Chapter 35 Arthur, Before
Arthur,
Before
Eva knelt in a pool of Dane Walker’s blood, sobbing as she begged him to keep breathing. But her touch made the vines in his body twist deeper.
“Ev, stop.”
“I can help him!” Her eyes were shot with a terror I’d never seen.
Jack must have followed Dane in, because he was suddenly there, peeling his daughter’s grip off the dying man. “Get her out of here,” he commanded. The chapel’s front door creaked and Izzy stepped in. “Lock the door!”
“What’s going on?” Izzy looked alarmed.
Little sprouts pushed from Jack’s scalp. He cornered me with a hard look, eyes green with wildness. “Go out the back,” he said. “Take the truck. Get Eva far away from this.”
“No!” Eva wept openly. “No, we can fix this.” She turned to me, desperate. “You can fix it!”
My eyes popped wide. “What?”
“Y-y-you’ve been practicing,” she blubbered. “You’re getting better. You can help him!”
My stomach flipped. I’d been practicing how to slow down the effects of my death-touch on plants, not… this. I shook my head. “Ev, I…”
“You can fix it!” she snapped. “Kill the vine!”
My body snapped to obedience at her command, my heart pounding with adrenaline as I snatched up Dane Walker’s hand.
Instantly, my death-touch woke at my fingertips.
As power surged inside me, dark and familiar, I closed my eyes and did as we’d practiced, forcing my breaths to slow, forcing myself to hold back the hungry thing inside me that wanted to take.
“Arthur,” Jack roughed out, his voice unsteady. Beyond him, Lenny knelt in a pool of his own vomit, panting and clawing his throat where the monster’s poison had seeped into his skin until it blistered and bubbled.
A whisper of doubt moved through me. But… no. This was different. I was different. The monster had wanted to hurt Lenny, but I was in charge now, and I could help Dane if I chose. There was more to me than death.
“Arthur,” Jack spoke a little louder. He pushed to his feet. “Step back.”
But I couldn’t. Not yet.
Blood dribbled from Dane Walker’s mouth as he stared at the starlings in the rafters.
“Little one,” the monster cautioned, but I flung its voice aside and clasped the vine, begging it to stop. I could do this. I had to do this. The vine withered under my command, verdant green giving way to a hard, knotted brown.
That was it. Relief unfurled in my ribs. I could do this. I just had to isolate the power, to kill the vine and not the man.
“Arthur!” Jack bellowed, wrapping both arms around my stomach and hauling me away. “I told you to stop!”
I startled, a wave of unchecked power rolling down my arm and into the vine still clutched in my hand. Dane gasped, and his eyes rolled back into his head.
The whole room stilled, and I stared, uncomprehending, until Jack dropped me and my body crumpled onto the bloodstained floor.
No.
I snatched up Dane Walker’s wrist, seeking the slug of a pulse. Instead, the glow of life inside him—warmer and brighter than any plant, bird, or mouse I’d ever stolen from before—slipped from his grasp and crashed into me. Iron coated my tongue at the sudden rush of life blooming in my bones.
It tasted divine.
“Fuck.” Jack stripped off his shirt and pressed it to the wound in the younger man’s chest. He checked Dane’s pulse, as I had done, but it was too late.
No, no, no.
There was no denying the horrible truth in front of us. The empty glaze in his eyes. The preternatural stillness of a man made into an empty shell. Dane Walker was dead.
Because of me.
Outside, the sounds of merriment died down and someone shook the chapel door. “What’s going on in there?” they called.
Jack yanked a set of keys from his pocket and hurled them at me.
“Go. Now.” He sounded scared, and that more than anything finally pulled me out of my haze.
Jack was staring at Eva, and Eva was staring at the body on the floor.
“Go to the house and wash up. Burn your clothes. They can’t connect her back to this.
Do you understand?” When I didn’t answer, he barked my name. “Arthur!”
I jolted. “Yes.” Took her hand. “Ev. Come on.”
“I killed him.” Her voice was the smallest and weakest I’d ever heard it.
I shook my head violently. “No.” I had done that. Jack had told me to stop and I wouldn’t—couldn’t—stop. My throat went hard with grief. He’d been so angry, and now he wouldn’t even meet my gaze.
Why hadn’t I stopped?
Izzy stayed with her father. Their voices dropped to a hush as I half walked, half dragged Eva to the back of the church.
A layer of moss coated the pews, and wildflowers bloomed in every crack and crevice.
A storm of honeybees filled the room. They were all I could hear, the hitch in Eva’s breath all I could feel.
Every step she took, more flowers bloomed.
Rough-cut pieces of a life-size nativity set filled the storage room in the back of the chapel. I shivered with cold as I led Eva through the labyrinth of painted plywood figurines.
She looked down at herself. “I’m… bleeding?”
“No,” I said. “You’re okay.”
Put like that, it felt like a lie.
Eva licked a fleck of red off the bow of her lip. More blood smeared her cheeks and nose. Alarm rose in me. I couldn’t let her or anyone else see her like this.
The voices at the chapel doors grew louder, knocking more insistently.
When I snuck a look back, I saw moss sneaking under the storage room door.
We slipped out the back into the shadows.
The remaining partygoers had congregated at the front of the chapel, clearing a path.
I took her hand, and we ran across the now-abandoned dance floor, my heart racing. I tasted copper on my tongue.
What would happen when the crowd finally made their way inside and found Jack and Izzy covered in a dead man’s blood? Would Jack lie for me and call it an accident?
