Chapter Nineteen
NINETEEN
An uncanny hush had fallen over Wickwood Academy.
Students crowded in the foyer, the mood sober and tentative, rumors growing like weeds down throats as they swapped stories about what they’d seen.
First period had been canceled and everyone was meant to file into the assembly hall after breakfast for announcements, but it was impossible not to notice which hallways had been blocked off or how there was a barricade in front of the faculty stairs.
It was said there had been police here last night. A body bag had been packed into an ambulance and whisked away.
Andrew chewed his lip and looked for Dove among the students trickling into the auditorium.
Thomas had slipped off to the bathroom again to check he hadn’t bled through his bandages, and Andrew had forced himself not to follow.
At least everyone was preoccupied with the fact that vines were growing out of the school’s walls and less interested in gossiping about which boys had locked themselves in the bathroom together yesterday, but he didn’t doubt Bryce would be foul about it soon.
Andrew had charged his phone and texted Dove a million times last night, but she still hadn’t replied.
She was the one who’d told him off on the bus for missing her calls, and now he deserved a cold shoulder?
He hadn’t done anything. Moths ate holes in his mind and their wings beat a frantic migraine behind his eyes.
It was all he could do to stand up straight and keep his face blank and guiltless.
He finally saw her standing at the farthest end of the foyer and hurried over.
She still wore her summer uniform of a short-sleeve blouse and perfectly straight tie.
No stockings or even a blazer. Not usual for someone who always worshipped cozy things like cardigans and hot chocolate, but maybe she was preoccupied with the unsettling chaos.
“Hey.” Andrew slid beside her and blinked as she leaned away. “Are you … mad at me?”
“Why is everything always about you?” The frosted steel in her voice said, yes, in fact, she was mad at him.
Annoyance ticked in his jaw, but he swallowed it back. “I’m not the one ignoring you. I look for you all the time and you always disappear. You don’t study with us—”
“Study for you.”
“—and you don’t hang out with us—”
“I have my own homework, believe it or not.”
“—or eat with us in the dining hall.”
Dove shot him a sideways glance sharper than a scalpel. “As if you eat.”
He forced himself to take slow breaths. They bickered sometimes, but not like this.
“What do you want me to say?” His jaw clenched. “I know you fought with Thomas, but he’s my roommate. I can’t pick you over him. Stop—stop making me. And stop being like this.”
“Being like what? Being honest? One of us has to be.”
Andrew turned on her sharply. “Okay, what is your problem with me?”
She sniffed and looked away.
“Dove, stop it.” His voice rose, all animal panic. “I don’t understand. We didn’t have a fight? I-I don’t know what I’ve done. I don’t even know what you and Thomas fought about.”
“You do. If you really thought about it.” Her eyes shone, amber and glossy. “You should’ve chosen me.”
“What?” Andrew had lost all control of this conversation. “I’m not”—he hated how uneven he sounded—“choosing anyone. He’s your best friend, too. He’s both of ours.”
Dove’s mouth twisted, jealousy maybe, or frustration that he missed her point.
But he had no idea what she wanted him to say. Unless it was I’ll give up Thomas for you.
He couldn’t say that.
He let numbness steal his heartbeat instead.
The foyer was almost empty as everyone found seats in the auditorium, and the urge to see if Thomas had already gone in ate at him, but he wanted Dove to come, too. He wanted—no, needed—the three of them to be okay.
“I have to go.” Dove gave him one last look, steady and scathing, before she stalked off. She didn’t look back.
He checked no one was looking before wiping at his stinging eyes. Get a grip, Perrault. They were siblings, they fought, they’d get over it.
He busied himself with his phone so he wouldn’t look pathetic trailing directly behind his sister, but holding it made the world spin in sick circles beneath him.
All he could think of was Clemens dangling the phone in front of him with that condescending smirk.
How the battery should be ruined. How none of this made sense.
It was password protected, but he hadn’t checked his apps yet for tampering.
When he opened his photo gallery, his stomach bottomed out.
All his old photos had been deleted. Instead, the reel had been crammed with black shots. Hundreds of them. He scrolled down the endless black squares, dread leaving malignant fingerprints down his throat. None of this was possible. Only Thomas and Dove knew his password, and they wouldn’t do this.
Cold air touched the back of his neck then, an autumn chill laced with the thick scent of the forest. Moss and decaying leaves and rot.
Andrew brightened one of the photos and stared at the grainy, murky shot.
It was him.
He had his back to the camera, flashlight clutched to his chest. Ferns bunched around his legs and the trees rose ominously behind him.
He brightened the next photo, then the next. Him again, his head tilted back to see the stars through the trees, his white throat exposed like an invitation to monsters.
In the next one he stood slender and smudged, while behind him loomed a shape big enough to blot out the stars. Teeth gleamed. Antlers curved from a skull. A monster grew behind Andrew and he had no idea.
He squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed back the bile. Who had taken these photos? Who watched him? Thomas was right there, half in the frame, and more than one photo showed them curved toward each other or standing with limbs entwined.
If Dove saw these pictures, she’d tell herself a sour story. Maybe this was why she was furious at him? What if she’d taken the photos—
Okay, no. He had to gouge that idea from his mind. She’d never do this. If she saw the monsters, she would have run for help.
