Chapter Eleven
ELEVEN
Thomas pulled Andrew to his feet and led him out of the forest.
They walked slow, adrenaline draining with each step and leaving them with bones of water. Andrew still clung to Thomas’s hand, their fingers laced and palms slick with blood and mud. One of them had forgotten to let go.
Climbing the fence felt impossible, but they forced themselves over.
Andrew ripped his sweatshirt on the jagged wire at the top, but Thomas slipped and sliced his arm.
He looked at it with dull, unfocused eyes, like he didn’t even feel it.
They were almost back to the dorms before Andrew realized he was in the lead.
He was the one dragging Thomas, forcing him on, holding him together.
Since when did their places switch?
When they’d climbed back through their window, their room didn’t seem real. Andrew touched his mouth, his eyes, as if phantom vines still dug at his skin. Maybe he was the one who had stopped being real. He was falling outside of himself.
Thomas sank down on Andrew’s bed and stared at his shaking hands. His nails were bitten to stubs, blood tracing the creases in his muddy palms.
Andrew dropped down beside him, their bodies jammed tight together, hip to hip. “How bad are you hurt?”
“I should be asking you that.” Thomas’s voice cracked around the edges as if he’d been screaming too long. Maybe he had, before Andrew got there.
“It got my shoulder, I think.” Andrew felt nothing, so it didn’t seem important. “This … this isn’t real.”
Thomas let out a laugh that withered into a sob.
“They’re not always that big. The smaller ones have bones of clay and glass, and they’re easier to break.
I have to kill them, every time, because if I don’t, they climb the fence and get into school.
They could attack anyone, go anywhere. I h-h-h-have to stop them. ”
Thomas peeled off Andrew’s bed and dragged out a cardboard box full of bandages, disinfectant swabs, butterfly tape, even a bottle of mild painkillers. A survival kit.
He ripped open packages with his teeth with the familiarity of routine.
“You do this every night.” Andrew sat frozen. “You never told me—” He choked. “We have to tell someone. We have to—”
“No.” Thomas looked up, and his eyes blazed with such vehemence that Andrew flinched.
He’d nearly said, We have to tell Dove, but maybe they shouldn’t.
Part of him sat there melting in shameful relief that he had been wrong about Thomas and Dove meeting in the forest, wrong thinking Thomas hated him.
He was so relieved that a manic smile tugged at his lips.
Sure, monsters were real and wanted to rip out their throats, but at least he still had his best friend.
Thomas slumped back on the bed, swiveling to sit cross-legged. “Take off your shirt.”
A ripple went through Andrew’s stomach. He obeyed, wincing when fabric stuck to bloodied skin.
When he tried to see the damage, Thomas took hold of Andrew’s chin and forced him to look away.
Then he carefully swabbed Andrew’s shoulder with one hand while the other pressed over his collarbone, which lit him up in a horribly beautiful way.
“They’ll come after you now,” Thomas said. “They’ve tasted your blood.”
“They already did,” Andrew said. “Yesterday in the bathrooms. I-I saw the hooves. It was hunting me.”
Thomas made a tight, vexed sound. “They grow out of the forest every night, and I used to think they’d disappear when the sun rises. But they don’t. If I don’t kill them all, they’ll go after anyone I hang around. That’s why my…”
“Your parents,” Andrew breathed.
Everything made sense.
Thomas’s voice shook so much he kept stopping to swallow.
“That day before school started? The fight the neighbors heard? It was a monster. I hid. I listened to my parents fight it, but they’re always high these days, and I didn’t think it was real.
How could it be goddamn real? I took a knife from the kitchen, but then I saw what it looked like and I ran. I just ran.”
His fingers traced the edges of Andrew’s cut shoulder before he taped on the bandage. Pain had arrived, white-hot and throbbing, but Andrew still didn’t care. Thomas’s misery had filled the whole room, and they drowned in it, together.
“I killed my parents,” Thomas said, soft and sick and terrified.
“Stop it.” Blood roared in Andrew’s ears. “These monsters aren’t your fault. You didn’t ask them to attack—”
“Didn’t I?” Thomas went to his desk and dug out a sketchbook.
He pulled a loose sheet from between the pages, smoothing out the wreckage of crumpled edges.
Then he flung it on the floor. It was the drawing Thomas had snatched away on the roof—the seventh son staring into a wishing well, while a monster with a torn-off wolf’s head ate his parents in the background.