And what story would Lenny tell?
When we got to the truck, I yanked open the passenger door. Eva scrambled to click in her seat belt, hands shaking. When a sob escaped her, she covered her mouth with bloodstained knuckles, smearing red over her lips.
I took her face in my shaking hands. Even now, every touch between us felt like a battle won.
Scars replacing wounds. It didn’t feel right to find relief in her, not now, but the relief came anyway.
“We have to go.” I planted a rough kiss on her temple, then slammed the door and ran to the driver’s side.
We made it halfway to the cottage before Eva rolled down the window. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
I shot her a look. “You want me to pull over?”
“No.”
The instant the house came into view, however, Eva tapped my leg urgently. I pumped the brakes, and we screeched to a stop, leaving a cloud of dust in our wake. Eva burst from the truck and vomited on the side of the road.
I was out the door and at her side in a moment. Helplessness flooded through me when I settled a hand between Eva’s shoulder blades and she burst into sobs.
“I’m sorry,” she wailed.
As I crushed her against my chest, Jack’s instructions filled my mind. We had to wash off the blood. Get rid of the dress. My shirt. My pants. “Let’s go inside, okay?”
“Okay.” A soft, childlike response.
I cupped the back of her head and forced a bit of calm into my voice. “All right, honey. Arms around my neck.”
Eva pressed her nose into my shoulder as she cried. Once inside, I carried her to the bathroom with the claw-foot tub and set her gently on the rim of it. Eva looked a little dazed.
“She’s going into shock.”
The faucet shrieked when I turned it, water plonking on the porcelain.
“I killed him,” Eva whispered again.
My heart twisted as I slid the zipper down her back, a reversal of my role earlier that day.
“I’m a monster,” she said in anguish.
“Don’t say that.”
I could still feel the rush of the withering vines in my palms. I could still hear them crackle as summer turned to autumn in Dane’s rib cage, the monster parching him of life. I could still feel the final beat of his heart.
Maybe she’d landed a blow, but I had been the killer here.
“You did him a mercy,” the monster said. “He wouldn’t have survived that anyway.”
Its callous words stunned me to the core. I’d never hated the creature, and myself, as much as I did right then.
Even though I knew it was right.
I raced down the hallway and fetched some towels from the closet. When I returned, Eva had peeled off her ruined dress. She perched on the edge of the tub in nothing but her underwear, eyes blank, knuckles white. Sweat plastered a blond strand to her cheek.
I shuddered. There was blood in her hair.
“Breathe through it. You need to stay calm for her.”
Resentment rushed through me. How could I do that? The dreamy afternoon had twisted the world into a nightmare, and all because it
we
lost control!
“I’ll help you,” the monster reassured me, pouring itself into the cracks of my resolve as it had when it took me over at the chapel. I shuddered.
No. I didn’t want that.
Closing my eyes, I pictured the sky and begged the clouds to clear away. I wasn’t the storm. I was the whole damn sky, and I would not be made to shrink.
With a mighty shove, I threw off the creature’s hold, setting the towels on the toilet and wetting a clean rag in the sink.
Bile swirled in my stomach as I blotted the streaks of blood off Eva’s skin.
Her eyes looked dull, and she swayed a little.
I took her face in my hands and softly brushed her cheeks with my thumbs until she met my gaze.
I couldn’t smile, but I could be here, and maybe that was enough.
Her swollen eyes tugged at my guilt. I shouldn’t have gone after Lenny. I should have just left the chapel like she’d wanted and gone straight home. But even in my darkest moments, I’d never thought to fear this. Never this.
Never her.
Eva licked her lips. “Can I brush my teeth?”
I snatched her toothbrush off the counter. Eva used twice the amount of toothpaste needed as I ran a wet rag over the cut in my arm. Lenny’s knife had grazed me, but adrenaline masked the pain, for now.
After she stood to spit her toothpaste into the sink, I handed Eva a cup of water. “Here. Drink this.”
She drained it in one go.
“Let’s clean you up.” I turned off the tap and helped her step in, then dragged over a footstool. I sat beside the tub just behind her and, using the cup on the ledge, scooped water onto her skin until the blood sloughed away, turning the water pink.
This would’ve been so much easier if the cottage had a shower.
I pumped the shampoo bottle and worked it through her tangles as best as I could. The scent of coconut dispelled the taint of iron, but only just. Eva brought her knees to her chest, quiet sobs racking her body.
I wrapped my arms around her and let her cry until the tears ran out and Eva sagged against me.
“Let’s rinse your hair, honey.”
She nodded and sank below the surface, bubbles churning as she scrubbed the lather out. Water slapped against the porcelain as she climbed out of the tub, and I wrapped a towel around her, using a second one to scrunch her hair dry, as I’d seen her do.
After putting on pajamas, Eva crawled into bed, clearly exhausted. When she tried to pull me down onto the mattress with her, I resisted. “I’ll be right back, bee girl.”
I had to burn the clothes.
Careful not to get any blood on her sheets, I wadded up the towel and retreated to the parlor. There, I set the paper with my mother’s number on the mantel and knelt by the fireplace. There was blood on my shirt. I could smell it, and I wanted it off.
Jack was right: We couldn’t let anyone tie her back to what I had done. My hands shook as I arranged the kindling and struck a match. The monster steadied my movements.
Its presence in the body we shared revolted me. I didn’t want to be this way. I didn’t want its help! But I could no longer fight its invasion either.
I wasn’t sure I even knew how.