Chapter Twenty-Two #2
It was freaking Thomas out in a way nothing else had yet. He kept one hand around his stomach as they walked into the forest, and whenever the bushes rustled, he looked ready to fall apart.
As Andrew stood before the birch he’d written on last night, Thomas rested his back against Andrew’s and matched their breaths. His came ragged and damp, Andrew’s steady.
He shone his flashlight over the bark and picked an empty space.
“I don’t want them to touch me,” Thomas said. “I can’t … not again. I—”
“I’ll write it different.” Andrew bit the Sharpie cap off and put pen to the bark, ready. He curled his other hand around Thomas’s wrist.
Thomas curved into him then, and Andrew’s breath caught, a riot of butterflies behind his ribs. They were so close, cheek to cheek. He thought if he tilted his head sideways, Thomas might kiss him right then, and it would be wonderful and terrible.
It would answer one thing and ruin everything else.
Or maybe it wouldn’t ruin anything. He didn’t know. It ate at him, how he didn’t know and was too scared to find out.
“Andrew…” Thomas said his name with such careful softness. “Do you…” He stopped. “When we slept—”
They couldn’t talk about this, not now. Andrew didn’t have words lined up to justify why they’d curled against each other in his bed, saying nothing like it meant nothing—
Andrew must have stiffened slightly, or maybe they both sensed the weight of monsters shifting in the dark, because Thomas pulled away.
“What?” Andrew said, mouth dry.
“I’ll ask you later.” Thomas’s voice was low and rough.
Then the monsters were there.
Andrew knew them from one of the drawings Thomas used to have tacked above his bed. Creatures slim as poplar trees and so tall Andrew’s neck ached to look up at them. They wore cloaks of mottled black, and their bones rattled as they walked.
Their heads were ram skulls, twisted and grotesque monsters with flesh rotted away and teeth full of worms. Lichen and mushrooms grew up their cloaks, and they didn’t so much walk as sweep forward.
Thomas smashed the hatchet through one and the bones exploded apart and clattered to the forest floor. But when he stepped back, the creature simply reformed behind its cloak and rose again.
This time it gnashed its teeth and Thomas stumbled backward into Andrew to get away.
The monsters came forward with jaws clicking, heads tilting as bits of dead flesh dripped from their skulls.
“Andrew…” Thomas dug fingers into the back of Andrew’s sweater. “They’re bone shrikes. When they scream—”
One of the shrikes tilted back its head and screamed as if on request. The sound whipped like a lash across their eardrums, and both of them bent double as they cried out.
Blood ran from their ears, their noses. It dripped wet and metallic over Andrew’s lips as he pressed himself to the birch and began to write.
On a night of velvet black, the bone shrikes walked their favored forest paths to call for secrets. If they screamed into an ear, their prey had no choice but to bare their soul.
Thomas clapped hands over his ears, hatchet abandoned. Andrew thought Thomas seemed more desperate than usual to protect himself, as if he owned too many secrets he couldn’t let slip.
But when the bone shrikes screamed before the marrow prince and his poet, their enchantment happened in reverse. It was the bone shrikes’ secrets that spilled. The shock and shame of losing their own secrets caused their own words to devour them whole.
Andrew wore the Sharpie tip ragged on the rough bark, but as soon as he finished and turned to watch Thomas take another swing with his hatchet, the story began to come true.
The bone shrikes’ jaws creaked open, but their screams unwound before they started and punctured backward into the shrikes’ chests. They swayed with the force of it.
“Don’t attack,” Andrew said. “I swear it’ll be okay, Thomas. J-just don’t attack.”
Panic twisted Thomas’s face—it was clearly taking everything he had to stand still. But Andrew wanted to hear the shrikes’ secrets. He didn’t know how they’d speak from skeleton throats, but he let them come closer, closer, and the rattling of their bones filled the forest.
One loomed over Andrew, its horns gleaming like daggers in the moonlight and its arms stretching out like endless tree limbs. It ran fingers through Andrew’s hair, and he bit his tongue so hard copper blossomed in his mouth.
Don’t fight. Don’t run. Don’t fight.
“Tell me your secret,” Andrew whispered.
It opened its mouth and clumps of dirt and worms tumbled out. Fungi grew on its jaw hinge. It dragged a finger down Andrew’s face, toward his eye, and he squeezed them shut as an agonizing, bone-deep cold filled him.
“Why are you doing this?” Andrew’s mouth barely moved. “What do you want?”
… sacrificeeeeee …
every good story ends with a wishbone snapped …
a bloodied kiss—
the prince’s sacrifice.
—cut out a heart—
and bury it in the woods.
but you already
knew that, prince.
The bone shrike drew back as one of its own kind came up behind and broke pieces off its skull and began to eat them. They all stood there, devouring each other, while Andrew watched in horrified awe as his story came true.
He backed up and knelt beside Thomas, who sat trembling in the leaves, hands clasped around his legs and knees up to his chin.
“Did they say something to you?” Andrew said.
Thomas shook his head, but his face was white, and an unnatural frost coated his cheeks. Maybe he was lying, but it didn’t matter. Andrew had the answers he wanted. He dragged Thomas to his feet.
When there was nothing left of the shrikes but their jaws still working on the ground, trying to chew themselves to death, Andrew and Thomas escaped back to the school.
Neither could get warm. Secrets apparently stole all the heat from your body.
Andrew put on another sweater over his flannel pajamas and crawled into bed.
He flicked off the lights so they could steal those slim dawn hours for sleep, but before he could close his eyes, his mattress depressed at the edge.
He could feel more than see Thomas hovering, one knee already on the comforter, questioning.
Andrew rolled over, and Thomas folded himself into the bed.
They couldn’t pretend it was an accident this time, so they said nothing, just curled into each other until they stopped shivering.
“You can control them,” Thomas said. “All this time and you could’ve saved our asses with your stories. Can we stop them now? Forever?”
Andrew pressed his face into Thomas’s curls and thought of princes with their hearts cut out. “I don’t know.”
Liar. But he’d always been one.
Instead, he whispered, “Would you die for me?”
Thomas sounded warm and cottony with sleep. “Of course I would.”