Chapter Twenty-Three Lysander
It’s getting worse.
The clock, tick-tock-ticking in his head.
The bomb, tick-tock-ticking in his chest.
Nothing inside him will be quiet. Not his thoughts.
Not his dreams. Not the bugs in his veins.
They crawl along the empty arteries, scrape at the ventricles of his heart, boring deep, deep, deep.
Sometimes he thinks that if he lay down and died, his body would get right back up again and keep going on without him in a mad little jig.
He thinks of a poem. A nursery rhyme—he detests children’s rhymes. He hates the repetition. The nonsense words. The oversimplified cadence. Most of all he hates how they make him think of his mother. Home again, home again, jiggety jig.
He’s not thinking of his mother right now.
He’s thinking of her . It’s hard not to—she’s looking right at him. Her eyes are narrowed in anger. Her voice is pinched tight.
“Asher, stop. Stop it—don’t touch him. He’s fine. He just needs to rest.”
He’s conscious of a boy’s voice. A low, irritable baritone.
A punishing white light jackknifes along his periphery and then disappears.
A door slams. There’s a featherlight touch at his brow, the feel of fingers pushing back his hair.
His head is on fire. His bones grind tight. Everything, everything aches.
And then, in the maelstrom, he hears her. “Catmint needs full sun and well-drained soil. It blooms in late spring and has these really pretty tubular flowers. It’s not as sweet smelling as lavender, but the bees love it—”
Time stands still. Or else it passes. He comes to on his feet, in the dark of a bathroom he knows cold.
Wide wood paneling. A scalloped pedestal sink.
The timeline of his life threatens to collapse in on itself.
For a moment, he’s certain he’s six years old again, cowering in the bathtub with his hands over his ears, waiting for his mother to stop wailing.
Everything ends. Everything ends.
There’s no wailing now. The door is shut.
The curtain has been ripped down from its rod.
The mirror is shattered. He grips the edges of the sink and stares into the glass.
His own reflection leers back at him in compound fragments.
Not a frightened little boy at all, but a beast. Black eyes.
Bruised lids. Horns dark as pitch, curving back in on him in needle-sharp points.
The Gravewood fucking Devil, breaking everything he touches.
The rattle of the knob brings him bolt upright. The door opens and Shea slips in, falling back against it until it clicks. For a long time, neither of them speaks.
“Say something,” she orders. “So I know you’re in there.”
“You walked away.” His voice is graveled.
“You told me to.”
“Obviously, I didn’t mean it.”
“And what about everything else? Did you mean that?”
He takes a tentative step closer. When she doesn’t run, he takes another.
She’s watching him, wary, her back pressed to the wall.
He doesn’t know how to tell her he regrets every word he said.
He doesn’t know how to say he’s sorry in a way that means something.
Carefully—experimentally—he fists his fingers in the hem of her T-shirt.
Same as he watched Asher do, waist deep in the surf.
They both look down at his hand. Neither of them moves a muscle.
“I acted badly,” he whispers. “Here’s what I should have said last night—I don’t care if you’re his, as long as you’re also mine.”
Her eyes snap to his. She looks surprised. Then resigned.
She presses a hand flat against his sternum.
His heart thunders into her palm as hope roars into his chest. Gently—firmly—she gives him a push.
It isn’t like every other time, when she’s pushed him over an edge.
This time, she’s pushing him away. His grip on her comes loose.
His back hits the sink, hope extinguishing just as quickly as it ignited.
She holds him there at arm’s length, the apex of his heart at the tips of her fingers.
“I’m not his,” she tells him. “I’m not yours, either.”
Fear bolts through him in a killing strike. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do.” Her touch is as ephemeral as a butterfly’s. Her voice is flat, lacking inflection. “You were right, before. This thing between us—it’s transactional. I misread the situation.”
Her words are a sucker punch to the gut. “You didn’t misread anything.”
“Blood for batteries. That’s what this is. It’s what this has always been.”
“Stop.”
There’s never any light in her eyes when she looks at him, and he hates it. The night Asher Thorley kissed her, she’d come in from the rain with eyes shining. All he knows how to do is snuff things out.
To take pretty things and break them, just like his father.
“I came in to check on you, that’s all.” She’s eerily calm, and he can’t stand it. He wants her to shout. To cry. To fight him— push him—until they’re through to the other side of whatever this is. He wants her to kiss him the way she kissed Asher. On her toes, a tide rushing in.
