Chapter Twenty-Nine
TWENTY-NINE
He has become the garden.
It is all up and through him, soft green tendrils coiled along optic nerves and tiny rosebuds and roots entwined through his jawbone.
Wildflowers blossom under his tongue and thorns have burst from the tender flesh of his gums to line his mouth in a second set of teeth.
Moss grows slow and steady behind his eyelids so that he no longer has to see the world if he doesn’t want to.
The garden fits itself around tendons and nerves and moves his body for him.
He can go away. Someplace where it doesn’t hurt anymore.
The space where it begins and he ends is impossible to outline, though he wonders, perhaps, if he should have kept hold of some part of himself.
His lungs have blossomed with delicate florals and he cannot breathe in without tasting it: bloodberry and King’s Sleep and belladonna.
If he lets go, he could be made of poison so vindictive he becomes death to touch.
If he lets go, he can’t find Laurie.
His eyes open.
Thickened ivy and violets stems clear from behind his eyelids as he blinks, slow and sticky. The garden holds him tenderly, the anxious weight of it pressed up against his spine with an offer to take back over, should he want.
Tears slide silently down his cheeks as he takes in the room around him and the way he’s been roughly crammed into a three-piece suit.
One of Oleander’s valets is dressing him like a doll, a hurried nervousness to their movements as they button his cuffs and adjust his collar.
Whatever room this is, Evander doesn’t recognize it.
Dust sits thickly in the air, furniture draped in ghostly sheets.
A porcelain basin lies on the carpet, water pink and frothy with soapy blood.
Dark coils of hair litter the carpet, his curls chopped back brutally short. He has been made respectable, normal.
The valet fixes the bow tie.
But they made a mistake by uncovering an ancient, antique mirror, the brass rim stamped with grapevines and dryads.
Evander stares at himself with fascinated disgust, mapping his elegant cheekbones and bruised mouth, the wicked green of his eyes so vibrant it hurts.
This is why they hid all the mirrors in Hazelthorn.
He doesn’t look right. He is the uncanny copy of a human, the best the garden could do. A boy made of otherness and green wood sticks and wicked hunger.
“That will have to do.” Oleander hovers by a crystal decanter of brandy in the corner, looking sour and displeased as always. She splashes it liberally into a glass and swallows fast.
“Did you know Byron refused to communicate with me for decades?” She doesn’t look at him, and there is an unsteady quality to her voice that says this isn’t her first drink.
“If he had shared Hazelthorn, then maybe this would all have played out differently. He refused my calls, my letters, my gifts.” Her laugh is a bitter rasp.
“I sent him a bloody deer’s heart as a threat once and that box never made it through the gates.
All I wanted was a piece to try and grow my own Hazelthorn since he wouldn’t share this one.
That miserable bastard wouldn’t give me a scrap. ”
A riotous scream pounds inside Evander’s sealed mouth, growing stronger and stronger until he is shaking.
It seems obvious she never sent Byron poisoned tea now, since she never even got close to him.
But she wanted a piece? He wonders if Byron would have given in eventually, carved off part of Evander and packed his bones in soil to send to her so she could grow her own Hazelthorn and leave him alone.
Will he be able to feel the new blood garden that Dawes grows?
Maybe it will always be part of him, a phantom limb that pulls him toward it even as he rots here locked in an airless room, waiting for his bones to be harvested again and again and again.
Because he’s not human. So it doesn’t matter what they do to him.
He is bleeding rage and murder and fury all over the floor.
But he stays quiet.
He stays so perfectly quiet as he looks at the stump of his left hand, bound and bandaged, so he no longer can see the fine white roots that protruded from the ragged flesh.
In his other hand lies the key. He’s confused how it made it out of his pajamas—unless the garden took care to be sure he didn’t lose it.
He pockets the key in his new pants.
When the leaves rustle and stretch behind his eyelids again in a tentative attempt to soothe him, he lets them black out the world again.
This time, his fall into the undulating dark is suffocating, earth pressed up against his lungs so he can barely breathe.
He is underground, he is choking, but when he tips his head sideways, Laurie is there beside him, his arms cold ivory as they twine around Evander’s neck.
His eyes have been gouged out and filled with dirt and flowers.
