The forest had left its teeth marks all over them, and it would never leave them alone.
Carefully, Andrew unbuttoned his shirt and used a towel to scrub out his swollen ear. It pulsed with terrific pain, as if someone had hooked their fingers into his eardrum andtwisted, but he could still hear. He was fine. Unscathed.
He stared at the mirror with bloodshot eyes.
The Antler King stared back.
Blood dripped down the crown as its skin flaked into burnished autumn leaves.
take Clemens as the tithe take him take him take him
Andrew was the murderer.
He’d done this.
The monsters had grown bored of biting Thomas and cutting Andrew. Their tithe wasn’t big enough. They wantedmore and more and more—
Andrew’s chest heaved. His fingers tightened into a fist, scars stretching. “Get out of my head. Get out. Get out, GET OUT GET—”
He raised his fist and he didn’t know what he was doing or how to stop seeing skin slough from Clemens’s face or how to stop the monsters stop them stop them stop—
He swung.
A hand caught his elbow and wrenched him backward.Andrew slipped on the steam-slicked bathroom tiles, but Thomas wrapped wet arms around his chest and held him up. Andrew closed his eyes.
“Don’t do that again.” Thomas’s voice came so quiet. “Please.”
Andrew forced his fingers to uncurl. The spiderweb of scars stared back at him like a map of lost control.
The bathroom door rattled and they both jumped apart. Andrew spun away, burying his face in his hands while Thomas knotted a towel around his waist. Which meant he had been very naked when he held Andrew a second before, but that had to mean nothing. They were slashed to the core right now; it had to mean nothing.
Andrew tried to remember how to fit back inside his skin.
“Why is this locked?”
“Who’s in there! Hey!”
“You aren’t allowed to lock the main bathroom doors. Open up.”
The doorknob rattled.
Andrew pressed his forehead to the door. “Just give me a minute.”
Voice turned to low mumbles.
Then Bryce Kane said, clear and bright, “Nah, that’s not Eckers. It’s totally Perrault.”
“Why’s he need the whole bathroom?”
“He’s probably vomiting. Did you see how skinny he is?”
They scuffled, hushing each other. Someone laughed.
Blood scorched across Andrew’s face, and for a second his fury narrowed to a startling point. He would wrench open thedoor and snatch Bryce Kane by the throat and slam him into the wall just as vines exploded outward and wrapped around the thrashing body to—
A fist banged on the door again.
Andrew flinched. His ear hurt so much it was hard to think.
