Thomas finished pulling on the hoodie and bundling his trashed clothes inside a towel. The stink of sap and blood twirled down the drain, but even slathered and washed off with soap, he still smelled of fresh earth from an overturned grave.
Andrew unlocked the door.
Thomas shot out like a bullet, breezing past the boys without a glance. Bryce’s smirk grew as he tracked Andrew slinking out next, and when he turned to his friend, they both burst out laughing before the snide comments started. Their words blistered against Andrew’s back all the way down the hall, but he forced himself not to react, not to turn around.
It was only after he’d slipped back into his room and slammed the door that he realized he’d been so dizzy with the horror of the Antler King in his reflection that he hadn’t put his shirt back on. He’d walked out in the open with skin stretched so tight over his chest that his bones looked like knobbed roots pressing against his skin. Embarrassment roared in his ears as he pulled on a sweater with shaking hands.
Thomas had returned to his frenzied pacing, his fingers clawing through his soaked hair, his breathing quick and unsteady. Outside, voices and footsteps flooded their floor. Questions and complaints clamored over the top of each other. No one wanted to be shut in their rooms.
Andrew needed to breathe, sit down, think—or maybe hedidn’t want to think. He couldn’t close his eyes and see Clemens again.
He sank to the floor, the bed too far away, but as his knees hit the ground, Thomas grabbed Andrew’s arms so hard he winced.
Thomas’s eyes looked liquid green, violent and wild and bright. “Are you hurt? I’ll kill anything that touches you. Iswear.”
“We have to… have to…” Every word came out strangled. “We have to make them stop.”
Thomas looked away, his throat working. “I’ll kill them all. I don’t know what else to do. I-I-I don’t know, Andrew. I don’t know what to do.”
Everyone was told to stay in their dorms for the rest of the evening.
Supervisors went to every room and gave the official statement: A rotten root system had collapsed some of the school walls. Mishap of an old estate, but maintenance would have it fixed directly. Wickwood clearly didn’t want the truth getting out about how Clemens died and freaked-out parents withdrawing their kids, so they simply said:
Everything would be fine.
Please stay calm.
You’re safe.
Thomas ripped all his drawings off the wall, lit a match, and burned them in a trash can while Andrew opened a window and tried to fan the smoke out into the thickening twilight. He wished he could stuff the ashy remains in his mouth, inkedmonsters and matches and wicked flames and all. It would burn him to the core but not before he spent a bright, searing moment feeling full. Emptiness banished.
take Clemens as the tithe take him take him take him
Andrew fell asleep and only woke because rain drifted in the open window to wet his clammy skin. Thomas was midway through climbing out into the witching hour.
Andrew could’ve rolled over and let him go alone, but he didn’t deserve to feel safe.
They saw the first monster before they’d even made it to the fence, a hulking shadow on the other side of the chain links. A wolf, but not. Its head looked sewn onto a different body, fur bloodied and matted until it disintegrated around its chest to show its rib cage and spine white and bare. Branches and briars burst from its pulsing organs and wound out past the stark bones. When Thomas tried to climb the fence, it lunged, white frothing from its snarling jaws.
Andrew caught Thomas’s sleeve. “Don’t.”
“I made this.” Thomas’s voice came thin and broken. “I have to stop them.”
He climbed the fence and killed the forest wolf. Then another, and another. He made Andrew stay behind the fence, claiming it was because they only had one hatchet, but it felt like punishment for being so useless, so thin and weak.
When dawn came, they crawled back into their room, Andrew frozen and Thomas with claw marks gouging his arms and chest, palms blistered. He’d have to wear layers and long sleeves tomorrow to cover it all from questioning eyes. Thomas fell asleep with one hand dangling over his bed, whimpering ashis eyes moved restlessly behind closed lids to the beat of his nightmares.
Andrew couldn’t take it. He lay on his back on the cold floorboards under Thomas’s limp hand. Carefully, not daring to breathe, Andrew brushed his mouth over Thomas’s raw red palms.
Kisses, but not.
Apologies, but useless.
The fever in his hands burned Andrew’s mouth.
NINETEEN
An uncanny hush had fallen over Wickwood Academy.
