Chapter Thirty
THIRTY
Once upon a time, a door was unlocked and a monster slipped out of its ivory tower. The garden did not step into him, but rather stepped out of him.
The facts seem raw and livid now, a bruise purpled with old blood, how that first night he escaped his room could easily be pockmarked with holes.
What if the garden took over his body? It could have sent him into the kitchen to bite the stems of poisonous blooms growing from his own wrists and crush them into Byron’s waiting tea while Carrington was in the parlor with Laurie.
Then Carrington served the tea none the wiser.
All this time, maybe Evander should have been accusing himself.
His memory has always been full of a thousand neatly cut holes. He can’t trust himself and he can’t be trusted.
It had to have been him. No one else makes sense.
Benedict Dawes would have gloated, if he’d been the killer. Bane couldn’t even get inside thanks to the garden. Oleander never sent any tea. Azalea wasn’t in the country.
As the dinner party descends into terrified chaos, Evander hurls his empty wineglass at the wall and surges from his chair.
No one stops him. Hands are at throats. Pressed over hearts.
Blood runs from their eyes like tears. Screams echo off the walls and chairs are knocked over.
Someone is shouting about calling an ambulance.
Evander doesn’t wait to see if their hearts will punch through their chests.
He bolts into the kitchen and through the back door.
Move fast, fast.
Don’t let him be too late.
Night hits like a cool shock to his burned-up skin, and he gasps at the relief of it as it sweeps his sweaty hair back from his forehead and tugs him in deeper toward the inky depths of the garden.
Cicadas and night birds double their songs.
Trees tilt toward him. Plants burst from the ground and stroke at his legs as he passes.
His hoarse scream through the dark is broken and raw.
“LAURIE.”
He bolts over low garden walls and plunges through hedgerows that catch in his hair.
The garden doesn’t stop him, rather urges him on, fast and faster, only snatching at his collar once when he is about to take the wrong turn.
A long, supple branch spins him around and pushes him left instead.
He staggers a bit, regains his footing, and starts running again.
“Thanks,” he breathes.
Don’t let him be too late.
Not after all of this. Not after he finally understands all of the rotten secrets.
Ahead, the red door looms like a bloodshot eye and he slams into it, a murderous roar tearing from his throat. “Don’t eat him. Don’t you dare eat him. DO YOU HEAR ME?”
He fumbles for the key, drops it, has to feel about in the heather grown thickly over the cobbled path before he finds it and then jams it into the lock.
Old dried blood flakes off the door as he shoves it open.
The smell of freshly turned earth greats him, the gentle hum of growing things and heady toxic floral perfumes from flowers blossoming under the silver moon.
His heart pounds so hard against his ribs that he feels bruised and breathless, staggering forward before he falls to his knees at the garden bed left empty to devour bodies.
He starts digging with his only hand, clawing as hard and fast as he can.
“Laurie, Laurie, Laurie.” His tears hit the soil and he is furious at how slow he is without both hands. He cries out in frustration before staring at the throbbing bandages of his stump. Maybe—
He starts clawing off the bandages, hurrying as fast as he can with shaking fingers and a heart stuttering in his chest. The bloodied cloth unravels.
A small, green branch has begun to sprout from his stump, the promise of fingers told amongst thin sticks with knots curved like knucklebones. Even as he grits his teeth against the splintering pain, it grows, shaping itself into a new hand of bark and leaves.
This is him. This is what they hid from him.
He starts digging again, wild and frenzied, and his hands hit something soft. But he has no idea which bed he should be digging in and he feels it like a fist to his gut, that this is the wrong body. Not Jessica’s, from that day Bane murdered her.
This can only be his guardian.
Even with moonlight spilled like glossy milk all around him, it’s hard to tell what’s left of Byron Lennox-Hall.
Roots have dug through his chest and half his side is already gone, earthworms writhing in empty eye sockets and beetles scurrying along the edge of a white jawbone.
