Chapter Thirteen #2
Evander arranges his cuttings in his arms and then hurries away from the pool. “Isn’t there a surgery that could fix your wrist?”
Laurie casts him an annoyed look. “I have had surgeries. Several of them. The last one just messed it all up. Also, put my wrist in the none-of-your-business basket, thanks.”
“Everything is my business while I’m investigating,” Evander says, though what he wants to say is I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.
Maybe he should just confess he has remembered a little of that day, how Laurie’s flesh tasted between his teeth and how the sky was a cracked-open azure egg while he lay dying.
It was a day much like this one.
They’re following a tall garden wall, looking for the entrance, though an odd energy has taken hold of Laurie. He’s irritated, twitchy, slapping at invisible bugs on his neck, his skin reddening under a sheen of sweat.
“Okay, but,” Evander says slowly, “how did the last surgery mess it up? Can’t you go back to your surgeon and make him fix it?”
“Because”—Laurie’s teeth are clenched—“the surgeon is dead.”
Evander slows, frowning, but Laurie has sped up in his search for a way through this impossibly tall garden wall. The ivy is so thick the stones have been lost beneath it and still there is no entrance.
“Can’t you get another doctor—” Evander starts, but Laurie turns on him, an unraveled fierceness in his eyes.
“Just to shut you up,” he says, “Grandfather was the ‘surgeon.’ So go ahead and add another motive to that list in your little detective notebook of why I’m probably the killer. I really don’t care.”
Evander is still frowning. “Mr. Lennox-Hall was a surgeon?”
Laurie looks at him for a long moment and then turns away, impatient. “Must be nice to be so oblivious.”
This is what Evander hates the most, the dismissiveness of what he doesn’t know when everyone refuses to explain.
Frustration beats in his throat, and as much as he tries to shove it down, to be quiet and logical and calm as he’s been taught, he storms forward and cuts in front of Laurie to force him to stop.
Laurie pulls up, his mouth tilted in displeasure.
“Stop talking in half-truths.” Evander keeps his voice deadly low. “Why can’t I know?”
“There’s nothing to know,” Laurie says, bored.
But it’s fake, Evander can tell it by the marble smoothness of Laurie’s face: his new tell.
“He isn’t a surgeon, he just likes to tinker.
And, yes, it’s extremely messed up, but do you know who stops old rich men when they want to do something? Literally no one. I didn’t get a say.”
The pain in his voice is barely concealed, but it’s as if he doesn’t notice his own agitation.
“But he can’t—” Evander struggles. “He can’t just decide to play surgery on a real person.”
“And yet here we are.” Laurie’s eyes drift past Evander as if this conversation is putting him to sleep. “Grandfather transplanted a new tendon into my wrist and it didn’t work. It’s shrunken and keeps contracting and here I am today.”
Evander folds his arms. “Where did he get the tendon?”
There’s a long pause. Laurie blinks. “What?”
“Where,” Evander says, “did your grandfather get a new tendon to put in your wrist?”
Apathy flickers off like a short-circuiting bulb, as if this is the first time Laurie has considered it.
He looks sick under the gloss of sweat, skin reddened and soft wisps of hair sticking to his forehead in contrast to Evander, who feels bright and lithe and full of energy.
He feels taller, full, his stomach not tormenting him for once with hunger, which seems strange since he’s only eaten half a plum.
“Who was holding the shovel?” Evander says suddenly. “There was a … a tall shovel and it—” His furrowed brow has started to hurt, the memory a watercolor blur melting behind his eyes. “When you tried to kill me, who was holding the shovel?”
The ghost of that day presses against his spine, the truth like a splinter driving through both wrists until he can’t get away. It replays in his head, the shovel coming down. Byron Lennox-Hall’s hands gripping the handle.
Evander wants a different answer.
“I don’t remember,” Laurie mutters.
“Whose memories are we out here to collect?” Evander demands. “Yours or mine?”
Laurie raises his eyes to the sky as if that might save him from the endless torment of Evander’s questions.
“You’re such a liar…” But Evander trails off, tilting his head to the side as he listens. He turns. “Do you hear that?”
“No.”
But Evander has lost interest in anything except the strange sound. He can feel it against his ribs, this steady beat, this pulsing.
Ahead lies a red door in the wall.
It’s a single interruption against the wall of razor-sharp ivy, an arch of wood with a flourish of ancient iron hinges. There is no knob, just a keyhole.
The beat is coming from inside it.
It forcefully reels Evander in and his attention is so fixated on it that he forgets Laurie, forgets their conversation, forgets all his fears of the garden.
