Chapter Nineteen
NINETEEN
The garden never really let him escape that day, not when he was already tooth marked, selected for devouring.
He will be put in the ground again.
He is going to die.
The way Evander thrashes in Carrington’s grip is rabid and wild, his body a lithe, liquid thing against a grip so phenomenally tight.
Carrington crushes bony fingers around Evander’s neck with one hand, and hauls him by the collar with the other, taking most of the weight as Evander’s legs go out from under him and he’s dragged down the path between blackened walls of ivy. Toward the red door.
Don’t go in there. Don’t don’t don’t—
A dull, tired part of his mind wonders if Carrington will put him in the earth beside Jessica or if he’ll pick an empty, cold bed. Maybe this is what it is to face your own death: to worry if you will be lonely, right there at the end.
But it feels as if a thin, silver needle is piercing right between his eyes. He needs to think.
If the garden has hold of Carrington, has eaten through him and wrapped its tendrils around his spine to direct him like a puppet, then why did it attack Laurie? The garden is owned by the Lennox-Halls, obeys them. It should want to kill only Evander, the sacrifice it didn’t get to finish.
Ahead, the doorway yawns wider and Evander tries to scream one last time. But the hand crushing his windpipe reduces his cry to a choked sob. He throws himself wildly from left to right, trying to beg Carrington to stop. To listen. To wait.
“What the—?”
Carrington jerks to a halt and Evander stops struggling in surprise, twisting his head just enough to see Bane blocking the doorway to the locked garden.
Shadows swathe his frame, and his loungewear is blackened and wet with blood, slippers caked in grime.
His eyes bulge, mouth agape, and he grips the doorframe as he lets out a shriek that sounds more like a strangled bird than a man.
“What is—What is that!” Bane raises one shaking finger straight at Carrington. “Oh my god—”
There is no way Bane didn’t hear the commotion before, but clearly he was going to ignore it and continue on his merry way with his blood-bought ruby. Evander assumed the Lennox-Halls were used to creatures like Carrington. Apparently not.
Evander uses the momentary disruption in Carrington’s focus to wrench free of him. This time it works.
He hits the ground and rolls sideways, grabbing for the first rock he can—a sharp-edged thing, big enough to hold in two hands. Carrington doesn’t seem to care and has started lurching in that uncanny gait toward Bane.
But Evander clambers to his feet, his heartbeat pounding with a sickening slurry of adrenaline. He rushes forward, rock raised, and slams it into the back of Carrington’s head.
The old butler goes down.
Bane starts screaming.
Evander’s heartbeat is a throbbing mess in his mouth, blood dripping down his chin, and all he can think is, make it stop stop STOPSTOPSTOP—
The rock comes down again.
again
He has a knee on Carrington’s back, his hands gripping the rock gone slippery and slick as the smell of iron stains the air.
He slams it down and watches the skull split like a robin’s egg, a viscid pool of bloody juices sluicing between the shattered bones.
Compost riddled with maggots plops onto the cobbled path and the smell is nauseating.
It takes him a very long time to realize the monster is no longer moving and he is simply mashing brains against rock while this terrible sound dribbles from his mouth. Agony, horror, terror.
“No…” Evander lets the rock roll from his hands and thud dully on the soft, damp ground. His arms are wet, slicked up to his elbows. His pajama shirt clings to his stomach, warm and saturated.
Everywhere, there is blood. Dark, endless pools of it.
It’s in his mouth, mixed with a sudden flood of saliva.
“Nonono.” He is shaking hard as he stumbles backward. This isn’t him—He didn’t do—
He didn’t do this.
He didn’t—
Slowly, he forces himself to look up at the petrified figure of Bane still standing there, staring with blatant shock.
This is how Evander must look, slivers of skull and flesh flecking his chin, soaked in blood like an ethereal horror pulled from the night soil.
Evander runs.
Nothing else exists in his head, just the need to get away get away from what he has done.
It was a monster. It was going to kill him.
He tears wildly down the path, clambering over garden beds and throwing himself through underbrush so thick it whips and slices his body as he bolts.
It’s all up in his mouth, the dirt and blood and foulness, and he can barely see.
His arms stretch out to ward branches out of his way and a heartsick sob escapes his mouth.
Darkness unfolds around him as he plunges into a clearing, tripping on cement broken up by roots.
