Chapter 18 Arthur #2
“Drink.” The monster roughly jerked the open water bottle to my mouth. It sloshed down my chin, but some made it in. I swallowed hard enough to hurt.
“Now eat.”
The crunch of apple skin sent a shudder down my body. Too much like the tear of sinew off bone. But it took only seconds for the sugar in the juice to offer relief.
Eva unclicked her pack and crossed to me, pressing a hand to my forehead. “Are you dizzy?”
“No,” I lied.
Eva clearly didn’t believe me. “Let’s take a break and set up camp. We’re not going to make it to the meadow today anyway.”
“I can do it,” I gritted out to both of them.
Her gaze turned steely. “A good hiker resolves a problem before it gets worse.”
“He’s bad at that.”
My flush intensified. “I’m a good hiker,” I muttered, pride wounded.
“Good.” Eva lifted the straps of my pack. “Here, you unclick.”
I buried a groan of relief as the weight slipped off my shoulders and landed with a clunk in the dirt. “Sorry,” I mumbled, though I wasn’t sure what exactly I was apologizing for this time. It was an easy state to slip into. Sorry for being difficult. Sorry for being me.
I wiped a bit of sweat off my forehead and took another swig of water, watching as yet another honeybee landed on Eva’s shoulder.
Even out here, they flocked to her. The wings on the little insect fluttered.
Above us, the canopy shifted, the sun finding the honeybee’s wings.
It was so ordinary. So painfully beautiful.
My eyelids drooped. For just a moment, I let myself drift, seeking a foothold where my body wasn’t an open flare of pain and discomfort.
“Arthur!”
Startled, my eyes snapped open. Eva arched an expectant brow. “You keep zoning out.”
“Oh.”
Eva studied me a bit too closely. “What’s going on with you?”
“Nothing.”
“You’ve been fidgety and unsettled all day.”
“Maybe you’re unsettling, bee girl.”
I hadn’t meant to say it aloud, and certainly not with a touch of irritation. Eva’s eyes blew wide in surprise. Chagrined, I took a quick, brutal bite of the apple. The flavor soured on my tongue, just like the rot spoiling inside me.
“What aren’t you telling me?” she demanded.
She shouldn’t ask questions like that. She wouldn’t like the answers.
“I’m just hot. And tired.”
“You’re developing a fever.”
“Really?” Eva challenged. “Is that all?”
For a moment, I thought what a relief it would be if she knew and understood. Not only about the monster but also about the fear that lived inside me, fear of what the creature’s existence said about the state of my soul.
“Just say it,” Eva said. “It’s clearly eating you up.”
Her word choice delighted the monster. “At least one of us gets to eat.”
I braced my forearms on my knees and shook my head. “Forget it.”
It was one thing to daydream, but I couldn’t tell her about the monster. I’d take that with me to the grave.
“You’re ashamed of me?”
I huffed. Why did it sound so surprised?
Eva switched tactics. “How’re your stitches feeling?”
They hurt like hell, but I wasn’t keen to bring that up again. She’d feel awful, and both of us would have to sit with the memory of sitting too close, sharing air, my hands splayed over her hips. It was instinctive, excusable, once. But we couldn’t do that again.
“Already feeling better,” I lied.
Eva didn’t look like she believed me, but she crossed to me, bent beside my pack and lifted it onto her shoulders.
“What are you doing?”
“I’ll come back for the other one when we find a place to set up camp,” she said, ignoring my question. When I tried to argue, she put up a hand. “Just… let this be easy. Okay?”
My jaw tightened. “Fine.”
We followed the nearby burbling to a river. I wanted to sprawl on the bank, feet in the water, and let the mosquitoes have me. It was worth it, or it would be, if the bank hadn’t been covered in tall, feathery reeds I didn’t dare touch.
“Take off your shirt,” Eva said.
“What?”
“We need to cool you down.”
I bristled at the monster’s smug satisfaction but obeyed without further protest. When Eva returned from the river, she wrung the shirt out over my head. The trickle down my neck was blissfully cold.
“Back on.” As Eva dangled the damp shirt in front of me, her eyes strayed to the honeycomb tattoo on my bare biceps. Somehow her unwillingness to comment made it feel even more incriminating.
The kitten pounced on a silverfish in the dirt.
“Take off your shoes.”
“You know, you’ve gotten a little bossy.
” But I couldn’t deny how much better I felt when the shoes came off.
I carefully rested my arches on the laces.
Sometimes I dreamt of grass between my toes.
It was a luxury I’d experienced only in snatches, and always just for a meager second, before the monster stole all the life out from whatever touched our skin.
Eva sank down beside me and we drank from our water bottles, the wind kissing our cheeks. The breeze blew a golden strand over Eva’s sun-rosed skin. She tucked it back. “You put the first aid kit in my pack, right? You got any aspirin in there?”
“Yeah.” I hadn’t told her my head was pounding, but of course she’d picked up on that. When Eva was certain I was cooling down, she left to fetch the other pack. The kitten apprehensively watched her leave, but one look at me and she settled, pawing at a line of ants.
“You’re a funny bug,” I murmured.
Mom’s memorial service felt far away, a distant memory from years past, instead of yesterday. So far, our hike had not gone well at all. In fact, I wasn’t sure how it could have gone worse.
At the rustle of wind, a strange feeling licked up the back of my neck. It was not unlike the feeling of the monster’s awareness expanding inside me to reveal the thump of a rabbit’s heart, or the ocean song of mycelium.
But this wasn’t the monster.
Arthur.
I stiffened at the musical lilt to my name and turned, unease collecting inside me. That voice had worn a groove in my brain I’d never be rid of. A broken-promise voice. A bedtime-story voice. A should-have-been-dead voice.
At first, I saw nothing but the green expanse of forest around me. When something moved to my left, I whirled, catching sight only of a fluttering branch. I blinked, thinking that I’d simply caught a bird in flight. But there were no wings or shaking leaves, and the monster sensed no heartbeat.
The outstretched arm of a branch bent inward, like the joint of an elbow.
“Arthur!” This time my name came on the verge of panic. I shook off the feeling of wrongness, blinking hard, and the tree became just a tree again, solid and still.
The voice melted back into the wind.
“Arthur!” Eva crashed through the trees and burst into view. “It’s gone!”
“What?”
“The pack,” she panted. “It’s gone!”