But there is enough skin left to see the surprised rictus of horror that shaped his mouth as he died.
In those last moments, he would have realized all his worst nightmares had come true and the garden was taking its final revenge. The monster was loose.
After all his hoarding of the garden, his family fed him back to the soil the first chance they got.
It would be ironic and circular, if Evander had it in himself to care.
But he spares only one second looking at the decayed wreckage of the man who tortured him and then assured him that this nightmare was love.
With a garbled cry, Evander lunges for the next bed and starts digging faster, harder.
He’s whispering words through poison-smudged lips as he digs; a plea or a prayer, tied up in a ribbon of salty tears.
“I don’t want him to be dead. I can’t. I can’t do this. I c-c-c-can’t. Please please please—”
All around him, vines pull from the soil, slow and elegant, and grow toward the moonlight. It’s always been like this, he understands it now; his riotous emotions make plants bloom toxic, violent, and beautiful, as if they can’t help but respond to his heartbeat.
Then his fingers hit skin, soft and supple.
He rakes dirt from a face, grit and loam jammed up under his nails and ground into the knees of his suit pants.
Nothing matters but this.
His hand cupping Laurie’s cold, muddy jaw. His fingers digging into the limp mouth and gouging out loose soil to clear the airway. His lips pressed to Laurie’s temple with fervent, delirious agony.
“Don’t leave me, please, don’t leave me. I am worse without you.”
The earth is soft, the garden abashed as it relinquishes its grip, and it doesn’t take long to pull Laurie from the ground and drag him over to the grass.
Dirt cakes his limbs, his face. Evander is on his knees, whispering soft reassurances as he uses his sleeves to wipe dirt from Laurie’s cheeks and brush off his hair and then prop him upright as best he can.
He is too heavy, his head slumping on Evander’s shoulder.
Around his ankles, roots grow, tentative, as if unsure why their feed has been interrupted.
Evander snarls at the earth, feral and vicious, and the roots sag in submission.
Not too much damage has been done yet. The garden has crept into the open wound of Laurie’s side, weaving amongst Evander’s teeth marks as if by invitation.
Soft, green shoots grow from Laurie’s body and roses black as old blood have sunk thorny vines into his skin.
It’s not too hard to yank them off. To hurl them away.
The sounds coming from Evander’s mouth feel alien: jagged breathing, dry moans, his own thorny teeth tearing open his bottom lip until he tastes tree sap and earth and fairy foxglove.
One root has plunged so deep into Laurie’s open wound that it takes several moments for Evander to yank it out. He pulls, and pulls, watching the root slither free covered in viscid gore and flop on the ground like a wretched snake.
All around him the garden leans forward to watch, a nervousness flittering about its leaves.
wait wait wait
Evander snarls, so animal, it scares even him.
But he is beyond thinking, beyond anything but this need to gather up fistfuls of shattered stars and moonbeams and bright blue skies, and fit them back inside Laurie.
He places a palm over Laurie’s wound, but it’s barely bleeding now.
“I’ll t-take you to a hospital.” Evander’s teeth chatter. “They’ll fix you. I—I don’t know how to use a phone, though, so-so you need to wake up. Wake up for me. Laurie? Laurie. I want you. I w-w-want you. I’ve d-d-done something terrible. I didn’t—mean to.”
But he had meant to.
And it terrifies him.
There is no line between him and the garden anymore. There is nothing but the both of them tangled together in rage and justice and the hysterical despair of feeling trapped.
He’s crying so hard he can’t breathe, his tears pattering down on Laurie’s face. His skin isn’t too cold; the dirt kept him warm. Laurie’s mouth parts easily when Evander presses two fingers to his bloody lips and he thinks, maybe, he could breathe life back into him.
“It will be okay, just you see.” His voice breaks and he is almost soundless as he whispers, “I’m only a monster because they made me monstrous.” He picks up Laurie’s hand and presses it to his own wet cheek.
And he pretends that it is
Laurie
who whispers, “It’s okay.”