Chapter Twenty-Two
TWENTY-TWO
The forest came alive that night as they slipped between the trees. Leaves skittered in their footsteps on a breeze they couldn’t feel, and something crawled through the underbrush with a form they couldn’t see. It was the witching hour and Thomas held a sketchbook and Andrew gripped the hatchet.
The prince and his poet climbed over fallen logs, soft with moss and fungi, and the shadows made it look as if they wore crowns of holly berries and thorns.
Andrew would write them as a story someday. He’d make the blackest parts beautiful and he’d write the kisses bloody and the vengeance sweet.
It was going to work tonight. They’d win, they had to. They had the answer.
Ink already stained Thomas’s fingers as he put his back to a shadowed pine and sank into a crouch. He balanced the sketchbook on his knees and propped his flashlight up beside him.
“I finished drawing the monster in study hall,” he said. “As soon as it appears, I’ll draw a noose of vines around its throat.”
Blood crusted behind Andrew’s ear. He rubbed his head against his shoulder and tried to reassure himself the wound was only oozing pus now, not mud. An improvement … sort of.
He adjusted his grip on the hatchet and zipped his fleecy jacket up to his throat. “How do we know that’s the one that will come out?”
“I’ve destroyed everything else.” Thomas sounded strained. “It doesn’t even make sense how they’re still appearing. If I’m not drawing monsters, why haven’t we won?”
“What about art class?”
“Those are portraits. I mean, I have birds and mountains bursting out of heads, but”—he spoke louder to cut off Andrew’s protests—“that’s different. No monsters.”
“Are you drawing forests? Trees?”
Darkness shrouded most of Thomas’s face, but a small corner of light touched his resentful mouth. He’d always hated being told what to do.
“I think,” Andrew said, “the problem is everything you draw.”
“If I can make monsters, do you … do you think about what this makes me?” Thomas uncapped a Sharpie, but the sideways glance he shot Andrew was wary.
Trapped between monsters and the waking dark for so long, Andrew was focused on only one thing: Make the monsters stop.
Not who had started it.
Not why.
His stomach flipped as he looked at Thomas’s unsure face, the way his chin tilted up as if he was starved for any reassurance Andrew could place on his tongue. This vulnerability made him look younger, softer.
“Magic,” Andrew said. “I think it makes you magic.”
Inside him, what he really thought beat against his pulse, dark and fervent and cruel. You are a nightmare, you are a god of wicked places, to stop your horror maybe we have to stop you—
Thomas allowed himself the smallest smile before turning back to his drawing. But some of the tension had left his shoulders, and it made Andrew’s lie worth it. He wished he could fit his face into the crook of Thomas’s throat and hold on until his anxiety thinned and they both felt warm again.
A stick cracked behind them.
Andrew turned slowly, his grip firm on the hatchet. He refused to fall apart this time like a boy made of glass.
Thomas drew faster. “It will be a devil with a terrible face and flowers in its horns. The tree roots will strangle it. If this works, we won’t have to do much.”
“What does this devil want?” Andrew said.
Thomas flicked a puzzled glance at him. “I don’t know, to eat us? It’s a monster.”
Something turned over in Andrew’s mind, a puzzle piece, toppling into his outstretched hand.
Everyone wanted something. Everyone yearned or searched or hungered—even monsters.
Clemens had wanted to feel clever by making others feel stupid, and Bryce Kane wanted to feel powerful by making others small.
So what did the monsters in the forest want?
Thomas drew them fierce and wicked, but he put no story behind his drawings—his monsters began and stopped on paper.
Andrew knew Thomas drew how he felt, but did he ever understand his own feelings?
He never seemed to know why he was angry or scared or lonely—this was obvious in all his wild moods and his bewilderment when Dove called him out for being loathsome and in the desperate way he held on to Andrew.
Maybe, this whole time, they’d been fighting the monsters wrong.
“What do you want?” Andrew said, and watched Thomas frown in confusion.
He stared at Andrew with the night pooled black in his eyes, and when his mouth shaped a word, Andrew so desperately wanted it to be:
You.
But Thomas didn’t say that. He didn’t have a chance to say anything.
Behind him a claw shot out of the darkness and snatched him by the throat.
Andrew cried out and vaulted forward, but Thomas had already been dragged backward into the brush.
He kicked with a frantic, animal fury, sketchbook torn from his hand and papers ripping and scattering across the forest floor.
The page with the monster he’d designed whipped up and caught on Andrew’s leg before flying away.
