Chapter Fourteen
FOURTEEN
There is something wrong with the garden.
Evander sits in the warm glow of his bedroom lamps, cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by botany books and a flurry of scrunched papers.
He prefers to leave the harsh overhead lights off and drift between pockets of gentle warmth from his small lamps.
His focus should be on the mystery, on adding new theories in thick black marker to the index cards on his wall and taping more string between his mind-maps to connect deductions—but he can’t stop thinking about the garden.
The field guide lies open on his lap. A semicircle of mugs and old jam jars surrounds him, each filled with a spoonful of dirt and water and his harvested cuttings.
Not a single one has wilted from the rough treatment of being beheaded and towed indoors.
If anything, the plants look even more viciously alive, their petals and leaves curved toward him as if, for lack of a sun, they are fixated on the bloody beat of his heart instead.
There is something wrong with these plants.
He maps the shape of their petals, their bulbs, their leaves, and cannot find a match in the normal botany books. They are, however, all in the Hazelthorn Field Guide.
“I think the hospital is lying about Carrington,” he mutters, and then takes a moment to wonder if speaking to himself means he has truly lost it. But people speak to plants all the time.
This is probably normal.
“But Bane is also sketchy.” He eyes the Nettle Night blossoms, as if they would be most interested in this conversation.
“Those scratches on his arms confirm it. To get inside the mansion when the front doors are locked, you’d have to go around the back, and there’s no way to walk through the garden without getting scratched up.
” His own arms wear confirmation of this.
“But what’s the point of lurking in the garden?
That wouldn’t get him written into the will, right? ”
He stares at the Nettle Night blossoms long enough that he thinks they nod, then decides he probably needs sleep.
It’s not like he misses Laurie or wishes he was here to listen to these rambling deductions.
Evander would rather hold on to the bitter resentment that filled him after Laurie snapped at him in the garden, not think about how it would feel to run his fingers along the soft hair at the nape of Laurie’s neck.
He has a murder to solve. That should be his focus.
This unkempt yearning tipping through his chest is ridiculous and distracting and—and pointless.
It’s just that he has never kissed nor been kissed, and wondering what it would be like is the only reason he is restlessly addicted to the angle of Laurie’s scornful mouth.
He’s read enough mildewy books to be aware that the lord marries a lady without much variation—but he’s also struggling to care if his feelings are inside out.
He wants to kiss a girl, but it’s just the idea of kissing a boy crowds his chest with fireflies and cracked-open shooting stars as well.
He just wishes he could talk to someone about this, could know what other people feel and what they do about it.
He would also rather fling himself out a window than bring this up with Laurie.
Evander sighs and rubs his forehead. He should go to bed, but when he closes his eyes, all he can see is that red door, the pulse of it a metronome against his rib cage.
He spent two hours in a hot bath once he came inside, scrubbing even the memory of the guts off his skin, and trying to forget the stomach-turning feel of that rotten-pudding consistency closing over his hand.
Even now that he’s in clean plaid pajama pants and a soft T-shirt, he still can’t forget the feel of that slippery, disgusting mess.
He’s always been like this—averse to the feel of things, sickened by a texture, his reactions disproportionate and swiftly followed by shame. The only things that feel safe pressed against the open palm of his hand are soft mounds of soil or a leaf curled up like a secret.
He forces himself to focus and riffle pages of the field guide to find a match for his sampling of the sharp-edged ivy. There it is.
Ever Ivy—from the Araliaceae family, similar in shape to its cousin Hedera Helix, but with stiff leaves, the texture similar to thinned steel. It leaves razor-sharp, thin slices upon touch. Beware of fine hairs remaining inside wounds, which will cause incessant itching.
Evander has already scratched most of his cuts and made them look a thousand times worse, and he is trying to ignore his worry about how Laurie is faring.
He slides a sideways glance to his evidence wall—he refuses to call it a murder wall despite what Laurie says—where he’s tacked up bad sketches of everyone in the house.