He glances down, trying to find his footing, but instead the world ends.
There is nothing nothing nothing beneath his feet.
His lungs are full of wildflowers, not screams, his body twisting like a bird with its neck broken midflight. But there is nothing to hold on to.
Air rushes past.
His stomach bottoms out.
Then he hits water with a cracking splash.
Somehow he had forgotten that stagnant, cement pool he and Laurie stumbled across yesterday, framed by gargoyles and throttled with algae and water lilies. The night disoriented him, and now water floods into his open mouth in a brackish wave.
He’s thrashing, choking, sinking fast. Wet, snakelike water lily roots tangle around his arms, his throat.
If he hits the bottom, then he can push off it back toward the surface.
But he sinks and sinks, impossibly far, his lungs screaming as frog spawn and weeds press about him from every side.
Beneath his bare feet, the pond descends in an infinity of blackness.
It’s a goddamn cement pool. It can’t be this deep.
Except it is.
And he is drowning.
He kicks as hard as he can, flailing his arms and ignoring the way his stomach spins.
Swim. Except he doesn’t know how. His head breaks the surface for a second, water lilies plastered against his chest, but weeds wrap around his ankles and yank him down.
Down. To fight is to lose energy, but panic roars through his brain and survival instinct takes over.
His arms windmill underwater and he comes up again.
Goes down. Water crashes wildly against the sides of the pool from his mad thrashing and a wave slams backward into his face.
He tries to cry for help, but he can’t get enough air, can’t think, can’t goddamn swim.
He understands the concept of it, but he is made of panic right now, and he can’t calm down enough to tread water.
When he lunges for the edge of the pool, his fingers scrape uselessly at the vast expanse of slick concrete wall, algae gumming beneath his fingernails as he tries to pull himself out.
It’s useless. The water level is too low, the pool too deep, and he can’t push off the floor to surge up and grab the lip of the pool if there is no floor.
Energy fast slithers out of his bones.
Keep moving.
But he’s tired, he’s so, so tired. He never thought about how quiet drowning can be.
Exhaustion sets in, a deep cold worming its way through his skin and sucking him down. He tries to float, his face all that could be seen amidst the swathe of suffocating lilies, but he is too waterlogged, his movements floppy and uncoordinated.
It has been minutes. It feels like hours.
A wet vine wraps about his throat and slowly begins to tighten and he doesn’t even have the energy to scream about how not right this is.
“Help.” But it’s too weak and water rushes into his mouth.
His legs are barely moving.
Keep going—
But he can’t reach the edge, he can’t pull himself out. All he can think, as he starts to sink, is that to drown here, after all that he survived, feels bitterly cruel.
Then something wraps around his wrist.
At first, he thinks little of it, his brain spinning with fright and exhaustion, too disoriented to understand the tender, green vine circling his arm isn’t pulling him down.
It drapes over the edge of the pool—he didn’t see it earlier, was it even there?
—and it’s stronger than it looks, covered in soft leaves that brush his cheek. If he could use it to pull himself up—
But he has no energy.
A foolish, pathetic urge to call for Laurie swells in his throat and he hates himself for wishing he could, for wishing a murderous boy like Laurie would even care. Evander’s head tips forward and rests against the vine as his chest burns.
Then, slowly, slowly, he begins to rise.
His body is limp as it is dragged from the pool, the vine encircling his wrist growing tight with the strain.
Water pours off him in a gushing roar as he’s pulled over the edge of the pool and flops on the concrete.
Lichen scratches his arms, his neck, as he coughs up stagnant water, his whole chest shaking from the violent expulsion.
Then he just lies there, spread out as if he’s been butterflied with a butcher knife, staring up at a sky gone gray with incoming dawn.
Duckweed sticks to his face and his wrists, tangles in his curls.
Each breath cuts lines of white-hot fire through his chest, and after a while his cheeks are only wet with salt tears, not pond water.
It takes forever until he looks down at the vine still circling his bird-bone wrist and the absence of anyone around to have used it to pull him out.
Slowly, the vine uncurls.
It draws away, but not before a tendril with tiny green leaves pats his tearstained cheek.
Evander forgets how to breathe, because there is something almost tender, almost human, about that gesture.
“I think you forgot,” he whispers, too emptied to care that he’s talking to a plant, “you’re meant to be trying to kill me.”