Chapter Thirty-Two
THIRTY-TWO
Moonlight turns the world to a softened silver as they lie in the grass inside the poisonous garden. The red door remains open and the low calls of night birds and cicadas filter through. The world feels empty except for them, but it is a soft kind of loneliness. It feels like peace.
Their heads are close, tilted against each other, their legs entwined and fingers threaded as they count stars bit deep into the dark sky. Dawn will come soon and Hazelthorn will have to see everything he has destroyed, but for now the dark smothers most of his guilt and he’s grateful for it.
The wreckage of the mansion still feels unreal.
It sags in the middle, trees grown through it and wrapped around it in loving strangulation, and it doesn’t seem as if they want to come out.
Most of the garden has settled its roots back into the soil, but a new, fervent life thrums through all the leaves.
As if it feels happy. As if it feels avenged.
Laurie did a quick circumnavigation of the mansion by himself since Hazelthorn couldn’t bear to look.
Maybe the garden was in him, pushing him toward a steep, dark edge, but he could have tried harder to stop and he didn’t.
Now it seems safest to tuck himself back behind the red door and wait for Laurie to come back and flop onto the grass beside him.
This is the place Hazelthorn was taken from, severed, where he lost who he was and tried to force himself to fit a skin that was never his.
He thinks, perhaps, he is meant to be feral and loud and sharp and angry.
It feels nice to lie in the dew-soaked grass and let the truth of himself soak through his skin, to feel the dread slowly stop throbbing through his gut and his heartbeat slow and limbs loosen.
He is almost at peace with himself; he has almost let go of that fallacy that he should try to be something else.
His fingers trace the heart line on Laurie’s palm and he rolls over to press his mouth close to Laurie’s ear. “I killed them. I killed them all and I—I—I couldn’t stop. I can never stop myself when—” He cuts off and lets out a long, shuddering breath.
“Not all of them.” Laurie absently runs fingers through Evander’s curls, picking out thistles and twigs and flicking them away.
“I looked when I was in the house. I’m not sure …
I think some of my relatives might’ve run.
The staff look like they climbed the garden wall and got out.
Not sure about Dawes, but I think those roots might’ve pulled him underground.
Bane and Azalea and Oleander are…” He seems to pause for a moment as if he’s wrestling with his own feelings and doesn’t quite know how to compact them into a shape that feels ready to hold. “I think they’re dead.”
They say nothing for a moment, both of them focused on the comforting warmth of the other while the weight of what has been done steeps in the air around them, sharp as holly leaves. Hazelthorn isn’t sure if he, alone, is to blame or if it could have been different if only they’d hurt him less.
“What will happen to the gardens now?” he says quietly.
Laurie lets out a small huff, something caught between laughter and loathing. “Maybe nothing. I have a feeling no Lennox-Halls are ever going to touch this place again. You’re kind of terrifying in monster-mode.”
Hazelthorn tilts his head back to give Laurie a proper glare, but Laurie just smiles innocently and pulls him back close to keep playing with his hair.
“I don’t know what they expected.” Laurie yawns, exhaustion crowding him toward the edge of sleep. “The garden was always going to bite back someday. Also, the front gates are so smothered in ivy now it’s like there’s no entrance at all. Maybe everyone will forget there’s anything here.”
“I’ll tell it to open for you,” Hazelthorn says. “When you leave.”
Laurie pushes up on one elbow and looks down at him, laid out there on grass soaked in moonlight, and the look on his face is pure desolation.
He must be beyond exhausted, biting back pain and fear, and yet he places one thumb over Hazelthorn’s lips and does nothing else but drink him in with aching, fond tenderness.
No one should look at a monster like that.
With such unashamed adoration.
“You should never have unlocked my door.” Hazelthorn sounds raspy after all the screaming. “None of this would’ve happened.”
“Want to know why I did?” Laurie leans in until their mouths are close enough for words to fall from his tongue onto Hazelthorn’s.
“I overheard my grandfather in the conservatory talking to Carrington. About you. About how best to cut you apart, and if—” Anger burns his eyes the coldest blue.
“If you’d survive it. They decided it didn’t matter this time if you did or not. ”
“I hate them,” Hazelthorn says softly.