Unless she couldn’t see the monsters and had only seen them, together, their intimacy clear. No wonder she was furious at him.
He deleted everything and stuffed the phone in his pocket before hurrying to find a seat in the auditorium with Thomas.
All he had to do was sit still and listen to the principal calmly lie about how, tragically, a wall had collapsed and resulted in the death of a beloved teacher, Christopher Clemens.
There were counselors available for anyone who needed to talk.
A freak accident. But the walls would be fixed by tomorrow and no one was in danger.
Andrew tried to catch Thomas’s eye, but he sat hunched, chewing his thumbnail.
Maybe he could put on a brave face when he fought monsters, but afterward he was always this: a panicked ruin, barely keeping himself together. He needed someone to hold him up, and hadn’t Andrew been doing just that? He was the only person in the world who understood.
They had to stay together.
They should never be apart.
That night, their dorm felt bare without any of Thomas’s art watching them get ready for bed.
With classes a disjointed mess due to half the school being blocked off and swarming with maintenance workers, their teachers assigned a criminal amount of extra reading to be done in the library or their dorms. Andrew and Thomas chose the safety of their room, wanting a locked door between them and the prying eyes, the whispers, the settling realization that they had let monsters attack the school and somehow gotten away with it.
Although as Andrew sat on the floor surrounded by textbooks and cupping a hand over his hot, throbbing ear, Clemens’s screams echoing in the back of his head, he didn’t feel like he got away with much at all.
Thomas struggled into his pajama shirt, toothbrush hanging from his mouth. “Back in a sec.” He wrenched the door open and strode out like he was marching to war.
It was fair to feel that way when all the rules had changed: Their monsters weren’t bound by forest or night or the fence, and they weren’t scared of their pathetic little hatchet.
Andrew pulled his legs up and pressed his face to his knees, needing to block out the entire world for a second and just breathe. They couldn’t keep surviving this.
Even with the window shut, he smelled the forest, felt it pulsing like a moldering second heartbeat beneath his skin. He touched the swollen lump behind his ear, now grown to a boil the size of a grape, a gorge of blood and pus. Just an ear infection. It depressed when he dug his thumbnail in.
He suddenly couldn’t stand it.
Rummaging around in Thomas’s art supplies produced a paper clip. He uncurled it and bent his ear with one hand, resting the sharp tip against the lump.
Don’t, a small part of him whispered.
He stabbed the paper clip in, hard.
Pain shot through his ear in a dazzling explosion. He gasped as the lump burst, liquid sliding down the back of his neck as agony slashed red across his vision.
The thick smell of the forest seized his throat. When he peeled his hand away from his ear, mud smeared his fingertips in clotted clumps. Milky sap instead of pus. A single seed coated in blood.
Everything inside Andrew twisted in shuddering repulsion, and he wanted to close his eyes and fall out of this entire universe.
The bedroom door creaked open and Thomas came in with a wet face, midway through muttering something hateful about an annoying freshman when he saw Andrew hunched up and shuddering, his hands as filthy as if he’d dug around in garden soil.
Thomas ran over, his eyes gone wide with panic. “What the—wait, why is your ear bleeding? Is that…”
“When Clemens died”—Andrew’s voice sounded thick and distended—“a vine went into my—my ear.”
“But I got it out. I swear I did.” Thomas grabbed for a towel and crushed it against Andrew’s bleeding ear.
“I need this all to stop,” Andrew whispered.
“I know. Shit. I’ll fix it. Whatever it takes.”
“We have to give the forest what it wants,” he said. “More blood for a tithe?”
“No.” Thomas’s mouth made a grim line. “It wants a better sacrifice.”
They ended up sitting on Andrew’s bed, trying to come up with a plan, though every idea felt thin and insubstantial, doomed to fail before they’d even tried it.
There had to be an answer, something about the drawings, but both of them were too exhausted and wrung out to reach for it.
Andrew pressed his palms hard against his eyes to distract from the sickening pain in his ear, but when he opened them, he realized Thomas had fallen asleep.
He still lay in Andrew’s bed, his face snuffled into the pillows and his breathing already evening out.
A shove didn’t wake him. There had been too many bitterly sleepless nights.
The obvious answer was to cross the room and sleep in Thomas’s bed instead, but everything seemed too far away, required too much effort.
So what if Andrew stayed where he was? Friends shared beds all the time, and they didn’t have to touch.
He lay down, his body pressed close to the wall, and let his eyes drift shut to the soothing lullaby of Thomas’s breathing.
A few minutes, then they’d go out and fight monsters.
But it was the witching hour that woke him.
The sound of a howl pulled from a ravenous throat filled the night beyond their safe little room.
Andrew startled upright, his heart hammering and his stomach a seasick riot, and he climbed over an unmoving Thomas and collapsed onto the floor just in time to vomit leaves and bloody nubs of violets in the trash can.
They were late to leave for the forest, but he shook with a foul cold, too nauseous to see straight, and the idea of facing the dark, the monsters, turned him inside out with despair.
Thomas slept on, oblivious. Andrew didn’t wake him.
He touched his ear and felt it swollen afresh, stretching as if something had regrown while he slept. But this time it wasn’t pushing against skin and trying to escape. It was growing the other way. Going in deeper.
It was inside him, he knew.
The forest.