But a whisper of doubt moved through the body they shared, and suddenly… the monster wasn’t sure that was true. It helped Arthur survive, but even it knew there was a difference between survival and truly living. Arthur wanted to live. He wanted to feel.
The monster was useless to Eva. It could feel her life draining out. Eva needed a champion, someone soft and brave enough to face grief even when it hurt.
She needed Arthur.
“Okay,”it whispered.“What do I do?”
First, promise to tell the bees that I am gone.
“Fine,”the monster snapped.“I’ll tell them anything you want. Just help me save her!”
The spirit nodded, as though she had expected this reaction. She extended a hand covered in delicate aspen leaves. In the place where a palm might be, she held out the chunks of honeycomb Eva had broken off from the wild hive.
Eat.
The monster frowned.“I can’t just give it to her?”
She’s spent a lifetime drinking tea from these flowers. It won’t be enough.
“Fine.”The monster wiped the sweat off Arthur’s upper lip.Push me out, little death-touch,it silently pleaded as it took the honeycomb from the spirit.
There will be a cost,the spirit of the wood said in warning as the monster brought the bit of comb to Arthur’s lips.
“There always is,”it whispered, squeezing its eyes shut in surrender.
And suddenly the monster understood that it had been wrong, all along. It was never meant to prevent Arthur from feeling all the pain in his world. It was meant to stand by him. To witness. To weep. It was meant to be for him what Jack and Izzy and Eva had been.
It couldn’t put its own fear of pain in front of Arthur’s heart anymore. The monster knew Arthur’s every desire. It knew what the bee girl meant to him, and so it knew that the price didn’t matter. Arthur would pay it every time, to save her.
The monster plopped the honeycomb onto its tongue, and bit down.
Chapter 38
Arthur
There was nothing quite like honeycomb.
Still warm from the sun, the hexagonal cells split under my teeth. The rich, sweet flavor slicked back over my tongue and into my cheek in a sugared burst, viscous and heady.
It was summer.
And summer melted ice.
The wall holding me captive in my own mind dissolved in a trickle, the return to myself painful in the way of a numb limb reexperiencing the rush of blood flow. I gasped, biting my tongue in surprise as the monster’s hold sloughed off, leaving me heavy instead of weightless, my head pounding.
And I was reminded at once that sometimes it hurts to exist.
“Help her,”the monster begged aloud, and I didn’t know if it was speaking to me or to the spirit of the wood,my mother, who still watched silently, but the instant I took a breath, relief and agony twining with the swell of my lungs, something changed.
It started as a glow deep within my ribs. Over the years, I had gotten used to the monster’s awareness tuning my senses to thebeating life surrounding us, but this awakening was different. Not a hunger to take but the pressure to grow. To create.
When I gasped, the ground at my feet burst into life with a crackle, daffodils jutting their thin green necks past the press of my knees, their sepals opening bright yellow faces to the sun. My heart pounded, a newborn power pulsing beneath my skin. It sang in my ears, sunlight spilling like a cracked yolk over the hills at dawn.
Shock rippled through me. This wasn’t Eva’s magic.
It was mine.
Human beings are not meant to hold the forest inside them,the spirit of the wood said, her voice gentler now than it had been before.That’s why it hurts, at first.
