Chapter Eighteen
EIGHTEEN
They didn’t speak. Words had turned to mud in their mouths, and if lips parted, who knew what would come out. All they could focus on was this:
disappear
Andrew dragged his sweater off, and Thomas copied.
He wrapped up the hatchet, while Thomas used his bloodied shirt to mop his face and arms. The feral blaze of war faded from his eyes and he started to tremble.
He was all unsteady fingers, fumbling movements, his eyes darting to the leafy remains of the monster as if it might rise again.
Neither of them looked at Clemens’s skinless face.
But Andrew did spend a few seconds scuffing about under the vines for his phone and pocketing it. No evidence could be left.
They had to know nothing about this. They had to have not been here.
Andrew slipped downstairs first, the hatchet bundled to his chest so tightly he could feel the bite of the blade against his skin. He deserved that, though. Pain. Punishment.
What … what had he done?
A group of teachers ran past, and the boys ducked into an empty classroom.
Somewhere, screaming had reached a crescendo.
Thomas jimmied a window and they climbed down into the garden.
Rain beat in a steady rhythm, and they’d never been so grateful for the way it washed the blood from Thomas’s bare skin and kissed away evidence of Andrew’s tearstained cheeks.
It was chaos outside. Half the students had dashed through the rain for the sports field like this was a normal fire drill. Others tangled in the garden in confusion while teachers yelled at everyone to go back to their dorms.
“Please calmly make your way to your dormitory!” A professor had snatched a megaphone. “Remain in your room until otherwise instructed!”
Andrew looked for Dove, terror leaving claw marks in his guts until he saw her filing toward the girls’ dorms. She was safe—breathe, Andrew, goddammit.
Thomas sneaked them around the back of the boys’ dorm so they wouldn’t have to explain his lack of shirt or the bundled hatchet. As soon as they’d climbed the trellis and tumbled into their bedroom, Andrew slammed the window shut and Thomas started pacing.
“Shit shit shit, they’re going to blame me. They’re g-g-going to—I’m not a murderer. I’m not—” Thomas jammed fists against his head. “I’m not, I’m not—”
“Shut up.” Andrew snatched towels and clothes, and wrenched their bedroom door open. “We have to get rid of the blood. Shut up, shut up.”
With everyone bottlenecked downstairs, they still had the second floor to themselves.
They sprinted for the communal bathroom and locked the door.
Thomas peeled off his clothes and left a trail of muddy footprints as he stumbled into a shower stall.
Tiny green shoots bloomed from his jeans, soft and delicate.
Andrew smashed each with his fist and flushed them down the drain.
The forest had left its teeth marks all over them, and it would never leave them alone.
Carefully, Andrew unbuttoned his shirt and used a towel to scrub out his swollen ear. It pulsed with terrific pain, as if someone had hooked their fingers into his eardrum and twisted, but he could still hear. He was fine. Unscathed.
He stared at the mirror with bloodshot eyes.
The Antler King stared back.
Blood dripped down the crown as its skin flaked into burnished autumn leaves.
take Clemens as the tithe take him take him take him
Andrew was the murderer.
He’d done this.
The monsters had grown bored of biting Thomas and cutting Andrew. Their tithe wasn’t big enough. They wanted more and more and more—
Andrew’s chest heaved. His fingers tightened into a fist, scars stretching. “Get out of my head. Get out. Get out, GET OUT GET—”
He raised his fist and he didn’t know what he was doing or how to stop seeing skin slough from Clemens’s face or how to stop the monsters stop them stop them stop—
He swung.
A hand caught his elbow and wrenched him backward. Andrew slipped on the steam-slicked bathroom tiles, but Thomas wrapped wet arms around his chest and held him up. Andrew closed his eyes.
“Don’t do that again.” Thomas’s voice came so quiet. “Please.”
Andrew forced his fingers to uncurl. The spiderweb of scars stared back at him like a map of lost control.
The bathroom door rattled and they both jumped apart.
Andrew spun away, burying his face in his hands while Thomas knotted a towel around his waist. Which meant he had been very naked when he held Andrew a second before, but that had to mean nothing.
They were slashed to the core right now; it had to mean nothing.
Andrew tried to remember how to fit back inside his skin.
“Why is this locked?”
“Who’s in there! Hey!”
“You aren’t allowed to lock the main bathroom doors. Open up.”
The doorknob rattled.
Andrew pressed his forehead to the door. “Just give me a minute.”
Voice turned to low mumbles.
Then Bryce Kane said, clear and bright, “Nah, that’s not Eckers. It’s totally Perrault.”