She doesn’t. She only asks, “Do you need to feed?”
He’s never heard a viler question in all his life. “No.”
“Then you and I are done here.”
Panic sinks its fangs into his throat and he catches her wrist quick, before she can leave. His bite marks leer up at him, feed after feed stitched into her skin in raised pink scars. Everything feels fractured, sharp. Shea studies his fingers encircling her wrist, her expression closed off.
“I panicked,” he says. “I said things I shouldn’t have—”
“Egor van Haut said you and I have knocked each other out of alignment.”
He blinks, slow. “Van Haut is a nutcase.”
“Is he?” She looks up at him, her stare empty. “I asked Poppy about proprioception. She said it’s your body’s ability to sense where it is. Since we met, all I feel is you. All I see is you. But that’s not love. I thought it was, but it’s just the feed messing with our heads.”
His grip turns raptorial as his panic builds. “Please.”
“Let go of my wrist, Oliver.”
“I can’t.” The voice that comes out of him doesn’t even sound like his. “I need you.”
Her breath catches. The sound is so quiet, it’s almost imperceptible. But he hears it. He clings to it.
“It’s just the feed,” she repeats, and she’s lying. He knows she is. She has to be. “It’s not real.”
“Don’t—don’t say that.” He gapes down at her, bewildered, searching for a tell. “How can you think that? I’m so fucking gone for you, Shea Parker. Everyone sees it but you.”
She blinks. Blinks again. She looks like she did that night in the devil’s backbone, clearing her eyes of a thrall. Resurfacing. He can feel himself losing her, and it makes him rabid with terror.
“Tell me what I have to do,” he begs. “Tell me how to fix this.”
“There’s nothing to fix.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “No, I don’t accept that.”
“Let go of her, Lys.”
His head kicks up, and there’s Asher, standing on the threshold as if he’s been there all along.
And maybe he has been. Lysander is off-kilter, unable to see anything—hear anything—other than the girl in front of him.
Funny, he always thought the fire in her chest burned the same as the flame in his.
And now he’s gone and snuffed it out. She’s cold as a coal in his hand.
“Did you hear me?” asks Asher. “I said, let her go.”
He obeys, blood humming in his ears. Shea slinks back from him the moment she’s free, gripping her wrist to her chest like he’s bitten her.
He feels disoriented, sick, his equilibrium thrown off.
Out of alignment, his body attuned to nothing but the way she moves, the way she breathes, the way her heart beats out of lockstep.
Distantly, he hears Asher ask, “Are you okay?”
“I have nothing to say to you,” snaps Shea. “Not unless it’s about Ellie.”
She’s leaving, her bare feet thudding against the hardwood, Asher on her heels.
“Shea, come on,” he calls, “we have to talk at some—”
A door slams shut somewhere out of sight. It rattles the joists, sets the old wooden cabin resettling on its haunches. Lysander tips back against the cool porcelain of the sink, striving for a calm he doesn’t feel. He can sense Asher watching him, his expression grim.
“Are we fighting, too?”
“Don’t start,” says Asher.
“Why not? Misery loves company.”
Mephistopheles. A Faustian horror. A master manipulator. A demon from the deep woods. He is what he is. What he’s always been.
“Why haven’t you killed me?” he asks Asher.
Asher grimaces. “What kind of question is that?”
“I’ve punched a hole through your life at every turn.” He runs a finger along the inside of his collar, the muscles in his neck stiff. “You’re just going along with it. It doesn’t make sense. You’re a good shot. Why haven’t you taken it?”
He doesn’t miss the way Asher’s trigger finger twitches. “You and I have a deal.”
“And I haven’t held up my end of it. We’re no closer to finding your sister than we were at the start. We’re not even looking.”
“Don’t bait me,” says Asher.
“It’s an innocent conversation, Sunshine.”
“No, you’re upset, and you’re looking for a fight. I’m not giving you one.”
Lysander sniffs. “What kind of friend are you?”
“ Are we friends again?” Asher’s brows kick up. “I thought I was just your foot soldier.”
He shoves past Asher with a snarl, refusing to dignify him with an answer as he heads swiftly for the shuttered door at the far end of the hall. Un-fucking-flappable as always, Asher falls into steady step behind him.
“Leave her alone, Lys.”