The monster who had Thomas now was all wrong.
Its body twisted in the vulgar imitation of a human.
Arms too long, spine mangled. Its torso was naked but for twine wrapped around and around its chest and neck and head.
Dirt and rotten fruit and twigs oozed between the bindings.
No eyes, no ears. Only its mouth showed in a red, lipless slash, and when its jaws parted, a tongue slithered out, long and forked like a snake’s.
It was nothing like Thomas’s drawing.
Everything in Andrew’s head started screaming.
He swung the ax but the creature ducked. It slammed its head into Andrew’s chest and he flew backward, landing hard with a wheeze.
The hatchet clattered down between Andrew and the monster.
Thomas scrabbled toward it, but the monster screamed and flung itself over him, pinning him bodily to the ground. Thomas landed a good punch at its face and the monster hissed, rearing back.
Then its tongue shot out.
“Thomas!” Andrew’s fingers closed on the hatchet, but his sweaty hand slipped. He was too slow, too shaky. He slammed the hatchet into the monster’s back, but it bounced off as if its skin was impenetrable.
Andrew staggered backward just as he realized the monster’s tongue had never been forked. It was an arrow tip.
It plunged into Thomas’s stomach.
Thomas screamed. He writhed beneath the monster, kicking so madly it had to fight to keep his limbs down.
No, no no no—Andrew was failing. He was failing him.
He flung himself on the monster’s back, but it flicked him off like he weighed no more than a butterfly. It hunkered over Thomas and rocked, slow and languorous, as it sucked on its tongue like a straw. Lisping smacks of pleasure came from its mouth.
Thomas stopped screaming, but his whimper alone could have murdered Andrew. He suddenly sounded so small, so full of pain. His mud-slick fingers grabbed at the tongue, but it was too slippery to hold.
Andrew dropped the hatchet.
A wildness grew in his head, thorns and fury and poisonous berries. If this was a story, he would have written himself strong enough to kill the monster.
So he’d make it a story.
He snatched Thomas’s Sharpie from the dirt.
Then he ran.
Thomas’s cry broke behind him, a thousand shattered pieces taken by the wind. His thrashing body churned the leaves, but he couldn’t get away. He was prey, impaled.
And Andrew had left him.
He didn’t look back even as Thomas sobbed for him.
Andrew vaulted the mossy log and flung himself at a smooth-skinned birch. He braced one hand on the trunk, forcing his other hand to steady as he rested the Sharpie to the bark. Think, think. He was static electricity; he was full of Thomas’s screams.
Then he began to write.
The dark hid each word as it bled out over the birch, but Andrew kept writing. The pen tripped over grooves and whorls, but the story tore out of him.
Deep in the hollow woods, a witch liked to catch boys and soak her tongue in their blood.
Thomas’s whimpers turned to another sobbing scream that left holes in the night. Andrew wrote faster, his heart pounding.
But when she dipped her tongue inside a boy with hair of stoked flames, she burned to ash from the inside out and everything left of her blew away.
Andrew shoved away from the birch, chest heaving as if he’d been the one running, fighting, screaming. He spun, his mind full of hatchets and blood, and this clawing terror for Thomas Thomas Thomas—
He saw the moment the monster’s body spasmed and curved backward as if its spine were made of rubber. Then, with a shrill scream, it exploded into ash.
Gray flakes swirled over Thomas’s body before the wind took them.
Andrew ran back, slipping and tearing the knees of his jeans on sharp rocks before collapsing at Thomas’s side. His hands were all over Thomas, feeling across his stomach, his chest, pressing a palm to his beating heart before cupping his face.
Thomas’s sobs came thick and low. With trembling hands, he pulled up his shirt.
Even in the dark they could see the hole, a perfectly round burrow straight into his stomach. It didn’t bleed. It was a black tunnel to another world.
Andrew flattened his fingers over it. “You’re okay. The monster’s dead.”
“What did you do?” Thomas choked on each word. “H-h-how—”
“I told a story.” Andrew gripped Thomas like he’d never let go. “I killed them with ink.”
They had to try it again, to be sure it hadn’t been a coincidence.
They stuffed Andrew’s pockets with thick black markers, and this time Thomas held the hatchet.
His eyes were hollowed and bruised with exhaustion, and he held himself gingerly.
They’d cleaned and bandaged his wound, but the hole didn’t close.
It stayed there, round as a coin and pitch black.
Andrew thought if he slid fingers into it, he’d find no blood, just a tunnel all the way to Thomas’s spine.