The sounds of the soft fabric sliding over skin filled the tiny, quiet room.
“How did you sleep?” Eva asked.
The monster scratched a salt crystal out from the corner of its eye.“Good,”it said. A partial lie. It never slept, but Arthur did, and while the boy rested, the monster had run over again and again what Arthur had said.
You hurt me every time.
The words clanged inside its head. It was accustomed to being the thing Arthur rained his anger on, but those words—delivered so raw, so broken—had burrowed deep.
The monster touched the swirl of tattoos on Arthur’s arm. The honeycomb hexagons. The dark, feathered songbirds. The starling on his tendon covered his first and deepest scar. The monster hadspent a long time thinking about the night Arthur finally took a blade to his skin and tried to carve the monster out.
You hurt me every time.
He hadn’t meant that. He was just upset. Arthur sharpened himself on the blade of guilt so often that living itself had become an open wound. The monster didn’t want that for him. It was time for a change, time to write his boy a new story.
To do that, however, the monster needed to get Arthur medical aid and sustenance to help him heal. There was life to be devoured in that meadow, flowers and field mice and all kinds of creatures that Arthur hadn’t let himself kill, too scared of what it would do to his soul to sacrifice another living thing to survive. The monster had no such problem. It had always done what it had to do to protect Arthur. From the moment the boy ripped the monster into existence, it had wanted nothing except to ease Arthur’s troubles and pains.
To become the home Charlotte had denied him.
Eva scratched the back of Bug’s head as she laid out more items from the trunk on the floor. She’d started on the task during the storm, before Arthur had coaxed her back to the cot, eager to sleep and arguing that they could hardly see the contents anyway.
Now in the light, the two of them cataloged their new inventory. There was a lighter, a first aid kit, a flashlight with dead batteries, and—
“Peppermints?” Eva laughed softly, crinkling something between her fingers. “Dad loves these!” She popped one out of its plastic pouch and held it out. Where her fingertips grazed Arthur’s palm, an electric zing of awareness sparked, bright and tingling.
The monster worked the stale mint into Arthur’s cheek and murmured its thanks, unable to stop the tug of its lips up into a smile. Bug seemed to have recovered from the state the storm had put her in, and she purred and pressed against Eva’s leg.
“Why did your dad create this place?”the monster asked.
Eva bit her cheek. “I’m… not sure, honestly,” she admitted. “I never went with him to harvest these flowers. Come to think of it, I think I tried to, once, and he didn’t let me.” She stilled, and a furrow knit between her brows. “I had no idea what he’d built up here,” she said, turning her head up to the slanted roof of the little shed. “Must have taken him ages.”
“Must have.”
Carefully, the monster rose to stretch, mindful of Arthur’s weakened state. As expected, a dizzy spell made the room around them spin. The monster caught its balance on the wall.
Deep within, Arthur stirred, confused. The boy must be realizing that something felt wrong. The monster tried to soothe him, cooling the fever running through Arthur, but the moment it tried, something inside Arthur snapped to attention, and alarm collected inside their shared body. Arthur tried to push the monster out, but it was too deeply sunk in, firmly fitted inside its glove. Arthur’s resistance was no more than a fly to skin.
Hush, now, little death-touch.
Though Arthur couldn’t hear the monster, it hoped the boy would feel the care behind its calming words.
Arthur couldn’t scream, couldn’t voice even a single word, but his shiver of terror moved through the body the two of them shared. The monster knew this feeling. The fear of tight spaces, of feeling trapped, was an unfortunate side effect that had risenover the years as, from time to time, circumstances had forced the monster to take control in order to keep Arthur safe—from the world, and from himself.
It touched the scar on his forearm again, a grounding reminder to its purpose.
You’re going to survive this too,it silently vowed.
When the boy tried to lash out again, the monster pushed back, hardening the barrier that enclosed him until it calcified.
The first aid kit allowed the monster to treat the lesser of Arthur’s wounds. It used the pack of cleansing wipes to clean the dirt off the cuts in his skin, then applied a soothing balm that clearly hailed from the Moreau household. It came in the same shallow tins Eva used when she boiled down her beeswax, but the smell was different from her usual concoctions, too heavy on the lavender. The monster warmed the balm between its finger and thumb, and rubbed more over Arthur’s bug bites, as Eva had done the summer they spent together.
“Let’s go down to the river,” Eva said as she wrapped Band-Aids over the still-healing blisters on her heels. “We can use those tablets and the canteen to purify some water.”
The monster chose not to remind her how much of the river’sunpurifiedwater they had certainly swallowed when they fell in. It was as good an idea as any. But when it reached for the purifying tablets, something hard and compact slipped out from the pile of stacked, used clothing. The monster plucked it off the floor.
And froze.
Even with Arthur held perfectly still and quiet inside him, the monster felt the boy’s shock when they registered what they were looking at.