He spent dinner staring at Bane and Azalea and trying not to wince at the incessant bickering.
Oleander was even more insufferable than usual, overriding everyone’s suggestions for the funeral and insisting on black lilies, not white, and that the service should take place in Hazelthorn.
“It’s spite, isn’t it?” Bane had said in a low huff. “Choosing that kid and cutting the rest of us out. Did you read the will yourself yet, Mother?”
Oleander sniffed. “All documents should be with my lawyers by now if that incompetent young creature Dawes has done as he’s told.
Cannot understand why he is taking the lead in our affairs when he scarcely knows this family.
As for Evander, well—” She paused, leveling a heavy gaze his way.
“I shall care for him exactly as Byron would have.”
“I was thinking”—Azalea delicately plucked up a wineglass, a gaudy ruby ring glinting in the candlelight—“if you needed me to stay and help balance the accounts—”
Oleander snorted and the arguing commenced again, more money focused now since that seemed to be the root of why everyone was here.
Not the funeral. Evander had said nothing the entire time, just focused on eating three helpings of butterflied pomegranate quail with fluffy white bread smothered in thyme and melted butter.
Laurie didn’t show up for dinner. They haven’t spoken since they came inside.
Now Evander props his arm on his knee, chin on his fist, and stares at the black lilies in their jam jar. “Like, I don’t need Laurie around. He’s still a suspect. And a liar. Also, what if he got expelled from school for doing something malicious? What if he’s just messing with me?”
Except there is the way Laurie plunged into knife-sharp ivy for him without a second’s hesitation.
And the way he wants Evander to regain his memories.
And the way he looked scared in the garden.
But he could also outright tell Evander some of the secrets he’s letting rot under his tongue, and yet he refuses. Either he’s playing with Evander or there’s a reason.
Evander puts his mouth so close to the black lily petals and breathes in nothing but petals and loam. “What’s behind that red door?” His mouth barely makes the words. “Is it a monster? Is that what they’re hiding?”
A labyrinth of blossoms and thorns for a monster.
He needs the key.
The air feels suddenly cobwebbed and musty, his skin prickled with summer humidity, and he wants nothing more than to wrench the window open and tilt his head so he can see the star-flecked sky.
But it’s still jammed shut. All he can do is brush his teeth, splash water on his face, and then flop on his bed with the field guide.
He flips to the pages of nightshades and rereads their descriptions, trying to match them to the symptoms of Byron Lennox-Hall’s poisoning. His guardian has been dead for almost a week and grief should be an all-consuming monster rendering Evander numb and useless.
Except, he’s thinking about how his door isn’t locked anymore and he can go wherever he wants and he is free free free.
He’s thinking of the shovel, the lies about the business trips.
He is thinking of the way Byron used his own grandson as a medical experiment and beat him when he stepped out of line. So much of Laurie’s pain ends now that his grandfather is dead.
It’s a pretty big motive for murder.
Evander tries to ignore the vines knotting around his intestines as he notices neat notes in the margins besides sketches of Bloodthorns. He thought this page was just about the side effects of the vermilion thorned flower, but on closer inspection, it’s a journal entry.
June 15—Dug up new plant in the garden. Took samples and will propagate it within the conservatory. The boy was playing with it and seemed unaffected by skin contact, but will still run toxin tests. Thorns are easily removed.
Is this Byron’s handwriting? “The boy” could mean Laurie—unless the field guide is even older than Byron.
It does look ancient, bound like an old book with spidery calligraphy that’s almost impossible to read.
Evander hasn’t thought much about how long Hazelthorn has been in the Lennox-Hall family. Another thing he needs to investigate.
He closes the field guide reluctantly and sets it on his bedside table, right next to his parents’ photo.
It hurts, sometimes, to look at their smiling faces, his mother tucked against his father as if he is an everlasting tree to lean against and she is his perfect flower.
