Chapter Fourteen
FOURTEEN
Traffic delayed their arrival in the city, and then the stop by a coffee shop lost them another half hour, so the bus reached the art gallery late enough to make Andrew antsy.
The tour started and the class dribbled through the immaculate building with their notebooks and sketchbooks out.
Ms. Poppy glowed seven times brighter as she floated between paintings.
When she passed Thomas, she squeezed his shoulder and chatted to him about pushing through artist blocks by refilling his “creative well.” Thomas twitched, but nodded.
His face darkened to thunderclouds as the morning wore on and he couldn’t do a single sketch. He picked at his bite scabs and stayed close to Andrew.
When the morning finally ended and the class was to be released for their precious hours of free time, they assembled at the bus for a lecture about boundaries.
Everyone wanted to hit the closest mall and cinema, anyway.
Deprive rich kids of ways to spend their parents’ money and they go all out once released.
Andrew and Thomas went the opposite way.
“I don’t have my phone to look up the nearest art store,” Andrew said.
“We’ll do it the good ol’ fashioned way.” Thomas power-walked across the street and Andrew had to run to keep up.
“Ask directions?” he said.
“What? No. Walk around until we find one.”
They wasted fifteen minutes before Thomas gave in and asked for directions.
Then they tumbled into a cozy arts-and-crafts store, its walls lined with rainbow tubes of paint and white canvases.
The second they entered, Thomas’s whole body relaxed, his eyes brightening as if, for the first time in weeks, he had a chance to breathe.
He touched everything. Tested Copic markers and inspected oil paints.
Hovered in the background while a man conducted a paint-mixing tutorial.
He almost kissed the shelves of pencils and charcoals until Andrew had to cough to hide his laugh.
They stocked up on everything. “You should throw your old stuff out,” Andrew said.
“Yeah, I guess.” Thomas didn’t meet his eyes. “Maybe just that one sketchbook was cursed.”
“No, get rid of it all—”
“You know I can’t afford to.” Thomas kept his back to Andrew as he inspected stacks of boxed charcoals.
He rapped the edge of the shelf in a poor display of nonchalance, but his shoulders had tensed, knuckles white with the effort of clenching back some twisting emotion.
“I have nothing now, Andrew. My parents barely gave me money before, and now … well, obviously they can’t.
” His voice had gone tight. “No one’s even told me what’s happening with the investigation.
I guess the cops contacted my aunt … She’ll probably deal with the house and, like, the finance stuff.
I don’t know. Not like she’s talking to me. ”
Andrew frowned, but didn’t answer. It felt like finding a paper cut in the corner of his month, a sting both sharp and surprising. Thomas had him. He would never have nothing.
Andrew reached over Thomas’s shoulder and collected a few boxes of charcoals, and the silent weight of the declaration that he would pay, that he would take care of this, made Thomas seem smaller than before.
But he didn’t have to make it a thing. Money barely felt real to Andrew anyway, what with its sudden appearance in his life and the inevitability that someday it would vanish as fast as it had come.
Good things didn’t last; they felt like a daydream he’d lose sight of if he shook himself fully awake.
“You haven’t lost anything with them gone.” Andrew said it with such softness that his mouth barely moved, not sure if Thomas would lash out, but unable to cage the words.
Thomas snatched a few new drawing pads and boxes of Derwent pencils and then stormed away. Andrew trailed behind, but he wasn’t sorry. If he could stop Thomas from ever being hurt again, he would. He’d do anything.
At the cash register, a woman with tattooed arms rang everything up while Thomas glared at Andrew until he finally sighed and held out his arms to take the unwieldy canvases.
Thomas stacked up his supplies in Andrew’s grasp so that every corner dug into his ribs and jabbed at his collarbone.
Thomas tucked the last box of pencils under Andrew’s chin with a somewhat snaky look of satisfaction.
Fine, if this was payback, they were even now.
Andrew’s mouth made a thin line. “My wallet’s in my back pocket.”
