Chapter 32 Arthur, Before
Arthur,
Before
Audrey was a petri dish for gossip.
The week before the Walker wedding, the whispers reached the shelves of the Honey Shoppe. I was in the back when a trio of girls I’d never met tucked themselves into a corner to sample our new ginger-infused honey. When they mentioned the Walkers, my ears perked up.
“Did you hear that Dane kicked Lenny out of their house?” the first asked, dipping her sample stick into the jar and swirling generously.
One of her companions gasped. “Really?”
“Long overdue, if you ask me,” the third snorted.
“But why?”
The first girl shrugged. “Something about the girl he was seeing, I guess.”
When the second girl dipped her actual finger into the honey jar, I decided I hated her a little.
The third member of their group flicked her friend’s wrist. “Seriously, Mai, were you born in a barn? Use a toothpick.” Then her voice dropped lower, forcing me to strain to hear. “I heard Lenny’s not allowed at the wedding.”
I’d been running a rag over the inside of a newly washed honey jar for at least a minute. At her words, I quietly set it back on the shelf.
I should have been relieved. Instead, Lenny’s absence had made me nervous.
Where was he?
That had been nearly a week ago. Since then, Jack had somehow scrounged up a pair of slacks my size, to match his gift of shoes. As I waited for the girls to finish getting ready, I examined my reflection in the hallway mirror. It felt strange to be so dressed up, like a reptile molting its skin.
“I think you look good,” the monster said.
I wasn’t sure. The shirt hung a bit long, maybe? I ran my hands over the starched cotton.
“It suits you.”
I whirled and found Eva leaning against the wall. At the sight of her, my heart damn near stopped. She wore a sage-green dress that came in at the waist and swished around her ankles. Embroidered flowers decorated the edges and sleeves, making her appear like spring itself.
“What?” Eva touched the low dip of her neckline. “Too much?”
“No!” I stepped toward her. “You look incredible, Ev.”
Pink tinged her cheeks. “Thank you,” she said softly, then she turned. “Will you zip me up?”
Goose bumps pebbled her skin as I slid the zipper, lingering at the top to brush a knuckle over the curve of her spine. After, Eva led me to the bathroom and wet a comb, attempting to smooth my hair into place. “You need a tie?” she asked. “Dad’s got a whole drawer.”
When I shook my head, Eva opened the top button and brushed the skin of my throat with her fingertips. It was gentle, and intimate, and I warmed at the sudden feeling of belonging.
But when she left to fetch a water bottle, my thoughts moved to the folded paper in my pocket. I hadn’t called the number yet, but I couldn’t stifle the budding fear that my time here was draining away like sand down an hourglass, whether I liked it or not.
The church itself was cold and drafty, the pews sardine-pressed with congregants in their finest hats and brightest shoes.
I knew the instant I stepped inside that I’d made a mistake.
With Eva’s help, I’d made progress controlling the death-touch, yes, but I didn’t want to test its limits. Especially not here.
Anxiety climbed my ribs as we slid into the back pew, the monster’s awareness tuning my senses to the delicate heartbeats filling the crowded room. It would take so little to hurt them. Just one slip. One accident.
One touch.
They kept the ceremony short and sweet. Despite his best man’s absence—or maybe because of it—Dane Walker looked more relaxed than I’d ever seen him.
After “I do,” his new bride squealed and jumped into his arms. The room stirred.
Smiles, rouged cheeks, and rose petals painted the whitewashed chapel every shade of blush.
I retreated to a shadowy corner with no one nearby, save a spider weaving its silk.
I fiddled with a loose button on my cuff, giving curious passersby a polite, strained smile.
Jack found me and casually angled himself so anyone sliding down the side rows grazed him instead. Embarrassment and gratitude heated my face in equal measure. He had a way of noticing when I felt anxious.
Izzy was the last to go, dragging her sister behind her. Eva tossed me an exasperated smile. I matched it, but when the door slammed behind them, I accidentally popped the button off its cuff.
“Breathe,” the monster soothed. “It’s going to be fine.”
Jack had cut himself shaving. I could see the line of red-green blood smeared over his jaw. “You all right?” he asked.
When I nodded, we made for the exit door and Jack shouldered it open.
“Wait…”
He paused. “Yes?”
