Chapter Seventeen
SEVENTEEN
Everything inside Evander has narrowed to this one point, the sharp edge of it wrapped like cutthroat ivy around his wrists.
He would bleed for answers right now, he would do anything to fix his upside-down world and finally understand what is happening.
But he doesn’t count on the swiftness of Laurie as he darts in front of Evander and snatches hold of his arm before he can get to the door.
Their eyes meet and he has no idea what’s on his face, but it probably isn’t the factual calmness of a gentleman ready to talk things through.
“You can’t go outside.” Panic lives in Laurie’s eyes. “It’s pitch dark out there and—and Carrington literally just attacked you, right? You can’t go out there after him.”
But it’s different, if Evander is ready. He isn’t going to get answers by curling up in bed and keeping his limbs from dangling off the edge in case the monster’s long tongue licks up between his fingers.
“What do you want us to do, then?” Evander says, trying not to sound bitter.
“I don’t know.” Laurie’s voice stretches, and he’s more upset than Evander thought he’d be. “Maybe … We could tell my aunt Azalea in the morning?” But there’s no conviction in his words. “You’re safe inside though.”
But he isn’t. Carrington proved that.
It freaks Evander out in a sickening way, how often Carrington has probably been in his room, stroking his hair as he slept hard and heavy.
Terror hasn’t left him yet, the pulse of it a dull thrum in his stomach, but knowing he’ll never find the truth because no one is honest with him has severed all his self-preservation.
Nobody can be trusted. Every single person here salivates over him and sees him as a key to be pocketed so they can own Hazelthorn, but the things they’re hiding are worse than he imagined.
He is sure now that there is a monster in Hazelthorn. Something worse than the creature Carrington has been corrupted into.
“You’re not poisoned.” Laurie sounds like he’s begging Evander to believe it. “You’d have felt effects before now and see? You’re fine. Let’s just deal with everything when there’s light. Okay?”
“Okay,” Evander says.
Laurie relaxes infinitesimally.
Evander waits exactly half a second and then bolts around him.
Laurie gives a muted yelp and snatches for Evander, but misses. “Evander! Wait.”
But Evander is already out of his bedroom and plummeting down the hallway.
“You are so goddamn stubborn—” Laurie lunges after him, but Evander is faster.
He shoots around corners and halls and then clatters down the narrow staircase, muscle memory kicking in to guide him through the murky dark. Footsteps pound the landing above him, but Evander is not a thing to be kept anymore.
He runs into the kitchen, where a small light over the stove breaks the darkness, and he flings open the back door, ignoring Laurie’s breathless shout behind him.
“Evander, you can’t—”
Night air hits him like a shock, slicing across his lungs as he gasps with the thrill of it. His bare feet hit the cobbled garden path and he’s moving fast, a roulette of frenzied screams circling his head.
What is he doing? If Carrington tried to poison him already, he could do much worse in a garden seething with toxic plants with only the moon as his witness.
This is what he wanted, after all.
Evander to come outside.
He should have grabbed a knife from the kitchen, though he isn’t sure if he’s the type of person who could use it. In the back of his mind, he can hear Byron Lennox-Hall’s firm voice nailing him to the floor. Be respectful. Be obedient. Be. Quiet.
Don’t go into the garden.
Swear to me—
“But why the hell not?” he whispers to the dark, his breathing quick and furious. “What is behind that goddamn door?”
Because he already knows that’s where Carrington was headed, the place where his blood coats the wood. To keep something in? Or to let it out?
unless you’re making everything up because it’s easier to imagine monsters than admit you’re lonely and scared and overwhelmed by inheriting this estate and you miss the man who hurt you even while you pretended he loved you and maybe you’ve got something to hide along with everyone else—
Evander slips between hedgerows and trellises throttled by brambles with a swift ease that surprises even him. It takes only seconds to lose Laurie.
Branches whip bloody lashes across Evander’s arms, but he seems to know just when to duck and weave, which mossy walls to climb over and when to dive beneath vine-covered archways, and he makes very little sound as he runs.
He shouldn’t remember the way this easily.
He should be anxious and terrified, fumbling in the dark.
He shouldn’t feel this confident.
