Chapter Twenty
TWENTY
Soft warmth pressed against Andrew’s side. Sleep left him too muzzy to investigate, so he merely let his fingers trail through thick curls before a very faraway part of him understood this was Thomas.
They must have rolled into each other during the night. Thomas’s head lay burrowed under the blankets, his face against Andrew’s ribs. He breathed slow and even, and he smelled of soap and sleep and boy.
It was nice, this warmth nested beside Andrew, no expectations that their touch had to turn into anything else. He let his fingers tangle lazily in Thomas’s curls and pretended vomiting leaves during the witching hour had been a crumpled dream.
He might’ve fallen asleep again if the pounding of feet outside their door hadn’t reminded them it was a school day and they were already late.
Thomas sighed, stretching out with a yawn, before he suddenly bolted upright and flung himself from Andrew’s bed.
The way Andrew’s stomach turned inside out, his mind already racing for an excuse, for a denial of how he’d barely noticed they’d fallen asleep together, hit with such sickening brutality that he almost couldn’t breathe until Thomas said, “Shit, shit, we didn’t kill monsters last night.
We slept? How did—we’re in so much goddamn trouble. ”
He flew around the room, stripping off pajamas and yanking on his pants before shoving feet into unlaced shoes. Andrew kept very still and very quiet.
There. It hadn’t meant anything. It was fine. They were fine. They didn’t need to acknowledge that skin and curls and limbs had been entwined, or how they’d fallen to an unrepentant craving for closeness and stolen a comfort they could never deserve.
While Thomas fought with his tie, Andrew emptied the trash with covert swiftness—the mess of smeared mud and seeds and bruised petals looking more like an overturned compost pile than something that had been down his throat—and he did his best not to touch his ear.
But a headache flourished behind his eyes.
As if small, green vines had grown into a tight knot while he slept and now pushed up at the confines of his skull, hungry for more room to stretch.
Stop. Worry about it later.
The thing to focus on was the sin of their laziness and the monsters that could be around a corner or folded into a wall, breath hot and rancid, tongues craving the wet blood of the two boys they hungered for relentlessly.
The anticipation of it, the dread of not knowing, had both Andrew and Thomas flinching at every shadow, every movement, skittering away from windows and double-checking classrooms before they slunk to their desks.
It made them look on edge. Paranoid. Unhinged.
When they had to separate for the classes they didn’t share—Andrew to Classic Literature and Thomas to Art—neither of them felt like they’d make it out the other side.
Andrew found a swollen line of fungi growing on the underside of his desk.
When he brushed up against it, the fungi clung to his pants, feasting on the fibers as he desperately tried to rub them off while Dr. Reul lectured.
He could feel dirt inside his shoes, though that was impossible.
The splitting headache was the worst part, still growing from his ear up behind his eyes.
He had the sudden urge to grab a compass out from his pencil case and shove it into his ear, dig hard and deep and gouge out every green, growing thing before it slid roots deeper into his brain.
Except he’d look absolutely mad massacring his own eardrum with blood exploding down the side of his face. He had to sit still. He had to get through this.
Lunch hour meant the torments of the dining hall, but at least he’d be back with Thomas.
Andrew fell in behind a few students talking loudly about the vine infestation and if their parents should be paying the school’s hefty tuition when “all these accidents keep happening.” He decided to slip down a shadowy side hallway and wait for them to pass—except there were two students lingering at the far end, close enough for clandestine whispers.
Or kisses. Wickwood had many narrow little hallways like this, relics from the days when servants needed swift access where they wouldn’t disturb the lord of the manor.
Art hung on the walls in tarnished gold frames, each piece darker than the last. Apples with dull black skin, bowls of grapes furred with mold, plums split open and oozing soft, spoiled innards.
He could almost smell it, the sweet decay of fruit dripping from ancient canvas.
An uncanny crawling sensation prickled up his neck, and he started to back away from the narrow hall when one of the students raised their voice in an unmistakable razor-sharp snap.
“… take a freaking second to think about what you’re doing to him.”
Andrew pressed himself against the art frames and went still as he listened.
Lana stood with fists clenched and body taut as she bore down on the slouched figure of Thomas leaning against the wall.
He had his arms folded, his mouth at a sour angle, but for once he wasn’t trying to escape her. That was the confusing part.
“I’m not doing anything to him.” Thomas’s voice held less of the usual acid he leveled at Lana, and instead he just sounded annoyed. And tired.
“Well, doesn’t look like it from here. Looks like you made your move when he’s clearly a vulnerable mess. He’s not even eating, is he?”
For some reason, it didn’t shock Andrew to realize they’d talk about him behind his back. He stared at another painting: brown-speckled pears next to cheese veined with rot, tiny white worms dangling from the perforated edges. It was unrepentantly gross, but somehow easier to focus on.
“I’m not…” Thomas trailed off and sighed. “You don’t understand anything.”