We’d hardly spoken all week. I wasn’t sure if he, or I, was avoiding this topic, but I had to know. “Have you really had a way to reach her, all this time?”
Jack took a deep breath. “Arthur—”
“Sorry,” I said automatically. But I wasn’t.
I was confused, and hurt, though I didn’t want to be.
“I know you didn’t ask for this.” For me, here all summer.
Heat rolled up my face, and my throat constricted.
I just wanted to know why. Why he’d kept me here when he could have called her to come back for me.
“Listen.” Jack’s voice grew heavy. “My history with your mother is complicated. Maybe I should have told you sooner. You deserve that. But…” Here he faltered. “I’m also not sorry I waited.”
“You’re not?”
“Of course not.” Jack stepped toward me and bucketed my shoulder with a giant hand, careful to touch only the fabric of my shirt. “We want you here, Arthur.”
My throat ached with sudden feeling.
“You don’t have to prove yourself.” Jack smiled. “You can take up space.”
Then he slipped out into the roar of festivities, and I was left with nothing but starlings in the rafters and a button clenched in my fist.
The reception went deep into the night, strings of fairy lights illuminating the clearing. Izzy seemed to gain more stamina with every new song, dragging her girlfriend, Priya Dawson, onto the dance floor and looping her arms around the shorter woman’s neck.
Priya and June were cousins, I’d learned. They had the same dark eyes, the same warm brown skin with a shock of sleek dark hair. I would have thought them sisters.
Eva and I sat apart on a hay bale, sipping apple cider the Walkers had ordered all the way from some specialty cider mill in Michigan.
I’d caught more than one side-eye thrown in Eva’s direction today, whispers passed about her possible connection to Lenny’s disappearance. She’d kept her head high, but after one too many pointed fingers, I decided I couldn’t take it anymore, so I popped to my feet and extended a hand.
“Dance with me?”
Eva’s eyes dashed to the swollen crowd, surprised. “We can’t.”
“Sure we can.”
I led her to where the shadows grew thick against the chapel’s eastern wall, then caught her by the waist and swung her in a circle. Eva squealed, clinging tightly to me. When we slowed, her nails drew over my scalp, sending shivers down my spine.
She’d braided her hair half up and secured it with a dark green bow at the back of her head.
I delicately tugged on the ribbon’s end, careful not to pull too hard, as the band crooned a warm acoustic cover of the classic song “My Girl.” Eva played with the empty place on my cuff where the button had broken free, her clean, earthy scent invading my senses.
“Come on.” When the song ended, she dragged me to the front steps of the chapel. The door creaked when she pushed it in and poked her head inside.
“What are you doing?” I asked, bemused.
Eva pulled me in after her. “Kissing you, of course.” She smoothed her palms up my chest and walked me back against a wall.
“She likes this shirt,” the monster noted. “We’re wearing it every day.”
When Eva tugged my lip between her teeth, I let out a ragged breath.
I couldn’t get enough of her. I felt hungry all the time, but nothing satiated me like she did.
Friction charged the space between us with desire.
She could banish my darkness forever—I knew it.
Her touch sanctified ordinary places. The greenhouse.
The attic. The pantry. The pond. All christened with our stolen moments.
The landmarks on my skin had changed too. My scars no longer felt like accusations.
“Stay in Audrey,” Eva murmured.
“What?” I asked.
“I know what you have in your pocket, Arthur.” She bit her lip. “Don’t call her.” Bewildered, I pulled back, but Eva took my face in her hands. “Stay here. With me.”
“I…” I tried to say that I couldn’t. I tried to explain this feeling in my chest that maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe I needed to leave so I could come back, like a migrating bird sure of its place. “I don’t want to leave you, bee girl.”
That was an easier truth.
A mischievous grin spread across her cheeks. “Good.” Then she was pulling me toward the pews. “Now come on.”
I scanned the sanctuary. “Isn’t this a bit irreverent?”
Eva shrugged. “I figure God’s seen it all by now.”
I wouldn’t know. I’d never understood the concept of churches in the first place. It seemed a little strange to seek the divine indoors when the wilderness was practically bursting with it. I’d found God among the trees, where the sun touched my skin and the warblers sang.
A sudden flutter of wings drew our attention to the rafters, where a nest of oil-slick starlings flitted. “I’m surprised the pastor was able to focus with all that,” Eva said.
