When I came to a halt, Eva turned. “What’s wrong?” she shouted over the din, but I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t speak, let alone breathe through the agony slicing me up from the inside, wriggling and twisting through muscle and sinew. I slapped a hand to the place beneath my ribs where the pain grew hot andbright, flashing to when I’d witnessed Jack Moreau doubled over in torment just like this.
“There’s something inside us,”the monster said, with none of the awe it had felt that night as it had watched the seed of Jack’s aspen crack open, pushing a thin sprout skinward.
Above us, the helicopter lowered, its blades cutting the sky. They’d seen us.
My vision blurred with pain as thesomethinginside me snaked outward, determined to see the light. I cried out, sinking to my knees as my peripheral vision filled with sudden dark spots.
“Arthur?” Eva sounded panicked now. “What’s happening?”
“Side,” I groaned. The nucleus of heat pulsed low in my ribs. It writhed upward, reaching for a surface where it could crack me open, splitting layers of skin like soil.
A whoosh of air threw back the petals and grass filling the meadow as the helicopter descended, the force sufficient to lift one of the frames of the broken hive boxes into the air, blowing it several feet away before it tumbled down again.
Eva knelt and tore my hand from where I clutched the same place on my side where the bullet had struck her. The skin was bruise-dark and swollen.
“What—?” Eva sounded stunned. When she grazed my ribs, the sprout’s wriggling intensified, seeking her like it would the sun. I cried out in pain and slumped against her, dizzy.
There will be a cost.
That’s what my mother’s spirit had said. Now I understood: Every time I would use the honey magic to heal someone or make something grow, the sprout in me would grow too, just as the tree had done inside Jack.
A few people dismounted from the helicopter and ran towardus. Surprise filled me when I recognized Dane Walker among the faces. The EMT who reached us crouched and began peppering Eva with questions.
I didn’t hear her responses. My eyes were fixed on where Dane Walker had paused in his tracks, staring at something in the grass. He bent and picked it up. I blinked through the haze and realized it was Lenny’s gun, discarded in the weeds.
Someone peeled my hand off my side to look at the wound. It took me a moment to realize the bellow of pain had come from me. I felt out of control, my throat choked with fear as the newborn gift inside me pulled flower after flower into bloom until—
“I don’t think so.”The monster yanked the sprout in my ribs back down.“I said I wouldn’t control you again, and I won’t,”it promised as it twined itself around the sprout and sucked the life from it.“But I won’t let you die either, little death-touch.”
I trembled as they loaded me into the helicopter. All the way down the mountain, Eva held my hand. Her eyes were drooping. The paramedics spoke in low voices, confused to find us covered in blood without a scratch on our bodies.
“Was there anyone else with you?” one asked.
“Yes,” Dane said.
“And where are they now?”
Dane looked at me. The monster didn’t want to answer, sensing a trap, but it didn’t prevent me from speaking either. “He ran off,” I mumbled. “Gone.”
The medics shared a quiet look, but I didn’t have a spare thought left for Lenny Walker. The hike, the fight, and the drain of new magic were taking their toll on me. I wanted to rest, but it felt as though the moment I closed my eyes we were touching down on the helipad of a hospital. Eva and I were rushed downdifferent hallways. I drifted in a fog as doctors worked around me, prodding my side and slipping an IV needle into my arm. A nurse brought me a large mug of ice water, and I sipped until my eyes were drooping. Then, unable to fight it any longer, I curled onto my side and finally slept.
I woke to a deep timbre. The voice was familiar, the rolling cadence reaching into my fog and pulling me up, up, up. Drowsy, I groaned and scrubbed my eyes.
Jack Moreau stood in the doorway to my room, speaking to someone just outside.
I snapped to attention, upending the tray at my bedside in my haste. My heart monitor sped its beeping. Jack glanced at me, then held up a hand, pausing whatever conversation he’d been having as he stepped into the room. My gaze dropped to his chest, anxious to see if the honey we’d brought with us had worked.
But what I saw confused me.
It wasn’t the tree anymore, not exactly. The branches were pruned back to the base. Only a nub remained, pushing out of his sternum like the stubs of a fruit tree in winter.
“Don’t look so worried.” Jack sank into a chair at my bedside and pulled a thermos from his jacket. He passed it over. “And drink this. You need it.”
Hesitantly, I unscrewed the cap. It was still warm, but not so hot it would burn my tongue. Steam lifted, wetting my cheeks.
Tea.
Not just any tea. I knew the faint notes of this flower, both from the summer I’d spent spooning honey and tea into mugs and the hours spent in that meadow, surrounded by thousands of the living blue-violet clusters.Little Lotties. I took a sip.
