Chapter 18 Arthur
Arthur
I’d spent a lot of time over the years thinking about homes.
When we were seventeen, Eva had told me that home was simply wherever we put down roots and grew, but that was easy to say when you grew things just by existing.
It was harder for me. I couldn’t stormproof my thoughts like people did their houses when the weather turned inclement.
I’d tried. I’d taken Eva’s advice countless times and tried to let rainy thoughts pass through without judgment.
But it was hard. I’d never had a brick-and-mortar house, and my body was my only true constant. If I was my own home, I wanted to board up my windows and keep the monsters out, not let them in.
But you couldn’t keep out a monster that lived inside you.
The aspens seemed to undulate around us as we hiked, the dark knots in pale bark giving the uncanny impression of eyes watching in my periphery. They never moved when I looked at them straight, but I felt them watching, and the hairs on the back of my neck rose.
Maybe I was being paranoid.
I tightened the straps of my pack and tried to ignore the ache in my plum-bruised knuckles.
Before leaving the van on the side of the road, we’d wrapped my hands in clean white strips of linen from the first aid box.
More bruises dotted my body in places I hadn’t really had the opportunity to examine, most of them scuffs and scrapes acquired in the jailbreak.
But the stitches were by far the worst of it. They ached with every step. The monster tried to help, but even it couldn’t numb all pain, and honestly, I didn’t want it to. Being numb too often meant I was slipping into the monster’s hold again. At least when I was hurting I knew I was me.
The touch of wind curled through the trees, brushing my skin in a way that made me feel at once too cold and far, far too hot. I couldn’t tell Eva that after the stink I’d made about coming along. She might make me turn back, and I couldn’t do that.
There were so many things I couldn’t fix; I just wanted to do this one good thing for Jack. And then I would leave, since that was clearly what Eva wanted. If her sour response at the trailhead hadn’t made that perfectly clear, then her silence since had certainly done the trick.
The ghost of a song moved in the breeze. If I didn’t know better, I might have sworn it was a voice. I shucked off the feeling. Maybe I was truly, finally losing my mind.
“No,” the monster said. “I hear it too.”
That didn’t exactly comfort me.
The monster’s unease pressed against me like a second skin. “Maybe this was a bad idea.” It didn’t like how many places on our body were hurting. It didn’t like that we were headed away from civilization. Most of all, it didn’t like this forest.
But unsettling trees or not, I had to do this. We owed it to Jack to at least try.
“You could let me help you.”
“No,” I muttered.
A strange flicker of vulnerability entered the monster’s voice. “Why do you fight me?”
I didn’t answer. It knew why. My deepest regrets had been sown by the monster’s impulsive judgment. Its sense of justice lay on a monochrome scale of black and white, measured only by what hurt me, which was, objectively, a terrible metric.
“Stop.” Eva held up a hand, nose pressed to the atlas. I slapped a mosquito. The uptick of humidity was a beacon to the little vampires.
“What—” A tremor rolled beneath my feet, stalling my question and forcing me to step back. A root snaked out from the soil, flailing like a cut worm split by the blade of a shovel. I sucked in a breath and stepped back.
Eva turned. “What’s wrong?”
I pointed, mouth agape, to the wriggling root just as it slunk back into the dirt. “There. It moved!”
Eva squinted, following my finger. “What do you mean?”
“I mean it moved, Ev!”
“Okay, okay,” she said, eyes widening in surprise at my vigor. Worry clouded her features, but I couldn’t tell if she believed me. I was sure of what I’d seen.
There was something wrong with this forest.
Or maybe… it was just her gift? Eva could be making the roots move without even realizing it. The moment I thought it, I relaxed.
We’d been able to do little to hide the trail of flowers that grew behind her as we walked, leaving an irregular pattern of goldenrod, asters, and bright orange butterfly milkweed weaving through the aspen trees.
Most likely, no one would even come up that road.
And if they did, who would be smart enough to connect a trail of wildflowers to her anyway?
It would be fine.
I licked my lips, the skin so dry it had split. The subtle taste of blood mixed with the salt of sweat on my tongue.
“Let’s take a break. Get a drink,” Eva suggested.
I didn’t fight her, sinking onto a fallen tree nearby. My hands shook as I unclicked the hiking pack and dropped it in the grass. The kitten leapt onto it.
The animal had taken to Eva at once, which didn’t surprise me. Unfortunately, she’d also taken to me. I arched in stress when she trotted toward me, purring contentedly.
“Go on,” I murmured, tossing down a shriveled leaf. The kitten pounced on that too.
