A huge grin crosses my face and that tingly sensation that only appears when I’m with him settles in my stomach. He reaches for the door handle to get out of the car, but I put my hand on his arm to stop him.
“Carson,” I say, “will you kiss me good night? And not because you owe me a favor or anything like that. I’ve never really kissed a boy before, and I want you to be my first. I mean, I had a great time tonight and it really felt like a date even though you said it wasn’t real.”
Our eyes meet.
I swallow hard, then close my eyes as the truth spills from my lips. “I know we’re supposed to be friends, but I have feelings for you here.…” I point to my heart.
He lets out a low breath and runs his hand through his hair. “You’re sixteen. I just don’t think—”
“Stop. I get it. Don’t say anything more.”
Humiliation rushes through me when I realize that he doesn’t remotely feel the same way about me that I feel about him. When he put his arm around me at the theater tonight, he was being polite … he was acting like a good fake date in front of Mandi and her friends. It was solely for show.
“Willow, don’t get upset.”
Tears start to form in my eyes. “Forget I asked you to kiss me. Forget what I just said. Forget everything I said tonight.”
I hurry out of the car and head for home, but he catches up to me and blocks my path. “Look at me,” he says.
“I can’t.”
“Look at me.” He tips my chin up with gentle fingers and urges me to look up. “ ’Cause I have something to say, and you need to hear it.”
––7––
CARSON
Willow’s eyes are glassy and a tear is running down her cheek. Damn.
I came to Seaside to get away from emotions and commitments and connections, and here I am, standing in front of a crying girl. I’d be lying to myself if I thought of her as just any girl. It’s Willow, the girl who made me want to talk again—the girl who wouldn’t take my silence and curt behavior as a hint to run far away from me.
“What?” she asks, then blinks teary lashes.
I cup her cheek in my palm. “I want to kiss you. I shouldn’t, but I do.”
I lean down and touch my lips to hers, reveling in the warmth of her sweet, full mouth on mine. I keep the kiss soft and it feels so good I’m tempted not to pull back for a long time.
When I finally do break the kiss, her eyes are still closed. The vision of her makes me smile.
“That was great,” she murmurs as she slowly opens her eyes and becomes aware of her surroundings once again. “You’re perfect.”
“I’m far from it.” I kick my foot into the dirt. “I got a lot of baggage I’m carrying.”
“Because of how your dad treated your mom?”
I nod.
“Where is he now?”
“Jail.”
I expect her to back away, or ask me details on how and why my dad got locked up, but she doesn’t. Instead, she wraps her arms around me and holds me tight.
“You’re not your father,” she tells me.
She’s the first person to tell me that. Deep down I knew it, but nobody ever put it into words before. I actually think my father thought he was a good role model, and was proud to tell people I was a chip off the ol’ block. I was always afraid that I’d end up a monster just like him.
“And I’m not gonna leave you like your mother did,” she adds.
Willow has helped me, whether she meant to or not. I was trying to ignore my feelings for her, especially tonight, because I was afraid to admit I care about her more than just as a friend. Being in a relationship means commitment. Being in a relationship means I’m not alone. I thought alone and noncommittal was where I wanted to be.
It’s not. Well, at least it’s not when it comes to Willow.
I want to express how much she means to me, but words don’t rush off my tongue easily.
Maybe I don’t need to tell her how I feel … I can show her.
“Wait here,” I say, then walk inside my RV and take out a switchblade I’d found in one of the kitchen drawers after I moved in. My heart is pounding wildly, like I’m about to jump off a cliff without a bungee cord to hold me back.
I don’t need to hold back, not anymore.
I find Willow waiting for me. I take her hand and lead her to the tree on my lot and start carving out my initials.
“What are you doing?” she asks, confused.
“You’ll see.”
When I’m done, I carve her initials below mine, then move away so she can see my handiwork.
Her eyes light up. “You carved our initials on the tree.”
I nod.
“Does this mean what I think it means, Carson?”
I take her hand in mine. “It means I can’t imagine my life without you. I’m falling for you, Willow.”
She looks up at me with a mischievous smile on her freckled face. “It also means if we ever get married we’ll have to name our first kid Crabapple.”
The Killing Garden
CARRIE RYAN
They say my father wept at my birth. Not from joy, but from agony that I was born a daughter rather than a son. Until me, my father’s family had run an unbroken line of male heirs, each one of them growing strong and following in the steps of those who came before as Gardener to the Emperor. It was a prestigious position that brought with it wealth and power.
My father took one look at me in my infant’s crib and declared, “She’ll never be strong enough for such a role.” Perhaps it was true, as the Emperor’s Gardener was not only in charge of the lush acres surrounding the palace but of pruning his court as well. This was accomplished through strangulation, and no one had taken to his role as Gardener more fiercely than my father.
In his first five years after assuming the title, my father strangled more than five thousand people. It was not enough for him to simply kill; he turned it into a sport as well. He raced the condemned through the gardens he maintained so meticulously, their finish line the execution platform. If the condemned won, he’d merely suffer banishment rather than execution. If he lost, my father strangled him and threw his body into the river.