Thomas flashed a wicked smile like a feral changeling, a creature you’d bargain your heart to and not even mind.
He slipped a hand into Andrew’s back pocket, and for a second they stood too close, lungs moving in sync, Thomas’s touch easy and familiar, like this moment meant nothing and they’d replay it a thousand times for the rest of their lives.
Then it was over. Thomas swiped Andrew’s credit card.
“You know what we need?” Thomas said, as they exited the shop with Andrew still struggling to carry all the art supplies alone. “Sugar. Since you’re burdened with the need to pay for everything right now, let’s get food.”
His glib tone sounded a little too forced, but Andrew wouldn’t comment. Let Thomas make it a joke if it made him feel better.
“I’m not hungry.” Andrew shoved a bag at Thomas. “Can you take your stuff?”
“Okay, okay.” They redistributed the bags while Thomas gave him a careful look. “When was the last time you ate? I feel like you never go to the dining hall anymore.”
Andrew did not need this right now. Eating felt like a sickening concept when the forest was filling him with nightmares.
“Let’s get milkshakes and fries,” Thomas said.
“Chips,” Andrew mumbled.
“You know they’re fries and you’re wrong. Stop correcting me with your Australianisms.” Thomas walked backward to give him a raised eyebrow. “There’s still time to become American, you know.”
“Er, no thanks. I only like one thing about this country.” It slipped out before Andrew’s brain caught up. Why did he say that? He backpedaled madly. “Your bookstore prices, I mean. Way, way cheaper than ours.”
“Sure, that’s what you meant.” Thomas patted him on the shoulder. “Nothing to do with me and my…” He trailed off as he looked over Andrew’s shoulder. “I have an idea.”
He ducked across the road, and it took Andrew a few seconds to catch up and follow him into a store.
Carson’s Camping & Hunting.
Inside smelled of cardboard boxes and metal, tenting canvas and boot polish.
The shelves stood so tight together that only a single person could walk between them.
Camping supplies spilled into hunting gear, and a bearskin on the wall watched them with empty glass eyes.
Andrew’s stomach turned over. He saw the entire wall dedicated to guns and he wanted out.
When he stumbled around a corner, he found Thomas standing on tiptoes in the next aisle.
“I hate this,” Andrew said.
Thomas turned around. He held a hatchet with a red blade, the tip under a protective cover. The handle fit sturdy against his palm, and it looked so violent and cold and final that it made Thomas seem lost under the weight of it. It was the last one on the shelf, and it felt like a sign.
Andrew chewed his lip. “We’ll never get that into Wickwood.”
“I can’t survive this.” Thomas sounded hollow.
“I pretend it’s fine, but every time I look at you, I think about monsters ripping open your stomach and feasting.
And … and you just lying there. Torn to nothing because of me.
It’s stuck in my head, Andrew, it lives there.
I can’t win this with a goddamn garden spike. ”
“Okay.” Andrew took a survival first aid kit off the shelf. “But this, too.”
They paid and stuffed everything in the bottom of Andrew’s backpack, receiving no dubious looks from the man in a red flannel with a huge beard. As if teenage boys buying weapons wasn’t something to question.
Andrew’s backpack clinked as they walked back to the bus.
He kept it hooked between his legs during the trip back so nothing clattered and drew attention.
Thomas crammed in the seat next to him and sketched frantically—trees and forests, willows and twisted oaks.
It was painful to see how much he’d missed this, craved it with a ravenous ferocity—being able to draw again where he was a god of paper and ink, and his monsters bent to his commands.
Andrew loved watching him like this, the unguarded intensity.
Thomas’s knee kept bumping Andrew’s. Between them everything felt electric.
But when they pulled into Wickwood and everyone filed off the bus, Clemens put out an arm to cut off Andrew’s escape.
“I see Mr. Rye has either lost his blazer on the trip or never had it in the first place. Yearning for another detention, are we?” His smile was aggressive in its politeness. “What’s in the backpack?”
Andrew’s chest caved in.
“Snacks,” Thomas said from behind Andrew. “We’re allowed to stock up, Mr. Clemens.”
