Chapter 21 Eva #2
For a moment, Eva let go of her fear of the unknown, forgetting the missing pack and the gnawing sensation of something other watching them where they slept.
Forests had a way of making her feel small in a good way.
Here, she was just another part of the ecosystem, and all she had to do to be worthy was exist.
A tear surprised her, slipping down her cheek. Why was that feeling so hard to hold on to?
“Ev!” Arthur called out.
She stiffened and turned in the direction of their campsite. “I’m here!” she called back, a knot tying in her belly. He sounded alarmed. Was it Bug? Oh no. “I’m here!” she called again, stomping back through the underbrush.
He gave another shout. Eva’s heart tripped, and then she was running through the trees. In seconds, her entire body became aware of something distinctly wrong moving beneath her feet. The ground was shaking, the compact dirt giving way beneath the press of her soles.
She broke into the clearing and gasped.
The tent was sinking.
The soil, once solid, had buckled beneath it, pulling the tent into a crater of its own weight. Already it stood more than a foot lower than it had been.
A groan sounded from the trees themselves, and Eva’s mouth fell open at the sight of thick, meaty roots ripping themselves out of the soil, spraying sediment that made her blink and cough.
They undulated, as fluid and powerful as tentacles stretching from the heart of a kraken in the deep.
One of the roots speared itself through the tent wall, the ripping sound of torn vinyl shooting a bullet of fear and adrenaline straight through Eva’s heart.
The kitten yowled from inside the tent.
Eva rushed to the quickly forming pit, slipping over loose dirt as she slid down the dirt wall, disturbing a colony of ants into a panic. She felt the frantic skitter of their legs down the back of her sweatshirt.
“Ev, what’s happening?”
“I don’t know!” This was unlike any sinkhole she’d ever seen. Unlike a sinkhole at all, really. And the roots. She had no words for their conscient, wild behavior. As she watched, the long, fibrous arms of once-buried roots wrapped around the crisscross where the tent poles met.
They tugged upward.
The tent’s suction with the ground released with a pop. Eva called out in panic, trying to force the tent door open, only to find the zipper teeth stuck. Soil sloughed off the vinyl walls, and gravity dragged Arthur down to the bottom. Bug yowled.
The trees groaned as they lifted the tent even higher.
Eva dug her fingers into one of the holes the tree roots had punched in the vinyl and yanked, tearing the fabric. “Help me!” she called out, and then Arthur’s hand brushed hers through the gap, and together they ripped the hole wider.
Arthur fell through with a grunt, knocking Eva into a snarl of roots. He held a wadded-up T-shirt in his arms, from which Bug burst free, panicked. The kitten clawed up the side of the pit and disappeared.
The aspens lifted the tent higher into their canopy, shredding it into an unrecognizable flap that stuck in the branches like a flag blowing in the wind.
Eva’s heart pounded, but she hardly had time to take in what had just happened. The pit was still sinking, and those octopean roots were folding over and over one another, settling back into place by weaving a thatch above her and Arthur.
Something with too many legs wriggled inside her bra. She shrieked, tearing a centipede out and, in her panic, crunching its middle beneath her fingers. The severed halves fell to the earth.
Arthur made a sound Eva had never heard before. It was small and pained. “Ev?” he whispered, his voice pitching upward.
That’s when she remembered. He didn’t like tight spaces.
“It’s okay,” she repeated, her mind racing for a way to get them out of this.
Her magic would only make the snarling roots grow thicker and more wild.
That had happened once, with Dad. He’d tried to push her to talk, and when she snapped that she didn’t want to, her flood of emotions had made his tree roots plunge even deeper into his chest cavity. He’d spent a weekend in the hospital.
After that, Eva had learned to hold things in. It was better for everyone, especially him. Maybe Dad and Isobel were right to treat her like glass. Glass was fragile, but when it was broken, it was sharp, and dangerous. Like her.
Through the dim light, Eva made out the shape of Arthur, one hand anxiously clutching the fabric of his shirt.
“You should crawl up there,” she said. “Your touch will kill the roots.”
“No.” They were closer than she’d realized, the heat of his refusal ghosting over her cheek. “Ev, I-I-I can’t.”
“You have to.” More insects, dislodged by the wriggling roots overhead, fell down. Eva couldn’t see them, but she felt the scurry of tiny legs, startled pincers nipping her flesh. She scratched at her arms. “Arthur, please.”
He didn’t budge, seemingly frozen in place.
Eva felt like a monster for pushing him. Arthur had only ever wanted to be good. He didn’t want to hurt anyone or anything, and he was clearly panicked, his breaths coming hotter and faster against her skin. They were nearly cheek to cheek.
An idea struck her. It was mad, reckless even, and so, so unwise. But he was frozen and she needed to shock him out of it. “I won’t let us die like this,” Eva said.
Then she pressed a hard kiss to Arthur’s mouth.
It was clumsy in the dark where they collided.
His warm, chapped lips parted in surprise against hers.
He whispered her name, a soft, fractured “Ev” so light it almost wasn’t there at all.
His obvious confusion stirred something buried inside her.
There had been a time when Arthur Connoway knew exactly what she felt for him.
She’d made it her mission to prove how vital he was to her by touch and taste and so much trust. She’d given him the parts of her that no one else had access to. The rough, the raw, the needy.
This kiss was not that.
This kiss was a ghost.
It lasted only a few seconds, but the haunting pressure of his lips sent a chill over Eva’s skin. A thousand other kisses echoed through her, kisses she’d fooled herself into thinking she’d buried. But no. She remembered and remembered and remembered.
When Arthur’s hand found the bend of her waist, Eva broke away, shaking. “You can do this,” she whispered. Her palm was still pressed to Arthur’s chest, and she felt where his breath caught, the trip of a heart beating faster.
Even with her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could make out only the shape of him. His neck ticked, his silhouette shifting in clear agitation.
“No,” he moaned. “Not now.”
“It has to be now,” Eva said, a tremor running through her.
Arthur shook his head. “Not that. Not you. Ev, I—” He cut himself off, the words strangled as his breath came harsher. In the dark, he felt like another person entirely. Someone sharper than the boy she remembered. “There’s something inside me. It won’t let me… I can’t…”
When he didn’t continue, Eva prodded him. “Can’t what?”
But Arthur only shook his head again, his hands twisting into the hem of her sweatshirt. Eva gently took his wrists in her grip. When her thumbs ran over his pulse points, Arthur twisted, pinning her back against the wall of dirt and shackling her hands above her head.
“Your heartbeat,” he muttered, “is so loud.”
Eva trembled. The tone of his voice had downshifted from its usual warmth into something hard and full of gravel.
The ground continued to groan as the cavity that had opened up in the earth began to close again, the spill of loose dirt flecking her arms and putting Eva in mind of the sands of an hourglass rushing to fill any empty space gravity provided them.
Above them, a shelf of hard-packed earth jutted from the side of the pit.
Using strength she wouldn’t have guessed he had, Arthur gripped it and hauled first her, then himself, up onto it.
“You’re not dying today, Freckles,” he said with a grunt.
When they were on the ledge, he thumbed the dip in her waist. “If he won’t save you, I will. ”