Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel Book 3) by Sierra Simone

Author:Sierra Simone [Simone, Sierra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-04-30T18:30:00+00:00

Part II

Midsummer

Midsummer

St. Sebastian

He doesn’t remember precisely how he came to be in a car with Auden and Poe driving down I-70, but he would never dream of complaining about it. The windows are down, the radio is blaring something loud and fun, and Poe’s hair is everywhere—a storm of hair, dark and silky—as she drives and sings and eventually goads Auden into singing too.

His voice is terrible, hers too, and St. Sebastian leans his head against the backseat window and smiles as he listens to them. Outside, stretches of Kansas flash by—green fields, greener pastures, broken by lines of stunted, prairie-hardy trees and shallow creeks with cows crowding the edges. This isn’t home—this isn’t sunlight glinting off glass and waving off asphalt, this isn’t a sidewalk ready to scald bare feet, paletas dripping onto your hands if you don’t eat them fast enough, the splash of a pool, the smell of chlorine, the hot sand of Burger’s Lake—all of that is Texas and Texas’s alone.

But it reminds him of home. The heat, the sun, the tar-ribboned interstate. The cows in their fields too, standing up to their bellies in muddy ponds or crowding under the shade of the one tree big enough to cast a shadow.

Prairie. It’s the prairie in summer, and even though St. Sebastian doesn’t think of the prairie as his home, even though his version of the prairie is made of mega highways and air conditioners humming like giant metal bees, he still feels himself breathe easier here.

It’s the Vitamin D, Poe will tell him later, once they’ve finished their drive from the airport and settled into her father’s living room with cold beers and panting dogs sprawled between them. No way are we getting enough at Thornchapel.

Maybe it is. Maybe he’s been craving the sun and the heat, the slow-rolling summer that bakes and bakes and bakes, doing its little chemistries inside his cells and making him stronger. Or maybe it’s the open sky, so far away and such a sweet blue that it’s impossible to believe in clouds and storms and wind, even when Poe points out trees snapped like sticks from a tornado last year. Or maybe it’s the open road, straight and wide and mostly empty, a runway to a horizon so distant that it feels like a movie set, a backdrop, a painting propped against the real horizon somewhere closer by.

Whatever it is, he’s still smiling as they roll into Lawrence—another car with Delphine, Rebecca, and Becket behind them—driving through a cozy downtown of brick storefronts and winding to the foot of a big hill.

Above them, there’s the University of Kansas, perched on the hilltop, glimpses of bright limestone and red roofs. Here at the base of the hill are narrow streets of old Italianate houses, fussy Victorian Baroques, low-slung Craftsmans, all jostling among mature oaks and maples and sweet gums, with dogwoods and crabapple trees squatting between. When they park and start spilling out of their cars, stretching and scratching themselves, Delphine twirls a slow circle in the middle of the shady street.

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