He doesn’t. He can’t. He shoulders open the door to his childhood room and skids immediately into Poppy, standing just on the other side. In her arms, the possum hisses up at him, teeth bared. He draws up short, snatching his fingers out of reach.
“What are you,” he asks, “security?”
Poppy’s smile doesn’t touch her eyes. “I think you should find somewhere else to be.”
“I have nowhere else to be.”
There is nothing more important than this—fixing what he broke.
Mending it, before the cracks can splinter into his psyche.
Before there’s nothing left of him. He can see Shea just behind Poppy, her legs tucked under her in his mother’s rocking chair, red starlight wobbling around her head.
In her lap she cradles a little board book, a thin white rabbit on the front.
The spine is creased, pages bent. He knows every line cold.
He barreled in here without a plan—without any thought in his head but her, her, her—but now that he’s here he knows exactly what he wants to say.
“My mom used to read that to me,” he says, speaking around Poppy. “The boy in the story loved that rabbit so much, its fur wore thin and its stitching came loose.”
“Oliver,” warns Poppy.
“There’s a line in the book about what it takes to be real,” he says, speaking like he has something to prove. “It’s not about how you’re made. It’s about how you’re loved—”
“Oliver.”
“—so much that it rubs you raw.”
Shea’s eyes are on his. He swallows around the grit in his throat. Threadbare , he’d called her. He’d said it all wrong, that night at Mercy Ridge. He’s always saying everything wrong.
“That was very nice,” says Poppy, wedging the door into his chest. “Now leave.”
“Wait.” He jams his boot in the gap just before it closes. Reaching into his pocket, he pries out the small brass sprocket he’d pulled from the bell strike at the old stone church, collapsing the system with a single, swift tug. “Can you give her this?”
Poppy stares down at the cog like it’s live ammunition. “What is it?”
“A birthday gift.”
“Her birthday is over.”
“Poppy.”
“Oliver.”
“Just give it to her.” With more defensiveness than the situation merits, he adds, “It’s for her necklace.”
“I’ll consider it.” She plucks the cog from his open hand. “Now go away.”
The door snicks shut before he can argue.
He’s left staring at the splintering inlay of his childhood bedroom, the dark swimming around him in dusty fractals.
And he’s not alone. He can feel eyes on him, cool and assessing.
Asher stands a few feet away, his shoulder butting up against the wide paneled wall.
“What are you looking at?” he asks hotly.
“You,” says Asher. “It’s like watching a train wreck.”
He wrings both hands over the back of his neck. “Fuck.”
“She’ll forgive you,” says Asher. “You just need to back off.”
Lysander barks out a bitter laugh and sinks to the floor. Swiping his hood onto his head, he kicks out his feet and settles in to wait. After a minute, Asher joins him. He lowers himself with a grunt, forearms draped over bent knees.
“Are we going to sit here until she comes out?” asks Lysander.
Asher lets his head fall back against the wall. “Looks like it.”
“Pathetic.”
It’s nearly night by the time the door swings wide. They both launch upright, knocking one into the other in their haste. Poppy stands on the threshold, her eyes big. Lysander braces himself to be admonished—chewed out and then chased away.
“It’s Ellie,” she says instead. “She was here.”
“What do you mean?” Asher cuts a glance at Lysander. “What do you mean, she was here?”
“There’s something on the wall behind the crib. Come look.”
They pile into the room to find Shea on her knees, her flashlight trained on a section of wall along the crib. Lysander doesn’t need to get close to know what the majority of the writing says. He’s heard it all his life, chanted over him like an exaltation. His legacy, written in blood.
From the fount of the forest comes the age of the beast.
Shea kneels before it like a priestess at an altar. His own personal cataclysm. A cog in the chain of his psyche. Pull her loose, and what then? He can already feel it, building inside him. A reckoning. An upheaval.
“Look,” says Shea. “It’s right here. She wrote it in our code.”
He bends in close, elbowing Asher out of the way. Among the myriad inscriptions, a single line of nonsense words has been carved into the cedar with a knife. Hgzb zdzb uiln gsv uozgdllw.
“What does it say?” asks Asher.
It’s a minute before Shea answers, running trembling fingers over the disrupted grain as she translates the schoolyard cipher. Finally, she rises to her feet. Her flashlight arcs feebly through the room. She’s a pale blade of light, knifing through the dark where he grew.
“It says ‘Stay away from the Flatwood,’?” she says. “And it’s a message for me.”