Chapter Eighteen Lysander
The ride in the camper’s back bedroom is the worst Lysander has ever endured in his life.
Not because the suspension rattles his teeth. Not because sunlight pokes in pestilent pinpricks through the blinds. Not because everything smells wet and sweet, like mildew.
Because the last time he was in this camper, it was with his mother.
He thinks of Viola in the dead of summer, heat wrapping everything in an infernal sweat.
He can still hear her voice, imbued with a false cheeriness that made him want to shout: We’re going to go north and see a friend of mine.
Would you like that? It’ll be fun. A road trip, just the two of us.
He has a little boy about your age. I think you’ll like him.
There’s a shallow laceration in his side.
He lifts his shirt and jabs a finger at it, watching as his skin knits itself slowly back together.
Distantly, he is aware of the trill of chains coming loose.
The door opens a crack and a thin strip of yellow appears, broken by the broad-shouldered frame of a boy in an orange cap.
Lysander can’t remember his name.
He pokes around in his head, irritable, and discovers he can’t remember much of anything.
His head is full of synapses, misfiring in sparks.
Words and words and words and words. None of them his.
None of them sane. All of them meaningless drivel, forced into his brain by his mother’s ceaseless recitation.
Again, Oliver. Again, the sun isn’t up yet.
“All things burn with it,” he says. “As with a flame.”
The watchdog’s scowl is so stark, Lysander mimics it without even trying.
“What did you say to me?”
“?‘Nameless,’?” says Lysander. “By William Montgomerie.”
The answering quiet knocks at his chest. Or maybe that’s his heart. Maybe it’s moments away from exploding. Maybe he’ll take the whole place with him when it does. He blinks and sees a girl. Straw-colored hair and a knife in her hands. Blood under her boots. Lys, look at me.
He can’t remember her name, either. It makes him feel like something vital has been torn out of him. Something black and blue and beating. Everything hurts.
“I don’t know who William Montgomerie is,” says the watchdog. He sounds annoyed.
“Unsurprising. You strike me as illiterate.”
The watchdog’s mouth quirks. “If you’re cracking jokes, you must be feeling better.”
“It wasn’t a joke,” he mutters, and crooks his elbow over his eyes. “Close the door. The light hurts.”
The soldier obliges, slamming the door shut.
The light snuffs out. Lysander feels the mattress sag as the watchdog collapses onto the bed beside him.
He peers out from under his elbow and watches the soldier pluck his ball cap off his head and drop it over his face.
Asher , he thinks. Thorley. His name flits back into Lysander’s awareness like a moth.
“Don’t even think about feeding,” he says. “If you come anywhere near me, I’ll open the blinds.”
Lysander replaces his elbow without a word. He imagines ants are crawling through his brain—digging at the cavities of his face. He wants to claw his skin clean off. Wants to howl and thrash and tear.
Instead, he says, “You shot me.”
“You’ll be fine,” comes Asher’s mumbled response. “You’re not dead.”
“It is easy to be dead,” mutters Lysander. “None wears the face you knew.”
Mouthless dead. Charles Hamilton Sorley.
One more time, my little love. It’s almost dawn.
“It creeps me out when you do that,” says Asher. “Shut up for a little bit, I need to sleep.”
Lysander is quiet as long as he can stand it, the suspension clunking horribly, his molars grinding down to dust.
Caving, he asks, “Who’s driving?”
“Parker.” Asher’s voice slips from beneath his cap.
Where Asher’s name skimmed into his subconscious, Shea’s pierces it like an arrow. He sucks in a punctured breath. “She’s hitting every fucking pothole in Pennsylvania.”
Asher snorts, and then he’s out, breathing deeply. He sleeps on his back, his throat exposed and his pulse slow. Lysander holds himself still and wonders if this is what it feels like to be trusted. He falls asleep counting Asher Thorley’s heartbeat.
They’ve come to a stop by the time Asher wakes.
The room is dark, the light at the edge of the blinds tinged red with a sunset.
Lysander stands propped against the low-lying cabinets and untangles a Slinky he found stuffed in one of the drawers.
His Slinky, the steel wire hopelessly jumbled.
He waits for Asher to notice him. It doesn’t take long.
From beneath the cap slips a bone-weary sigh.
“Is there anything else you can do to occupy your time?”
Lysander pries the coils apart like an accordion. “You know what I find interesting?”
“Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s deeply disturbing—”
“You haven’t asked me about your sister since we left Mercy Ridge.”
