The Butterfly Garden (The Collector #1)(84)

“I can hear sirens!”

I couldn’t hear anything but the bells going off inside my skull, but some of the other girls said they could hear them too. I wasn’t sure if they were trying to distract him or if the sirens were real.

Avery dropped me and ran through the Garden to take the path up the cliff to see for himself. I crawled to Desmond, who was trying to keep pressure on his chest with one hand. I moved his hands away and did it myself, his blood warm and sticky as it pumped against my palm. “Please don’t die,” I whispered.

He weakly squeezed my hand, but otherwise didn’t try to answer.

The Gardener groaned and pulled himself to his son’s other side. “Desmond? Desmond, answer me!”

The pale green eyes—his father’s eyes—fluttered open. “The only way to protect them from him is to let them go,” he panted. Sweat beaded his face. “He’ll kill them all, and they’ll be in pain at every moment.”

“Just stay awake, Desmond,” his father pleaded. “We’ll get you to the hospital and we’ll figure this out. Maya, keep pressure on it!”

I hadn’t stopped.

But now I could hear the sirens.

Avery jumped and swore atop the cliff, and the girls raced forward to surround us, probably figuring the Gardener and Desmond were a safer bet than Avery-off-the-deep-end. Even Lorraine was clustered with us, and no one tried to brush her away. Bliss picked up the gun with shaking hands, but she kept her eyes trained on Avery.

And the sirens got louder.




“I can’t figure out why they came back,” she whispers, clutching his hand for dear life. “They didn’t find anything the first time, right? Or the Gardener wouldn’t have lifted the walls.”

“One of the officers who stayed at the station ran the names Desmond gave over the phone. Keely’s name they recognized because she was so recently missing, but when he ran some of the others, FBI flags came up on the search. His supervisor contacted us and we met them back out there. Cassidy Lawrence, for example. She went missing almost seven years ago from Connecticut. There’s no reason to say her name with Keely’s unless there’s actually a connection between them.”

“So Lyonette was part of why we were finally found?” she asks with a faint smile.

“Yes, she was.”

They sit in silence for a few minutes, watching the man on the bed breathe in and out.

“Inara . . .”

“The rest of it.”

“Hopefully this is the last difficult thing I’ll have to ask of you.”

“Until you ask me to take the stand,” she sighs.

“I’m sorry, I truly am, but what happened next?”




Fucking Sirvat.

The Gardener pulled the remote control thing out of his pocket and punched a series of numbers into the tiny pad on it. “Sirvat, please go into the room right by the door and get some towels and rubber tubing.”

“The one by Zara?” she asked.

“Yes, that’s the one.”

A slow smile spread across her face and she spun away with a laugh. Sirvat had been there about a year and a half, and as long as I’d known her she’d been solitary and just . . . odd.

The Gardener adjusted his belt to put pressure on the wound in his side and stroked his son’s hair, telling him to stay awake, asking him questions and begging him to respond. Des squeezed my hand in response to some things and he was still breathing, but he didn’t try to talk, which I thought was probably for the better.

“When we get the towels tied on him, will you let us take him out the front?” I asked.

The Gardener just looked at me, nearly through me, seemingly weighing his Butterflies against his son, even now. Finally, he nodded.

Then I smelled it and froze.

Danelle was the next to smell it, her nose wrinkling. “What is that?”

“Formaldehyde,” I hissed. “We need to get away from that room.”

“What room?”

The Gardener paled even more. “No questions now, ladies, come.”

We had to drag Desmond across the sand, the Gardener stumbling and swaying after us. We splashed through the waterfall—anyone who tried to go behind it and stay dry got pushed in by Bliss—and crowded into the cave.

Over the sound of the waterfall, we heard Sirvat laughing, and then . . .




She shakes her head. “I don’t know how to describe the explosion,” she tells him. “It was just massive, all this sound and heat. A few of the rocks came down from the top of the cliff, but the cave didn’t collapse like I was half afraid it would. There were flames and glass everywhere and all these stupid little sprinklers misting straight into steam. Air poured in from the shattered roof and the flames leaped toward them. Smoke poured out, along with the real butterflies, but even with that, the smoke was so thick we could hardly breathe. We had to get out of there.”

“You went through the stream?”

“Until we reached the pond. Our feet got cut up pretty badly from the glass, but the flames were spreading and the water seemed like a better option. The front half of the Garden was just this huge blaze. I asked the Gardener . . .” She swallows hard, looks at the man in the bed. “I asked Mister MacIntosh if there was an emergency exit, any other way to get out, but he said . . . he never thought anything would happen.”