Chapter Sixteen
SIXTEEN
Andrew followed Thomas into the garden with the weariness of a boy facing a briar noose. If this was one of his stories, he’d write about a cornered fox chewing its own leg off to escape until the wound bloomed with flowers.
The sharp hunger inside him was never for food these days, not when he already felt crowded with monsters and panic and anticipation that everything might grow so much worse.
Thomas plunged deep into the gardens that wrapped around the Wickwood manor and dorms. When the sun shone, the gardens sprawled like a fairy tale, with hedges and lawns the color of emeralds and jade, all trimmed and precise.
Brick paths nipped around rosebushes and ivy trellises and led to cherubic stone benches and an ivy-smothered gazebo.
Now everything shimmered under a layer of silver rain and the garden didn’t look whimsical. It looked like it had been crying.
“You said it wasn’t raining. I’m literally getting wet.” Andrew knew he sounded petulant, but he didn’t want to be here. He didn’t need to be fed and monitored like a baby bird.
“The gazebo will be dry.” Thomas hopped over a puddle.
The air felt damp enough to drink; Andrew’s lungs were already having trouble. He pinched the bridge of his nose and crushed his eyes closed for a second before he realized it wasn’t the heavy air wrecking him—he was sliding toward a panic attack. He hated being like this.
“Thomas, can we just go—”
The path curved toward the gazebo, and Thomas pulled up short. Bryce Kane and his friends were already there, shoving each other with bullish laughter. They’d stomped mud all over the white wood floors and littered chip bags everywhere. The second they saw Andrew and Thomas, they started howling.
“Hey, there’s Tommy and his girlfriend!”
“Shut up, dude, remember he killed his parents. Want to be next?”
They broke into wheezing laughter.
Thomas speed-walked in the opposite direction. The paper bag smacked against his leg with an unappealing squish.
“Someday I’m running away to a dessert island,” Thomas said. “I will never speak to another person again.”
Andrew sighed as he followed. “It’s desert island.”
“I said what I said, Perrault.”
They sat on a low stone wall at the very edge of the gardens.
Ahead, the sports fields stretched and ended against the sharp line of the fence.
The forest watched them. They stared back, unblinking.
The air felt even grayer here, and they could taste the soaked leaves and mud and moss of the forest on their tongues.
A lonesome shadow crossed Thomas’s face as he stared at the woods.
He must miss it, those days where he sneaked out there for the pure enjoyment of it, returning with mud stains and pockets crammed with interesting rocks and leaves.
Dove would go off on him about risking expulsion, and he’d look her dead in the eye and lie. What? I haven’t been in the forest.
He used to kiss trees. Now they made him flinch.
Andrew picked at his sandwich. The peanut butter felt like glue in his mouth.
“I’ll fight Bryce Kane if it’ll help,” Thomas offered.
Andrew shot him a flat look. “Help you get kicked out? Ignore him.”
Thomas rummaged in the paper bag. “So, my aunt finally contacted me. Apparently she’s been sorting out affairs and stuff even though the case isn’t closed yet.
But she … she knows about our well.” He bit savagely into another sandwich.
“It’s overgrown with ivy, so the cops would’ve missed it. But she might look in there.”
“If she does,” Andrew said, picking his words like shards of glass, “the cops will have answers and they’ll close the case. Nothing ties it to you.”
“But I don’t want—” He stopped. “They might have escaped, you know?”
Andrew didn’t point out it had been weeks since his parents “vanished,” because he could hear the tentative wish in Thomas’s voice.
“They probably escaped,” Andrew said.
“But my aunt might pull me out of Wickwood. It’s the kind of vindictive thing she’d do.”
That couldn’t happen, not to Andrew. If he lost Thomas, and Dove kept this strange new distance from him, how impossible would it be to hold on to himself?
Thomas sighed and then cast a careful glance at Andrew. “Are you okay?”