Virtually no one ran faster than my father.
Except for me.
No daughter has ever worked as hard for her father’s approval as I have. From the moment I could walk, I ran instead. When I learned to speak it was in full sentences, always showing respect for my elders. At night, when the monsters came in my dreams, I suffered in silence rather than wake my slumbering parents.
As my mother’s only child I was showered with the best of everything; no cost was too great for tutors or clothes. Every birthday was a lavish affair, each milestone in my life marked by exuberant announcements and grand fetes. I grew into a darling of the Emperor’s court.
But I wanted none of that. What I truly craved was the acknowledgment of my father, any scrap of his attention. From the moment I learned of his disappointment in my birth I determined that I would make him proud and prove I could sustain the family honor.
I vowed to take the role as Gardener, but the only way to do that was to beat him at his own game. In secret I began my training. Long-sleeved gowns became the rage at court once I began wearing them to cover the scratches on my arms from sprinting through the gardens at night. The calluses on my hands I hid with brightly colored gloves.
When, on the eve of my fifteenth birthday, I announced my intention to challenge my father, I expected some kind of gleam of pride, a moment of weakness in which I could find his adoration for me. Instead he merely lifted one brow and nodded.
I asked my father before the race if he’d ever felt remorse for any of the deaths. “Were there any for whom you questioned their guilt?”
He didn’t look down at me. His eyes were trained forward toward the gardens. He knew them intimately—every intricate turn and dead-end path—which was an advantage during his races with the condemned
.
But today I was his opponent and I knew the route just as well, eliminating any advantage he would have.
“Mine is not to judge,” he told me. “But to run.”
I found that his answer did not settle my thoughts. “It’s not difficult for you? When you have your hands around their necks, you never wonder if they deserve it?”
This time he did look down at me. “Everyone dies, Tanci. Now or later, by my hand or someone else’s. We are all guilty of something deserving of punishment.”
That was when the marker called for the race to begin. My father’s bare feet were already pounding the garden path by the time I took my first step. No one, including him, thought I could win this race.
The number of paths to the execution platform is almost infinite, but my favorite has always been through the hedge maze. Most condemned avoid this route; there are too many false turns and confusing twists unless you’ve grown up with these trails as your playground.
As I expected, my father turned toward his preferred course along the Crying River, but I veered away and sprinted toward the topiary garden. Every turn was indelibly mapped in my head: left at the cockatrice, right at the manticore, straight past the twin alce, double back around the wyvern.
And here was where I knew I would win: there are no rules to this race. It is simply a matter of which of the two runners arrives first, and any means of accomplishing this goal is allowed. Too few condemned ever realize this. They may try to ford the Crying River or hop over the border between whispering beds, but never do they presume to truly break the boundaries of the ordered paths.
To them the hedges are walls. To me they are shortcuts. This was what I’d trained for: toughening the skin along my arms so that I could hold them over my face as I pushed through the interlocking shrubs with thorns as long as antelope horns and sharp as snake fangs.
There were gouges along my shoulders and shins as I climbed my way up the execution platform, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was this: I was the first to arrive.
My father’s steps did not lag when he rounded the final turn of his course and saw me, nor did his speed flag as he raced the final bit of distance between us. I waited for him to say something, to congratulate me or smile—anything—as he climbed the steps to stand beside me, but he was silent, his face betraying nothing.
Behind me stood a score of attendants used to pin the condemned if he or she chose to fight this final act. But they were unnecessary this morning: my father voluntarily knelt before me. His fingers didn’t fumble as he released the intricate knots holding the stiff leather Gardener’s collar, the symbol of his position, tight around his throat. The skin underneath hadn’t seen light or breathed air since he’d taken this same collar from his own father so many years ago.
No matter how hard I tried to control my body, I trembled. In all of my dreams I won this race over and over again, but I never dwelt on what would come after. For the briefest moment I wondered if perhaps my father had been correct all those years ago and I wasn’t strong enough to assume the role of Gardener.
All this time as my mind swam, my father knelt before me on the execution platform. Beyond him the Emperor and his retinue sat watching from the balcony, news of our race having brought a rather large crowd.
My father reached forward and took my hand in his. Here was a man whose fingers could squeeze the life out of any soul, but with me his touch was gentle as though my fist were a fluttering fledgling.
Blood leaked from the cuts in my arms and my father ran his thumb over one of the trails, smearing red across my wrist. His next words crushed me.
“I did not want you for this,” he said.
He lifted my hand to his throat.
I felt small in that moment, emotionally and physically. Even with him kneeling and me standing, his head reached the height of my chin. The tips of my fingers grazed the ridge of his spine; my thumbs pressed against the blood vessels on either side of his windpipe. His position forced me to hold my arms out straight, no way to leverage my body weight.
Either my hands alone were strong enough to strangle my father or they were not.
