Chapter Twenty-Six
TWENTY-SIX
Dirt presses against his cheek, as if it has curved itself to catch him before his skull cracked against the floor.
It is gentle, the way he is held by earth.
Evander is grateful for it in this distant, mussy way, his brain not yet up to speed and his eyes still half-closed.
This is the way it always is after an episode: his blinks delayed and languorous, the world undulating in blurred streaks of watercolor, his lungs full of wet leaves as he breathes out and waits for consciousness to crawl back into his hollowed-out body.
Usually, he wonders where his mind slips during the episodes and if, one day, someone will care enough to catch him as he falls so he doesn’t wake up with bruises.
But maybe he has been asking the wrong question.
It isn’t about where his mind went—
—it’s what his body was doing when he wasn’t in it.
A taut, high-pitched keen has started up inside his head, a frantic speed churning his heartbeat faster and faster. Don’t think like that. He pushes up on his elbows, blinking hard as his vision slides sideways before refocusing on the dirt scattered across tiles.
All around him, a lush, organic smell intensifies: fertilizer and earth, growing things and sap, that bright, fresh odor of spring water and flower buds in full bloom.
Everywhere there are potted plants—huge philodendrons crowded next to moth orchids, trellises of Black Baccara roses, and planters teaming with exotic ferns.
From the rafters hang endless rows of greenery, so thick and lush it blocks out the ceiling.
Long tables are set in the middle of the room, crowded thickly with plants, and one single lightbulb above spills a weak glow. Darkness reflects off walls of glass.
That’s all he can see, glass walls and plants and the night as thick as ink.
He’s in the conservatory.
And every green stem and floral bud has turned to stare at him.
Disorientation has him spinning, his brain scrabbling to understand how he traded that stuffy little attic space for this. If he walked here or was taken. And if Laurie is—
Laurie.
He can’t see Laurie anywhere. Did he just leave Evander after all that? After how tenderly he kissed him?
Cold sweat prickles the back of Evander’s neck as he struggles to stand, his legs numb and coltish as he clings to the tables for support.
Tipped-over terra-cotta pots and bags of soil and dishes of propagated leaves scatter the workspace, as if the gardener only stepped out for a minute instead of died brutally, horribly, on the floor two weeks ago.
But the way everything has grown since the night of the murder is unreal.
There is almost nowhere to stand between plants exploding from their pots and vines strangling everything with hundreds of tendrils.
He turns and is caught in long, dangling arms of pothos and grape ivy and has to detangle himself.
Beyond the glass walls, the garden has grown with wild, vicious intensity as if it’s trying to tear open the mansion—and it’s starting to succeed. Huge cracks run along the walls, panes broken as a whole tree branch grows through.
That tight, panicking feeling is back, though Evander can’t tell if it’s claustrophobia from being in this plant-smothered room or the same unease that struck him the first time he came in here. It’s an itch. Or maybe it’s a pull.
He feels dislocated.
Spliced.
He should get out.
Then he looks down at the tiles speckled with spilled potting mix and leaves—and ruby-red droplets.
There is a trail of them, some smeared, some still perfectly round like buttons left to be followed. There is a story to be read in the scuffed footprints and soil scooted aside in a wide arc as if someone fell. Stood. Fell again.
Sick dread starts pounding in Evander’s stomach. He takes a step, slow and unsteady, and follows the blood.
More smashed ceramics lie around the corner next to a pool of glossy red that reflects the dark. Too much, there is way too much.
“Laurie?” It comes out choked, dug through with terror he tries to ignore. He can’t leap to conclusions. It might not even be Laurie’s blood.
Evander slips deeper into the conservatory, away from the weak pool of light to where the plants are muted by a darkness so thick it feels like sludge dripping down skin.
Stifling humidity presses against him from all sides, sucking at his thin reserves of energy.
The plants watch as he passes, reaching out to gently stroke his arm, his neck, the bare skin around his bandaged chest. They are judging. Waiting.
whispering whispering whispering
“Laurie?” he says louder this time, but it cracks at the end and a sudden pain lances through his mouth so viciously that he nearly cries out. “What—” He rubs at his lips, then slips fingers into his mouth to press hard against his throbbing gums.
