THIRTY-THREE
Every good story ends with a wishbone snapped, a bloodied kiss, the prince's sacrifice.
—cut out a heart—
and bury it in the woods.
But he already knew that.
The hardest part was not what he had to do, it was walking away from Thomas as vines twisted around his wrists and tore open the buttons of his once-white shirt to find the hole the monsters had made—Andrew had made—that was impossible to fill.
The hardest part was listening to the way Thomas screamed, terror unraveling him right to the core, as he watched the forest eat through Andrew.
But he had no choice but to go.
Someone had to finish telling the story.
Night slid an inky tongue across the forest as he walked, like it meant to swallow him whole.
The weight of it pressed against his chest, drowned his lungs, smothered any pathetic whimpers escaping from his bloodied throat.
He stumbled on gnarls of roots and thorny underbrush, but even as it bit at him, he felt nothing. Behind him, Thomas stopped screaming.
Don't think, don't think.
He didn't let himself cry; he wasn't even sure he could with the rose thorns sinking into the tender skin below his eye.
He climbed over a fallen tree throbbing with fungi turned bioluminescent under the streaks of silver moonlight.
It crumbled under his palm and clung to his skin with moist, decaying flesh.
The whole night made sense, in a brittle, circular way.
He took in a lungful of air and felt it slide wet and tar-slick down his throat, a strange sort of calm folding over him.
He wondered if anyone would notice they'd gone into the woods and never came out, if anyone would care.
After this, everything strange and uncanny about the school would stop.
A shadow shivered behind a tree and the world seemed to crystalize around him, breath held, air turned cold enough that his breath was a white globe before him. He stopped and tucked his hands in his pockets.
"Come out," he said.
Silence stretched for one beat, then two.
Then Dove stepped from behind the roses.
She still wore her summer Wickwood uniform, the last thing he'd seen her in, though her face had begun to change now as if the need to look like neat, fastidious Dove had passed.
Moss grew across her cheek, soft green tendrils pulsed from the corner of her mouth, and her brown eyes had been replaced with the vivid, unforgiving green of the forest.
"Take off my sister's face." His voice did not waver.
"She wanted to protect you," the forest said softly.
"She wanted everything to stay the same," Andrew said. "And it couldn't. It didn't. We let our love for each other cut us to the bloody core."
"You didn't bring a pen."
It took everything in him not to stand there, not to cry. "I'm not telling that kind of story this time. Now take off her face."
The monster slipped backward into the trees, the dark taking hold of his sister's edges and unraveling them.
Andrew watched as the monster grew, as its flesh turned to bark and its fingers to scraggly sticks, as it grew tall and then taller until its huge form blotted out the moon.
Its jaws stretched open to show teeth, wicked and long, and when it pulled its feet from the ground, the earth tore as roots exploded free.
Gripped in its mangled stick fingers was a notebook with spores of mold flourishing over the battered cover.
Andrew wiped the blood off his mouth and took his notebook of wicked fairy tales from the monster. He nodded once in thanks.
They walked into the forest, the monster huge and terrible behind him, shadows and malignant rot slick on its branches.
He climbed fallen logs and let moss smear between his fingers and stain the knees of his pants.
He took off his suit jacket and let it fall behind him.
Then his shirt, streaked with dirt and leafy prints from the forest. He left it tangled in a thorny thicket.
From his pocket, he pulled out the box cutter.
As expected, the place where the Wildwood tree used to be was empty.
It had yanked its roots free and gone walking, had packed its body down to look like a girl with honey-blond hair and a name of softened feathers.
A distant part of him wondered how much of Dove's blood it had drunk as she died, quiet and alone under its canopy.
He nestled the notebook in the leaves at his feet. Then he traced fingers along the grooves between his naked ribs, across scars from monster bites and claws, until his palm pressed flat to his stomach where vines grew beneath his skin.
He cut, deep enough to hit wood. He wet his fingers with his own blood, feeling nothing but how warm and coppery it was.
He began to write, fingertips against skin, bloody letters smeared and slurred because he couldn't stop shaking.
The Wildwood monster fitted its root feet back into the hollow, and then it stretched for the midnight sky speckled with the chipped-off edges of diamonds.
The way it looked at him wasn't cruel or vindictive, rather gentle, as if it realized he had run as far as he could and his tiredness was to be expected.
Its voice had turned deep and melodic and ancient. "You woke us, now sate us. A tithe was never going to be enough."
Andrew began to write.
Once a prince took a knife to his chest and carved himself open, showing ribs like mossy tree roots, his heart a bruised and wretched thing beneath. No one would want a heart like his. But he'd still cut it out and given it away.
