Andrew felt sick. He’d wanted to get out of eating and so hehad. As if he’dasked for it. He scraped dirt out of his mouth and spat.
“Let’s go back and get water.” Thomas stood, but Andrew grabbed his elbow.
Mud stained his mouth. “Do you hear that?”
Thomas’s eyes flicked around the dripping garden. The sky looked ready to crack open again, and it had grown darker.
“It’s probably Bryce coming to mess with us.” But his body felt stiff under Andrew’s touch.
“I think,” Andrew said, “you were right about October.”
Something moved behind the hedges—thick, tarred, malevolent.
They both shot away from the wall, backing toward the path. It had to be Bryce. They hadn’t found monsters in the forest to kill last night, so there couldn’t have been any, right? This wasn’t—
fair
Thunder rumbled above them, light rain kissing the tops of their heads. A musk crept up the path, decaying leaves and damp earth and the ugly fester of rot.
A hiss sounded behind them and they spun as a shadow shifted. It left a claw mark dug into the grass.
Andrew’s pulse picked up, fast as hummingbird wings. Maybe they’d done this by taking solace in each other. Their soft touches, their bodies magnetized closer and closer—it must enrage the monsters, who wanted nothing more than their bare throats and pale wrists offered up as sacrifice.
From the corner of his eye, Andrew saw the tips of antlers jutting out of bleeding skin, a body smeared in the muck of the forest.
Thomas grabbed Andrew’s arm. “We have to go.Now.”
The creature unfolded itself from the rosebushes, tall, so tall, with clumps of earth and torn flesh clinging to its antlers. It grew from the wicked deep; it belonged there.
And it had come for them.
When it opened its mouth to show rows of pointed teeth, tarred saliva dripped down to splatter on the grass. Green shriveled. Black roses bloomed across the ground instead, their leaves corroding even as they grew.
Whatever this monster touched died and grew backwrong.
It reached for Andrew.
Thomas shoved him. “RUN!”
They shot for the school, tripping on each other’s heels with no air to breathe between them. They vaulted a low stone wall and threw themselves at the side entrance. Locked. How could it belocked? This late in the afternoon, students should be trickling from the dorms and library to the dining hall and the school should be full of people—
Which meant they were leading the monster toward a feast.
“Thomas, we can’t—” Andrew said, but Thomas grabbed his wrist and wrenched him forward.
The monster came fast, hooves and claws cutting up the path and murdering the garden as it came. It snarled a roar that tipped into a scream that felt like thin pins driving into their eardrums.
Andrew clapped a hand over one ear, but he felt blood trickle down his cheek. It was as if the monster wanted nothing more than to find a way inside him, to curl between flesh and bone and flourish there.
“Justcome on!” Thomas dragged them around the back ofthe school, but everything was bricks and ivy, closed windows and locked doors.
They skidded around the corner just as the monster lunged. It hooked a claw into Andrew’s shirt and yanked him backward toward that cavernous mouth, its tongue exploding with maggots. This close, its antlers looked sharp enough to cut anything, curved into a mockery of a crown.
He remembered this drawing. It was tacked to Thomas’s bedroom wall.
The Antler King. Who carved off faces with knives made of its own horns.
A cry escaped Andrew. He dropped to his knees as Thomas whipped around and flung himself with fists flying at the monster. He punched it in the chest and it stumbled backward.