“I know.” Laurie sighs and then lowers his head to rest on Hazelthorn’s chest. “I used to spend every summer trying to figure out a way to talk to you, to get you to trust me so I could get you out. But I figured the garden wouldn’t let you get far, so how could we escape?
” His voice takes on a shaky fierceness.
“That night, I had to act fast to distract them from whatever they were going to do to you. So I dosed his tea and then unlocked your door. It wasn’t a great plan, I know, but I didn’t have time to think. ”
The tea.
Hazelthorn sits up fast. “What.” He can hardly force the word out as he stares at Laurie.
A hesitant guilt blossoms in Laurie’s eyes and he looks away.
“No,” Hazelthorn says. “No, I killed him? I poisoned the tea. I must have when—”
“I didn’t mean for it to be a lethal dose.
” Laurie sits up and draws his knees to his chest, resting his chin against them.
“I just wanted him to be sick. Vomit and headaches or whatever, like he always gave you. Like, I literally used the poison they put in your milk every night because it was just there in the kitchen, but I guess you have built up a massive tolerance or it just doesn’t affect you the same way.
I only wanted him to be sick, I swear, so he wouldn’t hurt you.
I didn’t mean for—” He breaks off and sits there, breathing too fast, his mouth gone white around the edges.
“I never wanted him to die. That’s such a Lennox-Hall thing to do, kill whoever is pissing you off. And I didn’t want to be like them.”
So Hazelthorn didn’t poison Byron.
It wasn’t him.
He didn’t slip out of his skin that day, didn’t lose himself. He isn’t always monster of atrocities and vengeance, a creature uncontrolled.
The dark, mountainous dread that has been crushing his chest all this time suddenly unravels and he can feel the loss of it, the weightlessness, feel how easy it is to breathe as his rib bones stop bending under gangrenous guilt. Around him, small flowers bloom in a dozen shades of gold.
“That’s why I didn’t want to help you find the murderer.” Misery fills Laurie’s voice. “Give you another reason to hate me. I mean, you should hate me, but I just … I thought if anyone could like someone like me, maybe it would be you.”
“I don’t hate you.” Carefully, Hazelthorn brushes his fingers down Laurie’s side to tentatively check the wound. The garden’s stitched vines have held. It has been gentle as it heals him with leaves of witch hazel and petals of comfrey, and his face looks less pallid, the pain ebbed.
Hazelthorn carefully picks up Laurie’s damaged wrist and turns it to face the moonlight, running a thumb over the sunken flesh that should feel tight and gnarled after the traumatic, botched surgery.
But his wrist has loosened. He can stretch it now and there is an obvious absence of pain behind his eyes.
Tiny holes in his flesh show where the vines have slid in and they are likely, even now, growing new wrist tendons for him that will be supple as green wood.
The absence of pain must be shocking, wonderful, though Hazelthorn has no idea what the cost will be.
What it means for Laurie to be twisted up in the garden like this.
Then it’s Laurie’s turn to pick up Hazelthorn’s newly grown hand of bark and leaves, to turn it this way and that as he inspects the too-long, twiggy fingers and the wooden whorls in the knuckles.
He kisses it, softly.
“When you leave”—Hazelthorn is careful as he places the words down, making sure none of them tremble—“I want you to lock the garden door on your way out.” He pulls the key from his pocket and places it in Laurie’s hand, curving his fingers over it.
It hurts, in a way, to feel that warmth of his skin and know this is the last time.
“No—” Laurie starts, but Hazelthorn glares at him with such fierce vehemence that he goes quiet.
Hazelthorn’s eyes are glassy as he says, “I need the door to stay locked. You d-don’t understand how…” His voice drops. “How hungry I am.”
Not much different lies between this walled garden and his bedroom, except this is where he truly belonged, caged down here amongst the moss and flowers.
They are quiet for a moment, the earth pressed warm and solid against their bones, before Laurie finally pushes to his feet. Exhaustion mars his walk as he limps for the red door. He doesn’t look back.
It’s better this way. No lingering, no overthinking.
They both understand what needs to be done when a monster has all its teeth out.
