Chapter Thirty-One #2
“When school went back this year,” Dove said slowly, “Thomas was arrested for murdering his parents.”
Andrew stared at her.
“He didn’t come back to Wickwood after that. It’s horrible. It’s … hard to accept. So I guess you didn’t accept it. In your head, he’s still here.” She wiped her eyes quickly. “I didn’t think you were struggling this much, or I would have told Dad about it.”
“You’re lying.” The words hardly left his lips.
“I know things are tough for you—”
“YOU’RE LYING.” He whirled on her, and there was so much pain and fury and hysteria spilling from him that it felt like it would burst from his chest and tear open a hole in the world.
“He’s been in class with me, and he fights monsters with me, and—and Lana!
Ask Lana. He argues with Lana all the time. ”
The pity in Dove’s eyes landed like a lash against his cheek. “Lana doesn’t talk to you. She’s never been your friend.”
“She started talking to me this year. She…” He trailed off. “What about Chloe? She rooms with you and Lana. She’s … my friend.”
“I don’t know who that is and, um, Andrew, you don’t have friends.”
Andrew wanted to rip out a thousand trees and hurl them into the stars. “You’re messing with me and—and stop it! Just stop.” He jerked back when she reached for him. “Don’t you dare touch me.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you here. Please let me take you back up to the school and we’ll calm you down and call Dad and—”
“This is not all in my head.”
“Andrew.”
“It’s real. It’s all real and you’re lying—”
“Stop yelling at me!” Dove grabbed him by the shoulders, getting in his face before he could twist away. “God, Andrew. I am trying to help you. You. Need. Help.”
Across the forest, a low wail rose and then suddenly splintered into a bloodcurdling scream.
Then there was the thudding whack of a hatchet.
The scream cut off.
Andrew’s pulse leaped. Relief exploded in his veins, and he grinned at her, wild and unsteady and completely terrifying, but he couldn’t stop. “Did you hear that? Did you? Monsters. Thomas is killing them.”
Dove cupped his face with cold fingers, and she looked close to tears as she searched his eyes. “I want you to know, whatever happens, I love you and I’m going to get you help.”
It sounded like goodbye. It sounded like giving up on him.
“You don’t … hear it?” he whispered.
Tears slipped down her cheeks as she shook her head. “It’s going to be okay.”
But it wasn’t.
He was falling.
He was tipping toward nowhere with nothing to hold on to. Inside his chest, the forest grew, vicious and alive and hungry, and it filled him right up to the top of his throat.
He could feel the way this was the end, how he soon would not be able to hold it in.
He turned away and started to walk, slow at first, ignoring Dove as she called helplessly after him. Then, without even thinking, he started to move fast, faster, nothing in his head but rose petals unfurling and the soft lisp of rustling leaves. Then he was flat-out running.
The forest swept past him, black and endless, as he tore along the path so fast he felt like he was flying. Dove tried to come after him, but she couldn’t keep up on the uneven ground. He knew this forest intimately, wholly. He would not fall.
His lips parted, and he was screaming.
One word, the only one that mattered.
“THOMAS.”
“THOMAS.”
“THOMAS THOMAS THOMAS—”
Around Andrew, monsters peeled their teeth from the trees, and trained their yellow eyes on him. Bones rattled and the underbrush turned over in a snarl. Their rot, their malevolence, washed over his face and he sucked it in with a sob.
Ahead of him, a shape formed among the trees and began to move toward him.
It came up quick and lithe, and he was moving too fast to stop even if he’d wanted to.
But he didn’t want to stop. He was a boy close to the end of infinity and he would run off the edge of the world if that was what it took.
He was anguish and speed, his fingers outstretched for the only thing left in the world that made sense.
They collided like trees felled in a storm, arms flung around each other and heads cracking together from the force of their entwining.
He flung his arms around Thomas’s neck and crushed him breathlessly close, breathing him in, all forests and charcoal pencils, his body hard and lean and impossible to break.
