Page 72 of Together We Rot

If I played my cards right, the others are safe by now. I’ve led Elwood far enough away from them that there’s a chance for them to get away. A mile away, Cherry can get the car rumbling to life and hightail it to the hospital. Prudence’s baby can be born as a child and not as an offering. We can break the cycle. We have to.

Dad shouts my name in the distance, but I refuse to turn. He will be lucky if he walks away with a concussion after that fall. I still can’t believe he’s here. My heart pangs at that. I’ve already lost Mom. If I lose Dad, it will be the final nail in my coffin.

As soon as the transformation stole Elwood, the bloodshed began. His dad and Sheriff Vrees are dead. Slaughtered limb from limb. I saw it all. Chests torn through, dripping out onto the snow.

I taste the salt of my sweat trickling down my face. He could kill me just as easily. Maybe he still will.

But he’s in there, somewhere.

Elwood is more butterfly than man. A strange body held together by twisting vines and clumps of moss. Ribs with a dozen oozing hearts trapped inside—none of which look like they belong to it, all of which look stolen. Human.

And magnificent, unearthly wings.

He lowers his face to me, stares at me with milky-white eyes.

I feel the plume of his breath spilling across my throat. Hot and sticky. Those massive wings of his unfurl, crafted from a thousand tiny green leaves.

I conjure my remaining courage. One deep, bone-rattling breath. My lungs wheeze in the cold. What’s left of Elwood is being pulled from the surface. Soon there will be nothing left.

I’ve got to yank him out or he’ll drown.

I squeeze my eyes shut. I won’t look at what he’s become. I’ll keep his memory alive in my mind. No more wings and bones, no more hearts and antennae. All I see in my mind is the soft and shy Elwood Clarke I’ve always known. Elwood and his butterflies, the way he prattled on so intensely about them. Elwood and the little portraits he’d shove in my locker, the ones he was too embarrassed to show me face-to-face. Elwood’s eyes lighting up when we talked about running away one day.

So I tell him. All of it. Every little thing I’ve kept locked within my chest. All the quirks of his I love so dearly. The letters I wrote him but never sent (Dear Elwood: First of all, how dare you?). The aching I felt in his absence. Like he ripped off the most important piece of me and stole it away. I tell him maybe that’s what Dad meant after all, when he said coping without my mother was damn near impossible.

Elwood has always been a part of me. The most important part.

“And I’ll be damned if that monster takes you from me,” I finish, my lips trembling and my nails digging into the ground. “I love you.”

The world is very still after my confession. It feels a lot like the two of us are suspended in time, floating, even. But then the monstrous elements of him shift and ripple and change.

Bit by bit they peel off, and he ripples like a caterpillar emerging from a cocoon. He’s human again but not fully. The forest has come alive within him. His eyes are so much crisper and greener than I remember. A veil has been lifted off them. He’s alive with power. It radiates off him in a pulsating cloud—the wind rushes through his hair, his fingers grapple with the wind at his sides. It shifts directions with his fingertips.

I don’t care about any of that. I bury myself in his arms.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

ELWOOD

For the first time, I taste the iron tang of their blood on my lips. It stains my mouth, coating each tooth like a layer of grime. I hack and spit, but the taste lingers, gripping onto my tongue. My nails have become black talons, curving off each finger, my palms stained a hideous, telling red as I break away from Wil.

“Did I hurt you?” I breathe. I feel like I’ve woken from a hideous, horrible dream. I whip around myself, staring at her. Her knee is sliced through, the fabric of her jeans torn to smithereens. “Please tell me I didn’t do that.”

The truth tears through me just as I had torn through my father. Memories sprout all around me, bitter weeds that I cannot pluck. Reminding me what I did. What I am.

There was no chance to fight me off, no chance to stop what had already begun. I chased their pulse. My father cried and cried, but I didn’t hear him. I didn’t see him. A fog had drifted over my mind, blurring away the screams. Blurring away the monster inside me.

“That wasn’t you,” she tells me, and I feel her thumbs dart around my cheeks. She catches the tears before they fall. “It isn’t you.”

She holds me, and I bury myself in her arms. I want to hide away forever. The world is changing around me. She’s the only constant.

“I’m changing, Wil.” Even now, I’m not sure what the future holds. My breath ghosts across the side of her face. I taste pine and soil on my tongue. Wil has brought me back into my body, but I don’t know for how long. I might’ve escaped the monster, but I can’t outrun the seed within me. It’s already blossomed, and soon I will become something else altogether.

A transformation, that’s what Cherry said. Maybe she was right and Death isn’t death after all. Maybe death is my old life burning so that my new life can be born from the ashes. The beast inside me was never really a beast. It was only a boy tainted by centuries of bloodshed and darkness. “Know I love you. Whatever happens.”

“Nothing is going to happen,” she whispers through tears, but we both know that isn’t true. Something is coming.

I press my lips to hers and hold them there as long as I can. In my last seconds, I lift my mouth to her ear and whisper my promise. I savor the widening of her eyes as the world changes. As I transform.

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