Chapter 24 Eva
Eva
Eva couldn’t stop thinking about the kiss.
It wasn’t that she cared for Arthur still. She’d simply never really gotten closure the last time he left, and now that the old wound had been bared to the sun again, the heat of it stung.
Eva kept her eyes on the riverbank, mindful of the microgreens pushing through the soil with her every step.
They couldn’t be far from the meadow now.
Soon this nightmare would be over. Once they found Dad’s legendary honey, they could heal Arthur, heal her father, and put this horrible week and all it had dredged to the surface behind them.
Arthur would run, no doubt. And Eva?
She would forget him. She would try.
Her body was a living ache of little wounds. She’d thought she was tired before, but after another night of almost no sleep, her steps fell a little too heavily. The waning adrenaline left her with little resilience, and her eyes burned, a stinging tear of exhaustion sliding down her cheek.
But she kept going. That’s what she was good at, wasn’t it? Pressing on. Moving forward.
Soon, the smell of overturned earth and rich, dead wood gave way to the fresher scent of morning. The river rushed to her left, and Arthur followed behind her. Having lost his shoes, he hiked in socks that were surely getting damp in the dewy grass.
When the sunrise turned the sky violet, Eva caught sight of a honeybee and followed its flight path across the river with her eyes, where it landed on a cluster of wildflowers snugging the other bank.
She stopped, her breath catching in her chest. “Arthur. Look.”
He came up behind her, not quite close enough to touch, and followed her pointing finger. There, just beyond the thicket of green pine and lurking aspen, Eva caught a glimpse of color.
Little Lotties. They littered the ground, but Eva had almost missed them entirely, the deep indigo and violet shades of the rare flower mimicking the sky above.
That was her meadow. She was certain of it.
Eva rushed to a log that had fallen across the river, stepping eagerly onto its slippery surface to get a better view.
Her stomach clenched as she took a step on the slick rime of bright green algae covering the makeshift bridge.
“What are you doing?” Arthur asked.
“We have to cross!” Eva held her breath as she took one more step, then another, a flood of white water rushing below her. It was deeper here, the water rougher. A fall would be dangerous.
“Ev, wait.”
She was done waiting. She kept going, and after a moment, when she heard the sounds of Arthur relenting, she looked back to see him teeter slightly as he stepped onto the log, throwing his arms out to either side.
He was pale, and clearly didn’t share her confidence, wobbling forward and warily glancing at the river.
Eva looked forward. They would be fine.
But as soon as she thought it, the log bridge shifted beneath her, rolling slightly to the left. It wasn’t wedged as firmly on the other side of the river as she’d thought. Eva caught a hard breath and tried to regain her balance.
Arthur cried out in alarm. Eva turned toward him instinctively, and when the log beneath them rolled again, her foot slipped on the algae.
The two of them plunged into the water below.
Her ankle smacked the stones. Eva cried out, swallowing a mouthful of water at the shock of pain. The strength of the rapids flung her downriver. The river was deceptively deep here, even more than she’d thought when she stood on the log bridge.
Through the rheumy film of water, Eva caught sight of Arthur floating nearby.
She kicked toward him, but her good foot slicked uselessly along the riverbed’s loose slurry.
When she finally broke the surface, she gasped in a wet and painful breath and flung her arm out.
Arthur’s hair slipped through her fingers, and he surged downriver.
“No, wait!” Eva garbled. Her ankle screamed in pain as she pushed off the stones toward him, finally managing to get ahold of his T-shirt. As she tugged his limp form against her, something caught around her wrist.
A root.
Eva gasped at the way it slinked up her arm, squeezing tight and pulling her downward, under the water again. Sediment rushed through her fingers.
“Help!” The plea hardly made it past the shape of her lips when a second root wound around her knees, pulling her down to the river bottom. Alarm spiked within her, and too soon, her body protested its lack of much-needed oxygen.
She ripped her arm free of the root, instinctively thrusting her gift deep in the earth, deeper than she’d ever gone. The banks erupted in color: vivid mosses, thick reeds, and watercolor blooms filling the space.
For a moment, she felt triumphant. Then a thickly muscled vine encircled Arthur’s waist.
