It’s here, at school, in the hands of someone whoisn’t a Goode.
The group shifts closer to the bloom, gaping down at it, huddling like they’re at one of their Wednesday-night games. Blood roars against my eardrums, making all the voices around me turn watery and thick.
I start toward them, the feeling inside me burning like an electrical wire running down my spine. Mac notices me first, and he takes a quick step back, away from the circle. He’s afraid of me—a girl made of rumors and fables knotted throughout my family history, a girl who might as well be death itself. When I’m close enough, I reach out and yank the tulip from his hands, sharp and swift, my eyes burning into his. And he doesn’t try to stop me. He doesn’t even blink, shoulders pulled back, mouth open slightly like he’s afraid to speak.
“How did you get this?” I demand, my voice stronger than I expected, gripping the tulip stem in my fist. “Tell me how you got it.”
He shakes his head, but no words come out.
“Did you go into our garden?”
His lower lip falls open. “I, uh—uh… I… um, it’s not… I—” He can’t find the words, confusion cut across his features—like he doesn’t remember how to access his own mind. Like being this close to Lark Goode has rendered him utterly speechless.
I shake my head at him, irritated, angry, and when my eyes swing to his group of friends, they all stagger back, toward the school, as if my stare were cutting them wide open.
“If you trespass on our property again, you’ll regret it,” I tell him,the words sounding like a hex, a malediction, my eyes meeting his one last time. It’s an empty threat, but he doesn’t know that. And his chin nods swiftly, likethishe understands, his brown eyes as big as a terrified puppy’s.
I shove the tulip into my bag, then march across the lawn. I don’t look back, but I know they’re watching me, I can feel their eyes, feel the breath held in their tight throats.
And when I reach the far lawn, I don’t walk to the elm tree where I normally eat my lunch. I keep going. Past the football field, through the parking lot, and out to the road.
I run all the way home.
THREE
What the hell happened?” Archer asks as I climb the porch steps. He’s seated on the porch swing, strumming our father’s old guitar—the strings frayed at the ends, the wood worn thin in places. “You ditching class?”
My tongue feels heavy in my mouth. “There was a fight at school….”
Archer frowns, dark hair sliding over his eyes.
“I think…” I suck in a breath, my heart slowing its rhythm. “It had something to do with the tulips.”
He lowers the guitar in his lap. “What do you mean?”
But I move past him into the house, dropping my bag to the floor beside the kitchen table, then throw open the back door. As I stand on the porch, the tulips appear motionless, harmless, like children sitting perfectly still in an attempt to appear as if they’ve done nothing wrong—cookie crumbs on their cheeks and beneath their fingernails.
But I find what’s wrong.
Along the east edge of the garden, a swath of white-and-bloodred blooms… isgone.
A good thirty—no, forty—tulips have been snipped clean off from their stems. The green stalks now standing like tombstones, headless, lifeless.
Stolen.
A spike of fear drops into my gut.
In the dirt a few feet from the ravaged blooms sits a pair of shears—I recognize them from the toolshed. Sometime before the sun cracked above the horizon, a thief crept into the garden, yanked the shears from the nail where they usually hang against the slatted wall of the shed, and hacked away at a few dozen Goode tulips.
My temples throb.
A buzzing twists its way up from my stomach.
“Shit,” Archer murmurs, standing a few paces behind me, hands on the back of his head.
We’ve never worried about thieves sneaking into the garden. Locals fear us—the stories of how we practice black magic, how we slice out the eyes and pull out the bones of anyone who steps foot on our land—it’s enough to keep them away. Only Archer’s love interests dare to visit the Goode family home and only because they are entranced by Archer’s whispered words against their throats.
We’ve never needed a fence or a sign that readsKEEP OUT!We’ve never fretted about burglars or nosy neighbors wandering through the garden, plucking tulips from the soil. The legend of the Goode family has always been enough.
