Chapter Twenty-Five
TWENTY-FIVE
A taut unease breathes in the space between them as they climb through the walls of the mansion, their way lit by bioluminescent fungi and their limbs caught up in silken cobwebs.
Evander watches where Laurie steps as the ground shifts to loose, grayed floorboards perched precariously on beams over deep chasms. Being inside the walls of Hazelthorn between exposed brick and beams feels like climbing through its rib cage.
Now and then, Laurie tells him to watch out, to step this way.
To be careful. It feels unreal that no one can reach them in here, that they are safe.
Or at least Evander is safe.
Laurie can’t possibly feel the same way, not after that kiss.
It wasn’t a kiss.
It was revenge and it was starvation and it was obsession. The need to apologize crowds in Evander’s head as blood still slicks the underside of his tongue, but louder is the need to kiss Laurie again. But not like that.
He will do it differently, if he has another chance. He can be tender, too, when his pain is held behind his teeth and instead he lets the soft petals of his deepest yearning unfurl.
As Laurie fumbles in the dark toward a ladder made of splintery wood that stretches up toward pale light, Evander stays close.
His claustrophobia has ebbed—the distraction of the kiss short-circuiting his brain enough that he’s not focused on the smothered, trapped feeling of narrow spaces—but stranger is the vigorous energy that pulses through him.
He should be listless after a week of being sedated and starved, unable to force his emaciated body to keep up. But he feels good.
Fed.
At the top of the ladder, they enter a crawl space that must be between the attic and roof. Ahead lies a small square door.
“Here,” Laurie says. “My grandfather’s secret office.”
“What exactly are we looking for?” Evander folds himself up behind Laurie as he shoves his shoulder against the door.
“I just think the will might be fake. If there’s a real draft, it’ll be in here.” He hesitates. “Sorry.”
It occurs to Evander that he should feel angry or betrayed, but he doesn’t. He’s more confused as to why Laurie needed him for this or thought he’d cooperate with a plan to dissolve his claim on Hazelthorn.
The old, swollen wood finally gives and Laurie tumbles through.
Evander has to rearrange his shoulders as he squeezes inside. Splinters snag against his skin and his body feels suddenly too unwieldy and stretched. This makes no sense. Laurie didn’t struggle and Evander is far smaller than him.
He hits a soft rug with a muffled oomph.
Dust punches into the air in a gray plume and Evander sits for a second, coughing and surveying the filth covering his arms and bandages.
Laurie looks just as bad, grime and sweat smudged up his neck, and his once-white shirt beyond ruined.
He stands with shoulders tense as if his grandfather might unfold from the walls and strike him down for the intrusion.
“He spent most of his time here when he wasn’t in the conservatory,” Laurie says. “The real entrance is over there.” He nods toward a slim door in the corner. “But there’s four locks to get through that way, so…” He trails off, frowning as he looks around.
Evander wanders into the middle of the room and turns in a slow circle.
It’s a small attic space, the roof steeply slanted. A single bulb swings from the ceiling and there’s one round window smothered so thickly in muck that the late-afternoon sunlight barely filters through the cracks. A few ancient bookshelves hold battered tomes, spines busted and pages foxed.
But it’s the walls that make Evander’s skin crawl.
Words written in cherry-red paint have been splattered across the bare wood, crowded and overlapping, manic and streaked. It all looks like the ravings of a madman.
This is the burden of a god in the dark.
What is divinity, but the survival of death?
Not again, not again, I swear it on my beloved.
End it now before it grows too strong.
For all I have done, I cannot be forgiven.
THOU SHALT NOT KILL
This is godhood, but I cannot bear it.
Evander feels sick as he puts fingers against the old paint and traces the jagged letters.
This is a confession. It’s guilt immortalized in a museum display.
But it looks old. It’s as if Byron’s regret would overwhelm him, and he’d come up here to purge his terrible thoughts, then simply go back downstairs to continue feeding the gardens and ripping wealth from the soil thanks to a god-complex he wasn’t willing to give up.
And his “beloved”? He wonders what happened to Byron’s wife, if she one day grew a conscience and demanded he stop the killings and his response was to feed her to the garden too.
That is the Lennox-Hall legacy, after all. Putting those you love in the ground.