He finds it then: ruptured flesh, raw and loose, a nub of something sticking out.
It’s sharp enough to slice his tongue when he probs it.
Compulsion makes him tug at it, ignoring the pain, and for a second this is all he focuses on—worming the nub from his mouth until it’s loose enough to yank like a tooth.
Blood gushes in a salty, coppery spray, but he doesn’t care.
He stares at the thorn in his palm, a long, slick root dangling from its bloody end.
Don’t freak out.
But it’s too late. He is hurtling steeply down a spiral so dark, so out of control, that he is being torn apart from bone to marrow.
There is blood on the floor. Thorns in his mouth. He lost time, and not just a few minutes. The afternoon is gone and night has arrived like a thunderclap, like a fist, like the end of the world. He lost hours. And Laurie is gone.
The urge to scream his name is hard to hold back.
Evander starts to run through the conservatory, his heart pounding, his movements clumsy as he shoves aside massive branches heavy with diamond-shaped leaves and black, glossy berries.
He follows the trail of blood—right to a wicker seat cloistered by overgrown alocasia.
Byron Lennox-Hall once sat there with a cup of tea and dissected Evander with a clinical gaze, his alarm barely hidden that his young charge had dared leave the safe confines of his room.
Safe for who, exactly?
Evander pulls up, breathing hard and fast, as sweat mats his curls to his forehead—curls that have grown far too fast, far too long, and trail halfway down his spine. His hand goes to his bandages, to the dull throb slowly intensifying.
But he only cares about one thing.
There, behind the wicker throne, a single leg can be seen, sprawled and trembling. The muddy jean cuff is peppered with blood.
Evander takes a shaky step forward.
The leg draws out of sight, scrapping stiffly on the floor. The whimper is so low, so animal, it could be a fox caught in a steel trap.
Evander slowly brushes aside the massive, deep green alocasia leaves while his heartbeat drops out of his chest.
The world has inverted, the mirror flipped, and he’s suddenly back in that day of the will reading, when he hid in the greenhouse amongst sacks of potting mix with the field guide clutched to his chest as Laurie stood over him.
Only this time it is Evander bearing down like a nightmare made of sticks and twine and unholy thorns while Laurie huddles on the ground in a pitiful attempt to hide.
On his lap is the field guide, open to a sketch of a strange tree that looks mangled and vicious—and almost human.
His arms are wrapped tight around his middle, his head bowed like a supplicant. Everything golden about him has been tarnished, stripped.
He is shivering, hard.
He doesn’t look up.
“What … what happened?” Darkness speckles the edge of Evander’s vision and the vertigo is sudden and ruthless.
Laurie shrinks back at his voice.
It takes everything in Evander not to grab him by the shoulders, clutch him close, scream the question again. But something holds him back.
Laurie still won’t look up.
The drawing in the field guide isn’t a tree. It looks more like a monster, uncanny in the way of dryads and fauns as they playact humanity amongst their fur and horns and skin made of bark.
“You need to tell me what happened.” Evander can’t keep his voice even. “Did—did someone find us? I never know wh-what happens when I have an…” But he can’t finish when it feels like a lie made out of knives on his tongue.
He folds himself down into a crouch, his fist pressed hard to his mouth. His tongue can’t stop poking at the raw flesh in his gum where he yanked the thorn, but worse is the way he can feel other nubs in there, under the skin. Waiting to cut free.
“Laurie?” He breathes the word so gently.
Laurie finally tilts his chin up and there are tear-tracks through the grit on his cheeks, his swollen mouth a mottling of mauve and red. Though the gouges beneath his lip look less like teeth marks now; they look like a row of punctures from thorns.
A terrible haunting has settled in his eyes and he makes an effort to slow his breathing, but there is a hitch of unfiltered, glassy pain.
Evander wants to reach for him, but he can’t make himself move.
“It’s okay,” Laurie whispers, and it’s so tender, so sweet, that it breaks Evander in half.
