The world slid sickeningly left, and pain shot behind his eyes in a white-hot spear of excruciating agony. He couldn’t bear it. He was going to tear outside his own skin.
Monsters stepped out from behind the trees with masks of blackberry briars and vicious teeth curved over their jaws, limbs fused with riotous trees and claws extended. Perforated intestines and foul, viscid liquids, and endless decay slithered out of their concave bodies. Then Andrew noticed the writhing tangle of vines pulling themselves from the soil, thorns hooked and tipped with blood, bodies throbbing like snakes. He tried to scramble back, but a green vine looped around his ankle. In a flash, it tightened like a tourniquet.
“Thomas.” It burst from him like a plea, a prayer.
Thomas snatched up the hatchet and swung hard, choppingthe vine in half while maggots and festering black beetles burst from the severed flesh. But already another had grabbed his ankle, sneaked a tendril around his wrist, crawled toward his waist with leaves blossoming with a green so lurid it stood out like a scream in the dark.
Their eyes met and the grief was so visceral, so brutal, that a wail tore from Andrew’s throat.
He clambered to his feet, unsteady and drunk on his devastation, kicking back the vines as more surged from the soil and with thorns looking to hook into flesh. They smelled blood. They wanted more.
“S-stop.” He practically screamed it. “It’s not him. It’sme. You wantme!”
“Andrew, shut thefuck up.” Thomas sounded frantic as he tried to slice the vines tightening around his body. The hatchet slipped and sliced across his thigh, but he didn’t seem to care. “I won’t let them have you—”
“I’m the tithe,” Andrew said, and his mouth was full of ink.
Thomas screamed at the same moment the forest dug fingers into Andrew’s face andpulled.
Something slick and livid exploded from Andrew’s eye, growing thick and fast down his cheek in a rain of warm earth. He clawed at his face, as roots tore through soft tissue and skin. He was screaming; he couldn’t stop. Pain bloomed, vicious and bloody and red. With trembling fingertips, he touched his eyelid just as thorny roses unfurled petals dripping with the viscid jelly of his perforated eye. They grew.Blossomed.
He couldn’t see.
Someone was screaming his name.
He couldn’t see.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that the forest had outgrown the confines of his thin, frail body and longed to stretch. He used to be an empty boy, impossible to fill.
Now he was so full of monsters.
THIRTY-THREE
Every good story ends with a wishbone snapped, a bloodied kiss, the prince’s sacrifice.
—cut out a heart—
and bury it in the woods.
But he already knew that.
The hardest part was not what he had to do, it was walking away from Thomas as vines twisted around his wrists and tore open the buttons of his once-white shirt to find the hole the monsters had made—Andrew had made—that was impossible to fill. The hardest part was listening to the way Thomas screamed, terror unraveling him right to the core, as he watched the forest eat through Andrew.
But he had no choice but to go.
Someone had to finish telling the story.
Night slid an inky tongue across the forest as he walked, like it meant to swallow him whole. The weight of it pressed against his chest, drowned his lungs, smothered any pathetic whimpers escaping from his bloodied throat. He stumbled on gnarls of roots and thorny underbrush, but even as it bit at him, he felt nothing. Behind him, Thomas stopped screaming.
Don’t think, don’tthink.
He didn’t let himself cry; he wasn’t even sure he could with the rose thorns sinking into the tender skin below hiseye. He climbed over a fallen tree throbbing with fungi turned bioluminescent under the streaks of silver moonlight. It crumbled under his palm and clung to his skin with moist, decaying flesh.
The whole night made sense, in a brittle, circular way. He took in a lungful of air and felt it slide wet and tar-slick down his throat, a strange sort of calm folding over him. He wondered if anyone would notice they’d gone into the woods and never came out, if anyone would care. After this, everything strange and uncanny about the school would stop.
A shadow shivered behind a tree and the world seemed to crystalize around him, breath held, air turned cold enough that his breath was a white globe before him. He stopped and tucked his hands in his pockets.
“Come out,” he said.