“What the hell?” Laurie mutters.
At first Evander thinks he’s talking about the bloody words slashed all over the walls, but Laurie is headed for a sagging couch stuffed in the corner.
Blankets and pillows lie in disarray upon it.
A suitcase has been dumped on the floor, left open to show folded shirts and an unzipped toiletry bag, the smell of sandalwood aftershave faint on the air.
“This isn’t Grandfather’s stuff. Who’s been in here?
” Laurie digs through the suitcase, a sudden frantic energy to his movements.
Then he surges to his feet and lunges for the massive desk under the oval window.
It’s covered in a colossal amount of torn papers and old ledgers, pens crammed into dirty mugs and ink staining the wood.
He starts yanking at the locked drawers.
Evander picks his way cautiously to the suitcase. “I think … this is Dawes’s stuff.”
Laurie’s back is to him, but his shoulders go tight. “Not possible. You saw how eager he is to leave the estate before nightfall, and only my family know about this room.”
“Unless he’s been lying this whole time.
” Cogs begin to twist in Evander’s head and he is steadied by this—thinking through clues and matching up evidence.
“Did we ever even see him leave? Like literally pull out of the gates and drive away? I kept telling you that anyone could be living in this mansion. Which means he could’ve been here the night your grandfather died.
He’s another suspect.” He kneels back down by the suitcase and digs through the mess of folded clothes, his fingers brushing a small, velvet bag, similar to the type used to store bejeweled necklaces.
Which makes sense when he opens it and tips rubies into his palm like a scattering of bloodshot eyes.
He sits back on his heels, trying to slow his breathing, but everything is crashing into him with such unmitigated violence it’s hard to steady himself. He barely notices the way Laurie isn’t responding to any of this.
Neat piles of papers have been wedged into the side of the suitcase, and Evander tugs them free to look through résumés and letters of employment that quickly spiral into threats of extortion.
“I think Dawes found out about the gardens.” Evander’s eyes flick across the page.
“And decided he wanted in. I guess a junior lawyer’s wage isn’t that high …
he sounds really, really angry at your grandfather for steeping in all this wealth and not even using it.
This is all blackmail. He’s threatening to take everything he knows to the press.
If Byron was paranoid and private, he wouldn’t want anyone looking at Hazelthorn too closely and then linking it to local disappearances.
There must be a lot of missing people in this area, right? ”
He finally looks up to where Laurie has broken open a drawer with a brittle crack. But a short hiss escapes him, and he backs up, cradling his brace as his face ghosts white for a second. Above him the words I KILL IN DESPAIR eat through the wall in brutal vermilion.
Setting his teeth, Laurie shakes off the pain and starts shuffling through the drawers with one hand, his brace huddled close to his chest.
“I think Dawes has been going through your grandfather’s office and stealing rubies and trying to figure out how the garden works.
Or maybe he’s been slinking through the whole house to steal and that’s how he found this room…
” Evander stops, frowning hard as he sees another thick envelope tucked deep in the suitcase, dislodged by his digging.
When he snatches it up, his stomach twists at the dried leaves pressed between papers.
“This is Wolflock. I recognize the shape of the leaves from the field guide. Wait, you know how he said the old lawyer had a stroke? What if he was poisoned?”
“Circumstantial evidence though.” Laurie sounds distracted.
But maybe Evander isn’t focused on the right death. After all, Byron was in the way of Dawes digging his fingers into the garden—did he use Byron’s death as an opportunity or did he make all of this happen?
“Dawes is the one who told us Carrington was hospitalized when really he was—dead.” Evander finds it hard to force the word out. “Dawes could’ve attacked him, dragged him outside, and then the garden turned him into that—that monster.”
For a second, he lets himself kneel there, his fists opening and closing until he feels less like his organs are loose, slippery things that are about to fall from his mouth.
He casts a sideways glance at Laurie, who is still focused on his chaotic search through the drawers, messing up files and crumpling envelopes.
It doesn’t even seem like he knows what he’s looking for.
“What happened to you,” Evander says, his voice very low, “when you tried to tell people the truth about Hazelthorn?”
Laurie goes still, his fist clenched around an ancient envelope. His face turns to the wall, his expression buried, but his words sound dry and rusted out. “Does it matter?”