He thought, far away, he heard someone cry out his name. The cold took hold of his naked shoulder blades and sent goose bumps rippling down his spine.
He gave his heart to the October boy with one thousand and one freckles and hair of autumn leaves. But almost at once, the heart began to corrode, and the prince turned into a monster. They should bury it, the prince decided, and see what it would grow into.
Andrew painted words on his arms, his chest, his throat. A slow, dizzy molasses began to pour across his mind, and it was so very hard to keep his eyes open.
In the distance, someone was running.
Air tearing through lungs.
A scream almost reaching him.
They decided to bury the heart deep in the woods, for monsters were ravenous things, not to be trusted. This way the October boy would be safe.
Blood dripped from Andrew's arm and splattered on the notebook. Or maybe those were tears finding their way around the roses filling up his eye.
Within the ground, the heart grew into a tree and the monster lived among the branches and forgot he had ever been a prince. But the October boy didn't flee. He climbed the tree and kissed the lonesome monster until it devoured him whole.
Andrew scooped damp soil and decaying leaves until he made a shallow hole, deep enough for the journal to fit. There was just enough room left to fit a throbbing heart. He let out his breath, slow and careful, and stayed on his knees as he put the tip of the box cutter to his chest.
His mouth trembled.
The forest watched him, silent, and the monsters stayed back in respect, though the hunger in their eyes was still terrible.
To cut out his heart was actually
such a small
thing.
"Everything stops," he whispered, "after this."
Something slammed into him.
Andrew hit the leaves with a thud, all the air punched from his lungs.
His fingers curled tight and protective around the box cutter so it wouldn't fly from his hands, but someone grabbed his wrist and pinned it to the ground.
He tried to wrench away, to fight fierce and victorious, but he had so little strength left.
"Andrew, wait."
He smashed his head into Thomas's face and sent him careening backward, hands over his nose as he choked back a cry.
Andrew dragged himself to his feet, the box cutter burning in his hand as if it was a dragon-tooth blade forged for princes who wore briar crowns.
He stood over Thomas, his ribs moving raggedly, watching the October boy writhe on the ground with a hand cupping his bloody nose.
The world had begun to lighten with a graying dawn he wasn't ready for. He was running out of time. The Wildwood tree stretched its branches toward the sky, patience thinning.
"Cut out a heart and bury it in the woods."
Andrew didn't realize he'd said it out loud until Thomas looked up at him with swollen, glossy eyes and said, "Does it have to be your heart?"
He looked ruined, his clothes torn and blood seeping from dozens of cuts on his arms from where the thorny vines had pinned him down.
He must have freed himself with the hatchet.
Then he would have run so fast to get here in time because he, too, remembered the story Andrew wrote last summer and slipped into his back pocket.
Andrew pressed the palm of his hand against his good eye, squeezing until the world refocused. Dusty light shimmered like fairy dust around him and turned the edges of the forest sepia and soft. It seemed impossible they'd been scared of this forest for so long.
Thomas pushed himself to his knees and then stayed there, a supplicant before his prince. He could unmake Andrew if he wanted; he could destroy him with the tender shape of his mouth. But he waited.
"I know it wants a heart," Thomas said, raw, "but it doesn't have to be yours."
Andrew's fingers brushed across Thomas's beautiful cheekbones, the curve of his perfect jaw, then through the thick, sticky blood spilling from his nose down his lips. Then he wrapped his fingers around Thomas's throat.
This was how they were, bones broken and mended crookedly, each entwined with the other. He thought maybe you could love someone so much you ruined them, and then you ruined yourself.
"If you cut open my chest"—Andrew's voice was wrecked—"you'll find a garden of rot where my heart should be."
Thomas tilted his head up, and the way he looked at Andrew was so tender and fierce, so full of fearless worship. "I don't care how dark the world is for you. I'll hold out my hand until you find it, and I won't let go."
Ribbons of blood traced Andrew's wrists and threaded around the box cutter.
If he ignored what the forest demanded, this would never end.
The monsters would keep attacking, more people would die.
They hungered for guilt and grief and for the two boys who fed them relentlessly. So, in truth, this moment made sense.
"But just know this," Thomas said as he fought back tears. "Dove's death was an accident and she never would have haunted you in revenge. This is all your doing, and you could tell a different story if you wanted to. You're strong enough. You're brave enough."
Andrew slowly peeled Thomas's filthy shirt back just enough to show the trembling skin over his heart. He pressed fingertips against warm flesh, felt the throbbing, bloody beat. Hot and fierce and alive alive alive.
They didn't need two hearts. They could share Andrew's, even if it was a bruised and sorrowful thing. Their rib bones would twine together in a lattice to protect them from the worst of the world and they would always be together; they should never be apart.
He began to cut.