Chapter Thirty-One
THIRTY-ONE
All that’s left of him is a howling thing that runs through the garden with a scream torn from his unraveling skin.
He runs fast, wild, mad. There is a rush in this, a horrible pleasure that is so deeply entwined with a starving need to consume that he has lost all ability to hold on to himself. He has let go.
He screams.
and screams
and screams.
The midnight sky snaps in half, or maybe the snap comes from inside him, a cracking open of marrow so that anger can suck at his bones.
Vines grow from his wrists and wrap around his forearms, and his dinner jacket tears as roses blossom between his shoulder blades.
The cavity in his chest becomes a cradle for briars.
Mud fingerprints his jaw, and his skin flakes to show tree bark beneath.
And the garden matches his screams.
He isn’t even sure where he’s running, just that he can’t stop. If he twists his fingers, fresh foliage bursts forth on barren branches and saplings sprout from the ground. Somewhere along the way, he lost his shoes, and now clover grows wherever he steps.
He is a wild thing, a ravenous thing, an untamed thing, and there is no one to tell him to be quiet.
When he howls, the garden responds by putting a fist through the walls of the Hazelthorn manor, punching stone and brick and plaster as tree boughs slam inside.
The seething, furious garden that has so long scratched at the windows finally has permission to break through.
Glass shatters. Walls crumble. Roof tiles crash to the ground below as oaks explode through the chimneys and birches grow into the walls.
The garden eats through the manor with riotous joy.
He should share that, should be fueled by it.
They’re both getting what they always wanted, he and the garden.
Escape, revenge, freedom, veneration. Nothing can cage them back up; all the walls are down.
But somehow, when he stops running, he just feels like crying.
The garden has him back, it is finally whole, yet he feels emptied.
It isn’t for a boy he barely knew, he tells himself fiercely.
It shouldn’t mean anything, those years of watching Laurie out a window, of obsessing over him, hungering for him, of imagining his fingertips pressed against Evander’s hot skin as he kisses him senseless.
It could’ve been anyone, really. It just happened to be Laurence Lennox-Hall.
Except, deep down, he knows that’s not true.
Only Laurie stood in this garden as a child and cut himself open and wished for a friend with full understanding that it would be monstrous. And he didn’t mind.
Something crumples in Evander’s chest and he drops into a crouch, hugging his knees to his chest and sucking in lungfuls of summer night air.
Tears cut furrows down his muddy cheeks.
He is shivering, his lips moving in a soundless plea that has long since stopped making sense.
Around him, the garden pulls roots from the ground and trees step over him as they trundle toward the mansion to surge into the walls and grow branches in all the parlors, twist holly and ivy through the carpets, fill the beds with hemlock and roses and larkspur.
Evander wipes his mouth, his nose. He feels like a silly child, sobbing like this, desperate and thick and heartsick.
Stop.
Just stop and—
listen
Feet scuff the pathway just ahead, and there is the choked gasp of someone witnessing the impossibility of the garden’s vengeance.
Evander looks up slowly, his dark curls hanging limp over his eyes.
Dawes has frozen on the path ahead, a flowerpot clutched under one arm, his face waxy with terror as he takes a step backward, then another.
When Evander rises from where he’s crouched, he knows he must look nowhere near human. His bark hand hangs at his side; his face is stripped of emotion.
For a long minute, their eyes lock and the panic in Dawes’s expression intensifies under the weight of Evander’s deadened scowl.
“Wait.” Dawes swallows. “I’m not—Just—Just stay back.”
Evander screams.
It pierces through the air like a whiplash and Dawes recoils in visible pain as he looks for somewhere to flee. He must have been trying to find another way out of Hazelthorn, since the gate is locked with ivy, but he should never have come back here.
A tree snatches Dawes’s legs out from under him.
He goes down with a petrified shriek, all his smug, suave confidence gone as he scrabbles across the dirt, his fingernails clawing for purchase as the garden drags him backward by the ankle.
The flowerpot hits the ground and cracks, but Evander looks away.
He doesn’t want to see the severed part of him.
What he wants is to stop being hungry.
He comes forward with measured steps, picking his way through thickets and thorns as Dawes tangles amongst plum tree roots. He is messy and hysterical, babbling pleas and bribes and threats all at once. One root punctures through his calf muscle and he screams.
“Wait waitwaitwait. No, god. Wait.” Dawes is reduced to a sobbing smear on the ground, trying to drag himself away while the garden plays with him like he’s a sightless worm.
Roots coil like pythons around his middle.
“Just unlock the gates and let me out. Let me out. I’ll give you anything. Anything!”
