Chapter Eighteen
EIGHTEEN
Everything inside him has unspooled. His body is not his own, rather a cavity for dead moth wings and ruined wishes, and he thinks maybe it always has been.
Laurie hauls him upright, struggling to hold on while keeping a hand clamped over Evander’s mouth.
He is such an easily maneuvered thing, something to be packed up and folded down when misbehaving and placed back in his box.
Hot rage builds behind his eyes and, uselessly, he thinks he is about to cry.
He wanted one thing, just one thing, so, so badly.
An excuse to let himself trust his best friend again.
He can’t. He never will. The truth keeps unburying itself.
Laurie’s eyes flick nervously back at the red door where Bane stamps on the garden bed with annoyed grunts.
His foot must be churning mud now, the soil oozing blood like wet pulp around the crumpled body.
Then he bends and plunges his hand into the dirt.
When he straightens, he holds something small, the shadows obscuring most of it until he rubs it on his shirt and holds it up to the moonlight.
It’s the size of a button and glistens like calcified blood.
“That’s it?” he mutters to himself. “Waste of my time.”
Laurie drags Evander backward, away from the red door, the garden, the cousin who has just unearthed a ruby from the soil where he murdered a woman.
A low, guttural roar fills Evander’s head and something dark and monstrous crawls up his throat. Not a scream of terror, but a roar of unmitigated fury.
This isn’t real.
He did not just watch a throat cut, a life sacrificed, blood spilled into the dirt in return for an uncut gem.
It hits him suddenly, how often he has seen rubies in the mansion.
Studded into crystal wineglasses and watches, used to decorate stained glass doors, set into jewelry slung around Lennox-Hall necks. They’re wearing murder like trophies.
Laurie pulls Evander around a corner and into another garden, where the walls are low and mossy and a line of plum trees is being slowly strangled by brambles. Stinging nettles cover the ground and nip at their ankles as they stumble to a stop.
“Don’t scream,” Laurie says, low and soft, and he removes his hand from Evander’s mouth.
He doesn’t scream. He doesn’t cry out, either, though his voice is cracked all the way through. He thinks he’ll be sick. “You knew.”
Laurie’s jaw tightens and he looks away.
“That’s how it works?” Evander can’t keep his voice steady. “You kill someone and bury them in the garden and in return it … gives you gems? This is what I’m inheriting?”
Laurie winces, but his silence rings loud as a slap.
But worse is the new understanding crawling over Evander’s skin. No monster lives behind that door; there is just a poisonous garden with an appetite for blood. He nearly died in that garden.
There is dirt in his mouth again.
In his lungs.
He is ten years old and he is still screaming because he will always be screaming out there, half-buried in soil filled with monstrous vines wrapped about his ankles, ready to pull him down deep.
Evander takes a step backward as he stares at Laurie, his obsession, his sepulchre for unrequited adoration. Dirt streaks his pajama shirt and his hair is gnarled with twigs and crushed leaves, his expression ruinous.
Horrible understanding slowly fills Evander’s lungs.
“You tried to sacrifice me to the garden when we were kids, didn’t you?” He is surprised how factual it comes out when his hands are shaking this hard. “That’s what you were doing. That was the ‘game.’”
Laurie says nothing.
“You—” Evander’s voice begins to rise, hoarse and rusted. “You sacrificed me to the fucking garden.”
Laurie rubs at his face and then starts to reach out, but Evander slaps his hand away so hard he actually yelps.
Evander spins away, digging his fingers into his hair and yanking hard enough that pain splinters across his scalp. He wants to scream and never stop. He wants to beat himself bloody against a wall. He wants to sink his teeth into Laurie’s skin and tear all the way down to bone.
“You don’t understand.” Laurie’s voice sounds rusted. “It’s not—Just calm down and—” He tries, again, to grab Evander’s arm.
But this time Evander slams him backward so hard he trips and falls down in the stinging nettles.
“YOU CALM DOWN.” All he sees is red and red and red. “I thought we were friends. I wanted to believe what happened was a m-mistake.”
“It was a mistake.” Laurie’s voice is rising now, though he hasn’t gotten to his feet. “I didn’t mean—”
“FUCK YOU.” Rage is spilling out of Evander’s hands and he doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t know how to stop. He wants to punch his fists into the ground, but instead he snatches up a loose stone from the low garden wall.
There is nothing in his head but this monstrous need to tear, to rip, to destroy. He is so drowned in it, so lost to it, that he barely registers Laurie shouting at him to stop.
He stands above Laurie with the stone raised.
It would be so easy to bring it down and crack his skull open like a candied apple and make the lies stop. Make everything stop stop stop.
Laurie is still on the ground, his eyes blown wide, his hands flying up to shield his face with swift reflexes that speak of practice. As if he knows, intimately, what it is to cower on the ground.
Evander’s hands shake around the rock.
what what what are you doingggg—
what are you doing
WHAT ARE YOU DOING WHAT ARE YOU—
His lungs split. A gasp escapes.
He drops the rock to the soft earth with a thunk. A sudden dizziness makes him sway.
That wasn’t—
That didn’t feel like—
Him.
Laurie slowly lowers his hands and stares up at Evander and there is nothing on his face except pure fear. It looks wrong to see him like this, stripped of the smirk, the insolent swagger, but he also seems so much more real, so much softer and breakable.
“I’m sorry,” Evander thinks he says, but his mouth feels full of briars.
Bane had to have heard them yelling, but there’s no telling whether he doesn’t care or will storm over to investigate with the cruel edge of his knife.
Laurie is still breathing too fast, his body coiled and shivering as he stares up at Evander with fathomless despair. “Can we just go inside?”