Silt begins to spill from Laurie’s cracked lips.
“They buried me alive,” he whispers.
Evander begins to scream.
He pulls back into himself by accident, a whimper in his mouth as tender green vines tighten around his spinal cord.
But something catches his attention and he pauses, dizzy with the effort of flitting in and out of his own skin.
Fevered sweat soaks his underarms, plasters his roughly hacked curls to his cheeks, beads on his forehead and upper lip.
When he licks it, his tongue stings with salt.
Pain has become a thing he wears, a thing he is.
He cannot look down at the place where his hand was.
His suit jacket has been pinned at his left cuff, but it’s still obvious what is missing.
Blood leaks through the bandages and slowly saturates his cuff while a throbbing, monstrous agony devours his whole arm.
He is sick with it. But the fact he is upright and walking settles a different kind of dread in his core.
Maybe he is just a tree that has been pruned.
Maybe it shouldn’t hurt.
monster monster monster
It isn’t even real blood, like he always thought. His fingers touch his empty cuff and come away tacky with tree sap.
When he looks up, he’s in the kitchen entrance, his back pressed hard against the archway while Bane stands in front of him and argues with the waitstaff.
They must have been going somewhere—Evander remembers nothing—but the kitchen is bursting with activity as chefs and caterers bustle around preparing dinner.
The clash of pots and utensils and sizzling oil ring dully in Evander’s ears, and he can smell rosemary and yeasty bread and seared steaks.
Oleander has vanished and Bane looks pissed, though for once not at Evander.
“—saying he cannot open the gates.” The waitstaff looks apologetic. “The gentleman has become quite agitated and seems to want to leave the property immediately.”
“Goddamn Dawes.” Bane sounds annoyed. “The gates work. They were open for our guests just a few hours ago. Tell him to get out of his pretty little car and open them manually.”
“I’ll pass on the message,” the waitstaff says, “but I think perhaps something has grown through the locks?”
Hazelthorn won’t let Dawes leave with the stolen piece of Evander. A sick, awful smile spreads slowly over Evander’s mouth until Bane gives him a rough shake and his head snaps back and forth.
“Stop it.” Bane snarls in his face. “Wipe that smirk off your face before I do. Spent way too much time around Laurie, didn’t you? Absorbed his attitude problems real quick.”
Evander does nothing but stare unblinking until Bane looks away with an unnerved shudder. He steps away to argue with another valet who has appeared with a nervous apology to say an irate Dawes is now at the front door, demanding someone unlock the gates.
“I already said,” Bane is nearly shouting, “they’re not locked! What the hell is his problem?”
The back door is just there. Evander could make it.
Once in the garden, he wouldn’t be easily caught.
The garden would hide him, swallow him, tend to him with joyful adoration as it has longed to do all this time.
It’s he who has unwittingly fought every single attempt it made to reconnect with him.
Did it ever try to hurt him or did he just hurt himself refusing his roots?
He didn’t know. He didn’t know.
A sweet coppery tang fills the back of his mouth and he glances down to see scarlet droplets hitting the carpet in steady pats beside him.
He sways, his stomach tipping, and when he forces himself to look up again, the busyness of the kitchen seems to have magnified, sounds crashing through his head as if he is right in the midst of it instead of standing to the side.
He flinches as someone calls out an instruction and flame leaps from a burner and dishes clatter in the sink.
Along the counter sits a selection of wines, corks popped so it can breathe.
Evander stares.
When he raises his stump lightly, the steady patter of bloodied sap ebbs and simply trickles in a line down his sleeve. Beneath the bandages something shifts, throbs. He thumbs at his jacket just enough to see thin tendrils poking up through the layers of bandages, dotted with tiny red buds.
He recognizes them from the field guide.
Heart Rot—highly toxic, both to touch and taste, the closed buds resemble the shape of an anatomical heart. If consumed, will cause shortness of breath, blurred vision, swollen throat, and rapid heartbeat that escalates into the organ imploding within the chest.
Maybe it’s the pain leaving him delirious and slippery inside his own head, but he doesn’t even care that his wound is growing toxic flowers. It feels right, somehow.
From here, Evander can smell the sickly sweet odor of the plum wine, can almost taste it.