Thomas’s voice stretched with anguish. “That’s what it looked like. The monster in my house. Just like this, down to the stitching at its throat. And this—” He tore a drawing off the wall so hard the corners were left behind.
Andrew yanked it from Thomas’s bloodied hands and stared.
Hooves, and corpse skin, and vines exploding from its mouth and ears and eyes.
The monster from the woods.
“When did you—” He stopped.
“I don’t know … Last year sometime?” Thomas dug fingers through his hair and paced between their beds. “It’s not a coincidence. I’m doing this. I’m-I’m creating them.”
Andrew couldn’t hold the shape of this. He stared at the drawing until it blurred, and then he ripped it up and let the pieces scatter like charcoal confetti.
“I shouldn’t tell you this. It’ll make it worse.
” Thomas wrapped arms round his stomach.
“They’ll kill you like they want to kill me.
I can’t bear it if they take you from me, too.
I need—I need—I’m so goddamn tired. It’s every night, okay?
Every night I go into the woods and fight them so they don’t climb the fence, but I can’t make them stop. I c-c-can’t—”
Thomas would wake up the whole dorm if he kept spiraling like this. If their counselor burst in here, there’d be no way to explain the blood, their dirt-streaked faces, or why Thomas was ranting about monsters.
Andrew grabbed Thomas’s shirt and pulled him back down to the bed to cut off the frantic pacing. He cupped a hand over Thomas’s mouth, nothing like the bruising way his own face had been gripped in the forest; this was delicate and tentative and full of want.
Thomas went quiet.
Words seemed weak and meaningless when drawings could wake up monsters, so Andrew didn’t ask. He peeled Thomas’s shirt off and searched for the worst wound—a slash right over his ribs. Blood still oozed sluggishly from torn flesh.
Andrew pushed Thomas’s shoulder until he collapsed back onto the pillows.
He lay there, chest moving too fast while Andrew cleaned his cuts.
Where Thomas had been brusque and efficient, Andrew worked with a featherlight touch.
He splayed his fingers over Thomas’s heaving stomach until the dry sobs slowed.
They’d never had so much bare skin between them, so much blood.
Andrew’s heart felt bruised and weary, but he made his voice steel. “I’ll help.”
Thomas flung an arm over his eyes. “You know how there’s an old boarded-up well in the grove behind my house? I can’t even tell the cops to check in there because it’s as good as a confession. And if I start raving about monsters, they’ll still lock me up.”
“I get it, but there has to be an answer. A reason this is happening. But you can’t keep pushing me away.” Andrew swabbed the cut harder, and was rewarded with a hiss from Thomas.
“I can’t protect you and fight monsters, too.”
It stung, but it was true. Andrew had been worse than useless tonight, but he’d been in shock. He’d do better next time.
“You can’t figure out why this is happening,” Andrew said, steady, “while you’re fighting monsters with no sleep. Let me help.”
Thomas kept his arm over his eyes and said nothing.
For a vicious moment, Andrew thought about slipping his fingers into Thomas’s cut. Taking hold of his rib and breaking it. Pulling the soft crumbling bone from his chest and sewing it into his own. They’d be forever together, rib against rib, fused in gore and bone and adoration.
Andrew squeezed his eyes shut.
That wasn’t him. He was infected by this night of woken nightmares and ebbing adrenaline—and the starved desperation of wanting Thomas, Thomas, only Thomas.
He taped a bandage over Thomas’s wound and disinfected all the other cuts he could find.
“Are you scared of me?” Thomas’s voice was small.
“No,” Andrew said. “We’ll stop this. Everything that starts has a way to end.”
Thomas fell asleep in Andrew’s bed.
Andrew thought about curling up beside him and seeing if their bodies fit together like they’d been carved from the same oak.
Instead, he stared out the window until dawn blushed the sky and let the truth of last night sink into his bones.
Horrors always felt less real in the daylight, but this wouldn’t go away.
Andrew hadn’t asked it in the dark, but the question burned him.
Who was Thomas Rye that he could make monsters?
What was he—
Even though he’d slept for barely two hours, Andrew woke Thomas at the first alarm. They couldn’t draw attention to themselves—they had too much to hide.
Somehow Andrew had been shoved into playing the part of the steady one.
That should be Dove’s place, the one who spoke sense to balance Thomas’s fiery impulses and Andrew’s panic spirals.
She should be the one drawing up a flowchart for how to defeat monsters and still pass their classes. But he was forbidden to tell her.
So it was Andrew who got them dressed and through breakfast where they drank too much black coffee and ate almost nothing before stumbling to their first classes.