The monster reeled backward, vines jerking away from Andrew, slashing out toward Thomas instead.
Andrew stayed where he was, curled among the leaves.
Only the thinnest rays of moonlight piercing through the canopy lit the battle. Thomas smashed the spike again and again into the monster’s head. Bones cracked. Vines lunged toward his face, tried to catch his arms and pin them, but Thomas moved in a violent kaleidoscope, impossible to catch.
Then the monster slipped and went to its knees. Thomas gave a gravelly cry of feral triumph as he shoved the spike into the monster’s eye.
He put all his weight into it, driving it deeper and deeper as the monster went down screaming. Blood splattered across Thomas, murky and black. He didn’t stop until the thing lay on its back, the garden spike through its skull and driven into the earth below.
The screaming stopped. Its hooves twitched a few times. Then silence fell in a dense, velvet curtain across the world.
There was nothing but this:
Andrew curled with his knees to his chest, watching in numb horror.
Thomas forcing his fingers to release the spike as he slowly straightened.
He flexed his hands and looked at the blood smeared up to his elbows. He toed the motionless monster and then took a step away from it. Then another.
He wiped his mouth, smearing blood across his cheek.
Finally, he looked at Andrew.
“Please don’t hate me,” Thomas whispered.
They gently lowered the fairy prince’s body into a glass coffin, leaving bloody fingerprints smudged on the case. His chest had been caved in from battles fought and lost, and they’d filled the space between his ribs with flowers. Even now the flowers grew, blossoming as they drank the last of his blood.
The princess’s silver tears fell like rain upon the coffin. True love’s kiss should wake him, but she had tried seven times and nothing had happened.
Behind the princess stood her brother, a poet with soft lips and soft moss for hair.
He whispered, “Let me try.” But no one heard.
They buried the fairy prince alone.
By evening, the flowers had grown over his whole face.
ELEVEN
Thomas pulled Andrew to his feet and led him out of the forest.
They walked slow, adrenaline draining with each step and leaving them with bones of water. Andrew still clung to Thomas’s hand, their fingers laced and palms slick with blood and mud. One of them had forgotten to let go.
Climbing the fence felt impossible, but they forced themselves over. Andrew ripped his sweatshirt on the jagged wire at the top, but Thomas slipped and sliced his arm. He looked at it with dull, unfocused eyes, like he didn’t even feel it. They were almost back to the dorms before Andrew realized he was in the lead.
He was the one dragging Thomas, forcing him on, holding him together.
Since when did their placesswitch?
When they’d climbed back through their window, their room didn’t seem real. Andrew touched his mouth, his eyes, as if phantom vines still dug at his skin. Maybe he was the one who had stopped being real. He was falling outside of himself.
Thomas sank down on Andrew’s bed and stared at his shaking hands. His nails were bitten to stubs, blood tracing the creases in his muddy palms.
Andrew dropped down beside him, their bodies jammed tight together, hip to hip. “How bad are you hurt?”
“I should be asking you that.” Thomas’s voice cracked around the edges as if he’d been screaming too long. Maybe he had, before Andrew got there.
“It got my shoulder, I think.” Andrew felt nothing, so it didn’t seem important. “This… this isn’t real.”
