Silence stretched for one beat, then two.
Then Dove stepped from behind the roses. She still wore her summer Wickwood uniform, the last thing he’d seen her in, though her face had begun to change now as if the need to look like neat, fastidious Dove had passed. Moss grew across her cheek, soft green tendrils pulsed from the corner of her mouth, and her brown eyes had been replaced with the vivid, unforgiving green of the forest.
“Take off my sister’s face.” His voice did not waver.
“She wanted to protect you,” the forest said softly.
“She wanted everything to stay the same,” Andrew said. “And it couldn’t. It didn’t. We let our love for each other cut us to the bloody core.”
“You didn’t bring a pen.”
It took everything in him not to stand there, not to cry. “I’m not telling that kind of story this time. Now take off her face.”
The monster slipped backward into the trees, the dark taking hold of his sister’s edges and unraveling them. Andrew watched as the monster grew, as its flesh turned to bark and its fingers to scraggly sticks, as it grew tall and then taller until its huge form blotted out the moon. Its jaws stretched open to show teeth, wicked and long, and when it pulled its feet from the ground, the earth tore as roots exploded free. Gripped in its mangled stick fingers was a notebook with spores of mold flourishing over the battered cover.
Andrew wiped the blood off his mouth and took his notebook of wicked fairy tales from the monster. He nodded once in thanks.
They walked into the forest, the monster huge and terrible behind him, shadows and malignant rot slick on its branches. He climbed fallen logs and let moss smear between his fingers and stain the knees of his pants. He took off his suit jacket and let it fall behind him. Then his shirt, streaked with dirt and leafy prints from the forest. He left it tangled in a thorny thicket.
From his pocket, he pulled out the box cutter.
As expected, the place where the Wildwood tree used to be was empty. It had yanked its roots free and gone walking, had packed its body down to look like a girl with honey-blond hair and a name of softened feathers. A distant part of him wondered how much of Dove’s blood it had drunk as she died, quiet and alone under its canopy.
He nestled the notebook in the leaves at his feet. Then he traced fingers along the grooves between his naked ribs, acrossscars from monster bites and claws, until his palm pressed flat to his stomach where vines grew beneath his skin.
He cut, deep enough to hit wood. He wet his fingers with his own blood, feeling nothing but how warm and coppery it was.
He began to write, fingertips against skin, bloody letters smeared and slurred because he couldn’t stop shaking.
The Wildwood monster fitted its root feet back into the hollow, and then it stretched for the midnight sky speckled with the chipped-off edges of diamonds. The way it looked at him wasn’t cruel or vindictive, rather gentle, as if it realized he had run as far as he could and his tiredness was to be expected.
Its voice had turned deep and melodic and ancient. “You woke us, now sate us. A tithe was never going to be enough.”
Andrew began to write.
Once a prince took a knife to his chest and carved himself open, showing ribs like mossy tree roots, his heart a bruised and wretched thing beneath. No one would want a heart like his. But he’d still cut it out and given it away.
He thought, far away, he heard someone cry out his name. The cold took hold of his naked shoulder blades and sent goose bumps rippling down his spine.
He gave his heart to the October boy with one thousand and one freckles and hair of autumn leaves. But almost at once, the heart began to corrode, and the prince turned into a monster. They should bury it, the prince decided, and see what it would grow into.
Andrew painted words on his arms, his chest, his throat. A slow, dizzy molasses began to pour across his mind, and it was so very hard to keep his eyes open.
In the distance, someone was running.
Air tearing through lungs.
A scream almost reaching him.
They decided to bury the heart deep in the woods, for monsters were ravenous things, not to be trusted. This way the October boy would be safe.
Blood dripped from Andrew’s arm and splattered on the notebook. Or maybe those were tears finding their way around the roses filling up his eye.
Within the ground, the heart grew into a tree and the monster lived among the branches and forgot he had ever been a prince. But the October boy didn’t flee. He climbed the tree and kissed the lonesome monster until it devoured him whole.
Andrew scooped damp soil and decaying leaves until he made a shallow hole, deep enough for the journal to fit. There was just enough room left to fit a throbbing heart. He let out his breath, slow and careful, and stayed on his knees as he put the tip of the box cutter to his chest.
His mouth trembled.
