A Lesson in Thorns (Thornchapel, #1)

by Sierra Simone

It wasn’t a quaint name, chosen on a whim. It wasn’t, as he’d once heard his grandfather say, a corruption of a Latin word referencing the thick forest canopy around the house. There was a chapel. It was covered in thorns. Thornchapel. And he had the strangest feeling that as he thought the name of this place, the place thought his own name back to him . . .

“That’s stupid,” Rebecca said back to Delphine. “Three people can kiss. All six of us could kiss if we wanted.”

German shepherd puppy named Sir James Frazer.

At nine, he finishes his prayers, checks the side door of the church to make sure it’s unlocked in case St. Sebastian wants to come in. St. Sebastian, the unbeliever, who still comes in and prays and kneels and sighs. Who sits and stares at the tabernacle as if he expects God himself to crawl out and apologize to him. Becket the priest reads for thirty more minutes in bed, a book of Celtic mythology he ordered online last week. It’s a secret fascination of his. He tells himself it’s purely academic. When he goes to sleep, the zeal comes for him in his dreams. It shows him dying kings, dying gods, rain pattering on the summer-spread leaves of Thornchapel’s forest. And Proserpina in the middle of it all, haloed and radiant. Waiting.