“Those are portraits. I mean, I have birds and mountains bursting out of heads, but”—he spoke louder to cut off Andrew’s protests—“that’s different. No monsters.”
“Are you drawing forests? Trees?”
Darkness shrouded most of Thomas’s face, but a small corner of light touched his resentful mouth. He’d always hated being told what to do.
“I think,” Andrew said, “the problem is everything you draw.”
“If I can make monsters, do you… do you think about what this makes me?” Thomas uncapped a Sharpie, but the sideways glance he shot Andrew was wary.
Trapped between monsters and the waking dark for so long, Andrew was focused on only one thing: Make the monsters stop.
Not who had started it.
Not why.
His stomach flipped as he looked at Thomas’s unsure face, the way his chin tilted up as if he was starved for any reassurance Andrew could place on his tongue. This vulnerability made him look younger, softer.
“Magic,” Andrew said. “I think it makes you magic.”
Inside him, what he really thought beat against his pulse,dark and fervent and cruel.You are a nightmare, you are a god of wicked places, to stop your horror maybe we have to stop you—
Thomas allowed himself the smallest smile before turning back to his drawing. But some of the tension had left his shoulders, and it made Andrew’s lie worth it. He wished he could fit his face into the crook of Thomas’s throat and hold on until his anxiety thinned and they both felt warm again.
A stick cracked behind them.
Andrew turned slowly, his grip firm on the hatchet. He refused to fall apart this time like a boy made of glass.
Thomas drew faster. “It will be a devil with a terrible face and flowers in its horns. The tree roots will strangle it. If this works, we won’t have to do much.”
“What does this devil want?” Andrew said.
Thomas flicked a puzzled glance at him. “I don’t know, to eat us? It’s a monster.”
Something turned over in Andrew’s mind, a puzzle piece, toppling into his outstretched hand. Everyone wanted something. Everyone yearned or searched or hungered—even monsters. Clemens had wanted to feel clever by making others feel stupid, and Bryce Kane wanted to feel powerful by making others small.
So what did the monsters in the forest want?
Thomas drew them fierce and wicked, but he put no story behind his drawings—his monsters began and stopped on paper. Andrew knew Thomas drew how he felt, but did he ever understand his own feelings? He never seemed to know why he was angry or scared or lonely—this was obvious in all his wild moods and his bewilderment when Dove called him outfor being loathsome and in the desperate way he held on to Andrew.
Maybe, this whole time, they’d been fighting the monsters wrong.
“What doyouwant?” Andrew said, and watched Thomas frown in confusion.
He stared at Andrew with the night pooled black in his eyes, and when his mouth shaped a word, Andrew so desperately wanted it to be:
You.
But Thomas didn’t say that. He didn’t have a chance to say anything.
Behind him a claw shot out of the darkness and snatched him by the throat.
Andrew cried out and vaulted forward, but Thomas had already been dragged backward into the brush. He kicked with a frantic, animal fury, sketchbook torn from his hand and papers ripping and scattering across the forest floor. The page with the monster he’d designed whipped up and caught on Andrew’s leg before flying away.
The monster who had Thomas now was all wrong.
Its body twisted in the vulgar imitation of a human. Arms too long, spine mangled. Its torso was naked but for twine wrapped around and around its chest and neck and head. Dirt and rotten fruit and twigs oozed between the bindings. No eyes, no ears. Only its mouth showed in a red, lipless slash, and when its jaws parted, a tongue slithered out, long and forked like a snake’s.
It was nothing like Thomas’s drawing.