“What did I do?” Evander sounds frantic, shrill, and when Laurie doesn’t speak, there is nothing to do but cut the answer out of his own throat. “I’m the same as Carrington, aren’t I?”
“Not … not exactly.” Laurie’s arms shift slightly in their strangling grip around his own middle. He’s holding himself together. Or hiding something.
Carefully, Evander reaches out and wraps his fingers around Laurie’s brace. He tugs and there is resistance—and then Laurie simply gives up.
Evander pulls Laurie’s arm away from his middle and stares at the shredded T-shirt. At the blackened blood soaking his side. Between the flutters of fabric, bite marks can be seen ravaging his flesh.
Blood oozes from the wound and drips slowly to the floor.
It is such a slow, nonchalant sound.
pat pat pat
Evander’s fingers jam hard against his mouth again, and he can taste it again: the bits of flesh caught in his back molars.
The sound that pulls from him is low and animal. He scrambles backward until his shoulders hit one of the long tables of plants, and then they both just sit there staring at each other, a chasm of violation between them.
He did that to Laurie.
He did that.
Clarity slices across him in a slash: He probably hunted Laurie, chased him, attacked him again and again as he begged Evander to stop, to come back to himself, to wait please please please—
The ghostly cadence of the screams rings in his skull, growing more horrifying by the second.
did he did he did he swallow Laurie’s flesh and is that why saliva is pooling under his tongue right now and why his stomach is clawing holes in itself in desperate, ravaging hunger hunger hunger—
“It’s okay.” Laurie sounds so far away, and there is something irrevocably broken about this voice. “I knew it could happen and I wanted … I wanted you anyway.”
Evander squeezes his eyes shut, his shaking fingers going to the bandages around his chest. He slowly starts tugging at the ends.
Laurie’s swallowing hard, but his breathing has quickened in a labored, worrying way.
“There is nothing else to me but the hollow spaces I’ve carved out for you.
I knew I’d cut myself to pieces on you if we ever had the chance to touch, but I wanted to.
” His voice unravels, massacred on yearning. “Let me ruin myself on you.”
“It was you.” Evander can taste it, the blood. “You unlocked my door. You let me out.”
A soft sob escapes Laurie and he presses the heel of his palm to one eye.
“What’s h-happening to me?” Evander wipes at his face quickly, wondering now if there is blood staining his cheeks.
There is no use pretending anymore.
The garden holds him like a puppet.
Laurie’s mouth trembles until he forces a smile so soft it hits Evander like pure agony. “You woke up,” he says.
With sudden, manic fervor, Evander unravels the last of his bandages and hurls them away.
He stares down at the history of scar tissue he’s always worn with resentment, expecting new surgery incisions across his torso.
He never asked why they kept cutting open his ribs.
His only real wound had been across his stomach, long since healed and scarred.
He never questioned anything.
The scream grows in his skull as he stares down at himself.
He has been vivisected—sternum to the bottom of his rib cage.
A cut meant for heart surgeries. A cut meant to remove.
Vines entwine through the stitches and tiny mauve flowers blossom from his skin.
Clover has begun to grow between the ladder rungs of his too-sharp ribs, as if it has always belonged there.
It is easy, so easy, to push his fingers into the loose stitching, to dig his hand into his chest, deep and then deeper, while terror pools in his mouth. There should be gushing blood, the undulating pulse of organs, pain so eviscerating he should black out in agony.
Instead, he has sunk half his hand into his sternum while stitches snap and soft petals of fairy foxglove drift to the floor. Red, sticky sap oozes between his fingers.
All he can feel is dirt and bark as he wraps a fist around his own rib bone of soft, green wood. The end lies jagged where it’s been broken off.
Harvested.
When he raises his head, his whole body trembles and his eyes meet Laurie’s with unmitigated horror.
Laurie’s voice comes so soft, so wretched, and his chest is moving too fast as if he can’t quite get a full breath.
“I never tried to sacrifice you, because I was sacrificing me.” Each word shatters as it hits the ground. “I asked the garden for you. Then I dug you up.”