But what if she’d stayed?
What if she’d said goodbye? What if they’d made a new promise?
She wants to ask him now—wants to start over, to do better, to rewrite every wasted moment—but she can’t. She’s gripped in the coils of a slithering sort of awareness, immobilized by the feel of a presence at her back. A shadow, cool and dark. It’s Lys, standing stalwart in a blaze of yellow sun. The light eats away at him, devouring him in sunlit blisters. He looks like a true skeleton this way, all bone and sinew, the hollows of his eyes as black as hell.
“This will end, too,”he says in a voice like death.“Like everything else.”
When she swallows, she tastes hibiscus.
She opens her eyes.
The moment she does, panic engulfs her. She’s on a bed, her wrists and ankles strapped to the mattress and her chest belted tight. The room is basement dark, windowless and dank. The only light comes from several wall-mounted plant lamps, under which sits a row of glass terrariums. Inside each cloche blooms a poison plant—blue skullcap and white oleander, toothy larkspur and flowering nightshade and spiky castor beans, red as blood.
Someone is shouting. She can’t place the noise. Can’t slot the bilabials into words. It all pings, indecipherable, off the walls. The light hums, flickering at vertigo speed. Everything loses shape and regains it, focusing like a camera’s aperture with each blink.
“Look,”says a voice, just out of her line of sight. “Oliver, look. Look, and then breathe. She’s awake. She’s unharmed. You’re making this harder on yourself.”
The shouting stops. She tries to crane her head and finds movement impossible, a thin strap belting her forehead. She feels like a butterfly, pinned to a board for examination. In the quiet, Lys’s voice sharpens into coherence.
“Let her out.”
“Now, Oliver.” Egor sounds weary, as though they’ve gone several rounds already. “You’re being willfully obtuse. It doesn’t suit you. I know you feel it—the misalignment in your proprioception. In hers. It goes well beyond a youthful obsession, and I saw it the moment you appeared on my doorstep. How it doesn’t keep you awake at night—”
“It does. Is that what you want to hear?”
“What I want,” says Egor carefully, “is to take a closer look. No one has to get hurt.”
Distantly, there comes a hammering sound. Another meaningless noise, no perspective to give it roots. The buzzing light makes her dizzy.
“You want me to cooperate?” Lys’s voice is flat. “You want me to be a good little lab rat? Let her out.”
The hammering gets louder. Shea’s mouth is cotton, her thoughts mud. Her tongue feels thick and unwieldy and she can’t dredge up the words to speak, to scream. Her heart thuds in time with the distant pounding. A snare against a drum.
“He’ll get through the door eventually,” says Lys. “How do you think that’ll end?”
Not a snare, a fist. Not a drum, a door. Asher’s outside. More sounds drift toward her as she struggles against her bindings. Egor appears, lit from beneath by the lamps. He’s slipped into the pressed white of a lab coat, an stethoscope slung around his neck. A silver head mirror glimmers down at her like a third eye. Panic pops into fireworks and she thrashes, pulling at her straps.
“There, there,” says Egor, in a voice she’s sure he means to be soothing. “There’s no need for alarm. I’m not going to hurt you.”
He bends over her, pressing back her sweating hair. She tries to flinch away, but she’s bound too tight. She feels wild and tethered—her fangless teeth bared—as he presses two fingers to her pulse and checks his watch.
“She’s got a nice, strong pulse. She’ll be back on her feet in no time.” To Shea, he says, “I’m going to go ahead and loosen these straps. I’d like you to sit up slowly. Understood?”
She nods as best as she can, and he falls to unfastening her ties. Outside, the hammering has stopped. In the quiet, her ears ring. The lights flicker maddeningly at her peripherals. She allows Egor to help her into a sitting position. A dizzying heat crawls up her neck and she tips forward, catching her hands on her knees.
Slowly, the room around her coalesces into shape. A human skeleton hangs from a hook nearby, ivy wound along its bones. A wide curio cabinet sits flush against the wall, several wet specimen jars nestled against the shelving. Backlit, she can just make out the shapes of the creatures within. A frog, its webbed feet extended. A rabbit, its little body curled inward. A fawn, its head tucked in.
A human fetus, its full-black eyes wide and unsettling.
Shackled beside the shelf is Lys, his arms hyperextended and his wrists cuffed, inked fingers hanging loose. His expression is as murderous as she’s ever seen it. The lamplight throws the lines of him into monstrous relief, accentuating the twin peaks of solid bone that curve out from beneath the messy curtain of his hair. He looks like a satyr in the dark.
A storybook monster, and not a boy at all.
“Do you hear that?” he asks Egor, with bone-chilling calm. “Thorley’s stopped knocking.”
“Perhaps he’s come to his senses.”
“Or maybe he’s got a plan B. I’d work fast, if I were you.”