My father did not move his eyes from my own. Not when his breathing became labored. Not when his face burned red and the blood vessels began popping in the whites surrounding his pupils. He stared at me through every moment.
Tradition held that the new Gardener did not have to execute the former but needed only to prove his strength and fortitude. Normally, choking the predecessor to unconsciousness was enough.
But of course all mercy rests in the heart of the Emperor. After my father’s tongue pushed from his mouth and his body fell forward, my hands still wrapped around his throat, I looked up toward the Emperor’s box, my glance alone a request for mercy.
It didn’t come.
In that moment I had a choice: kill my father and take the Gardener’s collar or release my hands and admit that my father was right: I would never be strong enough.
I stared down into my father’s purple face and remembered him telling me that every person is guilty of something deserving of punishment. If only I knew what his guilt was, then perhaps I could determine whether he was deserving of this sort of retribution.
But I knew, as clear as the sun on a bright day, that were our roles reversed and it was my father’s fingers ordered to circle around my neck, he would do so without thought. As he himself said, his role was not to judge.
If I was to follow in his path, then mine wouldn’t be either.
The last flutter of my father’s pulse was struggling against the blockade of my thumbs when the Emperor gestured for one of his men to call mercy. I released my hands instantly, muscles so cramped my fingers were frozen in the form of claws.
A deep sense of relief welled within me, causing me to stumble back. On the execution platform my father choked and wheezed, heaving as he lurched to his feet. He bowed, short and sharp, to the Emperor in thanks for the mercy before bending to grab his discarded collar.
He said nothing as he stepped behind me, his fingers fluttering soft around my throat as he knotted the collar so tightly that breathing became a chore. My neck was shorter than that of my male ancestors, so the edges of the leather bit against my collarbones and chin, making it difficult to move my head.
Only two things would ever necessitate the removal of this symbol of office: death or defeat at the hands of a challenging executioner.
After the trumpeters heralded my success and the Emperor showered me with gifts—my own retinue of servants, my own set of rooms in the palace, a festival to mark my ascension to the new position—I found my way to my parents’ residence.
My mother greeted me with tears in her eyes, a mixture of joy and sorrow. Bruises ringed the dark skin of my father’s throat and he stood formally as I sent my new servants to pack my belongings.
I’d never seen him without the collar that now encircled my neck. He looked vulnerable and even a bit weak. Until that moment I hadn’t considered what he would do now that he was retired from gardening. The chase and the kill were his life, his passion, and I had no idea how he’d fill the chasm of time just opening in front of him.
“Do you have any advice?” I asked him, hoping that by sharing this common bond I could tempt him into showing me validation for my choices. After all, at my birth he’d claimed me too weak for this role and I’d proven him wrong. I wanted him to tell me he was proud.
“Run fast,” he said simply. “And remember that you are nothing more than a tool to the Emperor.”
The servants carried my trunks from my rooms, and my mother placed her hands against my forehead, my mouth and then my heart in a gesture of goodbye. She never let her eyes settle on the collar around my neck. I would always be welcome in my parents’ house, but from now on it would be only as a guest.
My father said nothing, which agitated me. I’d done everything he’d ever asked of me, exceeded every expectation I’d understood him to h
ave for me. For a brief blaze of a moment I almost wished the Emperor hadn’t granted him mercy, and this thought brought shame to my cheeks.
“Do you have any regrets?” I asked him as I stood in the doorway to leave.
He stared me straight in the eyes. “Only that you now wear the collar.”
The position of Gardener wasn’t easy, but I took to it just as fiercely as my father. The difference, though, was that he had found a sort of joy in the role, while I felt only a deep need to prove my worthiness. I quickly gained a reputation for being ruthless and swift. I’d walk into a room at the court and people would fall silent. The Emperor needed to simply nod in someone’s direction for them to find themselves on the line to race me to the execution platform the following morning.
I never lost. There had been times during my father’s tenure when the condemned would win, thus earning banishment rather than death. I vowed to exceed his record in all ways. To be sent to race against me through the gardens was to be sent to certain death by my hands around your throat.
Sometimes they fought or begged or sobbed. Their mouths would dribble excuses even with their last gasping breaths. I never listened. As my father told me: I was a tool of the Emperor, and mine was not to judge but to run. For years that was what I did.
Until one morning when I found myself standing at the starting mark next to my best childhood friend. Her hair was unbound, flowing over her shoulders in tangles, and I realized that I hadn’t even known she’d been married. Since becoming Gardener I’d lost touch with my former life.
The marker called for the race to begin before either of us could utter a word. My body was well honed, it knew nothing to do but run, and as I sped along the Crying River I tried to understand what crime could have brought my best friend to the garden. Growing up, she’d been as gentle and subservient as a butterfly in a breeze.
Of course I made it to the execution platform first; it had never occurred to me to do anything otherwise, and it would have been difficult to claim that someone like Sifri could have outpaced me. High-born women had no reason to run, and my best friend was no exception. By the time she stumbled to the clearing, she was winded, and limping from a cramp in her side.