Evander flicks off his lamp and burrows into the blankets despite the stuffy warmth of his room, because he needs to nest, to sink into oblivion, to dissolve.
But all he can think of is Byron propagating poisonous plants in his conservatory.
Evander’s sleep is restless, a fevered heat in his mouth as the dark closes hands around the fragile confines of his rib cage and pulls him down, down. This is what it is to be buried. Moss crawls up the back of his throat, latching on to the back of his tongue and drinking hard, long, deep.
Blood is what it wants.
He pushes at the edges of the dream with a whimper.
wakeupwakeup
His fingers clench into his sheet, relax, tighten, stretch out like roots still clotted with fresh soil. He is made of sticks and teeth and broken rose stems, his cheeks kissed with salt from tears he pretends he hasn’t wept. Loneliness haunts him. He needs to—
wake up wake up wake up
Cold finger bones stroke his damp curls away from his forehead, cartilage clicking together, soft as a wind chime.
His eyes are half-lidded, his body pressed deep into the mattress under the weight of a thousand tons of dirt.
A groggy, disoriented part of him understands he is not fully asleep. But he’s not awake either.
A dull light clicks on, the bulb flickering with a high hum. The night throbs around it, relentless. His face is half-mashed into the pillow, so it takes him an age of pushing through the molasses churning sluggishly over his brain to understand he is staring at his bedroom door.
It’s open.
The velvet dark sits beyond, pulsing like an opened wound.
He is staring and staring, his vision blurry as he tries to pull himself out of mud-soaked fatigue.
Finger bones brush down his cheek again, so very, very gently.
Then they wrap around his jaw and begin, so very slowly, to pull his mouth open.
There is a second where Evander’s eyes close again, the world sliding sideways to tuck itself back into the dark. He is almost asleep—
Then the bones push into his mouth.
Understanding shoots through him like a thunderclap, that this is not a dream, that he is awake.
He is so very awake.
He sits bolt upright, sucking in air with a desperate gasp as if his lungs had forgotten how to work. His scream chokes on confused, breathless terror.
He’s staring at the thing beside his bed.
It leers over him.
It doesn’t vanish.
The shape of it is backlit by the single bulb from his lamp, the shadows around it so thick and slippery that they turn its edges indistinct. Wrongness oozes from it in thick, heady beats, but it is hard to register what he’s seeing compared to what he knows.
“Carrington?” Evander whispers, breathing so quickly he’s close to hyperventilating. His heartbeat pounds, riotous and wild, as he stares at the old butler leaning over his bed.
Except it’s not Carrington.
It can’t be.
Evander’s eyes lock on to the butler’s chest. His waistcoat is gone, tie undone, his usually white crisp shirt now shredded and clinging together by only a few top buttons. The lower half of his shirt is undone, flapping gently.
It is dyed a red so dark it looks black.
Carrington reaches out again and Evander flinches back, but his legs are tangled in twisted sheets and he can’t shy far enough away.
The butler’s fingers are in his hair again, but no skin wraps the bones.
They are held together by tendons turned a putrefied, oxidized brown.
Evander can’t stop staring at the butler’s shirt, the corner drifting aside again just enough to see his middle is a blown-out cavity.
There is nothing behind his shirt. No skin, no meat, no organs. Just a scooped-clean hole where a single shoot has been planted into his pelvis bone, its roots wrapped about his bared spine and soft, fresh leaves unfurled.
Carrington’s hand closes around Evander’s jaw again. Dirt begins pulsing out of the butler’s mouth in a steady, black stream, flooding down his chin. His voice is crusted and gravelly. “The garden—”
Evander is shaking, clawing backward.
“—wants—”
The fingers dig into his cheeks with crushing, horrifying pressure until his jaw is pried apart.
“—you back,” Carrington hisses as he squeezes a single blackened berry between Evander’s teeth.
The scream that pulls from Evander’s mouth is animal and terrified as he tastes it.
The garden. The sweetness. The poison.