Chapter Twenty-Eight
TWENTY-EIGHT
All around him, the plants breathe out, pressing close and hovering anxious leaves over his shoulders.
Their whispering has turned hushed but reverent, a tenderness to the way they try to cup him in comfort.
It is so disturbingly human that all the fine hairs stand up along the back of Evander’s neck.
He can’t breathe.
Every rib in his chest curves inward as if it wants to perforate his heart, his lungs, his soul, break him in unfixable ways.
If he tore himself the rest of the way open, he’s sure he would find his organs packed with soil, moist flower bulbs wedged between liver and kidney, moss furring his intestines.
No wonder he failed at being normal, no matter how he tried.
He is not even—
human
He is all—
monster monster monster
A dull, detached weight settles over him as he stares at Laurie, seeing nothing but a bloodied blur as the world folds in on itself and his eyes burn. Only a few feet of space lie between them, but he has the sudden urge to scramble backward. To get as far away as possible.
To protect Laurie.
“You need to lock me up again.” Evander’s voice sounds disembodied, a flat, lifeless thing that falls from a flaccid tongue. “I still have the key.” His hand goes to the pocket in his shorts, to the iron key that doesn’t just lock up a monstrous garden. It should lock up a monstrous boy.
It all fits together with shocking, crystallized clarity and he should laugh at how oblivious he was to not see himself for what he truly is.
A boy with no past, who was so feral he had to be “taught” how to act.
A boy they kept locked up, sedated, hidden away.
A boy with thorns for teeth and a taste for flesh. Just like the garden.
Not buried alive.
Dug up.
When Byron saw the thing in the garden worming up out of the soil, his first instinct had been to try to kill the little garden horror.
What had he written in the field guide? Thorns are easily removed.
He’d used pliers to yank them out of Evander’s mouth as a child, probably every time they grew back.
He’d never, never seen him as a person. Maybe that’s why the field guide had been hidden in those sacks of soil in the greenhouse—Carrington probably shoved it there after Byron’s passing to make sure Evander never read it and started understanding what he is.
Maybe that’s when the garden killed Carrington.
Laurie slumps against the massive pots, his head tilting to rest against the wicker throne as if it’s all that keeps him upright.
His back is a bent sapling, his face gone waxy as his breathing continues to be too abrupt, too shallow.
Fevered sweat trickles down the side of his face as he flattens his good hand over his bloodied side.
There is way too much blood. It saturates his torso in lustrous red as if he is a painting only half-finished.
“That’s not the answer.” A tremor cracks his voice. “You don’t … d-don’t deserve a life like that.”
“Maybe I do.” The venom shocks even Evander. “I don’t even know what I’m doing—what I’ve done. What if I—” Try to kill you again. He can’t force it out in case that makes it real. “The garden is inside me.”
This can’t be real.
The smell of soil and fresh, vivid greenery intensifies to a choking level.
“No, it’s…” Laurie’s eyes close for a second.
“You are the garden. It’s not like Carrington.
The garden used his body as a tool, as a weapon.
But for you, it’s…” He looks up at Evander with such desolation it hurts.
“I think when you get overwhelmed, your brain shuts down to give you a break and the garden takes over. And the garden just really fucking hates Lennox-Halls.” His laugh is flat and breathy and pain slices at his mouth.
“But I don’t hate—” Evander starts, but the lie tastes tart. He does hate them, for what they’ve done to him, for what they might do next. So instead he whispers, “I don’t hate you.” Except the words stretch with unshed tears, because he used to.
He had seven years of hate grow through him like sharp-edged thistles while he blamed Laurie for trying to kill him.
Who even told Evander that’s what happened?
Byron? Another manipulation to keep him tamed and fearful and twisted up in ribbons of lies, not looking to Laurie for help because Laurie had been made the enemy.
Laurie tries to shift the pressure on his wound, but his face goes white.
“What did I do to you?” Evander whispers.
“I tried to reason with you, when—when the garden had control.” He’s struggling to speak, but he pushes on.
“But it’s like you weren’t inside yourself.
I had to run. We were mostly in the walls and then I crawled out this grate into the conservatory and—well, you caught up fast. The second you stepped foot in here, everything started growing like mad. You did all of this, just now.”
Evander stares at the soft green vines draped over his shoulders, the leaves drifting into his hair.
