Chapter Twenty-One
TWENTY-ONE
This is how it feels to fall outside of his own skin, to be scissored open with gardening shears so the soft underside of his flesh can be bared to the world.
His throat is wrapped in tendrils of wisteria and wickedly sharp ivy.
His mouth is full of dirt. Inside of his head, thunderstorms rage, and he can’t fit logical thought around the crack of fists against the back of his teeth.
It isn’t an episode, but it’s not a panic attack either.
Evander is losing his goddamn mind.
He holds himself so rigid his spine feels near to snapping. The foul smell of the pond still stains his skin and the crawling urge to peel out of this body seems the safest thing to focus on, because he can’t think about the rest of it.
Get the garden’s fingerprints off him. That’s what he’ll do.
He shuts himself in his bathroom and fills the tub with water so scalding it renders his bruised body a livid red.
Countless scratches cover his hands, his arms, his throat, and he scrubs them all with brutal amounts of soap, relishing the sting.
Think of this, only this. Pain. Otherwise, he’ll freak out about being submerged in water again, about closing his eyes and feeling like he’s back there: drowning and drowning while no one cares.
Don’t cry. But it’s so goddamn hard not to.
Lies have been placed like delicacies on his tongue for so long he can’t recognize anything else; he is a cobwebbed collection of pretty untruths and made-up stories, and if all of that is cut away, there is nothing left.
He is just a boy who was once buried alive on an estate full of monsters.
And he doesn’t know what else about him is real.
Carefully, Evander draws his knees up to his chin and simply sits in the tub, staring at the green tiled wall with mold threaded between the cracks. Moss flourishes there, too, now. He doesn’t have the energy to wonder if that’s normal or if the garden is crawling into his life any way it can.
His spine is the naked curve of a half-moon and he can’t stop shivering. Shock has eaten all the way through his bones, his muscles, his marrow, but his mind is still picking through the shattered pieces of all he knows.
He wanted to be a detective? So be a detective.
The scrambled mess of clues and lies and secrets seem impossible to sort into cohesive shapes, but he can make deductions like the detectives do in his musty classic books. Starting with this: Why the hell is he even at Hazelthorn?
His parents were obviously never close with the Lennox-Halls, which means he and Laurie were never childhood friends.
He fabricated this entire life of growing up trailing after Laurie with dogged adoration, and now embarrassment sends his stomach spinning.
What if Laurie resented the way his grandfather became guardian over some random kid?
Maybe it was easy to see Evander as a skinful of blood, useful only for sacrificing to the garden so he could ask for something he actually wanted.
Evander needs to remember exactly what happened before the sacrifice.
Who was he? And why is it a secret?
He squeezes his eyes shut, digging his chin into his knees with such vicious pressure that new bruises will form. If only he could force his memories back by sheer, furious will.
Years ago, he read a medical textbook about amnesia and head trauma, how sometimes a patient doesn’t want to remember, so they make no real effort to heal their minds.
That could be him. Maybe he’s known, all along, that Laurie thought nothing of him, and he wants so desperately for it not to be true that he refuses to fight through the thick, choking cobwebs that smother his past.
But even as he grits his teeth harder, reaching and reaching into the black depths of his mind, he finds … nothing. Before they tried to kill him, there is nothing nothing nothing.
Tepid water sloshes against his heaving ribs and he’s hyperventilating here in this tub, with grime rimming the white porcelain from his scrubbed-off filth.
Gooseflesh ripples down his arms. Just get out.
Sharp pain fissures the undersides of his feet, and he slowly unclenches his arms from around his legs and awkwardly pulls a foot into his lap to inspect the damage.
He thought he’d find flesh grated to pulp thanks to running barefoot through thorns and thistles, but it isn’t that.
For a long, long minute, he doesn’t understand what he’s seeing.
Thin, white nubs poke out from his soles.
He picks at one, thinking it’s a sliver of dead skin.
Instead of peeling, it pulls. An uncomfortable shudder runs through his stomach, not painful exactly, but weird in a way that makes every fine hair on his body stand on end.
It’s like tugging a piece of hair that’s been stuck down his throat—except this thing is long and thin, lightly haired like a radish root.