Thomas tossed his hatchet to the side so it thumped dully on the leaves.
Then his mouth pressed hard to the side of Andrew’s sweaty hair, then against his jaw, so close to his mouth it felt like dying.
He palmed tears from Andrew’s cheeks and then simply held him like nothing else mattered.
“I n-n-n-need you to be real.” Andrew could barely pull the words bound in thorns and wicker switches. He wanted to bite Thomas’s jaw just to feel that hot, sweaty skin, already flecked with blood and damp dirt.
“What?” Thomas said. “Of course I’m real. I figured you ran down here, and I came as fast as I could but—”
“Bryce is—”
“It’s not your fault.” Thomas slipped from Andrew’s arms and scooped up his hatchet.
He spun with a graceful agility that made Andrew’s heart skip a beat and then slammed the blade into a monster scuttling across the leaves.
It shrieked, and blood splattered the front of Thomas’s white dress shirt in a hot streak of red.
One of his suspenders had slipped, but he didn’t seem to notice as he flipped the hatchet with deft ease and cut down another monster.
Then he turned back to Andrew, blood flecking his cheekbones, his eyes smoldering coals. He reached out a hand to see if Andrew was okay, just as he always did.
But Andrew stepped back. He grabbed at his hair, his head shaking, a low moan escaping from his raw throat. “I don’t know … I don’t know if-if-if you’re real.”
Thomas took Andrew’s wrist and turned it over, placing his thumb on the frenetic pulse. “Hey,” he said, so softly. “What do you need me to do?”
“Is this all in my head?” Andrew went on, barely coherent. “Did I make this all up? The m-monsters, the-the stories, the—”
“I’m real, Andrew. Do you see the blood on my shirt? How can—”
“Kiss me, then.” It burst out of him, frantic and feral. “Kiss me.”
Thomas took Andrew’s face in his hands, thumbs tracing his lips as he tilted his head down. Their lips almost touched, Andrew’s swollen and crusted with blood, Thomas’s warm and soft as a story.
Then he whispered, “I am real. You are real.”
“Make me believe you,” Andrew said.
And Thomas kissed him, hard and fierce and merciless. All teeth and tongue as he took everything from Andrew and devoured him whole. Andrew’s teeth sank into Thomas’s lip until the old scab burst open again, and then it was impossible to do anything but breathe as one.
They were a catastrophe, exploding.
Thomas pulled back and grabbed Andrew’s face, rough and hard. He pressed their foreheads together. “Do you feel this? I am here and I am here and I am here.”
He couldn’t make this up, could he? The extraordinary wonder of pain and blood and Thomas.
“Dove said it was all in my head.” Andrew could barely get the words out, he shook so hard.
“She s-said I make stuff up and you were gone, but you can’t leave me, I-I can’t be without you—” He choked on a sob; he felt like an autumn leaf, disintegrating to the touch.
“When she catches up, you have to—have to make her see the monsters so that—”
“Wait.” Thomas pulled away slightly, his hands still cupped around Andrew’s cheeks. “When she … catches up?”
“She was right behind me.” Andrew twisted, looking at the empty track. “I just don’t understand why she lied. I’m so confused, I’m always—I’m so confused.”
“Andrew.” Thomas’s voice came sharper this time. “Look at me.”
He drew in a shuddering breath, trying to center himself as he leaned into the one person who would always hold him up. But almost too late he registered a growing panic in Thomas’s face, a worry not stoked by monsters or the night or all the rules they were breaking.
He kissed the corner of Andrew’s mouth so tenderly it could make him cry.
“You need to listen to me,” he said, low and urgent. “You were not talking to Dove.”
“I was—”
“That … that thing you were talking to. It wasn’t her.”
“She’s my sister. I know her—”
“Andrew.” Thomas’s voice cracked. “It can’t be her. You know that.” His eyes looked like a thousand shattered mirrors as he pressed his thumb to Andrew’s mouth. All he could taste was blackberry briars and dirt and forest rot. “That thing was not Dove because Dove is dead.”