Summer Sons(56)

Andrew pressed his palms harder and laid his forehead on the coarse wood, grinding it into his skin. In all his dreams, he’d never seen the tree, this broad spreading creature standing guard over a forest he wasn’t sure the name of. The toes of his shoes touched the base of the roots, his shoulders rounding. The rustling steps on the other side of the trunk ranged farther out.

This didn’t feel like it could be the place. He felt more death walking down any street of Nashville. Any tree in the forest would have the same tug of interest or knowledge—which was to say, none—even though the cops said Eddie’s blood had watered this monster’s roots. Andrew took a knee at the base of the trunk. One hand on the root nearest him, crawling free of the underbrush, and one on the packed earth, he closed his eyes. He had an idea of how to ask, if asking was the right word. It was precisely the depths to which he’d promised himself he’d never stoop, but Eddie had called to him in his desperate times, and he still felt the visceral memory of power lashing out.

“Fuck you,” he said to himself, and to the boy who whispered in his dreams. Then he shoved mental fingers into the snake pit of creeping potential coiled in the base of his guts.

Disgusted and clumsy without practice, he woke the cold pulse into his veins and his tongue and the fingertips he curled into the dirt. Eddie had practiced drawing out the power; Andrew never had, not once. Fuck you, Eddie, fuck you for making me do this, he thought on a loop. Eddie would’ve crowed to see him. He’d been pushing so long for Andrew to embrace himself, their difference, their death-made-life. Andrew reached into the ground, and instead of Eddie’s praise, fresh blood pulsed up from the otherwise summer-dried earth with a reverberating strike that knocked the wind out of Andrew’s lungs. An unnatural gust stirred the leaves up in a tiny red-spattered cyclone around Andrew’s wrist, his fingers, stinking of rot and life.

The vision he’d called for spilled up from the ground and into his flesh, bowing him face-first into the wet earth and forcing his hands deeper into the solid ground: cool lax limbs spread to their full length, knife lying suggestive at the knee, jaw hanging a fraction loose. Uncaring alien fingers adjusted the dead weight and thumbed the livid purpling bruises at the elbows, the wrists, chafed and burned around his matched tattoo. Andrew existed in that moment as both the dead man and himself, inside and outside, witness and victim all at once in an immense moment of confirmation—someone else was there. Another set of hands arranging the stiff corpse.

Violence hadn’t found Eddie here in the forest, not at this resting place, quiet and green under the leaves that had scattered themselves on Andrew’s call in a paroxysm of sacrifice. The land had known Eddie, had given him its rites, drunk the dregs of him down. He was one and the same as that earth. But the true death had happened elsewhere, not beneath the handsome tree in the woods far from home. The soil had so little spilled blood to give as offering to Andrew when he came for his inheritance.

Andrew came into his skin heaving, slumped on his side in the fetal position. The blood on his hands might’ve come from his cracked nails, but he knew otherwise. The dampness on his face might’ve been sweat or tears. Footsteps approached and paused at the side of the tree, and he scrubbed his fingers ineffectually on his shirt.

“I leave you for five minutes,” Sam said, strained.

“He didn’t die here,” he slurred.

“Remember that thing I told you, about not fucking with things you shouldn’t fuck with,” Sam said. There was a subdued fury in his voice. “This is one of those things. What even were you doing?”

“I needed to be sure.” He planted his back against the tree, legs spread. A tremor crept up from his hips to his heart. He was lying now in the same spot Eddie had been staged. Panic raced and spasmed. “Someone killed him, someone fucking—”

Halse grabbed his upper arm and hauled him to standing, grip like iron. Andrew staggered against him. “That’s the real reason you’ve been asking around, huh? Asking questions about me and him? It didn’t occur to you to wonder why Riley told me all that shit when he hadn’t told me before? We all met up last night to talk about you, compared notes after your party with Ethan.”

The blazing fire in his stare was the realest thing Andrew had seen in weeks.

“Say it to my face,” Halse snarled. He released Andrew’s arm and took a step and a half back, shaking his elbows out. “Fucking hell. Ask me if I did it, you fuck, come on.”

“Fine.” Nausea gripped his esophagus. “Was it you who killed him?”

Halse’s fist caught him square in the stomach.





15


The second blow landed off-center, knuckles on his bottom ribs, and Andrew crumpled around the breath Sam drove out of him. He clawed a hand into the neck of the other man’s T-shirt and grabbed his bicep with the other. The edge of Sam’s jaw pressed into his temple as they grappled. Ragged, silent struggle took up the quiet calm of the spreading oak’s embrace, broken by gasped breaths. Sam’s clumsier free hand crashed into the meat of Andrew’s upper back three times in quick succession. He wedged his palm around Sam’s throat to push, up and out, separating their clinch. Sam choked as he staggered free. Spit flecked his cheek and mouth, viscous. Andrew wiped it with his forearm. He smelled blood and dirt. Skin-on-skin contact seared the chill from his bones.