His bunches of flowers and twigs drop from numb fingers onto the path as he stops in front of the door and stares hard at the deep vermilion paint, the texture like boiled sugar and sticky to the touch.
He doesn’t even remember placing his fingertips against it.
All he can think is how desperately he wants to press his tongue to the wood, let his teeth make grooves in the toffee coating.
“Evander—”
The word has been left underwater to drown. He ignores it.
He presses his palm flat against the sticky, rough surface even as a small voice in the back of his head screams at the feel of it.
He pushes hard at the wood.
It doesn’t budge.
He can smell it now, copper pennies and spilled wine. The beat has planted itself in his belly, a throb both sickening and elating, and he forgets anything except the need to open his mouth and put his tongue against—
“EVANDER.”
A hand grabs his arm and whirls him around. His hand slips from the door as he stumbles back a few paces, losing his footing, and goes down hard on his tailbone.
“Ow.” White spots spark in front of his eyes before he blinks them away. He glowers up at Laurie.
There’s something sharp and wild in Laurie’s eyes, all of his apathy vanished. “Let’s go back inside.”
“That door is locked,” Evander says. “Maybe Carrington has the key. He has all the keys.”
“I don’t care.” Barely tempered urgency has Laurie by the throat. “Get up, let’s go back.”
“You wanted to come out here,” Evander snaps.
Whatever odd hold the door had on him before has faded and now he has time to feel properly annoyed by the shove and how they walked all this way for a locked door.
His botanical samplings have spilled all over the path and the heather is scratching his back where his shirt has untucked.
His hand has also landed deep in something that feels disgustingly like pudding and every nerve ending in his skull has gone off in a silent scream.
He will need to scrape a hard-bristled brush over every inch of himself in the bath after this.
But when he yanks his hand out from where it sank into the heather, every thought in his head empties.
Blood has splattered all the way up his arm.
A neat pile of entrails has been left hidden amongst the leaves, the organs split and bloated with maggots and smelling of sharp, metallic rot. A sliver of intestine wraps around Evander’s fingers like a noodle.
He screams.
Never in his life has he scrambled up so fast, shaking his hands hard as he tries not to vomit.
The worm of intestine goes flying and Evander lunges away so fast that he gets snagged on the ivy-covered wall.
It does not let go. His stomach is still trying not to flip out over the feel of that oozing, rotted offal, so he doesn’t realize he’s stuck until razor-sharp leaves start slicing his shirt to ribbons.
There is something deeply wrong with this ivy.
It feels like it’s made of unforgiving steel.
He wrenches forward with a cry as it slices at his arms, his neck.
“Wait! Wait, wait!” Laurie grabs a fistful of Evander’s waistcoat and uses his brace to dig into the ivy and pull it from Evander’s skin. “God, stop struggling. You’re making it worse. Can you—Wait—Calm down.”
“I AM NOT AN OUTDOOR PERSON.” Evander flails, smearing blood from the entrails all over his waistcoat before Laurie leverages him free and they both tumble backward.
They stand there, breathing too hard, neither looking at each other’s raw distress. Evander points a shaky hand at the bloodied heather and feels his stomach punch inside out.
“That—that looks freaking human.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Laurie snaps, and then turns abruptly, gripping his hair as if he wants to tear it loose. “It’s just some dead animal.”
“Where’s the rest of it?” Evander’s voice spirals higher. “It’s literally disemboweled. Shouldn’t there be fur or or or—”
“It would’ve been a fox or something. Do you want to sit here and analyze rotting innards or can we go? You’re such a damsel.” Heat has left brash lines on Laurie’s cheekbones and he doesn’t wait for Evander’s answer, just shoves him so hard he stumbles back the way they came.
Evander wants to snap, Don’t touch me, but he can’t help noticing the vicious cuts on Laurie’s arms, the tear in his brace.
There had been no hesitation before using his bare hands to rip Evander out of the ivy’s jaws.
But why does he immediately have to be so cruel?
Something scared him and he’s covering his own untamed feelings by sneering at Evander.
Bitterness stings behind Evander’s eyes and he doesn’t know why. He shouldn’t care if Laurie thinks him pathetic.
Evander jerks away and scoops up as many of his dropped botanical clippings as he can before he marches off. Viscid organ juice runs down his hands and drips from the tips of his fingers, and the smell of it has stained him.
“You know what? I do remember something,” he says. “I remember how much I hate you.”
He snakes a foul look back at Laurie, expecting an eye roll, but hurt flashes briefly across Laurie’s face. There is no retort. Laurie looks away and keeps walking, his arm tucked to his stomach as if to hold himself together.
It should feel satisfying, to strike back. Instead, Evander’s mouth is full of nettles.