The Slinky trills shut. Asher lifts his cap off his face and peers out at Lysander from beneath. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but we’ve been under attack at every turn.”
“That’s not it,” says Lysander. “I think you know your sister is dead.”
The pause that follows is too long. Too damning. It takes Asher a beat to recover.
“If I really thought that, then what the hell am I doing here? Why would I desert my post and get a bounty put on my head in the process? Why would I follow you into the Gravewood on a suicide mission? Why would I give up everything ?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet,” admits Lysander.
“Yeah?” Asher drops his cap back onto his face. “Well, do me a favor and leave me alone until you do.”
···
They’re deep in the devil’s backbone, surrounded on all sides by towering loblolly and ancient red maples.
A former state park, gravel lot shot through with spurge.
Through the windshield, Lysander can just make out the last of the daylight glinting off a metal slide.
Shea perches on the bottom, the crossbow in her lap.
Waiting for the last of the sun to fade, Lysander drops into the dinette alongside Poppy.
She shifts to the side without ever once looking up, too absorbed in her knitting.
There’s no discernible pattern to the garment in her lap.
The colors clash. The yarn is knotted. It reminds him of his mother’s cross-stitching.
He watches her complete a row before he speaks.
“Tell me about Asher’s sister.”
Poppy glances up at him, her brow crinkled in concentration. “What do you want to know?”
“Anything,” he says. “Everything. What was she like?”
Poppy considers the question before answering, “She’s a lot like her brother, actually.”
“A giant stick-in-the-mud?”
“No,” says Poppy, stifling a smile. “Assertive.”
“Ah.”
“But in a protective way, you know? She’d do anything for her friends.”
Lysander drums his fingers on the laminate. “And you don’t think she ran?”
“I know she didn’t.” It twists out of her, sharp, and Lysander studies her anew.
“You love her.”
It’s not a question. He can see it in the color of her cheeks. He can hear it in the stutter of her pulse. He can sense it, pinching the air in her throat. He waits as she scrambles for something to say, her fingers knotting in the fabric.
“I haven’t told her so, but yes. I think I might.”
“What is that like?”
“Loving someone?” Her eyes lift to his. “That’s an impossible question. I don’t have an answer.”
“I don’t believe you,” he says. “You’re a know-it-all.”
Her nose crinkles. “You know, some people might consider that rude.”
“It isn’t rude, it’s true. You have an answer for everything.”
“That’s hyperbolic,” says Poppy. “I don’t know everything . And love isn’t an exact science. There are no set parameters. It looks different for everyone.”
Outside, the sun has set. Moonlight trickles down in broad, leafy shafts.
From where Lysander sits, he can just make out the lines of Shea.
She’s on her feet, gazing up at the cosmos.
Sometimes, in his very worst moments, he thinks he’d like to black out all the stars—cast the whole of the universe in darkness so there’s nowhere she can go where he isn’t. But whatever that is, it isn’t love.
At least, he doesn’t think so.
“That’s a hideous scarf, by the way,” he tells Poppy, heading for the door.
Her smile is small. “It is, isn’t it? I’ve decided it’s the perfect metaphor.”
“For what?”
“For love, I guess.”
He looks back at her, half in and half out. Cold careens in through the crack. “Love is a scarf full of holes?”
“Love is hideous.”
And there they are again—thoughts of Shea, pulsing through his head. Occupying far too much space in his brain . We’re doing an ugly thing . He hopes she never thinks about anything half as much as he thinks about her. He wouldn’t wish this feeling on his enemy.
“See?” he says, smirking up at Poppy. “You did have an answer.”
···
He finds Shea seated on a swing, its steel joists overgrown in wood sorrel.
The November air is warmer this far south, but she’s layered as it gets.
She’s stolen his hoodie and it peeks out from beneath her flannel, hood up and sleeves overlong, the cuffs engulfing her hands so only the pale buds of her fingers are visible. Her cross gleams silver at her throat.
It’s meant to ward him off. A holy relic, intended to burn.
It doesn’t matter that it’s only superstition—it could sear him to bone, and he’d still be out here, lowering his skeleton into the vacant swing beside her.
Silently, he wills her to look at him. She doesn’t, even when the chains grind noisily beneath him.
He kicks out his feet and joins her in looking up at the stars, feeling resentful.
“Barry Bonds,” he says, when the quiet begins to corrode his patience.
She blinks over at him. “What?”