This is the kindest option. Hazelthorn is a hungry, cavernous gouge that nothing can fill, and he can’t be trusted, can’t even trust himself.
He will stuff his mouth with dirt and leaves as soon as Laurie’s gone to quench some of the pain tearing his stomach in half and then he will curl up in the soft soil, the earth pressed to his achingly sharp shoulder blades, and he will rest. He already knows what it is to be buried alive, but maybe he was never scared of it. Maybe he missed it.
He just wishes Laurie had kissed him, one last time.
Laurie stands at the red door and fits the key into the lock, scowling with concentration against the shadows. Then he pauses, his hand rested against the flaking, brown bloodstains, before he glances over his shoulder.
“I don’t think my blood was actually enough of a sacrifice,” he says.
“Not to make a whole person. I think that’s why …
the garden has been so ravenous. Like it needs to eat and eat to make up for losing you, and it was never enough because it just wanted to be whole again.
That’s why it’s been raging the last seven years and hardly giving my family any gems.”
“It wanted me back.” Hazelthorn feels the garden lean into him, tender and gentle and peaceful, finally whole again.
The corner of Laurie’s mouth tilts up in the saddest smile. “Everything is kinda my fault.”
“Yeah, it is,” Hazelthorn says. “Useless boy.”
The ocean shine of Laurie’s tear-filled eyes is so beautiful it hurts.
Then he takes a deep breath and slams the door.
The key turns in the lock with that familiar thunk.
Silence pours over the garden, broken only by the gentle shift of the wind through the laurel hedgerows, poisonous as their namesake should have been. But somehow Laurie grew up fierce with kindness.
Hazelthorn sits cross-legged on the grass, staring at the closed door with a dull hollowness carving a place for itself between lungs and rib cage. He is trembling, but he isn’t sure whether it’s rage or relief.
Laurie flips the key up and down and then tosses it as hard as he can into the garden, where the ivy swallows it.
Hazelthorn glares at him. “You’re meant to be on the other side of the goddamn door, Laurence.”
“Don’t ‘Laurence’ me.” Laurie strides back over and then, with a sudden burst of speed, runs at Hazelthorn and tackles him hard to the grass.
They go down in a tangle of limbs, their hearts pounding against each other in bloody ecstasy, their kisses missing mouths and hitting cheekbones, jaws, necks.
Soft, warm joy spreads through Hazelthorn and he cups both hands around Laurie’s face and pushes him down hard into the ground. This is what it is to kiss a wretched boy of a god down amidst the soft green rot of a locked garden.
“I’m staying until you feel in control of yourself,” Laurie says simply. “I don’t want anything out there in the world anyway. We can still live in the house—I know it’s wrecked, but I don’t mind sharing my room with a tree.”
“Am I the tree?” Hazelthorn’s voice is a little flat.
Laurie grins, suddenly impish. “Maybe. I know we can’t access any of my grandfather’s fortune anymore, but we don’t want it. We can grow stuff to eat—you could probably grow us anything, right? I have it worked out, you’ll see.”
Hazelthorn ghosts his kisses over Laurie’s collarbone while he lets out a long, soft sigh. It won’t be hard to find the key again, with the garden’s help, but he can’t think of that now. A slow, bloody pulse has begun behind his eyes.
Laurie murmurs something that sounds like “I told you, right from the start, I wanted Hazelthorn.”
But it is hard to hear him through the drunken thrill devouring Hazelthorn until he can’t think, can’t focus on anything but the way his mouth meets Laurie’s in a litany of worshipful kisses.
“You should leave me here. I’m not … not safe.” But his fingers are twisted into Laurie’s hair, his body pressing him to the ground, and he doesn’t think he could let him go even if he wanted to.
Laurie’s throat tilts toward the sky, his murmurs soft with anguished desire as Hazelthorn kisses him, ravenous and adoring.
A distant part of him whispers, Stop, as the tip of his tongue traces the curve of Laurie’s jaw, but he is all heat and reverence and want want want as hunger pulls him in half.
His mind has emptied and is grown through only with lovely, bloody flowers, and this feels so much like love, this need to devour.
He thinks it is true, what Laurie said. Once the garden has a taste, it wants the rest.