The tub has softened his feet, so it slides straight out, snapping off at the end.
When he holds the white, wormlike thing up with shaking hands, he realizes that’s exactly what it is.
A root.
He just pulled a little white root out of his own flesh.
A sob breaks in his mouth as he hurls the root away and reaches for another, sick compulsion making him pull it out.
Then another, and another. Their exodus leaves little peppered holes in the hard skin of his sole, bloodless but deep.
Worse is the gag reflex that comes as he plucks at them, the way his toes curl, and revulsion crawls up his spine.
The bath fills with tiny roots floating limply on the water.
“What the fuck,” Evander whispers, hoarse and horrified. “What the actual—”
The garden
wants you
back.
Maybe this is the result of being half-eaten. The garden took a bite and its tooth broke off under his skin, and all these years it lay dormant inside him until he went outside and woke it up.
Then why did it save him from the pool? He’s missing a crucial piece and he doesn’t know what it is. He doesn’t understand what a murder garden wants if not to finish eating him.
Unless—
Unless he’s turning into a monster like Carrington.
It’s too much to swallow, to even think about, and it’s all he can do not to rip off all his skin to see if vines coil around his intestines and thread through his bones.
If he keeps looking at the roots floating in water, he’ll vomit, so he hauls himself from the tub in a rush, water sloshing over the bathroom tiles in a grubby wave.
In his bedroom, he finds clothes. His curls hang wet and limp, plastered to his neck and trailing past his shoulders.
None of his usual care goes into dressing: He yanks on thick socks so he can’t see his feet, then stuffs himself into corduroy pants and a button-up shirt that he leaves untucked, his collar popped, cuffs undone.
He doesn’t even get the buttons in the right holes and it’s too short at the wrists, which makes no sense unless he just shot up a few inches over the last week. Which should be impossible.
Electricity fizzes behind his burning eyes as he hurries around his room, snatching up a handful of pens and tearing open his notepad to scribble frantically. He pins more notes to his evidence wall and slashes haphazard writing on the old notecards. On Bane’s, he writes in red marker: MURDERER.
Except he’s the wrong murderer. Unless he isn’t. It’s impossible to guess because everyone in this house is a goddamn liar.
Bane could have been so pissed that Byron refused him entrance to Hazelthorn, so he killed his uncle in revenge. That gives him access to the gardens, to wealth.
Suddenly, all Evander wants is to find Laurie, to pin him down with knees on his chest, hand at his throat, and make him talk.
Anxiety blossoms under his tongue, wondering if Laurie made it back inside, and he shouldn’t worry, but he does.
What if—No, Laurie is fine, he’s probably just off somewhere only caring about his own problems.
A light crash and thump sounds behind Evander and he whirls, his heartbeat rabbiting in his chest. He isn’t safe safe safe. But his spiral is cut short when he realizes the crash was one of the jam jars on his window seat toppling over.
Evander lowers the pen from where he’s been writing straight onto the wallpaper and blinks hard.
The clippings he’d so carefully arranged in jars have grown.
Not a few new shoots or unfurled leaves; they have doubled in size.
Branches stretch from the tiny jars, flowers blossom in brilliant colors, and leaves the size of dinner plates unfurl toward the sunlight.
They have far outgrown their confines in a single night.
Evander takes a hesitant step toward the plants and then stops.
The sound of his socked foot hitting the carpet has every leaf and petal and lean green stem turning slowly toward him.
As if they heard.
As if they grew for him.
As if they want him to see.
you have to get out you have to run you literally brought them inside you invited them to do this you asked for this you should never have gone outside they told you not to and you did it and you’re going to die and die and die—
The doorknob rattles, the dark oak swinging open with a low groan, and Evander flinches back so violently his shoulder blades hit the wall.
His chest moves too fast, too ragged, and he can’t swallow past the growing knot of hysteria bunched up in his throat.
He half expects Carrington to stagger in with hemlock growing from his empty eye sockets, but instead, Oleander swoops into his room, tall and imposing in a loud pantsuit splattered with violent swirls of orange and yellow florals and decked out in a lavish amount of chunky gold jewelry.
Her earrings are polished, red rubies, and Evander can’t stop staring.
All he can think is: Who did you slaughter to make those?