Cold air touched the back of his neck then, an autumn chill laced with the thick scent of the forest. Moss and decaying leaves androt.
Andrew brightened one of the photos and stared at the grainy, murky shot.
It was him.
He had his back to the camera, flashlight clutched to his chest. Ferns bunched around his legs and the trees rose ominously behind him.
He brightened the next photo, then the next. Him again, his head tilted back to see the stars through the trees, his white throat exposed like an invitation to monsters.
In the next one he stood slender and smudged, while behind him loomed a shape big enough to blot out the stars. Teeth gleamed. Antlers curved from a skull. A monster grew behind Andrew and he had no idea.
He squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed back the bile. Who had taken these photos? Whowatched him? Thomaswas right there, half in the frame, and more than one photo showed them curved toward each other or standing with limbs entwined.
If Dove saw these pictures, she’d tell herself a sour story. Maybe this was why she was furious at him? What if she’d taken the photos—
Okay, no. He had to gouge that idea from his mind. She’d never do this. If she saw the monsters, she would have run for help.
Unless she couldn’t see the monsters and had only seen them, together, their intimacy clear. No wonder she was furious at him.
He deleted everything and stuffed the phone in his pocket before hurrying to find a seat in the auditorium with Thomas. All he had to do was sit still and listen to the principal calmly lie about how, tragically, a wall had collapsed and resulted in the death of a beloved teacher, Christopher Clemens. There were counselors available for anyone who needed to talk. A freak accident. But the walls would be fixed by tomorrow and no one was in danger.
Andrew tried to catch Thomas’s eye, but he sat hunched, chewing his thumbnail.
Maybe he could put on a brave face when he fought monsters, but afterward he was always this: a panicked ruin, barely keeping himself together. He needed someone to hold him up, and hadn’t Andrew been doing just that? He was the only person in the world who understood.
They had to stay together.
They should never be apart.
That night, their dorm felt bare without any of Thomas’s art watching them get ready for bed. With classes a disjointed mess due to half the school being blocked off and swarming with maintenance workers, their teachers assigned a criminal amount of extra reading to be done in the library or their dorms. Andrew and Thomas chose the safety of their room, wanting a locked door between them and the prying eyes, the whispers, the settling realization that they had let monsters attack the school and somehow gotten away with it.
Although as Andrew sat on the floor surrounded by textbooks and cupping a hand over his hot, throbbing ear, Clemens’s screams echoing in the back of his head, he didn’t feel like he got away with much at all.
Thomas struggled into his pajama shirt, toothbrush hanging from his mouth. “Back in a sec.” He wrenched the door open and strode out like he was marching to war.
It was fair to feel that way when all the rules had changed: Their monsters weren’t bound by forest or night or the fence, and they weren’t scared of their pathetic little hatchet. Andrew pulled his legs up and pressed his face to his knees, needing to block out the entire world for a second and justbreathe. They couldn’t keep surviving this.
Even with the window shut, he smelled the forest, felt it pulsing like a moldering second heartbeat beneath his skin. He touched the swollen lump behind his ear, now grown to a boil the size of a grape, a gorge of blood and pus. Just an ear infection. It depressed when he dug his thumbnail in.
He suddenly couldn’t stand it.
Rummaging around in Thomas’s art supplies produced a paper clip. He uncurled it and bent his ear with one hand, resting the sharp tip against the lump.
Don’t, a small part of him whispered.
He stabbed the paper clip in, hard.
Pain shot through his ear in a dazzling explosion. He gasped as the lump burst, liquid sliding down the back of his neck as agony slashed red across his vision.
The thick smell of the forest seized his throat. When he peeled his hand away from his ear, mud smeared his fingertips in clotted clumps. Milky sap instead of pus. A single seed coated in blood.
Everything inside Andrew twisted in shuddering repulsion, and he wanted to close his eyes and fall out of this entire universe.
The bedroom door creaked open and Thomas came in with a wet face, midway through muttering something hateful about an annoying freshman when he saw Andrew hunched up and shuddering, his hands as filthy as if he’d dug around in garden soil.
Thomas ran over, his eyes gone wide with panic. “What the—wait, why is your ear bleeding? Is that…”
“When Clemens died”—Andrew’s voice sounded thick and distended—“a vine went into my—my ear.”
