to come running and kneel at my feet, heads bowed and begging forgiveness for staying out of my reach.

  It was not the first time I’d ever felt possessiveness—no, Proserpina and St. S
ebastian had made sure of that—but it was the first time I’d ever felt possession.

  Dominion. Imperium. Command.

  I was entitled to whatever grew, crept, or slumbered at Thornchapel, and it would reveal itself to me. My fingers found the stem of the rose and followed its thorny tether up to the heavy, tightly furled head of the bloom itself. I pulled it, meaning to pluck only the bloom, but registered my mistake an instant too late. An unseen thorn sank into my thumb and bit into the skin, sending pain right down to the bone, up my wrist, up my entire arm.

  I swore, but I didn’t let go, twisting harder and tearing the bloom right off the plant, until it was mine.

  I looked down at my prize—a whorl of bruise-colored petals, a scroll of silky impossibility. Blood from my pierced thumb—a bright and shocking red against the dark, shadow-scarlet of the rose—was smeared over the petals and sepals, over my palm and my wrist. It dripped onto the snow below.

  The back of my neck crawled with awareness, a feeling of not-aloneness that superseded the usual watchfulness of the chapel. I turned with the rose still in my bloody hand and then took a step back.

  A woman, beautiful and feral looking, with pale skin and eyes as green as a cat’s, was staring at me from the other side of the altar. She wore a long dress—a near-white, with the kind of shapeless fussiness that spoke of Victorian origins—and a slender torc of gold around her neck, its terminals etched with interconnected spirals. She reminded me forcefully of Proserpina—those cat eyes—but also of Proserpina’s mother, who’d gone missing here at Thornchapel five years ago.