Chapter Sixteen Shea
This is a memory, or else a dream—the Thorley house in deep summer, in the middle of a heat wave. The air is so thick, it snaps against the pavement. Poppy and Camellia are in the hammock out back, feet tangled and eyes on the sky. Laughing themselves sick over a private joke.
Shea isn’t with them. She’s standing in the garage, her bare feet burning, a crown of yellow hawkweed wilting atop her head.
She wandered over in search of Howard, the family beagle, and now she’s here—watching Asher work.
It’s two days before he leaves for the garrison.
For now, he’s home, and things are the same as they always are.
He sits on a stool by his bike, a rag over his shoulder and Howard dozing at his feet.
His hands are stained with oil. Sweat adheres his T-shirt to his spine. They both know she’s staring.
“Are you really going?”
“Yeah,” he says. It comes out bitter as a rind. “Looks like I am.”
Off in the distance, Camellia lets out a full-bodied cackle. The sound carries in on a stale breeze. Everywhere, everywhere, the air hangs hot and heavy. Shea wants to unzip her skin and crawl clear out of it.
“You don’t have to do what they tell you. You could leave.”
He sets the wrench down with a clatter, startling Howard awake. “And where would I go?”
“The Gravewood.”
She hadn’t meant to say it like that—like a reflex. Like she thinks about it all the time. Running. Leaving. The forest, cool and dark. Horrified, Asher glances quickly around—searching the garage like he’s certain someone might have overheard.
Finally—stiffly—he says, “Don’t joke.”
“It’s not a joke. I mean it.”
“You want me to pledge myself to the devil? How is that any better?”
She’s practiced this, at home in her mirror. At night in her bed. In the mornings, as she brushed her teeth. “Because then I could come with you.”
His expression shifts to one of surprise. “Parker—”
“You promised,” she says quickly. “Remember? You promised we’d leave together.”
“That was years ago. We were kids.”
“So what if it was? Are you saying you didn’t mean it?”
“I did mean it, I just—” He falls silent as Camellia appears, dragging Poppy behind her. They stutter to an abrupt halt at the sight of Shea in the garage.
“You’re not allowed to steal my friends,” Camellia declares, jabbing an accusatory finger at her brother. “Shea isn’t interested in your dirty old bike, anyway. Tell him, Shea.”
Her cheeks heat. “I, uh—”
“We’re going inside to see if there’s ice pops,” Poppy interjects. “Want one?”
“I’ll be right there.”
“Perfect.” Poppy ushers Camellia hurriedly inside.
Alone again, the silence blisters. Asher tugs the rag from his shoulder and falls to cleaning his knuckles, his jaw locked, his stare crawling through her.
The air smells of hibiscus. Floral. Tart.
She wants to tell him she doesn’t know how to watch another person leave.
She wants to say that she hasn’t learned how to say goodbye—that she’s never even been given the chance.
She doesn’t say it. And she hadn’t said goodbye that day, either.
The dream is all wrong—she’d gone inside with Camellia and Poppy.
She’d sat on the counter and eaten an ice pop, feeding the last few licks of it to Howard.
When she’d finally gathered the courage to sneak back outside, Asher had been gone, and so had his bike. It was the last time she saw him.
But what if she’d stayed?
What if she’d said goodbye? What if they’d made a new promise?
She wants to ask him now—wants to start over, to do better, to rewrite every wasted moment—but she can’t.
She’s gripped in the coils of a slithering sort of awareness, immobilized by the feel of a presence at her back.
A shadow, cool and dark. It’s Lys, standing stalwart in a blaze of yellow sun.
The light eats away at him, devouring him in sunlit blisters.
He looks like a true skeleton this way, all bone and sinew, the hollows of his eyes as black as hell.
“This will end, too,” he says in a voice like death. “Like everything else.”
When she swallows, she tastes hibiscus.
She opens her eyes.
The moment she does, panic engulfs her. She’s on a bed, her wrists and ankles strapped to the mattress and her chest belted tight.
The room is basement dark, windowless and dank.
The only light comes from several wall-mounted plant lamps, under which sits a row of glass terrariums. Inside each cloche blooms a poison plant—blue skullcap and white oleander, toothy larkspur and flowering nightshade and spiky castor beans, red as blood.
Someone is shouting. She can’t place the noise. Can’t slot the bilabials into words. It all pings, indecipherable, off the walls. The light hums, flickering at vertigo speed. Everything loses shape and regains it, focusing like a camera’s aperture with each blink.