The plants cling to him with worshipful adoration and buds open to flourish stunning flowers that seem to preen for his attention.
He is their sunlight. He is their lost limb, their prodigal heart.
Which explains why Byron had to keep moving him from room to room in the north wing.
A particularly strong episode must have resulted in an explosion of vicious, botanical growth—poisonous plants growing up the walls and toxic flowers threaded through the carpet. It’s not the garden’s doing; it’s his.
All of this has always been him.
Evander lets out a low moan and digs his hands into his hair, shaking his head slowly and then faster.
They let him out of his room and fed him bloody meat at meals and he shot up several inches almost overnight.
His hair trails halfway down his back in a tangle of wicked, beautiful curls.
He is a tender green shoot reaching for the light after years locked in darkness and it isn’t enough. Hunger crowns him like a punishment.
It’s too much. He is splitting under the weight of it, drowning with nothing to do but sink.
Yet none of this seems important when pain is bleeding through Laurie, his cornflower eyes gone dull as he folds in on himself.
“You need a hospital.” Evander surges to his feet, vines and leaves snapping as he moves away from the plants’ longing grip.
“What if we get you help and then I—I lock myself back up? You’ll be safe.
I just don’t understand why you didn’t tell me before it was …
too late?” He swallows rust and mottled dirt and ignores the way his own tongue scrapes against thorny teeth.
Laurie tries to smile, but a tear spills and runs in a clean line down his cheek.
“My whole family is terrified of you and what you’d do if you took revenge for all the ways we’ve ravaged your garden.
” His mouth trembles. “You know all the blood in the garden that day? Most of it was mine. I c-c-cut myself so bad to make the sacrifice and I think the garden thought it would have the rest of me in exchange for you. I got away with it somehow. I wanted you. I’m so …
s-so sorry I didn’t tell you everything straightaway, but I was”—he seems to be having trouble talking now, his words slurring—“still s-scared of my grandfather, even after he was gone I couldn’t shake it.
I’m—I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I thought if you found everything out too fast you’d freak out and hate me and never, never forgive me.
But I’m not scared of what you are. I never could be. ”
A lie; it must be. There is no way he can’t be sick with fear as he stares at Evander, who still wears Laurie’s blood around his mouth.
“I d-don’t want to be this,” Evander whispers.
A pulled-up root from an ancient, eldritch garden of horrors.
“It’s okay.” But Laurie’s voice has gone far too soft.
Evander will carry him to find help if he has to. He will scream down the world until someone listens and finds a way to knit Laurie back together.
But he only has time to take one tentative step forward as he tries to figure out if he can lift Laurie, where to take him, how much blood he’s lost, how to stop stop stop him from dying—before he hears the crunch of a footstep on broken ceramics.
Evander whips around, his pulse punching holes in his lungs. The sudden movement sends white-hot agony eating up his own torn-open chest, more sluggish red sap descending in a line to his naval, but he doesn’t care.
The locked door to the conservatory lies ajar.
Light filters in with the delicate hum of music and champagne glasses clinking together.
He’d almost forgotten the wake the Lennox-Halls are throwing to honor—or probably celebrate—Byron’s passing.
More people will be out there, conniving, backstabbing, greedy Lennox-Halls who will flash claws and beautiful smiles and lust after a garden that can make them wealthy beyond all imagination.
A shadow shifts in the corner. Evander steps quickly in front of Laurie, his long, skinny legs a pitiful attempt at protection as the shadow solidifies into a figure with hands in pockets, tweed jacket unbuttoned, hair artfully combed back, and tortoiseshell glasses framing his affable face.
Alarm ripples down Evander’s spine and suddenly he is glad for how terrible and unholy he must look, vivisected and bloody and grown through with vines. He bares his teeth.
“Whoa.” Dawes raises a hand in an easygoing gesture, a wry smile playing on his lips. “Just me.”
“Just you?” Evander’s whole body tenses. “The one who’s been lurking secretly in Hazelthorn? The one who poisoned the last lawyer? The one who’s been manipulating me this whole goddamn time?”
Dawes’s face shows no surprise, only wry amusement. He glances around at the wildness of the plants and batters a branch out of his face before prowling closer.
“Evander.” But Laurie’s voice is too soft to be a warning.