“Don’t talk birds to me, bee girl, or we’ll never leave this room.”
She laughed and pulled me down. I slipped a hand beneath the soft layers of her skirt and cupped a hand around the back of her thigh.
I loved her thighs.
When I took her mouth in a kiss, Eva made a satisfied sound. She tilted her head back to expose more of her skin to me, tugging her neckline down. Her neck tasted like salt, like need. I melted as I kissed my way down her jaw and collarbone. No one had ever needed me before.
Eva hooked her finger in my belt loop, her eyes a question in blue. I nodded, and she slid the buckle open. The graze of her fingers made me groan. “Way better than dancing,” I husked.
Just then, the door behind us gave a whine. At first we froze, before jumping apart a moment later, scrambling to put our clothing to rights. “I thought you locked the door!” I whispered.
“I thought I did!”
A shadowed figure staggered inside, a flask dangling from his fingers.
“Thought I saw you come in here,” Lenny Walker slurred.
Even in the shadows of the small chapel, it took him only a second to locate us.
Startled. Wrecked. Lips puffy and clothes askew.
Lenny sucked in a breath and stumbled forward a few steps.
“You,” he growled. “You let this piece of shit touch you?”
I stiffened.
“What gives him the right—” Lenny stumbled and had to catch his balance on the backrest of a nearby pew. I moved to stand between him and Eva. Lenny cut me a hard glare.
“Fuck off,” I growled.
“I’ve been waiting”—Lenny smashed the flask on the wooden floorboards, and the sound made me flinch—“long enough.”
Then he lunged forward.
“To your left.”
I shifted obediently, pushing Eva to the side. He won’t get near her. Lenny tripped over his own shoes and fell, feet upended, over a pew.
Eva tugged at my sleeve. “Let’s just go.”
No.
Adrenaline pumped inside me, and I clenched and opened my hands. Where were my gloves when I needed them?
“Arthur,” Eva pleaded.
Lenny popped to his feet. “She’s mine,” he snarled.
The monster rushed forward, filling my hollows. I didn’t remember choosing to lunge forward; I registered Eva’s shout only when my shoulder slammed into Lenny. We hit the ground hard, knocking over a stack of hymnals.
Eva’s shout found me in a sea of red feelings.
Despite the monster’s grip on me, her presence and fear pulled me back to the surface, where I gasped.
My gloves. I need my gloves! The monster and I had shared space in moments of crisis before, but never like this, where I was nothing but a husk to its flame.
Pink spittle dribbled from Lenny’s mouth. He spat out a tooth, and my thoughts slipped like sand through my fingers.
“That all you got, Connoway?”
This time, Lenny found skin, digging his nails into my cheek. Pain sliced through me where he scraped back flesh, followed by quick relief as a whisper of life stole out of him and into me. It took only an instant for my death-touch to start draining the life out of a person.
But an instant wasn’t enough to kill.
The monster snapped our arm forward and shackled a hand around Lenny’s throat, curving our lips into a smile.
The chapel door slammed open. I didn’t care. I didn’t look. Lenny clawed at my hands. My fingers bled, but the monster squeezed our grip tighter.
“Arthur, stop!” Eva pleaded.
I didn’t. I tried, but my control over the death-touch weighed nothing against the monster’s hate. A heavy cold bloomed inside my chest, spreading quickly down my limbs as the monster surged into every part of me. It wanted to take and take and take.
Someone shouted behind me, someone I knew. Lenny’s stare blackened. He whipped something out of his pocket and slashed…
Silver flashed.
I let go, pain rearing through my arm and yanking me out of the monster’s icy grip. Eva screamed. Green vines rushed through my periphery, and a figure shoved between Lenny and me.
A slick and horrible squelch filled my ears as something dark and wet sprayed the chapel’s plaster walls. It speckled my skin too.
I smelled summer. I smelled iron. The world thinned to a ringing in my ears, and I blinked fast, trying and failing to process the scene before me.
None of it made sense. A blanket of moss and wildflowers, spread over the pews.
Lenny Walker, dry-heaving the contents of his stomach. Eva, my Eva, sobbing.
The real horror, however, was Dane Walker. He lay face up on the hardwood, eyes fixed on the rafter starlings, a bloodied vine impaling his chest.