Under the light of a moon curved like the back of a silver spoon, the garden looks like a thing from a fairy tale.
Fireflies glow like pixie dust and the thrumming hum of a thousand cicadas and frogs sweetens to a cadence that feels like a song.
Flowers turn to opal stones in the shadows and fungi lines garden walls like bioluminescent plates.
His fingers brush them as he passes and come away powdered in spores, and he has an odd urge to lick them.
There is something wrong with him and the way he constantly wants to put the whole garden in his mouth and swallow.
Lithe greenery ushers him forward, and when he hears a smattering of voices ahead, he squirrels himself down amongst lush sweet ferns that curve like cupped hands to hide him.
This is the part he knows he’s ignoring: how the garden seems to want him there, how it reaches for him, how it is pulling toward the red door.
Behind him, something breathes. When he twists, trying to catch it out, it stops moving and all he can hear is a chorus of cicadas, their song rising to a shrill pitch.
The feeling remains, of being watched.
The back of his neck prickles.
A shivery spike of fear surges in his chest and thumps wetly against his aching ribs, and he hasn’t so much stopped freaking out as become used to the constant scream ringing in the back of his head. A frenetic laugh bubbles up in his throat at what he’s doing.
Black hooked thorns dig into the back of his thin shirt, but he ignores the needling sting against his flesh as two figures come into view on the twisted path that weaves in and out of the walled gardens.
Bane Lennox-Hall has a shovel over one shoulder and a tiny flowerpot under one arm, his flashlight illuminating his caustic expression as he gives a sardonic eye roll at something his companion said—his companion, who is none other than Oleander’s timid assistant.
Jessica trails after him, lugging a sack of gardening tools.
The juxtaposition of them together in the dead of night makes Evander frown.
He came out here for answers about Carrington and instead he’s turning over stones and finding only worms and rot the deeper he digs into the confusing mess that is the Lennox-Hall family.
“—being so precious about this,” Bane is saying with a huff. “This is part of the job. Assisting me is assisting my mother.”
“But that’s not … I didn’t sign up for…” Jessica catches up, and when the flashlight slashes across her face she winces. Her pantsuit is disheveled as if she flung it on at the last second, possibly after she thought she was off duty for the night. “I’m not qualified for gardening.”
“Nonsense. You’re doing such a good job.” Bane drips with condescension. “Like I said, we’re planting one seedling. It’s very rare, I might add, and must be planted under the light of a full moon.”
Evander squints because the moon isn’t full and the flowerpot seems to hold a wilted stick of basil, not some exotic plant. If Bane is pranking a hapless, underpaid assistant, he’s even more pathetically awful than Evander thought.
Bane powers off, snarking at her to keep up. He has on loungewear and what look like slippers, while Jessica has at least shoved her feet into some oversized rain boots. She staggers after him, the sack making scraping sounds on the cobbled path.
Evander follows.
The problem of Carrington folds itself into his pocket as he slips forward, keeping to the shadows near hedgerows or beside the tallest garden walls.
His bare feet are soundless against the mossy stones, his heart a wildly fluttering thing in his chest as he detangles scarlet creepers from his ankles.
The garden seems torn between urging him forward and snatching at his clothes, as if it longs to flatten its soft furred leaves against his hot, bared skin and keep him forever.
It’s in his head, of course, thinking the garden wants anything. It’s just a garden, and it’s just dark, and he is just a boy playing detective.
The path narrows into a heavy green throat of that steel-sharp ivy, and it takes Evander a second to realize where they are.
Ahead, the red door looms, dark with blackened blood, and the walls seem even taller than before.
Bane sets down his shovel and starts fiddling at the door, grunting complaints until it swings open. He holds up a thin, tarnished object.
So Carrington isn’t the only one who knows where the keys of Hazelthorn are kept.
With walls of ivy on both sides, Evander has no real coverage, so he drops to a crouch and crab-walks closer, the darkness layering him with invisibility as he watches them disappear into the locked garden.
If they heard that odd heartbeat or felt the tacky, coppery ooze of the door’s bloody paint job, now dried to an oxidized reddish brown, they’ve made no indication.
Maybe that was only for him to hear, to taste.
At least no monsters rush out.
Or maybe the thing that lives inside there still sleeps.