Chapter Thirty-Two
THIRTY-TWO
Andrew’s mind was a lit fuse, catastrophic detonation imminent, and everything inside his skull pounded and strained, as if it wanted out, out, OUT.
His legs couldn’t hold him, and he sank to the leaves with hands curling over his ears.
A keening wail slipped between his bloody lips and he felt thorns curl deeper, harder into the soft meat behind his eyes. He needed to think, but he couldn’t.
Someone was lying to him.
Yellow eyes flickered around them, the gnarled shadows of monsters tucking themselves between trees and roots as they wet their lips and waited for the right moment to attack.
Thomas swallowed hard, his gaze darting from the lurking monsters in the thickening dark to Andrew folded in on himself.
“I don’t understand how you don’t—” Thomas stopped, choking on a dry sob.
“Lana told me that she didn’t think you knew, like somehow you’d …
blocked it or something. But I don’t understand.
You have to know. You … have to. I tried not to bring Dove up since you didn’t, and I didn’t want to hurt you.
” He put his fist to his lips, pressing so hard his teeth cut into his knuckles.
“I feel so fucking guilty. I should have been with her, and I’m scared you still … blame me.”
Andrew dug his hands into the leaves until his fingernails hit something hard and sharp. Not rocks. Teeth.
“I already told you.” Every word shook as Thomas fought against tears. “I think someday you’ll hate me.”
He was gorged on guilt; he festered with it.
Andrew could see it unspooling around his eyes and running like brackish tears down his cheeks.
He could hear the way the monsters salivated for it, their claws tearing through tree bark, teeth clacking against bone in anticipation for their next taste of suffering.
They wanted him to take a fistful of agony and stuff it in his mouth again and again until he was so full of decaying leaves and moss and the wet, rotting skin of trees. He would belong to the ground.
But none of this was Thomas’s fault,
was it?
Thomas swiped a dirty hand across his eyes. “She would never have gone into the forest if not for me. She hated breaking rules. A-a-and I drove her to it. We fought … You know we fought, but it was about you.”
Andrew looked up, his mouth stained with blood. “What.”
“I was going to ask you out.” Thomas sounded wretched.
“I was just working up the nerve and she somehow knew. I guess she saw how I looked at you, even though you—you didn’t notice.
She didn’t want us to change, us three. It had to be us three, she said, but I never would have cut her out.
I just wanted to kiss you. I still”—his voice had gone so high and hoarse it kept cracking—“I still just want to kiss you all the time. We started arguing before we even got to the forest because she said ‘I forbid it’ and I-I flipped out and said you didn’t belong to her. ”
They’d fought over him. Andrew almost didn’t believe it. He thought Dove was sick of him, of watching out for him and mopping him up and keeping his tremulous ribs together when he was always seconds from bursting apart.
“I stormed off and she went into the forest alone. I don’t know why.
She was so mad. I guess she just wanted to stomp around and get her feelings out.
And then…” Thomas trailed off miserably.
“Then she fell. And I wasn’t there to catch her.
I didn’t even feel it. I should have felt it or been there or run to her.
I loved her like she was my family. But I love you … like you’re my whole world.”
“Stop.” Andrew stared at the soil filtering between his fingers, at the scars like spiderwebs and lace across his skeletal hand. “You’re … lying. She’s not—”
He couldn’t say it, because it couldn’t be true. He had seen her, he had—
“But how shitty would I be,” Thomas said, raw, “to kiss you after she was gone? This is why Lana hates me so much. She thinks I saw Dove’s …
she thinks I saw it as an opportunity to get with you, but I didn’t.
I’d rather die than be like that. I just don’t want to be alone anymore. I just—I’m so scared of being alone.”
He dropped to his knees. Energy sloughed from Andrew’s skin, and his forehead slumped against Thomas’s shoulder, but he cupped Andrew’s face and forced him to look up.
“Listen to me.” A fevered terror lit Thomas’s eyes. “I don’t think the monsters are going to let us go easily this time. Or at all. You have to get out of here.”
“But I can’t,” said Andrew, his voice so dull and far away it sounded smothered six feet underground. “They want the prince, and I’m … that’s me. Not you. It was never you.”
And it was the way Thomas didn’t correct him that said he knew.
That he had known, perhaps, for a long time.
Andrew, who hadn’t fallen asleep when the dream ravager came.
Andrew, who told a wicked fairy tale about a wolf that ate Thomas’s parents.
Andrew, who had never stopped writing, even though Thomas had stopped drawing.
Here was a boy who made monsters, or perhaps was a monster himself. All because he couldn’t face the fact, the guilt, the sorrow, the rage, of his sister being
dead.
The world slid sickeningly left, and pain shot behind his eyes in a white-hot spear of excruciating agony. He couldn’t bear it. He was going to tear outside his own skin.
Monsters stepped out from behind the trees with masks of blackberry briars and vicious teeth curved over their jaws, limbs fused with riotous trees and claws extended.
Perforated intestines and foul, viscid liquids, and endless decay slithered out of their concave bodies.
Then Andrew noticed the writhing tangle of vines pulling themselves from the soil, thorns hooked and tipped with blood, bodies throbbing like snakes.
He tried to scramble back, but a green vine looped around his ankle.
In a flash, it tightened like a tourniquet.
“Thomas.” It burst from him like a plea, a prayer.
Thomas snatched up the hatchet and swung hard, chopping the vine in half while maggots and festering black beetles burst from the severed flesh.
But already another had grabbed his ankle, sneaked a tendril around his wrist, crawled toward his waist with leaves blossoming with a green so lurid it stood out like a scream in the dark.
Their eyes met and the grief was so visceral, so brutal, that a wail tore from Andrew’s throat.
He clambered to his feet, unsteady and drunk on his devastation, kicking back the vines as more surged from the soil and with thorns looking to hook into flesh. They smelled blood. They wanted more.
“S-stop.” He practically screamed it. “It’s not him. It’s me. You want me!”
“Andrew, shut the fuck up.” Thomas sounded frantic as he tried to slice the vines tightening around his body. The hatchet slipped and sliced across his thigh, but he didn’t seem to care. “I won’t let them have you—”
“I’m the tithe,” Andrew said, and his mouth was full of ink.
Thomas screamed at the same moment the forest dug fingers into Andrew’s face and pulled.
Something slick and livid exploded from Andrew’s eye, growing thick and fast down his cheek in a rain of warm earth.
He clawed at his face, as roots tore through soft tissue and skin.
He was screaming; he couldn’t stop. Pain bloomed, vicious and bloody and red.
With trembling fingertips, he touched his eyelid just as thorny roses unfurled petals dripping with the viscid jelly of his perforated eye. They grew. Blossomed.
He couldn’t see.
Someone was screaming his name.
He couldn’t see.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that the forest had outgrown the confines of his thin, frail body and longed to stretch. He used to be an empty boy, impossible to fill.
Now he was so full of monsters.