“Look,” says a voice, just out of her line of sight. “Oliver, look. Look, and then breathe. She’s awake. She’s unharmed. You’re making this harder on yourself.”
The shouting stops. She tries to crane her head and finds movement impossible, a thin strap belting her forehead. She feels like a butterfly, pinned to a board for examination. In the quiet, Lys’s voice sharpens into coherence.
“Let her out.”
“Now, Oliver.” Egor sounds weary, as though they’ve gone several rounds already.
“You’re being willfully obtuse. It doesn’t suit you.
I know you feel it—the misalignment in your proprioception.
In hers. It goes well beyond a youthful obsession, and I saw it the moment you appeared on my doorstep.
How it doesn’t keep you awake at night—”
“It does. Is that what you want to hear?”
“What I want,” says Egor carefully, “is to take a closer look. No one has to get hurt.”
Distantly, there comes a hammering sound. Another meaningless noise, no perspective to give it roots. The buzzing light makes her dizzy.
“You want me to cooperate?” Lys’s voice is flat. “You want me to be a good little lab rat? Let her out.”
The hammering gets louder. Shea’s mouth is cotton, her thoughts mud. Her tongue feels thick and unwieldy and she can’t dredge up the words to speak, to scream. Her heart thuds in time with the distant pounding. A snare against a drum.
“He’ll get through the door eventually,” says Lys. “How do you think that’ll end?”
Not a snare, a fist. Not a drum, a door.
Asher’s outside. More sounds drift toward her as she struggles against her bindings.
Egor appears, lit from beneath by the lamps.
He’s slipped into the pressed white of a lab coat, an stethoscope slung around his neck.
A silver head mirror glimmers down at her like a third eye.
Panic pops into fireworks and she thrashes, pulling at her straps.
“There, there,” says Egor, in a voice she’s sure he means to be soothing. “There’s no need for alarm. I’m not going to hurt you.”
He bends over her, pressing back her sweating hair. She tries to flinch away, but she’s bound too tight. She feels wild and tethered—her fangless teeth bared—as he presses two fingers to her pulse and checks his watch.
“She’s got a nice, strong pulse. She’ll be back on her feet in no time.” To Shea, he says, “I’m going to go ahead and loosen these straps. I’d like you to sit up slowly. Understood?”
She nods as best as she can, and he falls to unfastening her ties.
Outside, the hammering has stopped. In the quiet, her ears ring.
The lights flicker maddeningly at her peripherals.
She allows Egor to help her into a sitting position.
A dizzying heat crawls up her neck and she tips forward, catching her hands on her knees.
Slowly, the room around her coalesces into shape.
A human skeleton hangs from a hook nearby, ivy wound along its bones.
A wide curio cabinet sits flush against the wall, several wet specimen jars nestled against the shelving.
Backlit, she can just make out the shapes of the creatures within.
A frog, its webbed feet extended. A rabbit, its little body curled inward. A fawn, its head tucked in.
A human fetus, its full-black eyes wide and unsettling.
Shackled beside the shelf is Lys, his arms hyperextended and his wrists cuffed, inked fingers hanging loose.
His expression is as murderous as she’s ever seen it.
The lamplight throws the lines of him into monstrous relief, accentuating the twin peaks of solid bone that curve out from beneath the messy curtain of his hair. He looks like a satyr in the dark.
A storybook monster, and not a boy at all.
“Do you hear that?” he asks Egor, with bone-chilling calm. “Thorley’s stopped knocking.”
“Perhaps he’s come to his senses.”
“Or maybe he’s got a plan B. I’d work fast, if I were you.”
“It’s just a small sample collection, Oliver,” says Egor, reaching for a metal trolley.
It clatters toward him on a pair of squeaky wheels, a wide array of sharp-looking tools rattling atop the tray.
“There’s no need to put up such a fuss. Aren’t you at all curious to know how your insides reflect the changes on the outside? ”
“No,” says Lys.
Egor tch s, reaching for a silver lancet knife. “Insolent, as always.”
“It’s been said.” Lys eyes the blade in Egor’s hand. Sweat beads along his brow. “You’re not coming anywhere near me with that.”
“Your mother brought you here because she thought I could help you,” Egor reminds him, turning the lancet over so that it catches the light. “Let me help you.”
“Last time I was here, you said I was beyond help.”
“The variables have changed,” says Egor. “This girl—a human girl, no less—has caused a violent upheaval in the natural order of your existence. She’s a cataclysm, Oliver. You will not survive her. Not without my help.”
Lys’s gaze snaps to hers. There’s panic in his eyes, wild and dark.