“But I got it out. I swear I did.” Thomas grabbed for a towel and crushed it against Andrew’s bleeding ear.
“I need this all to stop,” Andrew whispered.
“I know. Shit. I’ll fix it. Whatever it takes.”
“We have to give the forest what it wants,” he said. “More blood for a tithe?”
“No.” Thomas’s mouth made a grim line. “It wants a better sacrifice.”
They ended up sitting on Andrew’s bed, trying to come up with a plan, though every idea felt thin and insubstantial, doomed to fail before they’d even tried it. There had to be an answer, something about the drawings, but both of them were too exhausted and wrung out to reach for it. Andrew pressed his palms hard against his eyes to distract from the sickening pain in his ear, but when he opened them, he realized Thomas had fallen asleep. He still lay in Andrew’s bed, his face snuffled into the pillows and his breathing already evening out. A shove didn’t wake him. There had been too many bitterly sleepless nights.
The obvious answer was to cross the room and sleep in Thomas’s bed instead, but everything seemed too far away, required too much effort. So what if Andrew stayed where he was? Friends shared beds all the time, and they didn’t have to touch. He lay down, his body pressed close to the wall, and let his eyes drift shut to the soothing lullaby of Thomas’s breathing. A few minutes, then they’d go out and fight monsters.
But it was the witching hour that woke him. The sound of a howl pulled from a ravenous throat filled the night beyond their safe little room. Andrew startled upright, his heart hammering and his stomach a seasick riot, and he climbed over an unmoving Thomas and collapsed onto the floor just in time to vomit leaves and bloody nubs of violets in the trash can. They were late to leave for the forest, but he shook with a foul cold, too nauseous to see straight, and the idea of facing the dark, themonsters, turned him inside out with despair. Thomas slept on, oblivious. Andrew didn’t wake him.
He touched his ear and felt it swollen afresh, stretching as if something had regrown while he slept. But this time it wasn’t pushing against skin and trying to escape. It was growing the other way. Going in deeper.
It was inside him, he knew.
The forest.
Once there was a boy who slept in an enchanted tower, his back flecked with whip marks from battles lost and monsters who’d won. He wore a crown of cherrywood and firebird bones, gifted to him by his sisters who were trees in the forest. But they had not been able to protect him, and his capture meant endless years of torture.
The boy whimpered in his sleep, waiting for the whips to return.
Instead, a witch climbed through his tower window. She wore a cloak covered in the gold dust of wishes, and she promised to save him. For a price.
“Take this ax,” she said with a coy smile, “and cut down every tree in the forest. Then nothing will ever harm you again.”
“But the trees are my sisters,” he said, his bones already filled with dread.
“Why do you care for them?” the witch asked. “They do not love you. They did not come for you. Take the ax.”
He began to cry, but he took the ax.
TWENTY
Soft warmth pressed against Andrew’s side. Sleep left him too muzzy to investigate, so he merely let his fingers trail through thick curls before a very faraway part of him understood this was Thomas.
They must have rolled into each other during the night. Thomas’s head lay burrowed under the blankets, his face against Andrew’s ribs. He breathed slow and even, and he smelled of soap and sleep and boy.
It was nice, this warmth nested beside Andrew, no expectations that their touch had to turn into anything else. He let his fingers tangle lazily in Thomas’s curls and pretended vomiting leaves during the witching hour had been a crumpled dream.
He might’ve fallen asleep again if the pounding of feet outside their door hadn’t reminded them it was a school day and they were already late. Thomas sighed, stretching out with a yawn, before he suddenly bolted upright and flung himself from Andrew’s bed. The way Andrew’s stomach turned inside out, his mind already racing for an excuse, for a denial of how he’d barely noticed they’d fallen asleep together, hit with such sickening brutality that he almost couldn’t breathe until Thomas said, “Shit,shit, we didn’t kill monsters last night. We slept? How did—we’re in so much goddamn trouble.”
He flew around the room, stripping off pajamas andyanking on his pants before shoving feet into unlaced shoes. Andrew kept very still and very quiet.
There. It hadn’t meant anything. It was fine. They were fine. They didn’t need to acknowledge that skin and curls and limbs had been entwined, or how they’d fallen to an unrepentant craving for closeness and stolen a comfort they could never deserve.
While Thomas fought with his tie, Andrew emptied the trash with covert swiftness—the mess of smeared mud and seeds and bruised petals looking more like an overturned compost pile than something that had been down his throat—and he did his best not to touch his ear. But a headache flourished behind his eyes.
As if small, green vines had grown into a tight knot while he slept and now pushed up at the confines of his skull, hungry for more room to stretch.
Stop. Worry about it later.
The thing to focus on was the sin of their laziness and the monsters that could be around a corner or folded into a wall, breath hot and rancid, tongues craving the wet blood of the two boys they hungered for relentlessly. The anticipation of it, the dread of not knowing, had both Andrew and Thomas flinching at every shadow, every movement, skittering away from windows and double-checking classrooms before they slunk to their desks. It made them look on edge. Paranoid.Unhinged.When they had to separate for the classes they didn’t share—Andrew to Classic Literature and Thomas to Art—neither of them felt like they’d make it out the other side.
Andrew found a swollen line of fungi growing on the underside of his desk. When he brushed up against it, the fungi clungto his pants, feasting on the fibers as he desperately tried to rub them off while Dr. Reul lectured. He could feel dirt inside his shoes, though that was impossible. The splitting headache was the worst part, still growing from his ear up behind his eyes. He had the sudden urge to grab a compass out from his pencil case and shove it into his ear, dig hard and deep and gouge out every green, growing thing before it slid roots deeper into his brain.