“Who else has Bane killed?” Evander’s voice has gone detached, cold, and it sounds so very far away. “Are you pretending you don’t know who killed your grandfather?”
“No,” Laurie says quickly.
Memory hits, sharp as a blade slicing across a tendon: Jessica’s scream as she dug up an already-buried arm in that garden bed.
Someone else is already dead.
“Your family is a bunch of serial killers,” Evander says flatly. “You feed innocent people to the garden for … for profit.”
Laurie climbs shakily to his feet. Red welts streak his arms from the stinging nettles, and his pajamas are filthy and torn. “I tried to tell her to quit.”
For a second, Evander doesn’t understand—and then he remembers Laurie’s obnoxious mocking of Jessica when she attempted to trim those rosebushes.
“I was going to make her so … so uncomfortable, and then she’d quit.
I just—” His voice crumples. “I ran out of time. I hate this, okay? We’re not allowed to breathe a word to anyone outside of the family about the garden.
I’ve tried and Grandfather fucked me up pretty bad over it.
” His voice wobbles slightly. “I can’t stop them. ”
“Stop them? What about stop you?” Evander’s voice goes mockingly light, but it’s so unsteady he knows he’s about to cry.
“Were we ever friends or was I just some annoying little kid you hated being stuck around? I don’t remember us before, so just tell me the truth.
Were we even friends before you tried to sacrifice me? ”
Laurie makes a small noise, pressing his face into the crook of his arm. “Please, just listen to me.” He is hoarse and ragged and when he raises his head, his eyes have turned to twin pools of moonlight. “Once the garden has a taste, it wants the rest. It wants you back. Do you understand?”
And suddenly Evander can hear Carrington’s wet rasp again.
the garden
wants you
back
His mouth has gone bone-dry.
“No, I goddamn don’t understand!” Evander nearly shouts it.
“You keep everything from me. I can’t trust you!
How am I supposed to find a killer in a family of killers?
” He starts pacing, his hands fluttering up to his face.
“Maybe I don’t even care who killed your grandfather, because he’s just as evil as—” He spins away with a muted growl and his body smacks into something solid.
A small grunt escapes him and his hands shoot out to steady himself against the thing that wasn’t there before. And now is.
Carrington snatches hold of Evander’s face and
screams.
Bloodied soil splatters against Evander’s shocked, open mouth. His cry is high and inhuman as terror shoots through him like a thunderclap. He jerks backward but Carrington digs mud-crusted fingernails into the skin around Evander’s cheekbones and roars.
It is endless. It is a nightmare.
It goes on and on, a scream everlasting.
Carrington scratches hard at Evander’s face as if he’s trying to peel back the flesh, and then he lunges, teeth gnashing. Evander keeps trying to hurl himself backward, his own terrified cry pitching higher and higher, but Carrington holds on to him hard.
Laurie shouts behind them and flings himself at Carrington.
They go down, all three, except Evander is underneath.
He fights wild and hard, his legs kicking as he struggles to get free.
“Evander.” But Laurie sounds too far away.
Carrington rolls off him with a snarl, his neck at a horrible angle until he takes both hands and rights it with a meaty, wet snap.
There is even less of his tattered butler’s uniform than before, rib bones wrapped with vines and hollyhock showing through the shredded fabric.
Evander lands a hard kick to the creature’s sternum and sends him reeling back.
It gives Evander enough time to clamber to his feet while his heartbeat rockets out of his chest.
Laurie has grabbed up a fallen branch. “Evander, run. Go inside!” He tries to raise the branch but Carrington simply grabs his wrist midswing and wrenches it sideways until Laurie cries out.
Carrington shoves him aside as if he weighs no more than a butterfly, and he hits the ground hard. Then Carrington slowly turns back to Evander.
“Stop.” Evander shakily raises his hands. “P-p-please, Carrington. I’m s-sorry. I’m sorry—”
Carrington lunges.
It’s inhuman how fast he moves, skittering with such speed that Evander has no time to do anything but turn and bolt as fast as he can. Maybe he is saving Laurie, leading the creature away.
But as he leaps over a bed of lavender, he realizes there is no putrid breath on his neck, nothing bearing down on him. He spins, wild, because Carrington didn’t follow.
He’s slamming into Laurie.
Evander doesn’t hesitate.
He hurls himself back toward them, while a tiny voice stabs the inside of his skull.
Run run run, let him deal with the monsters his family creates.
But it is worse than anything else, somehow, to be only a few yards away while Carrington pins Laurie to the ground and rakes gnarled claws down his chest as if he means to split him open.
It is worse, somehow, to listen to another boy let out the kind of panicked scream that could shatter the sky.
Carrington is a ravaging, horrifying force, his bare finger bones plunging for Laurie’s eyes.
Laurie is still screaming.
Then Evander is close enough to grab the back of Carrington and haul him off with a strength he didn’t know he had. Dirt spills from Carrington’s wounds, vines unravel like intestinal worms from the gaping cavity where his guts should have been. It splatters on Evander’s feet. He gags.
The distraction is enough.
Carrington peels himself upright, bones clattering and jaw unhinged, and his fist slams forward and wraps around Evander’s throat.
“Time,” he rasps, “for the ground.”
And then he starts dragging Evander away.
He fights, striking out as he chokes, his legs slipping out from under him. But it does nothing. A new strength has gripped Carrington and he simple walks away into the murky overgrown depths of the garden, pulling Evander along with him.
Laurie tries to stand, slips, and curls up on the ground with a guttural cry. He’s cradling his bad wrist.
Carrington hauls Evander around a corner and the rest of the garden wall blocks his view of Laurie.
The garden
wants you
back.
He already knows where Carrington is taking him.
He can hear the bloody, hungry throb of the red door.