The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(54)

Bruised eyes.

I ate the rest of the orange in the time it took him to find something to say, and then he didn’t say anything at all, just handed me his sweater. I put it on and when he reached for my hand, I let him take it.





He was never going to go to the police.

We both knew it.

All that the past half hour had changed was that now he hated himself a little for it.




“You haven’t asked who survived.”

“You’re not going to let me go see them until I’ve told you everything you want to know.”

“True.”

“So I’ll find out when we’re done, when I can actually spend time with them. My being there now can’t change anything anyway.”

“Suddenly I can believe you haven’t cried since you were six.”

A faint smile flickers across her face. “Fucking carousel,” she agrees pleasantly.




Bliss made a carousel, did I mention that?

She could make damn near anything out of polymer clay, baking sheet after sheet in the oven with Lorraine scowling at her the entire time as supervision. She was the only one of us with oven privileges. She was also the only one who’d ever asked.

The night before she died, in those long hours we spent curled together on her bed, Lyonette told us stories about when she was younger. She didn’t give us names or locations, but she told them just the same, and the one that made her smile, the one that she loved more than any of the others, was about a carousel.

Her father made the figures for a lot of carousels, and sometimes little Cassidy Lawrence would draw some out and her father would incorporate the designs into the next project, let her choose the colors or the expression on a face. Once her father let her go with him to deliver the horses and sleighs to a traveling carnival. They placed the figures all around the disc and she sat on the rail and watched as they ran the wiring through the golden poles so the horses moved up and down, and when everything was done, she ran around and around the carousel, petting the horses and whispering their names in their ears so they wouldn’t forget. She knew every single one, and she loved them all.

The Gardener’s traits don’t exist in isolation, just in extremes.

But the horses weren’t hers, and when it came time to go home, she had to leave them all behind, probably to never see them again. She couldn’t cry because she’d promised her father she wouldn’t, promised she wouldn’t make a scene when they had to go.

That was when she made her first origami horse.

In the cab of the truck on the way home, she made her first two dozen origami horses, using notebook paper and fast-food receipts to practice until she could make them well, and when she got home, she graduated to using computer paper. She made horse after horse after horse and colored them all to match the ones she’d left behind, whispering their names as she did, and when she was done, she carefully painted thin dowels and stuck them through the middles with a little bit of glue.

She drew out and colored the patterns on the floor, all the paintings on the sloped ceiling, even the pictures framed in the elaborate curlicues that ran along the base of the tent top, and her mother helped her put them all together. Her father even helped her make a crank for the base so the whole thing could slowly spin. Her parents were so proud of her.

The morning of the day she was kidnapped, when she left the house for school, the carousel was still sitting in pride of place on the mantel.

After Lyonette died, I had the nameless new girl to keep me occupied.

Bliss had her polymer clay.

She didn’t show anyone what she was working on and none of us asked, letting her work through her grief in her own way. She was unusually focused on this project. Honestly, as long as it wasn’t a Lustrous Copper figurine, I wasn’t too worried. She’d done that for a few of the other dead girls and somehow I found those two-inch-tall butterflies more macabre and disturbing than the girls in the glass.

But then the new girl’s infection reached a critical point—her tattoo was never going to heal properly. Even if the infection didn’t kill her, the wings would be hopelessly flawed, and that was something the Gardener couldn’t accept. Not when beauty was why he chose us.

The doors had come down in the dark hours of earliest morning, like they would have for her normal tattoo session, but when they came up, she wasn’t in the tattoo room or her bed. She never appeared in the display cases. There was no goodbye.

There was just . . . nothing.

There was literally nothing left of her, not even a name.

Bliss was in my room when I came back from looking, sitting cross-legged on my bed with a wrap skirt draped over a bundle in her lap. Dark shadows bruised the pale skin under her eyes and I wondered how much she’d slept since Lyonette had said goodbye to us.

I sank down next to her on the bed, one leg curled under my body, and leaned my back against the wall.

“Is she dead?”

“If not, she soon will be,” I sighed.

“And then you’ll sit through another new girl’s arrival and tattoos.”

“Probably.”

“Why?”

I’d wondered that myself over the past week or so. “Because Lyonette thought it was important.”

She pulled the fabric away from her lap, and there was the carousel.