Evander’s head is empty as he crouches down by Dawes. He places twiggy finger bones on Dawes’s skin and lets them scuttle in eerie, inhuman ways toward the lush sound of that throbbing heartbeat.
Hunger splits open his belly in a roar so terrible that his vision speckles.
Dawes’s frantic babbling tips up a notch. “I don’t know why they ever let you run around. They’re crazy. You’re all crazy. How did they ever think you were human, I can’t—”
Saliva fills Evander’s mouth. “Be quiet.”
He has become a nightmare from the dark and there doesn’t seem any point in pretending he could ever have been something else.
“EVANDER.”
He catches himself, hovers, the thorns in his mouth an inch from sinking into Dawes’s cheekbone as he lies trembling like pinned prey.
“Evander. Look at me.”
But the voice is coming from behind him, not from Dawes, who has started weeping piteously.
A sob catches in Evander’s mouth, spills, and when he twists his head at an uncanny angle to look over his shoulder, he is sure he looks nothing like himself. Evander is a name that no longer fits him. He is—
“I said, Look at me, Hazelthorn.”
He stands, shaking, and he looks.
The impossibility of Laurie standing there feels like having his soul split open all over again. Of course it isn’t real, just his imagination digging a boy out of the ground to hold him together when he is falling apart.
But the mirage stands firm just beyond a low garden wall smothered in yellow roses and ivy. He leans against it, breathing hard, dirt and blood matting his clothes to his skin and his side spilling greenery and vines.
It makes sense, in a wild, hot rush—the garden isn’t eating him, it’s mending him. Those vines have stitched his side, moss has soaked up his blood, tiny violet roots have sprouted from his busted lip to suture ragged flesh.
“You’re not this,” Laurie says, his voice firm. “This isn’t you and you don’t want it to be.”
For a second, Evander can do nothing but stare, blinking to clear the mussy confusion. He wavers, unsure. It could be the moonlight, playing tricks on him.
Laurie is still a few feet away, but his glare is ferocious. “You really lose your shit when you’re left alone for five minutes, don’t you?”
“You’re—No.” Evander steps back. “You’re not—”
“Check for a goddamn pulse next time,” Laurie says, but his mouth is wobbling and his eyes are bright and he takes a shaky step forward.
He’d probably fall if not for a sudden shoot of greenery bursting from the soil to leap up and grab his wrist to stabilize him. The garden, helping. The garden, tending.
Because however deep its rage runs, it hasn’t always been a blood-soaked monster. It has been unmade and remade that way by Lennox-Halls who bled it for riches and glory.
Maybe it hungered for something else before they fed it blood and flesh relentlessly; maybe it simply slept in deep, cozy darkness, and enjoyed soft birdsong and warm golden sun.
“Come here.” But the traitorous way Laurie’s voice bends says he is pretending to be made of flint while, inside, he is crying.
Evander steps over the sobbing, babbling wreck of Dawes, and picks his way carefully, slowly, toward Laurie. He stops while Wolflock and Bloodberry petals blossom between them and when he reaches out a hand, he wonders how toxic he’s become, with Heart Rot vines coiled about his wrists.
“Did the garden bring you back?” A tremor runs through Evander’s voice.
“I think it was holding me.” Laurie doesn’t come forward, doesn’t reach out. He seems to respect the wary distance of the feral creature before him, pacing back and forth with fairy foxglove all through his hair.
“What if you’re wrong? What if this is all I am?” Evander hates the way the words tear from him, unsteady and wet and so close to a snarl. “What if the worst of us is the only part that’s real?”
But Laurie doesn’t hesitate. “I won’t let you be.”
“What did you call me before?” Evander’s bark hand curls into a fist.
Laurie touches two fingers to the blood still crusted over his mouth. “I’m sorry I named you after my imaginary friend. It’s just—you were meant to be mine and I never wanted to lose you.”
“I said—” Evander takes a brittle step forward. “What did you call me?”
“Hazelthorn,” he whispers.
With a broken cry, Evander runs forward and slams into Laurie like a thunderstorm finally wearing itself out.
His face is pressed to Laurie’s neck, and Laurie’s arms go tight around his ribs, and there is no room for anything between them except for soft, broken agony.
Laurie presses his mouth hard to the side of Evander’s head and his fingers dig into the disheveled dinner jacket until his knucklebones go white.
All he says, his voice soft and reverent and broken all the way through, is, “God was stronger than me when he made Adam and didn’t fall in love with him.”
Behind them, a plum tree root plunges through Dawes’s chest and his mangled cries cut off as his body is slowly folded down into the soil.
The snap of bone is muffled by the soft rustling of leaves and it is almost possible, in that moment, to pretend the plum tree chose this on its own. And Evander had nothing to do with it.