Clemens gave Thomas a cool look at the omission of professor. “Nice. Unzip it and show me what you bought, boys.”
Andrew froze with his eyes on the ground, and a thousand thoughts blazed in terrified circles through his brain. But Ms. Poppy swept past in her patchwork skirt. She smiled when she saw Thomas’s new sketch pad under his arm.
“Let the boys out, Chris,” she said. “Wickwood isn’t a prison. We don’t pat them down.”
Andrew stumbled off the bus before Clemens could argue with a senior teacher. Thomas catapulted after him and they bolted for the dorms.
“We’re going to get caught and expelled.” Andrew’s heartbeat roared in his ears. “Maybe the monsters won’t even be there tonight.”
Thomas gave him a dry smile, but there was something empty behind his eyes. Something hopeless.
The night was a living thing, breathing with them as they stood in the forest. Moss thickened in their lungs and they could taste autumn leaves.
Thomas held the hatchet, flashlight glancing off the red blade until it looked dipped in blood. Andrew carried a garden spike and his anxiety knotted around his throat like it meant to strangle him.
Thomas had pulled his hood up and kept his eyes on the ground to hide his dread. But Andrew could feel Thomas’s fear, the exhaustion—but also his loss.
First his art, now the woods. They used to belong to Thomas. This was the place where he roared and grew taller, where his smile could make flowers bloom and his energy could flow endless and untamed.
Monsters had eaten that out of him. The trick would be to stop them before there was nothing left of Thomas to save.
Thomas’s hand trembled around the hatchet, and he couldn’t stop twitching and snatching glances at the forest as Andrew made a half-hearted attempt to find his phone again.
If he had to confess its loss to his dad and ask for a new one, he’d have to lie about what had happened. No way could he say where he’d lost it.
“It could be anything tonight,” Thomas said. “Once it was an elven queen with a moon sickle blade, and I only survived because she got bored.”
“Maybe we should set a trap,” Andrew said. “Find something for bait.”
Thomas’s smile had a hard edge. Humorless.
Andrew understood it then. They were the bait.
The wind picked up and scattered leaves over the path as they set off to hunt.
No use waiting for the monsters. The night pressed close to Andrew’s spine, cool hands sliding up his sweater and over his ribs.
It seemed fascinated with the concept of his beating pulse, and it left inky fingerprints along his collarbone.
If it asked to kiss him, he thought he would say yes.
If the trees belonged to Thomas, midnight was in love with Andrew. It made him braver somehow, invisible, hiding his delicate edges and leaving behind a lean and hungry shadow. In the dark, no one could see his hollow and empty places. Instead he looked like he could have teeth.
They felt, more than saw, the monsters wake.
Things pulled out of trees. Breathing came, hot and heavy, so close but out of sight.
Andrew could smell it: rotting leaves and earth left to molder for a thousand years. It was diseased trees and putrefied sap and that disgusting sweetness of decaying meat.
The monsters could be anything tonight—except they didn’t attack. They just watched and nipped at the boys as they passed.
“Right, so it’s not the sketchbook,” Andrew said. “But something’s different. Do you feel it?”
Thomas adjusted his grip on the hatchet. “I guess destroying the sketchbook and getting a real weapon has threatened them?”
The boys waited, but dawn drew soft pink lines in the sky before they realized nothing would come for them that night. They returned to bed exhausted, because it turned out that not fighting monsters was just as harrowing as fighting them.
The next night was the same.
And the next.
They heard snickering among the trees, or maybe it was their boots crunching leaves.
They found claw marks in the bark and a half-eaten deer with its belly ripped open and splattering the roots of the Wildwood tree.
Andrew remembered when his boots had sunk into bloodied mud here, but that hadn’t been real. This was real. At least, he thought so.
But nothing attacked them.
“I hate this,” Thomas said, his voice cracking. “They’re waiting.”
Andrew tilted his face to the black-painted sky. “So something else is coming.”
“Something worse,” Thomas said.