Chapter 36 The Monster
The Monster
The monster let out a huff of surprise when Eva collided with its back. Instinctively, it reached to block her from entering the shed. Under Lenny’s glare, the monster’s shock turned quickly to venom.
“What…?” Eva started.
“Stay back.” Even to the monster’s ears, the harsh words sounded foreign. Arthur never let himself surrender to his fury like this, and it felt wrong to dredge up the darker, angrier parts of him, but the monster wanted to feel its rage.
What had the spirit of the wood called it? A creature of want?
She’d been right. It wanted so much. To kill. To consume.
Lenny stood slowly, a predator’s rise that also revealed some stiffness in his muscles. The shadows of the little shed cut a harsh line across his face, obscuring his eyes and the intent within. The hard-set line of his mouth pulled back into a sneer.
“Outside,” he commanded, the words full of quiet malice.
Eva tensed at the monster’s back. It nudged her to go. When her warmth disappeared, the monster took a careful step back, then another, its gaze fixed on Lenny’s gun as he followed them out into the light.
The sight of him in broad daylight sent a ripple of shock through the monster.
Lenny’s arm hung limp and heavy from a shoulder clearly dislocated out of its socket.
His sleeve had been ripped wide-open, exposing a deep gash down his arm, the wound weeping dark vermilion blood.
The cuts weren’t clean and precise, like those made by a knife.
Instead, the flesh looked as though it had been twisted into and ripped free.
The monster wrinkled its nose at the rank iron scent.
“One of you is going to tell me what the fuck is going on.” Lenny’s other hand shook as he swung the gun from Arthur’s chest to Eva’s. “Or I shoot.”
Arthur’s heartbeat sped to a gallop inside their shared body, his panic cracking through.
The monster lifted its hands, palms out. Despite the instinct to reach for the bastard’s throat, the monster knew that if provoked, Lenny might very well make good on his promise to pull that trigger.
The monster had to wait for the right moment.
“How did you find us?” Eva asked, her voice thin.
Lenny sneered. “You leave an easy trail.”
The wildflowers. Of course. The monster cursed inwardly.
“I have to admit, I never thought I’d see you again, Connoway,” Lenny said, waving the gun in a loose figure eight as his head tilted to the side. “And then you just… reappeared.”
Without taking its eyes off the man, the monster steadied its feet in the soil beneath it. If Lenny provided an opening, it had to be ready to strike.
“You always do that, you know. You show up where you aren’t wanted,” Lenny spat. “It doesn’t matter what damage you do, does it? People keep giving you chances to fix it.”
“What are you talking about?”
Lenny harshed out a laugh. “What, you gonna pretend you don’t love that? Starting over, only to screw with the people around you again? I know who you are, Connoway. I know what you can do.” Lenny spat in the dirt. “And I know you tried to kill me.”
A delicious sensation stole across the monster’s tongue as the memory unspooled in its mind. That night may have haunted Arthur, but the monster savored how closely it had dragged Lenny Walker to the edge of death.
“You don’t get to start over. You don’t get to pretend that never happened!” In his agitation, Lenny’s aim swung from Arthur to Eva. The monster stiffened, and its voice dropped low in warning.
“Put the gun down.”
But a craze seemed to have taken Lenny over. “Do you have any idea how you fucked with my life that night?” he said to Eva, staring at her now with eyes starting to shine. “I saw everything, you know, but no one believes me. Your family made sure they wouldn’t. They said I was drunk—”
“You were drunk,” the monster shot back, losing an inch of control.
Lenny flinched but didn’t tear his gaze off Eva. “Funny that your daddy’s tea is the only thing that eases my brother’s chest pains.”
Eva blinked. “What?”
“Oh, you didn’t know that?” Lenny taunted. “They like keeping their secrets from you, don’t they? Poor Eva, fragile as a bomb. Of course they didn’t want to risk you blowing up again.”
“That’s enough,” the monster growled.
“He bleeds green now!” Lenny shouted. Red bloomed down his neck in a flush.
The monster flicked a look to Eva, whose eyes were now shining with horror.
“My brother, he’s… not the same,” Lenny said, pained.
“I’m sorry.” A little sob slipped out of Eva.
“No,” the monster graveled. “Don’t apologize to him.”
Lenny swung the gun back toward Arthur, his bad arm dangling heavy and loose from the shoulder joint. Like a broken doll. “Stop!” Eva cried out.
