Chapter Nine #2
Laurie pauses impatiently on a landing, so Evander walks even slower in response, brushing his hands across overgrown potted monstera and maidenhair ferns that line the hallway.
His clothes feel all wrong, too tight and brutal against his skin, and he keeps picking at his cuffs, his buttons, his collar.
The more anxious he gets, the more things become unbearable—like clothes and lights and shrill voices.
Sometimes he just wants to crawl out of his own skin and peg it on a washing line to air out for a bit while he takes a long nap somewhere cool and dark.
But those are not the sorts of things he can explain out loud. No one cares how he feels anyway.
He drags himself over to Laurie, tugging at his too-tight collar.
“Don’t unbutton it,” Laurie says.
“I’m choking.” Evander can hear the whine in his own voice.
“I don’t care.” Laurie nods toward an alcove where a thin line of light emanates from beneath a shut door. “Dawes is in Grandfather’s office. Been there all day. Supposedly putting his affairs in order.”
“Why do you sound so skeptical?” Evander says before he remembers he doesn’t talk to Laurie.
“Because I don’t trust him.” Laurie rolls his eyes. “One junior lawyer is suddenly in charge of the entire estate? Sure. Not to mention he read out that bullshit will and snatched my inheritance out from under me.”
“Technically,” Evander says, “it was me who snatched—” He stops and frowns at what’s coming out of his own mouth. He really needs to get it together.
“Too true, buddy. Too true. You are the continual source of all my problems.” Laurie leads them to the grand staircase.
Evander needs to be more careful before antagonizing a wolf. The only safety net he has is the assumption that Laurie won’t risk losing Hazelthorn altogether by doing something like pushing Evander down the stairs and breaking his neck.
“Is the conservatory that way?” Evander says.
Laurie has started down the stairs. “Yes, but—”
Evander turns and takes off in the opposite direction, leaving Laurie scrabbling to catch up.
“Evander, wait.”
There’s no explaining it, the pleasure of hearing his name in Laurie’s mouth.
With a speed he didn’t think his exhausted self capable of, Evander hurries around corners until he finds that dim, narrow passageway where the carpet feels eerily like moss.
The stained glass door is ahead, ruby accents glowing even in the dark.
Not a single light lures him closer, yet he is drawn in as if there’s a hook in his stomach.
A thick, molasses dread starts pulsing in his throat.
A warning. If he holds his breath, he can almost hear it—all the plants breathing as one, ragged and desperate, as if they’ve been left to die in the suffocating dark.
Laurie hurries forward and grabs Evander by the collar. “Wrong turn.”
“I want to go in.” Except he doesn’t. His fingers tremble as they wrap around the doorknob. “I need to … look.”
For evidence, for clues, for the poisonous plants from the field guide.
But when he twists the knob, it doesn’t budge. Jiggling it does nothing except rattle the glass in its frame. Laurie yanks him backward.
“Before you break down the door,” he says, “let me remind you he’s dead. He’s not in there. He’s goddamn dead and he’s never coming back.” He says it with no inflection, but his fingers are too tight in Evander’s collar.
Before, Evander would have assumed Laurie was trying to be cold, his heart a decayed pulse of derision in his chest, but now he thinks about why Laurie acts like this.
Don’t you dare feel sorry for him.
It’s hard not to.
That pervasive feeling of wrongness curdles in Evander’s stomach as he stares at the door, drawn and repelled at the same time, as if entering might show him a corpse still splayed out on the tiles.
Even in the tiny confines of this hall, the smell of loam and fertilizer and green, vile sweetness is choking, and he thinks he sees the outline of green vines pressed against the other side of the glass.
Laurie spins Evander around so fast his breath catches.
“Who locked the door?” he whispers. “Something feels wrong. It feels—”
“Who the hell cares who locked it?” Shadows eat half of Laurie’s face, his eyes turned to molten opals. “Maybe his petty ghost is haunting his petunias. I couldn’t care less.”
“You’re such a liar.” Evander jerks free of Laurie’s grip but instead of shoving away, he takes a furious step closer until they are chest to chest, the dark pressing in furred and heavy around them. “You have a tell when you lie, by the way.”
“What tell?” Laurie sounds dismissive.
“Your face does this thing where—Actually, I won’t say. Helps me to know when you’re messing with me.” Evander keeps his voice level, but anger is there, bristling and alive. “Someone’s keeping me from looking for evidence.”
“Fascinating,” Laurie says. “And you are keeping me from dinner.”
Evander tucks his shaking fists behind his back. “What don’t you want me to find out? Are you hiding something?”
They are too close, this tiny corridor too tight, and yet Laurie only leans back against the wall with his head tilted while he watches Evander through sleepy, half-lidded eyes, as if the palpable frustration means nothing to him.
Then Laurie pushes away from the wall and, for a second, his mouth is very close to Evander’s ear, his breath hot around cold words. “If you start unlocking doors, you might find things you don’t want to see. Or worse, you might wake up.”
“I’m not asleep,” Evander says, but heat prickles along his skin.
“Whatever you say,” Laurie says. “Take me apart if you want, find where I keep all my secrets. But I’m not helping you do it. I don’t care who killed him and I don’t care what you do.”
Evander’s heartbeat skids along the inside of his ribs and he doesn’t know how to name what he’s feeling, this mixture of dread and confusion and electrified hunger. All he knows is that Laurie is playing with him, twisting him in knots for the pleasure of it.
“Liar. You care so much you’re sick with it.” Evander sets each word down as quietly and viciously as he can, and then he shoves past so fast Laurie’s shoulders hit the wall. “Now, show me where the dining room is.”
“You do love telling me what to do,” Laurie mutters behind him.
“And you seem to like to be told.” Slow heat coils down the back of Evander’s neck and he can hardly believe he said that with such cool swiftness, but he’s glad Laurie’s eyes darken with annoyance.
Evander won this round.
He walks quickly, trying to outpace the unmistakable sweet, floral smell of poisonous plants seeping from under the conservatory door.
Laurie collects himself and follows, prickly silence wrapped around him, but when Evander looks back, he notices Laurie’s face has turned into a stone angel above a sepulchre.
He didn’t have a tell before. Now he does.
When he lies, he’s going to work overtime to keep his face still. Which is very useful.
Evander keeps his smile to himself.