Andrew gripped the sandwich. He’d taken two bites and he already felt stuffed all the way up to his throat, but he didn’t want Thomas to baby him, so he took another huge mouthful and tried to chew.
It tasted of mud. He had to be imagining it, what with the air smelling so thickly of forest and him already being on edge. But mud was all through his mouth, cloying and suffocating, bits of gravel grinding into his molars. He choked and bent double, spitting out the sandwich.
Thomas leaped up and grabbed Andrew’s shoulders as he gagged. “Hey, what? What’s wrong?”
When Andrew peeled apart the bread, the peanut butter was mixed with black, wormy soil, grubs wriggling with their guts pulsing out their severed edges where Andrew had bitten in.
Andrew dropped it and dry-heaved.
“What the hell—” Thomas stared. “I didn’t—that peanut butter was fresh out of the jar! Shit, I’m so sorry—”
Andrew’s mouth tasted of leaves and muck and worms. He was breathing too fast. He’d eaten that. He’d put filth in his mouth and—
Thomas crushed himself down on the wall next to Andrew, close and tight, his hand sliding over Andrew’s stomach and up his chest. Feeling him hyperventilate.
Holding his ribs together so they didn’t burst apart.
It was so intimate and he leaned into it, needing the way Thomas bent his head until his mouth nearly brushed Andrew’s neck.
“See, this is what I mean.” Thomas’s voice came low and urgent. “They’re watching us. They’re here. The dark doesn’t hold them back, and it’s like they’re all over us, all the time.”
Andrew felt sick. He’d wanted to get out of eating and so he had. As if he’d asked for it. He scraped dirt out of his mouth and spat.
“Let’s go back and get water.” Thomas stood, but Andrew grabbed his elbow.
Mud stained his mouth. “Do you hear that?”
Thomas’s eyes flicked around the dripping garden. The sky looked ready to crack open again, and it had grown darker.
“It’s probably Bryce coming to mess with us.” But his body felt stiff under Andrew’s touch.
“I think,” Andrew said, “you were right about October.”
Something moved behind the hedges—thick, tarred, malevolent.
They both shot away from the wall, backing toward the path. It had to be Bryce. They hadn’t found monsters in the forest to kill last night, so there couldn’t have been any, right? This wasn’t—
fair
Thunder rumbled above them, light rain kissing the tops of their heads. A musk crept up the path, decaying leaves and damp earth and the ugly fester of rot.
A hiss sounded behind them and they spun as a shadow shifted. It left a claw mark dug into the grass.
Andrew’s pulse picked up, fast as hummingbird wings. Maybe they’d done this by taking solace in each other. Their soft touches, their bodies magnetized closer and closer—it must enrage the monsters, who wanted nothing more than their bare throats and pale wrists offered up as sacrifice.
From the corner of his eye, Andrew saw the tips of antlers jutting out of bleeding skin, a body smeared in the muck of the forest.
Thomas grabbed Andrew’s arm. “We have to go. Now.”
The creature unfolded itself from the rosebushes, tall, so tall, with clumps of earth and torn flesh clinging to its antlers. It grew from the wicked deep; it belonged there.
And it had come for them.
When it opened its mouth to show rows of pointed teeth, tarred saliva dripped down to splatter on the grass. Green shriveled. Black roses bloomed across the ground instead, their leaves corroding even as they grew.
Whatever this monster touched died and grew back wrong.
It reached for Andrew.
Thomas shoved him. “RUN!”
They shot for the school, tripping on each other’s heels with no air to breathe between them.
They vaulted a low stone wall and threw themselves at the side entrance.
Locked. How could it be locked? This late in the afternoon, students should be trickling from the dorms and library to the dining hall and the school should be full of people—
Which meant they were leading the monster toward a feast.
“Thomas, we can’t—” Andrew said, but Thomas grabbed his wrist and wrenched him forward.
The monster came fast, hooves and claws cutting up the path and murdering the garden as it came. It snarled a roar that tipped into a scream that felt like thin pins driving into their eardrums.