And maybe it was foolish, with the barrel of a gun aimed straight at its heart, but the monster couldn’t help the tug of its smile as it stared at the vile man, knowing Lenny’s life was quickly coming to a close.
Lenny scowled. “There’s something wrong with you.”
“I know.”
Lenny huffed. “You’re just going to stand there while I kill you?”
The monster cocked its head. “You don’t want to shoot.” It could tell by the shake of the gun, the crack in Lenny’s voice, the delays, one after another. The coward wanted to scare them, but he didn’t actually want to kill.
Not like the monster did.
A muscle twitched in Lenny’s jaw. The monster glanced at the faded scars marring Lenny’s throat, remembering how it had felt to hurt him all those years ago.
Its mouth watered.
Eva made a pitiful sound of protest as the monster took a step closer to the barrel of Lenny’s gun. The monster was made of hunger, all the want consuming the body it shared with Arthur forming a tight knot in their belly.
Confusion flickered over Lenny’s face.
How would it do it? The monster had tried to cut Lenny’s life short once before, and had nearly succeeded. Now death by its touch felt like a mercy after all the monster had imagined doing to Lenny over the years.
Arthur’s dread fluttered in the monster’s chest, so much like the wings of an injured bird.
Of course the boy’s moral compass would put up a fight. Though unable to hear his thoughts, the monster knew Arthur well enough to guess exactly how he felt about this, the tension in their shared body making it clear that Arthur was still here.
The monster growled under its breath and tried to ignore the feeling as it prepared to lunge forward.
It would grab Lenny’s arm and thrust it skyward before he could get a shot off.
Humans were complex. Like any animal, they took more time to poison than any weed or flower.
The monster would have to hold on for several seconds, maybe more, for its deadly touch to take hold.
You hurt me every time.
The monster ground its teeth together, hating how the words pressed and pounded within its skull. Even frozen inside, locked away where the monster couldn’t hear his protests, Arthur was everywhere, his soft heart pounding in the monster’s chest and his goodness leaking into its veins.
The monster loosed a harsh exhale.
“What are you doing?” Lenny asked uneasily. Blood from the cuts on his arms wept down his sleeve.
You hurt me every time.
The monster could kill him so easily. If only it could tuck Arthur away where he wouldn’t see. It took a step forward.
“Stay back!” Suspicion and fear bled into Lenny’s voice. He was close now, and the monster lurched forward, digging an elbow into Lenny’s ribs and forcing him to the ground with a howl.
The tussle had brought their skin into contact, and the brief touch woke the monster’s hunger. It wanted more. It wanted to consume, to kill this pathetic creature that had brought so much ruin to their lives.
You hurt me every time.
With a growl of frustration, the monster shoved Lenny away, flinging his gun into the grass. Denial was an agony, and the monster’s chest crowded with a sudden mix of love and resentment.
There was one thing it wanted more than vengeance.
Damn you, little death-touch. A stinging sensation heated the bridge of Arthur’s nose, a sure sign of swallowed emotion. But this was not the boy. No. This was something else. Something raw and unfamiliar.
“Go back to your brother,” the monster snapped.
It could spare one life, not for Lenny’s sake but for the boy the monster loved so much.
Lenny seethed up at both of them, his bad arm twisted wrong in the grass. For a moment the monster saw itself as though through Lenny’s eyes, a wicked slash of lips curving Arthur’s mouth into a grin. What had the spirit of the wood called the monster?
Something worse than a man.
Maybe she was right.
When Lenny stood, the grass beneath him lengthened, stretching up past his knees, where it swirled, ropelike, around his legs. Alarmed, Lenny kicked the grass off with a shout.
“Leave,” Eva echoed, her voice small but steady.
The monster watched, moved by her grit.
“I don’t care where you go,” Eva said, “but I don’t want to see you ever again. ”
How remarkable she was. Full of admiration, the monster shot her a brief look of approval.
A mistake.
In that split second of distraction, Lenny flung his body to one side.
The monster’s attention snapped back to him just in time to catch a flying stone to the side of the face.
Pain erupted in the monster’s skull. The stitches split open, the already tender, swollen skin stinging as it wept hot, new blood.
The monster’s ears rang with tinnitus, and its knees hit the dirt.
Lenny rolled to his feet again, breathless. The gun was back in his good hand, and he pointed it at Arthur’s face.
“No!” Eva lunged toward the monster just as Lenny fired.