Page 20 of Together We Rot

CHAPTER SEVEN

WIL

There’s a stillness in these woods that only exists in cemeteries. No chatter of birds or scurrying in the branches, no creature watching me among the shadows.

Only death.

These are the dying months. The time when winter runs its frozen fingers along the world and murders everything in its path. It feels wrong for me to be here at all, living and breathing in a place lacking a heartbeat.

It’s not like I have much of a choice. I’m too far gone to abandon my plan now. You can’t stop swimming after you’ve waded into the deep end. You have no choice but to make it to the other side.

I’ve made this bed. I’m going to need to lie in it.

This is the absolute worst time to think about warm beds.

I curse myself under my breath and trudge forward in silent frustration. It’s hard to say how long I spend drifting through the trees.

My plan feels hazier, more impulsive with every step. I only thought about getting to the Clarke house; I hadn’t considered how I’d break in when I got there. “When” being the key word here. With the blizzard, my trek feels twice as long.

The forest stretches forever in the distance. My labored breath hangs in a dense fog in the air, and I’ve lost all sensation in my toes. I only remember that I have toes in the first place when my good-for-nothing laces unravel and the soggy edges slip beneath my heel, tripping me with my next step.

The world slips beneath me as I fall and I brace for impact. For the only time in my eighteen years of life, I’m thankful for the snow. Without it, my knee would be shredded by a snaking root or a jagged rock underfoot. All I meet is a plush carpet of soft white.

That being said, I’m not fully relieved. The cold drenches through my jeans and I get a face full of ice. As if I hadn’t already been worried about losing my nose to the cold, now I’ve got a one-way ticket to frostbite city. I guide myself upward, my one hand massaging feeling back into my face and the other sliding up the base of a tree beside me.

Something sticky is on the bark and curls around my fist. Black blood drips down my skin like sap.

There’s a body nestled among the branches.

Two empty sockets caked in darkened, dry blood. Sallow, tight skin, a fist-size hole ripped through her chest. A gut full of leaves and skittering, crawling bugs. My mother.

“No.” That’s all I am capable of saying. My mouth hasn’t caught up with my mind and my mind hasn’t caught up with my eyes and there’s no possible way—

Dinner drags up my throat, but before I can spew, the image of her vanishes with the shift of the wind. She blurs away until she isn’t my mother but a rabbit. Eyes no longer bright blue but a hollow black. A flayed hare hanging in the tree, white fur tinged black, entrails escaping from an open chest.

I scream myself hoarse. Until my throat feels bloody. I scream because I know the woods will swallow it up. I’ll bottle my fear, my grief, my frustration, and I’ll hide it here in this forest. I let it all out until I have nothing left.

With the last of my screams, I crumple inward, falling to the ground. My nails dig past the snow, all the way to the dirt beneath. I’ll root myself here. Some nights I think I can hear her screaming. Some nights I think she never really left.

My eyes lift up, soaking in the cold scenery. The dishwater-gray sky, the dark pine, the never-ending white. I’m not like Cherry or Mom, but even I can’t deny that the Morguewood is cursed. It’s been tainted forever. Mom spent so many days with her cheek to the glass. You feel it, too, don’t you? she’d ask, eyes trained on the tree line. That forest is a graveyard.

I never felt it then, but I do now.

Your mother isn’t missing, my thoughts sing with the wicked vision of her still burned into my mind. She’s dead. You’ve always thought you could save her from the Clarkes, but how can you save someone they’ve already killed?

“They haven’t,” I chant to myself, and I don’t care how loud or frantic I’ve become. “She isn’t dead. She’s not, she’s not. She’s not.”

My breath hitches in my chest. I’m no longer alone. I sense it before I even see the silhouette breaking through the trees.

They’ve come to kill you, too, that same awful voice croons. For an awful, fleeting moment, I believe it.

I only have a second to regret coming out here. Only a moment in time to imagine my father’s grief when his family is fished out from the trees.

The shadow focuses, the shape clearing into a boy. He runs toward me, his green eyes wide, all my fear reflected back in him tenfold. His hair is whipped wild, a deep chestnut brown.

All my fear, all my numbness twists and turns in my gut, boiling into a sharp hatred. Elwood Clarke.

I shake my vulnerability off with the snow. No one can see me like this. Especially not him. Why is he here? The thought flutters briefly through my mind, rushing past like the wind. Why isn’t he back at the party?

---