Before I could answer, Jack peered around the corner. “Eva,” he chided. “I told you not to bother him.”
Eva looked at me sweetly. “Am I bothering you, Arthur?”
I fumbled a reply, finding the wordbotheringwholly inadequate and hating the trickle of feeling that my name in her mouth sent up my spine. She said it like a secret.
“See, Dad?” Eva smiled, all innocence. “We’re just eating.”
Jack plucked a green sprig from his hairline. I did a double take.Is that a sprout?“Eat up, then. Got a lot of work to do today.”
When he left, I turned to Eva. “What work?”
She smiled. “We’re uncapping honeycomb. You’ll love it.”
When she turned to go, I snatched my jeans and a dirty T-shirt off the floor, dressing quickly, then followed the bee girl down the hall, irritation sparking.
She plucked two aprons off a hook in the mudroom, tossing me one of them. “We’ll start with uncapping the wax from the hives in our own backyard.” A strand of hair fell into her eyes as she tied the strings at the small of her back. “Then we’ll move on to the apiary just north of the Walkers’ orchard.”
I clutched the linen apron, worn soft from years of use. “I don’t work for you. Or your father.”
Eva shrugged. “Your loss. There’s nothing like fresh honeycomb, believe me. And spring’s harvest is the sweetest. Though”—she slipped into a pair of sandals—“autumn has the deepest flavor. If you stay here long enough to see the asters and goldenrod bloom, you can try that too.”
“I’m not staying,” I snapped.
I didn’t realize I was trailing after her until the door to the cottage clapped shut behind me. Eva opened the chicken coop, and for some reason, I followed her inside. Immediately, the swell and beat of too many hearts pressed against me. The monster was wide-awake, its alertness to signs of life making the close space insufferable.
“Do you like birds, Arthur?”
My face snapped to hers. The question was innocent enough, but something about the too-easy way it had rolled off her tongue caught my attention.
“Yeah. I do,” I said carefully.
The hens were calm as Eva reached into the nesting boxes and gathered egg after egg, setting each into the wide, square pockets of her apron. An Orpington with deep rusty hackle feathers poked herhead through the coop door. I loosed a breath. This bird wasn’t free, but she was soft and feathered, like all my favorite things. “If you touched one of them,” Eva said casually, “would it hurt?”
My stomach corkscrewed.Why would she ask me that?
Eva waited, but I couldn’t—wouldn’t—answer. My mind filled with a hundred different times when the beating heart of something alive had painfully slowed to a halt because of me, killed to sate the hungry thing that lived beneath my skin. I couldn’t tell her that even though I hated myself for it, it felt good, necessary on a cellular level.
I couldn’t tell her that like a shriveled sprout in the dirt, I needed nutrients, nourishment,life,and that when I was desperate, I would take it every time.
I couldn’t tell her I craved it.
“What about me?” Eva didn’t move closer, but she may as well have. I felt her attention like a weight and stepped back. “Would you hurt me?”
“No,”the monster rasped inside my head.
I swallowed. “I don’t want to hurt anyone, bee girl.”
Eva’s lips puckered, like she wanted to ask more, then changed her mind. She led me out of the coop, the back of her heels striped in dark green excrement.
I squinted into the too-bright light. Asters bloomed a path down from the cottage, their petals uncurling like soft little stars. I could have sworn they weren’t there before. When Eva bent and picked one, she scratched the head of the same fluffy gray-and-white kitten I’d seen my first day here. It nuzzled her leg, purring loudly.
“I can feel it when they die, you know.” Eva’s eyes met mine. Isucked in a breath when she held the flower out. “Will you show me?”
“I… I can’t—”
“I know you do it. I want to see.” Eva wiggled the flower’s stem. I watched the aster lengthen, the cut vine curling back to wind around her wrist.
“The flowers respond to her,”the monster said in amazement.
