The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(31)

She was the one who determined their pace, and whenever she lagged, he turned to her solicitously. It was the same tenderness he showed to his Butterflies, soft and sincere in a way that sent spiders crawling under my skin.

It was the same tenderness with which he touched the glass of the display cases, with which he wept over Evita. It was in the way his hands trembled when he saw what Avery had done to me.

It was love, as he knew it.

Two or three times a week, Avery accompanied them, trailing along behind and rarely staying for the full hour. He usually did a single revolution and then walked into the Garden, where he looked for someone who was sweet and innocent and so easily gave him the fear he craved.

And twice a week, on consecutive days that were the same as our maintenance mornings, there was a younger son, with his mother’s dark hair and slim build. As with his mother, the detail was lost to distance, but it was clear she doted on him. When he joined them, she moved between her husband and younger son.

For months, I watched them unobserved, until one day, the Gardener looked up.

Right at me.

I kept my cheek pressed against the glass, curled within the leaves high in my tree, and didn’t move.

It was another three days before we spoke of it, and even then only over the bed of a stranger, not even a Butterfly.




Victor takes a deep breath, pushing away that bizarre image of normalcy. Most of the sickos he arrests seem normal on the surface. “He’d kidnapped another girl?”

“He took several a year, but never until the previous one was fully marked and more or less settled in.”

“Why?”

“Why he took several a year? Or why he waited between them?”

“Yes,” Victor tells her, and she smirks.

“For the first—attrition. He never took more than the Garden could support, so generally he only went shopping when one of the Butterflies died. That wasn’t always the case, but usually. For the second . . .” She shrugs and presses her palms flat against the table, studying the stippling of burned tissue across the backs. “A new girl was a stressful time in the Garden. Everyone got on edge, remembering their own kidnapping and how it was when they woke up the first time, and then the inevitable tears just made it all worse. Once a new girl settled, things were quiet for a while, until the next death, the next wings on display, the next new girl. The Gardener was always—mostly—exquisitely sensitive to the prevailing mood in the Garden.”

“Is that why he allowed Lyonette to act as a guide?”

“Because it helped, yes.”

“Then how did you end up doing it?”

“Because someone had to, and Bliss was too angry, the rest too skittish.”




It wasn’t the girl after me but the next one that I first helped with, because Avery had brought the flu into the Garden and it was cutting a hell of a swath through the girls.

Lyonette was a train wreck. She was pale and sweating, her tawny hair plastered to her neck and face, and the toilet bowl was a much truer friend than I could ever be. Bliss and I told her to stay in bed, to let the Gardener deal with his own mess for once, but as soon as the walls lifted to let us out of our rooms, she pulled on clothes and staggered out into the hallway.

Swearing, I tied on a dress and jogged after her until I could loop one of her arms around my shoulders. She was so dizzy she couldn’t walk without keeping a hand to the wall. She didn’t flinch away from the display cases like she usually did even after almost five years. “Why does it have to be you?”

“Because it has to be someone,” she whispered, and stopped to swallow back her need to vomit. Again. Even though she’d been kneeling in front of the toilet for most of the past eighteen hours.

I didn’t agree, not at that point.

Maybe not ever.

The Gardener was very, very good at guessing ages, better than any carnival whack I’d ever heard of. A few girls came in at seventeen, but most were sixteen. He wouldn’t kidnap younger—and if he thought there was a chance of fifteen or less, he said he chose someone else—but he tried not to go any older. I guess he wanted the full five years whenever possible.

The things that man felt comfortable talking about with his captives . . . or maybe just with me.

The new girl was in a room that was every bit as naked as the one I’d woken up in. Mine was slowly starting to accumulate personal touches, but for now she had a plain grey fitted sheet and nothing else. Her skin tone was dark and, combined with the cast of her features, suggested mixed race: Mexican and African, I’d find out later. She wasn’t much taller than Bliss, and except for a rather astonishing set of tits that looked like they’d been a quincea?era gift, she was reed-slender. Small holes marched all the way up one ear and most of the other. Another hole on the edge of her nostril and yet another around her navel suggested they’d been pierced as well.

“Why’d he take them all out?”

“Maybe he thought they were tacky,” groaned Lyonette, sinking to the floor beside the unshielded toilet.

“My ears were double pierced when I came. Still are.”

“Maybe he thinks yours are classy.”

“Plus the cartilage cuff on the right.”

“Maya, don’t be a bitch. This is rough enough, all right?”

Surprisingly, that actually was enough to make me stop. It wasn’t just that she was clearly pathetic at the moment. It was also the undercurrent. Trying to make sense of why the Gardener did what he did was an exercise in futility, and completely unnecessary besides. We didn’t need to know why. We just needed to know what.