I worked my lips without sound, unable to form the words at first. There had been a moment, down in the pit, when I’d tried to tell her the truth: There was something awful and deadly inside me, and I was afraid that I no longer had control of it.
The monster hadn’t let me get the words out.
Sensation trickled in slowly, painfully, like blood returning to a numbed limb. “Please, Ev,” I rasped.
The monster ripped away from her touch, but it was too late. The ice had melted, and for the first time in minutes, I took a deep breath. My lungs felt burned, my throat raw.
My stitches were agony.
“Please,” I repeated, my knees giving out.
Eva caught me on the way down. “Oh, hey, hey. Take a minute, okay?”
I nodded, the world spinning in dark shades of night around me. Eva rubbed a circle over my spine as she waited for me to speak.
I searched for a way to explain, afraid of the monster cutting me off again. “Do you ever feel… hollow?” I finally asked.
Eva’s hand slowed over my lower back. “What do you mean?”
I didn’t know how else to say it. “Like something inside you is… missing,” I roughed out, letting my eyes close. “Something important.”
When she didn’t answer, I looked up. Eva’s cheeks were pale against the moonlit sky. “Yeah,” she said softly.
It was ridiculous, to cast my shadow over her light. The bee girldidn’t know what it was like to wonder if she even had a soul, or if the emptiness inside was merely a sign that her soul was rotten. She had honey in her veins, not death. Not rot.
Not like me.
The kiss we’d shared sat like a phantom between us now. I couldn’t help the drop of my eyes to her mouth. She had a bit of dirt smudged on her chin. I wanted to reach out and clear it away with the pad of my thumb. I wanted to touch her again. I wanted to tell her I was sorry.
More than anything, I wanted another chance to show her I could begood.
But then I thought of the nest of hatchlings, their delicate bodies broken and still. I thought of how easily the monster had taken the life of their mother with a single, pitiless touch, and my mouth closed, the words dying just as easily on my lips.
I didn’t deserve absolution.
The monster squirmed inside me, the membranous layer between our wills stretching thin. I knew if it pressed, it could take me over again, no matter how deeply Eva’s warmth touched the ice inside my heart.
“Let’s follow the river,” Eva said, rising to her feet. She whistled for Bug, and to my surprise, the little fluff monster darted out from between the trees. Relief unfurled inside me. She was okay. “The atlas showed it curving around the meadow.”
The atlas. We’d lost that too, lost everything we weren’t wearing when we went to bed. I looked down at my socked feet, poking out beneath a pair of fuzzy checkered pajama pants. Eva wore my old sweatshirt and a pair of boxers repurposed into sleep shorts.
Heat bloomed up my neck. “Right. Yeah, let’s go.”
Chapter 23
Isobel
The instant they pulled up the drive to the cottage, Isobel knew something was wrong. Dane sucked in a breath and leaned forward. “Holy shit,” he breathed.
All her work in the yard that afternoon had been undone, leaving a mess of flowers, vines, and tree roots upended from the earth. The abandoned patrol car, now entirely smothered in grasping flora, had sunk so deep the front bumper and tires were entrenched in the soil.
Isobel blinked several times, trying to make sense of the scene with only the moonlight to illuminate it. The ocean of greenery almost looked to be swallowing her home in the same way it was devouring the car, wrapping the cottage in a summered maw of greenbrier, moss, and rose vines.
“The porch,” Dane said. “It’s too low.”
Isobel followed his finger, a stone dropping in her belly as she realized he was right. The wooden steps had splintered, and the sloping deck now stood nearly level with the ground.
Her house was sinking.
