Thomas let out a laugh that withered into a sob. “They’re not always that big. The smaller ones have bones of clay and glass, and they’re easier to break. I have to kill them, every time, because if I don’t, they climb the fence and get into school. They could attack anyone, go anywhere. I h-h-h-have to stop them.”
Thomas peeled off Andrew’s bed and dragged out a cardboard box full of bandages, disinfectant swabs, butterfly tape, even a bottle of mild painkillers. A survival kit.
He ripped open packages with his teeth with the familiarity of routine.
“You do this every night.” Andrew sat frozen. “You never told me—” He choked. “We have to tell someone. We have to—”
“No.” Thomas looked up, and his eyes blazed with such vehemence that Andrew flinched.
He’d nearly said,We have to tell Dove, but maybe they shouldn’t. Part of him sat there melting in shameful relief that he had been wrong about Thomas and Dove meeting in the forest, wrong thinking Thomas hated him. He was so relieved that a manic smile tugged at his lips. Sure, monsters were real and wanted to rip out their throats, but at least he still had his best friend.
Thomas slumped back on the bed, swiveling to sit cross-legged. “Take off your shirt.”
A ripple went through Andrew’s stomach. He obeyed, wincing when fabric stuck to bloodied skin. When he tried to see the damage, Thomas took hold of Andrew’s chin and forced him to look away. Then he carefully swabbed Andrew’s shoulder with one hand while the other pressed over his collarbone, which lit him up in a horribly beautiful way.
“They’ll come after you now,” Thomas said. “They’ve tasted your blood.”
“They already did,” Andrew said. “Yesterday in the bathrooms. I-I saw the hooves. It was hunting me.”
Thomas made a tight, vexed sound. “They grow out of the forest every night, and I used to think they’d disappear when the sun rises. But they don’t. If I don’t kill them all, they’ll go after anyone I hang around. That’s why my…”
“Your parents,” Andrew breathed.
Everything made sense.
Thomas’s voice shook so much he kept stopping to swallow. “That day before school started? The fight the neighbors heard? It was amonster. I hid. I listened to my parents fight it, but they’re always high these days, and I didn’t think it wasreal. How could it be goddamn real? I took a knife from the kitchen, but then I saw what it looked like and I ran. I just ran.”
His fingers traced the edges of Andrew’s cut shoulder before he taped on the bandage. Pain had arrived, white-hot and throbbing, but Andrew still didn’t care. Thomas’s misery had filled the whole room, and they drowned in it, together.
“I killed my parents,” Thomas said, soft and sick and terrified.
“Stop it.” Blood roared in Andrew’s ears. “These monsters aren’t your fault. You didn’t ask them to attack—”
“Didn’t I?” Thomas went to his desk and dug out a sketchbook. He pulled a loose sheet from between the pages, smoothing out the wreckage of crumpled edges. Then he flung it on the floor. It was the drawing Thomas had snatched away on the roof—the seventh son staring into a wishing well, while a monster with a torn-off wolf’s head ate his parents in the background.
Thomas’s voice stretched with anguish. “That’s what it looked like. The monster in my house. Just like this, down to the stitching at its throat. And this—” He tore a drawing off the wall so hard the corners were left behind.
Andrew yanked it from Thomas’s bloodied hands and stared.
Hooves, and corpse skin, and vines exploding from its mouth and ears and eyes.
The monster from the woods.
“When did you—” He stopped.
“I don’t know… Last year sometime?” Thomas dug fingers through his hair and paced between their beds. “It’s not a coincidence. I’m doing this. I’m-I’mcreating them.”
Andrew couldn’t hold the shape of this. He stared at the drawing until it blurred, and then he ripped it up and let the pieces scatter like charcoal confetti.
“I shouldn’t tell you this. It’ll make it worse.” Thomas wrapped arms round his stomach. “They’ll kill you like they want to kill me. I can’t bear it if they take you from me, too. I need—I need—I’m sogoddamn tired. It’s every night, okay? Every night I go into the woods and fight them so they don’t climb the fence, but I can’t make them stop. I c-c-can’t—”
Thomas would wake up the whole dorm if he kept spiralinglike this. If their counselor burst in here, there’d be no way to explain the blood, their dirt-streaked faces, or why Thomas was ranting aboutmonsters.
Andrew grabbed Thomas’s shirt and pulled him back down to the bed to cut off the frantic pacing. He cupped a hand over Thomas’s mouth, nothing like the bruising way his own face had been gripped in the forest; this was delicate and tentative and full of want.
Thomas went quiet.
Words seemed weak and meaningless when drawings could wake up monsters, so Andrew didn’t ask. He peeled Thomas’s shirt off and searched for the worst wound—a slash right over his ribs. Blood still oozed sluggishly from torn flesh.
