He moves in closer, moving like a wolf, locking in on his prey.
“My mom loves to garden,” she blurts out, unthinking. “Loved. Will love again. She kept the yard full of perennials. Purple astilbe likes full sun, although sometimes in a heat wave she’d sit out there with an umbrella, just in case it got too hot. Spiked speedwell likes well-drained soil, and it has to be cut back every year or you won’t get blooms.”
Lys’s head quirks oddly, canting to the side.
“Coral bells like partial shade.” Her back collides into the wide trunk of a tree. She takes a swallow of air and keeps going, unable to do anything but watch Lys approach. “They tend to heave out of the ground in the wintertime, so you need to mulch after the first freeze. I missed it this year, and I’m worried they’ll uproot while I’m away.”
He sways into her, a clawed hand braced against the flat of her stomach. The bloodied tips of five sharp talons snag in her shirt. She shuts her eyes.
“Then there’s bleeding hearts,” she whispers. “They’re my favorite. They grow in the shade, kind of like you. My mom keeps them next to the red columbine, because they match, and because they both attract hummingbirds.”
His hand closes around the hem of her shirt. Fingers—human—scrape the bare skin of her belly. Slowly—slowly—his forehead lowers to hers. His breath shreds the air between them.
“What are you doing?”
Relief blooms, sunshine bright, inside her chest. “I don’t know any baseball facts.”
A distinctly Lys smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. He sways, unsteady.
“Lys?”
She pulls away just in time to see his eyes roll back. He collapses into her, boneless. He’s heavier than her by a large margin. They go down together, hitting the cold, wet ground.
“Lys?” She shoves at him, to no avail.“Oliver.”
Something heavy crashes through the trees up ahead. She rolls as best she can, scrabbling for the flashlight just as Asher emerges. He takes in the scene before him—the body on the ground and Lys’s head tipped back, his hair matted with rainwater.
“Help me,” she cries. “Help me get him up. I can’t—he’s too heavy.”
“Okay. It’s okay. I’ve got him.” Asher hauls Lys onto his feet, pulling an arm over his shoulder to prop him up. His head drops forward, eyelids fluttering.
“Get his other side,” orders Asher.
Shea rushes to obey, wedging herself under his shoulder like a crutch. The stars as their audience, they make their way back to the cabin. Shea slips in the mud as she goes, struggling under Lys’s weight. She feels small and weak and angry, her heart in her stomach, the woman’s words beating like a drum in the hollow of her chest:Come to the revel. Alone.
It’s getting worse.
The clock, tick-tock-ticking in his head.
The bomb, tick-tock-ticking in his chest.
Nothing inside him will be quiet. Not his thoughts. Not his dreams. Not the bugs in his veins. They crawl along the empty arteries, scrape at the ventricles of his heart, boring deep, deep, deep. Sometimes he thinks that if he lay down and died, his body would get right back up again and keep going on without him in a mad little jig.
He thinks of a poem. A nursery rhyme—he detests children’s rhymes. He hates the repetition. The nonsense words. The oversimplified cadence. Most of all he hates how they make him think of his mother.Home again, home again, jiggety jig.
He’s not thinking of his mother right now.
He’s thinking ofher. It’s hard not to—she’s looking right at him. Her eyes are narrowed in anger. Her voice is pinched tight.
“Asher, stop. Stop it—don’t touch him. He’s fine. He just needs to rest.”
He’s conscious of a boy’s voice. A low, irritable baritone. A punishing white light jackknifes along his periphery and then disappears. A door slams. There’s a featherlight touch at his brow, the feel of fingers pushing back his hair. His head is on fire. His bones grind tight. Everything, everything aches.
And then, in the maelstrom, he hears her. “Catmint needs full sun and well-drained soil. It blooms in late spring and has these really pretty tubular flowers. It’s not as sweet smelling as lavender, but the bees love it—”
Time stands still. Or else it passes. He comes to on his feet, in the dark of a bathroom he knows cold. Wide wood paneling. A scalloped pedestal sink. The timeline of his life threatens to collapse in on itself. For a moment, he’s certain he’s six years old again, cowering in the bathtub with his hands over his ears, waiting for his mother to stop wailing.
Everything ends. Everything ends.
