Thomas’s sobs came thick and low. With trembling hands, he pulled up his shirt.
Even in the dark they could see the hole, a perfectly round burrow straight into his stomach. It didn’t bleed. It was a black tunnel to another world.
Andrew flattened his fingers over it. “You’re okay. The monster’s dead.”
“What did you do?” Thomas choked on each word. “H-h-how—”
“I told a story.” Andrew gripped Thomas like he’d never let go. “I killed them with ink.”
They had to try it again, to be sure it hadn’t been a coincidence.
They stuffed Andrew’s pockets with thick black markers, and this time Thomas held the hatchet. His eyes were hollowedand bruised with exhaustion, and he held himself gingerly. They’d cleaned and bandaged his wound, but the hole didn’t close. It stayed there, round as a coin and pitch black. Andrew thought if he slid fingers into it, he’d find no blood, just a tunnel all the way to Thomas’s spine.
It was freaking Thomas out in a way nothing else had yet. He kept one hand around his stomach as they walked into the forest, and whenever the bushes rustled, he looked ready to fall apart.
As Andrew stood before the birch he’d written on last night, Thomas rested his back against Andrew’s and matched their breaths. His came ragged and damp, Andrew’s steady.
He shone his flashlight over the bark and picked an empty space.
“I don’t want them to touch me,” Thomas said. “I can’t… not again. I—”
“I’ll write it different.” Andrew bit the Sharpie cap off and put pen to the bark, ready. He curled his other hand around Thomas’s wrist.
Thomas curved into him then, and Andrew’s breath caught, a riot of butterflies behind his ribs. They were so close, cheek to cheek. He thought if he tilted his head sideways, Thomas might kiss him right then, and it would be wonderful and terrible.
It would answer one thing and ruin everything else.
Or maybe it wouldn’t ruin anything. He didn’t know. It ate at him, how he didn’t know and was too scared to find out.
“Andrew…” Thomas said his name with such careful softness. “Do you…” He stopped. “When we slept—”
They couldn’t talk about this, not now. Andrew didn’t havewords lined up to justify why they’d curled against each other in his bed, saying nothing like it meant nothing—
Andrew must have stiffened slightly, or maybe they both sensed the weight of monsters shifting in the dark, because Thomas pulled away.
“What?” Andrew said, mouth dry.
“I’ll ask you later.” Thomas’s voice was low and rough.
Then the monsters were there.
Andrew knew them from one of the drawings Thomas used to have tacked above his bed. Creatures slim as poplar trees and so tall Andrew’s neck ached to look up at them. They wore cloaks of mottled black, and their bones rattled as they walked.
Their heads were ram skulls, twisted and grotesque monsters with flesh rotted away and teeth full of worms. Lichen and mushrooms grew up their cloaks, and they didn’t so much walk as sweep forward.
Thomas smashed the hatchet through one and the bones exploded apart and clattered to the forest floor. But when he stepped back, the creature simply reformed behind its cloak and rose again.
This time it gnashed its teeth and Thomas stumbled backward into Andrew to get away.
The monsters came forward with jaws clicking, heads tilting as bits of dead flesh dripped from their skulls.
“Andrew…” Thomas dug fingers into the back of Andrew’s sweater. “They’re bone shrikes. When they scream—”
One of the shrikes tilted back its head and screamed as if on request. The sound whipped like a lash across their eardrums, and both of them bent double as they cried out. Blood ran fromtheir ears, their noses. It dripped wet and metallic over Andrew’s lips as he pressed himself to the birch and began to write.
On a night of velvet black, the bone shrikes walked their favored forest paths to call for secrets. If they screamed into an ear, their prey had no choice but to bare their soul.
Thomas clapped hands over his ears, hatchet abandoned. Andrew thought Thomas seemed more desperate than usual to protect himself, as if he owned too many secrets he couldn’t let slip.