We shouldn’t have brought her. There were too many creatures in these woods that would gladly make her their next snack. If she survived those, she still had to face me: a killer who made her purr.
“She’s probably getting tired.” Eva unzipped her pack and rifled through the contents inside before pulling out a loaf of sandwich bread. She tore a slice into little pieces. “What should we call her?”
“I don’t want to call her anything.” Naming was claiming, and she would never be mine.
“Maybe… Puff? Snowball?”
“Snowballs are white.”
Eva snorted. This was the longest conversation we’d had since leaving the Volkswagen. She’d taken me up on my offer of a change of clothes, eschewing her bloodstained overalls for a clean T-shirt and shorts. “You care a little,” Eva said. “Admit it.”
It was strange how quickly those words drew my monster up. I shrugged, unwilling to argue, but the simple tease made the beast in me bristle. It held my spine a little straighter, hissing in my ear. “You care too much.”
I shivered.
“You care what people think of you.”
“Socks is a good cat name,” Eva mused, oblivious to the sharp-tongued voice in my head. She laughed when the kitten jumped on a piece of bread she’d tossed.
“You let people eat you up.” The monster’s self-righteous anger crowded my thoughts, squeezing me out like a lemon.
“Stop it,” I whispered.
Eva shot me a look. “What? Do you have a better suggestion?”
“You let them consume you.”
The permanent fixture of honeybees over Eva’s head seemed to pulse, growing louder. When our eyes clicked together, Eva blinked. “Are you… okay?”
“You let them spit you out and—”
“SHUT UP!” I pressed my hands to my ears, a hard lump in my throat. “Stop talking!”
Eva jumped, eyes blowing wide, and a loud buzz sounded just beside my ear. I batted it away on instinct—and felt a stinger sink in. The monster faltered, and with its retreat came a rush of feeling. Shock. Breathlessness.
Pain.
Eva stepped forward. “You’re stung.”
“I’m fine,” I growled, shaking as I braced my hands on my thighs.
“Liar.”
She crossed to the trunk of an aspen tree and ripped a bit of cheatgrass from the soil.
“Unsophisticated palate,” the monster muttered, displeased with her choice of plant.
When Eva got back to me, she held it out without a word. I took it and let the green stalk wither against my skin, hating the short-lived relief it brought to kill the plant. “I’m sorry,” I muttered. I hadn’t meant to yell at her.
Eva nodded, not meeting my gaze. “Let’s just keep going.”
Jack had left fastidious notes. Eva pointed out the highlights as we passed.
Ginseng, she said, was a big deal in Appalachia.
Sang hunters who cared only for the herb’s market price took everything they found, overharvesting be damned.
When we passed a cache Jack had marked, Eva bent and pushed her fingers into the soil.
Green shoots sprouted, tripling the trove.
She left it all in the ground, always one to give instead of take.
Not like me.
At some point, my breathing grew too labored to hide.
“You need to stop?” Eva asked. “Take another drink?”
Water wouldn’t stop my body from feeling like I’d squeezed it through a paper shredder. My vision went slightly out of focus as I shook my head. It was these damn aspen trees. The endless sea of white bark and rippling green leaves swayed around me like an optical illusion.
“You have grown too accustomed to self-neglect.” The monster’s annoyance cut down my ribs. Before I could stop it, it slipped into the muscles of my arms and sloppily jerked my bottle from its pouch in the pack. Screwed off the lid.
I flushed with distress and tried to rip away from its hold. Fine, I’ll drink!
The monster didn’t release me.
Let me go.
“Push me out.”
My eyes widened. The monster had never demanded that before.
“Maybe I deserve a chance to pilot this ship, if you won’t captain it properly.”
“Here, have an apple.” Eva tossed one my way. I had no athletic skill, but the monster snatched it from the air. A bruise marred the fruit’s dark, carmine flesh.
“Eat.”
But even looking at the apple made me feel a little nauseous. It seemed the more space the monster took up inside me, the less appetite I had, though its presence didn’t fill me. If anything, it did the opposite, carving hunger into a hollow I couldn’t fill with food.
“Don’t make me into some kind of villain. You have to push through, little death-touch,” it snapped. “You’re too hot, and probably dehydrated too. You need to drink.”
The very thought of water made me smack the roof of my mouth with my tongue.
Eva planted herself on a rock, angled so when she leaned back, the pack squished under her. The pink glow of a sunburn striped her forehead. It wouldn’t last long, the way she healed. She eyed me. “You don’t look so good.”
“I’m fine,” I mumbled.