“No!” Eva shouted. “Let him go!” She snarled a long tress of grass growing on the bank in her fingers and used it to keep them from flowing any farther downriver.
A figure standing on the opposite bank caught Eva’s attention. She blinked, confused. It was a woman, but something about her was wrong. Her body was made not of flesh but of tree branches woven and bent as though to imitate the shape of a person.
My son.
The voice rang through the clearing, finding Eva in peril.
The roots binding her tightened, and Arthur woke with a hard exhale, expelling water from his mouth.
When he clawed at the vine around his stomach, the woman on the bank screamed.
The shape of her was unmade in an instant as the branches snapped back into their places, rigid and…
and dead, Eva realized. The roots burning Eva’s skin slackened and fell away as the figure disappeared, the trees that had made her now as stiff and dead as the grove of aspens Arthur had killed.
Had she been the one to attack them? First at the pit, now here?
Eva hauled Arthur onto the bank, her ankle screaming as they both crawled up the muddy slope and fell onto the grass. Every inhale was a knife.
The wildflowers her gift had yanked into bloom lay beneath Arthur in a colorful carpet. Where his skin touched, they faded, only to bloom again under the heavy rush of relief Eva felt. He made things die, but she brought them back. Life and death. Always a tug-of-war between them.
“Breathe,” Eva commanded, flattening her palm to Arthur’s chest. It rose and fell in a stutter, but he was breathing still, his face pale but with color slowly returning.
Something slinked up and over his wrist, filling her nose with the scent of fresh, damp peat.
The root was small and tentative, barely brushing over his pulse point, as though it, too, was searching for signs of vitality.
But that was absurd.
“GET AWAY FROM HIM!” Eva snatched the root up and twisted it hard, snapping it from the soil.
It was already dying, doomed by his skin.
Eva felt the echo of its last thread of life wisp away as Arthur drew its light into himself.
He had corrupted it. Poisoned it. For a moment, with his hot breath fanning against her cheek as she leaned over him, Eva was certain he was poisoning her too.
What else could make her feel such a burn?
She laid frantic touches to Arthur’s torso and arms, afraid that he was hurt because of another choice she’d made. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
Arthur gathered her weakly against his chest. Her ankle was throbbing, but when he brought her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to her palm, Eva forgot the pain, and shivered at the scrape of his teeth.
She liked his teeth.
“S’okay,” he croaked.
But it wasn’t.
They were both still dripping, shivering from the cold of the river. Or maybe it was the pressure of so many feelings kept inside that made Eva shake.
“I never should’ve left you,” Arthur whispered. “I know you said you don’t want my apology, but… fuck, Ev, I wish I’d stayed.”
The words should have been a balm. Instead, they were gravestones. If Eva really were made of glass, this confession would shatter her.
She drew back. Water dripped off Arthur’s brow, running pink from his reopened wound. The stitches weren’t holding, and the dribble marked a path down his cheek. He opened his eyes and met her gaze. “I wish I could go back and make a different choice,” Arthur said softly. “For you. For us.”
And something did shatter then, but it wasn’t the splinter of heartbreak she feared.
Instead, Eva’s anger fractured. There were two griefs bisecting her heart now: The fury she’d held on to all these years, bitter and spent.
And the newer, sharper ache of grieving what might have been, if only they’d been a little braver.
“At the very least,” he said, “I wish we’d had a better goodbye.”
She thumbed a bead of scarlet blood off his cheek. Arthur found the small of her back with a gentle hand, and for the first time since his arrival back in Audrey, Eva realized he was in pain too, a kind that reached far beyond the physical aches they’d incurred on this mountain.
“Let’s find that honey,” she whispered.
Arthur nodded and sat up, twisting as he searched the bank full of vivid blue Lotties. Despite the peril of the river, they’d somehow both ended up on the opposite bank. Their meadow had to be close by.
Bug yowled in displeasure from the other side of the river.
“We’ll come back!” Eva called out.
The reassurance did nothing for the panicked little kitten, who tentatively pawed the ground beside the very log the two of them had fallen off. Eva’s heart jumped into her throat when Bug leapt onto the log. Arthur stiffened too.