“Why’s he need the whole bathroom?”
“He’s probably vomiting. Did you see how skinny he is?”
They scuffled, hushing each other. Someone laughed.
Blood scorched across Andrew’s face, and for a second his fury narrowed to a startling point. He would wrench open the door and snatch Bryce Kane by the throat and slam him into the wall just as vines exploded outward and wrapped around the thrashing body to—
A fist banged on the door again.
Andrew flinched. His ear hurt so much it was hard to think.
Thomas finished pulling on the hoodie and bundling his trashed clothes inside a towel. The stink of sap and blood twirled down the drain, but even slathered and washed off with soap, he still smelled of fresh earth from an overturned grave.
Andrew unlocked the door.
Thomas shot out like a bullet, breezing past the boys without a glance.
Bryce’s smirk grew as he tracked Andrew slinking out next, and when he turned to his friend, they both burst out laughing before the snide comments started.
Their words blistered against Andrew’s back all the way down the hall, but he forced himself not to react, not to turn around.
It was only after he’d slipped back into his room and slammed the door that he realized he’d been so dizzy with the horror of the Antler King in his reflection that he hadn’t put his shirt back on.
He’d walked out in the open with skin stretched so tight over his chest that his bones looked like knobbed roots pressing against his skin.
Embarrassment roared in his ears as he pulled on a sweater with shaking hands.
Thomas had returned to his frenzied pacing, his fingers clawing through his soaked hair, his breathing quick and unsteady. Outside, voices and footsteps flooded their floor. Questions and complaints clamored over the top of each other. No one wanted to be shut in their rooms.
Andrew needed to breathe, sit down, think—or maybe he didn’t want to think. He couldn’t close his eyes and see Clemens again.
He sank to the floor, the bed too far away, but as his knees hit the ground, Thomas grabbed Andrew’s arms so hard he winced.
Thomas’s eyes looked liquid green, violent and wild and bright. “Are you hurt? I’ll kill anything that touches you. I swear.”
“We have to … have to…” Every word came out strangled. “We have to make them stop.”
Thomas looked away, his throat working. “I’ll kill them all. I don’t know what else to do. I-I-I don’t know, Andrew. I don’t know what to do.”
Everyone was told to stay in their dorms for the rest of the evening.
Supervisors went to every room and gave the official statement: A rotten root system had collapsed some of the school walls.
Mishap of an old estate, but maintenance would have it fixed directly.
Wickwood clearly didn’t want the truth getting out about how Clemens died and freaked-out parents withdrawing their kids, so they simply said:
Everything would be fine.
Please stay calm.
You’re safe.
Thomas ripped all his drawings off the wall, lit a match, and burned them in a trash can while Andrew opened a window and tried to fan the smoke out into the thickening twilight.
He wished he could stuff the ashy remains in his mouth, inked monsters and matches and wicked flames and all.
It would burn him to the core but not before he spent a bright, searing moment feeling full. Emptiness banished.
take Clemens as the tithe take him take him take him
Andrew fell asleep and only woke because rain drifted in the open window to wet his clammy skin. Thomas was midway through climbing out into the witching hour.
Andrew could’ve rolled over and let him go alone, but he didn’t deserve to feel safe.
They saw the first monster before they’d even made it to the fence, a hulking shadow on the other side of the chain links.
A wolf, but not. Its head looked sewn onto a different body, fur bloodied and matted until it disintegrated around its chest to show its rib cage and spine white and bare.
Branches and briars burst from its pulsing organs and wound out past the stark bones.
When Thomas tried to climb the fence, it lunged, white frothing from its snarling jaws.
Andrew caught Thomas’s sleeve. “Don’t.”
“I made this.” Thomas’s voice came thin and broken. “I have to stop them.”
He climbed the fence and killed the forest wolf. Then another, and another. He made Andrew stay behind the fence, claiming it was because they only had one hatchet, but it felt like punishment for being so useless, so thin and weak.
When dawn came, they crawled back into their room, Andrew frozen and Thomas with claw marks gouging his arms and chest, palms blistered.
He’d have to wear layers and long sleeves tomorrow to cover it all from questioning eyes.
Thomas fell asleep with one hand dangling over his bed, whimpering as his eyes moved restlessly behind closed lids to the beat of his nightmares.
Andrew couldn’t take it. He lay on his back on the cold floorboards under Thomas’s limp hand. Carefully, not daring to breathe, Andrew brushed his mouth over Thomas’s raw red palms.
Kisses, but not.
Apologies, but useless.
The fever in his hands burned Andrew’s mouth.