“Apples?” Bertrand said happily. “Thank the skies; I’m starved.” Then, after a moment, he let out an incredulous, “Huh.”
“What is it?” said David distractedly, still frowning at Sy.
“Bit early for apples, isn’t it?”
“I found them,” Terrence replied, tossing his spent core aside and biting into another. With a grimace, he clutched his stomach again. “These wild fruits are odd. They taste…strange. Good, very good. But strange.”
David scooped one off the ground. Just before it touched his lips, Sy clutched his wrist, locking his arm in place.
“Strange in what way?” he asked Terrence, glancing at David.
“Strange like…like I’m satisfied and unsatisfied at the same time.” David returned Sy’s look; Terrence had never been so poetic. “Like every bite is simultaneously giving life and taking it away. Like I’m…like I’m eating myself.”
David’s muscles shifted in Sy’s grasp as his apple fell to the ground with athud. Sy rolled it over with his foot. Still no bruises.
Terrence had finished the second apple, and bit into a third.
“Perhaps you should slow down,” Bertrand suggested. He set down his sticks, glancing warily at Sy, who kept his attention fixed on Terrence.
Terrence was not listening. Despite his words, and the way he gripped his stomach as if he were about to regurgitate what he’d eaten, he devoured the third apple with the enthusiasm of a starved animal. The three of them watched his strange behavior, rapt.
He stopped eating. He dropped the half-eaten apple and spit the white pulp left in his mouth onto the ground. Frantically, he ripped open his shirt.
In the center of his chest was a bruise the size of a fist. But the bruise was not the plum color of pooled blood. It was a sickly, turbid brown, the skin gone wrinkled and thin. Like the bruise of an apple.
Terrence pawed at his skin, as if to wipe the bruise away. The flesh wrinkled further under his touch. “What’s happening?”
“Something’s wrong,” Bertrand called.
“I feel strange.” As they watched, the bruise on Terrence’s chest grew, spreading, swallowing the entire center of his chest. “Someone help me!”
“We need to do something,” David said, reaching for his pen and jerking forward.
But Sy kept an iron grip on his wrist. “There’s nothing you can do,” he said. When David jerked his wrist again, he let go. But David stayed planted beside him.
Terrence pawed at his chest, then started scratching. When his fingernails touched the bruise, the wrinkled skin collapsed and peeled away like soggy paper. Inside of his chest was a white, hollow cavity. Small green worms chewed through the mealy flesh beneath his crumbling ribs.
He screamed. Bertrand paled and clamped his hands over his mouth, retching as he spun away from the sight. David pulled out his pen but stopped short of rolling up his sleeve.
Sy only watched.
The bruise and tear kept spreading, faster and faster, up his chest, around his throat, up his jaw. His screams became choked, as if his mouth was full of dirt.
“Shoot him,” David said. As if drawn from a nightmare, Sy started and stared at him. David’s eyes were transfixed in horror on Terrence. “Do it, Sy.”
Sy fumbled for the ammunition pouch, struggling to remember what Anya had told him. Slugs and birdshot, slugs for killing big things. Something about a safety?There are only so many ways it can work, he thought, his hands shaking. Perhaps he would blow his hands clean off. What would happen to his bond with Edgard then?
Before he had a chance to find out, Bertrand was beside him. Firmly and carefully, he took the gun from Sy’s unsteady hands and plucked a slug from the pouch, depositing it and shutting the barrel in one motion. With his crushed right hand, he held the barrel aloft, bracing the butt against his shoulder. With his left, he pulled the trigger.
Terrence’s muffled cries ceased as his body fell to the ground. As they watched, it disintegrated, leaving behind nothing but what looked like fresh soil on the exposed roots.
All that remained of Terrence shifted, stirred by the digging of the writhing worms.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Seven skies, it’s Anya Degen,” cried Perrine, crushing into her. The falcon lifted into the air, settling on a tree branch. “It’s been ages!”
“Four months,” Anya said, a relieved smile lighting her own face as she pulled back and clasped Perrine’s arms. A soothing warmth filled her. No trick of the forest could replicate Perrine’s beaming smile; this was her friend.