Andrew clapped a hand over one ear, but he felt blood trickle down his cheek. It was as if the monster wanted nothing more than to find a way inside him, to curl between flesh and bone and flourish there.
“Just come on!” Thomas dragged them around the back of the school, but everything was bricks and ivy, closed windows and locked doors.
They skidded around the corner just as the monster lunged. It hooked a claw into Andrew’s shirt and yanked him backward toward that cavernous mouth, its tongue exploding with maggots. This close, its antlers looked sharp enough to cut anything, curved into a mockery of a crown.
He remembered this drawing. It was tacked to Thomas’s bedroom wall.
The Antler King. Who carved off faces with knives made of its own horns.
A cry escaped Andrew. He dropped to his knees as Thomas whipped around and flung himself with fists flying at the monster. He punched it in the chest and it stumbled backward.
“GO!” Thomas shouted.
Andrew scrambled to his feet, slipping on the rain-slick path, and bolted for one of the narrow staff doors.
This time, the knob turned. He shoved inside, Thomas on his heels.
They both slammed the door a second before the monster snatched for them.
It roared and punched the wood so hard the hinges rattled.
Thomas braced himself against it and Andrew fumbled to fasten the lock.
They stood there in a disused, darkened service corridor, shaking as their eyes met.
“I need the hatchet,” Thomas whispered.
Something crashed into the door with a boom. The wood splintered.
Andrew flinched back, but not before he heard it: a voice of foul, rancid blood.
you shall not leave the Antler King without a tithe …
cut it from your chest—
come back come back bACKKK BACCCCKKK—
Andrew could hardly stand, he was trembling so hard. His fingertips had unconsciously crept to rest over his heart.
“Hide,” Thomas hissed. “I’ll come find you.”
“No-no-no we have to stay together—”
“It wants me.” Thomas’s eyes were too bright. “I’m the one bringing this on you, okay? Hide and let it follow me.”
Then he shoved away and ran down the hallway.
Andrew stood there a second, shaking. His mouth moving in silent, unheard words. Please don’t leave me.
A fist splintered through the wood, claws slashing out. Andrew bit back his cry and fled.
He went left, since he knew Thomas would’ve gone right, toward the front of the school. But Thomas was leading the monster to a dining hall full of kids, and how was that safer?
It hit Andrew then, how Thomas would sacrifice the world for him without even thinking.
How terrible that was.
How part of Andrew’s chest caved in with the relief of knowing it.
For a second, he hated himself—or maybe he hated Thomas.
“Monsters aren’t real,” Andrew whispered as he ran toward the downstairs classrooms.
This late, they should be empty. All he had to do was stay away from the student lounge and rec rooms. He slipped down the hallway with his arms wrapped around his aching stomach, dirt in his mouth and blood sticky in one ear.
Windows lined one wall, classroom doors the other.
In the deep afternoon gloom, the wallpaper looked black.
No, it looked … like it was moving.
Andrew paused. A faint scratching ticked across the walls. He let out a long, shuddering breath and tried to center himself. The monster hadn’t followed, and it wanted Thomas, not Andrew. It wanted its creator.
The wallpaper exploded.
Andrew threw his arms over his head, wrenching his body away as he cried out. Everything was lost to the sound of wallpaper tearing and glass shattering as the windows smashed inward. He didn’t understand what he was seeing, couldn’t make his brain accept it.
Vines grew out of the wallpaper. They shot across the floor, growing and writhing like fat green snakes.
Roses blossomed as he watched, each petal the red of pooled blood.
They didn’t stop. Ivy punched through the broken windows, and brambles unfurled over the carpet.
Everything took a breath together, loud and wet and rasping.
And they grew.
Leafy tendrils shot for Andrew’s ankles. He tripped backward, kicking them away.
They kept coming, feeling their way across the carpets.
Hunting.
And if Thomas wasn’t here, it meant they wanted Andrew.