Lana huffed. “Dove told me enough. If you hadn’t hurt her—”
This made him shove away from the wall. “I didn’t hurt Dove. I’d never hurt her. And I’ll protect Andrew with my life.”
“Seems like you need to with all the creepy stuff going on in this school. Guess you don’t know anything about that?”
“No,” he snapped. “Sorry I don’t control the goddamn building and can’t stop it falling apart for Your Majesty’s convenience.”
There was a terse silence, both of them with dagger-expressions and tight jaws.
“The school,” Lana said, stiff and low, “isn’t the only thing falling apart. Don’t use him as a distraction from your nasty little inner monsters.”
Andrew slipped quietly away, his breath held, and he hoped they didn’t hear his footfalls on the carpet. He wanted to have never heard any of that, and he wanted to not think about what it meant.
He hid out next to the bathrooms until he saw Lana storm out of the narrow hallway, each step a staccato beat of righteous fury.
A minute passed, then two, and when Thomas still didn’t emerge, Andrew backtracked and wound his way between the walls of putrefied paintings until he found Thomas sitting cross-legged under a gilt frame of a fruit bowl infested with beetles and spider eggs.
He could almost taste the corruption under his tongue, the mold like a carpet of poison.
Surely Wickwood hadn’t hung paintings like this on purpose, but he wasn’t sure if he was imagining their corruption or if this was an effect of what had escaped the forest last night.
A monster shaped like decay was crawling into the very bones of the school.
“Hey.” He kicked Thomas’s shoe lightly.
Thomas stayed where he was, glowering at the floor. Without any windows, the dusty light tarnished his hair to the color of old blood.
“If getting rid of my artwork doesn’t stop them,” he said, “the next step is obvious. I’m the creator. I’m the problem.”
A panicky feeling took hold of Andrew’s lungs, and he already didn’t want to hear the rest. “Maybe that is the answer. You are the artist. You drew them to life, so can’t you, like, I don’t know, draw their deaths?”
Thomas looked pained. “And while I’m doing that, you’re swinging the ax? I’m meant to fight the battles, not you.”
“Does it matter?” Andrew said softly.
“I have to protect you.” Thomas scrunched up his brow and scrubbed tiredly at his face. “That’s always how I’ve drawn us. Me, the prince with the sword, you the valiant storyteller.”
“We can’t kill monsters every night until we graduate. They’re getting worse. The Antler King was a freaking lot more to handle than thistle fairies.”
“I know.”
“What if,” Andrew said, “we killed them with ink?” He was rewarded with a blank stare, so he hurried on. “I mean, it makes sense, right? Control your art and then you control the monsters.”
“Maybe I can’t control them.”
“You have to try. We … I need you to try.”
Thomas finally pushed to his feet with a barely concealed wince, a hand going to his side where the wolf monsters had bitten. He took a step closer to Andrew, then another, only light filling the aching space between them.
“I won’t let my monsters hurt you.” His hand reached out, tentative at first, and then he took hold of Andrew’s Wickwood sweater and twisted his fingers into the soft fabric so hard Andrew felt the shape of Thomas’s finger bones against his heartbeat.
“If I lose control, you’d stop me, right?
If I’m the true monster, you’d fight me. ”
“You’re not the monster.” But all Andrew could think was if he could crack open Thomas’s ribs right then and fit his whole self inside him, he would.
“But if I am”—Thomas’s teeth clenched—“you have to swear you’d stop me.”
“I can’t,” Andrew whispered.
“Yes, you can.” Thomas’s eyes were on him then, wretched and dark and mossy. “Prove to me that you can. Hit me.”
Andrew stared.
“I need to know you can do it.” Thomas let go and took a step back. “That you can defend yourself from me.”
They stood an arm’s length apart, both breathing too fast as if they’d run a thousand miles and still not outpaced the dark. Between them the world crumbled into a cavernous black void.
“No,” Andrew said.
Thomas shoved him. Andrew’s shoulders hit the wall and air burst from his lungs with a gasp.
“Hit me.” Thomas’s eyes blazed. “Or I swear I will fucking leave you in case that’s the only way to save you. I will leave you and never, never come back. I’ll—”
Andrew hit him.
His fist met flesh with a thick and terrible sound, and he felt the moment blood slid across his knuckles like a crimson tithe to the woods.
His second punch made Thomas stumble backward, hand to his mouth as his fingers came away red.
Everything felt vicious and electric between them. Sweat ran down the back of Andrew’s neck and raw, red heat ravaged his eyes. He wanted to kiss Thomas. He wanted to press their bloody mouths together with a hunger he thought would kill him.
He hadn’t needed to hit Thomas twice.
But he had.
Thomas wiped his mouth. “Okay.” He sounded calmer. “Okay, good.”
This is all they were, at the end of it all, boys with stomachs empty and concave, waiting to be filled by Wickwood and forests and rot.