Camellia and Poppy found her there a short while later, her palms abraded and her stockings torn. When she refused to come down, they left to get help. Reinforcements arrived fifteen minutes later in the form of Asher Thorley—thirteen years old and fed up with her antics.
“I’m not afraid of the Gravewood,” she’d insisted as he coaxed her down. “There’s nothing to do in Little Hill but wait to die. Why not do it where the trees can see?”
She’d dropped to the ground to find Asher’s expression a careful blank. She’d known right away that he was thinking of her father—of the way Calhoun Parker left his family without a word. She’d braced herself for yet another empty platitude. Another meaningless scrap of sympathy.
Instead, he’d said, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It isn’t stupid. It’s true. Which would you rather? A slow, horrible death, or a quick, painless one?”
“You’re not dying a slow, horrible death.”
“That’s what you think.”
Feeling mulish, she’d thrown out her arms and collapsed into a patch of auburn overdam, sending several woolly aphids skyward. Directly overhead was a marmalade sky and a dozen feathered seed heads and Asher Thorley’s lopsided frown.
“Get up,” he’d ordered. “Sun’s almost down.”
“So what? Are you afraid?”
His face tightened and she counted twelve whole heartbeats before he eased himself down beside her, muttering under his breath as he went. They lay that way for a long time without speaking, watching a dragonfly drift from stalk to stalk. Beneath the earthen musk of the meadow, she’d been able to smell the sharp turpentine of the trees. Cold. Crisp. Inviting. It said nothing at all to her. It never did.
“See,” she’d said, “it’s not so bad.”
“That’s because you can’t hear it.”
She’d turned to face him, each of them mottled in shadows like bruises. “Can you?”
He’d nodded, quiet, his arms crooked behind his head. He’d looked riveted—uneasy—focused on something faraway. A strange sort of jealousy gripped her like a fever.
“What’s it saying?”
Asher didn’t answer. Not for a long time. Not until dusk fell, and a nearby bullfrog began to croak. Slowly, he rolled on his side to mirror her. They lay face-to-face, the shadow of the forest looming over them.
“I’m not going to die in Little Hill,” he said. “I refuse.”
The wind picked up, clicking the branches. He met her eyes across the swollen dark.
“I won’t let you die here, either.”
It wasn’t a promise from the forest, but itwasa promise.
For years, she’d clung to it like a life raft.
“It’s almost curfew,” she says now. “I should get home.”
She doesn’t tell him what he wants to hear—she doesn’t say a word about his sister, or about the horrible way they fought the day before she disappeared. She doesn’t mention how Camellia found her in the third-floor lavatory, changing her bloody dressings between classes, or how she’d gasped when she spotted the half-moon lesions scored into Shea’s wrist.
“Asher is risking his life to keep those things away,” Camellia had hissed, the color going out of her face, “and you’re letting one of them feed on you.”
“Quiet. Someone will hear.”
“Do you know what they’ll do to us? If you bring the Rot home to Little Hill?”
“Stop talking.”
“It won’t just be your life on the line, Shea. It’ll be everyone. Do you remember Highbush? What they did to all those people?”
The way Asher is watching her is too intense. Like he’s searching her. Like he knows everything already, without her even having to admit it. She wishes he’d never come home. She’s not the same girl she was when he left. She stopped waiting for him to save her a long time ago.
