The Butterfly Garden (36 page)

“And here’s the bitch herself, the little queen of the Garden.” He pistol-whipped me so hard my ears rang, and part of the gun sliced my cheek with the impact. Dropping the gun, he kicked me onto my knees and fumbled at his belt. “Well I’m the king of the Garden now, so you’d better learn to show me some respect.”

“You put that near my mouth and I’ll bite it off,” I snarled, and from behind the boulder, Bliss cheered.

He hit me again, and again, and raised his hand to do it once more when Nazira’s voice stopped him.

“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.”

She twists her hand in his grip until her other hand can reach underneath the bandages to touch the scabs. He gently pushes it away.

The flames were spreading so fast. Panes of glass shattered overhead, raining down on us in chunks and shards. Willa dodged one but stepped directly into another that cut her head almost in half. We could see the flames beyond the glass, eating into the outer greenhouse.

The Gardener shook his head, leaning on Hailee for support. “If it reaches the room with the fertilizers, there will be a second explosion,” he said, coughing.

By now, most of the girls were crying.

I tried to think of any possible way we weren’t trapped and fucked. “The cliff,” I said. “If we break some of the glass on the wall, we could go out onto the roof of the halls.”

“And what, slide down the breaking or broken panes of glass for the outer greenhouse?” muttered Bliss. “And still probably break ankles, legs,
spines
when we land?”

“Fine. Your turn.”

“No fucking clue. Your turn.”

Desmond chuckled, then groaned.

Pia screamed and we spun around to see Avery behind her, his burned and blistered forearm across her throat. A chunk of glass quivered in his shoulder, soot and gashes streaking down his cheeks. He laughed and bit her neck as she struggled against him.

“Avery, let her go,” the Gardener moaned.

Despite the roar of the flames, we heard her neck snap.

He threw her body to the side and then jerked back from a sharp crack. I turned to see Bliss with the gun up, her feet planted, and she shot him again. He bellowed with pain and threw himself forward, and she squeezed off two more shots until he finally fell face-first in the flowers.

One of the larger trees, all its branches aflame, snapped near its roots and crashed into the wall with a terrific groan. Glass shattered, metal panes snapping under its weight, and the black roof that ran between the two sections of greenhouse collapsed beneath it. We could see the outer greenhouse through the dancing flames.

“I still have nothing,” Bliss said, and choked on the smoke. “Really, it’s still your turn to think of something.”

“Fuck off,” I muttered, and she gave me a weak grin.

I hooked my ankle around Ravenna’s knee and pulled her to take my place pressing against Desmond’s chest. With how much we were moving him I didn’t think it would do any good, but I couldn’t bear not to at least try. He’d tried, even if he hadn’t succeeded. We could try.

And I didn’t want him to die. Not when he’d finally given us a chance to live.

I ran to the fallen tree, tugging away the larger chunks of glass and the more jagged branches. Pain seared through my hands, but if there was even the chance of this being the way out, I had to try. Then Glenys and Marenka were helping me, and then Isra joined us, and we tried to dig a way around the trunk. We were able to clear one side of it, and with all four of us pushing and straining from the other side, we managed to push the trunk just far enough into the outer greenhouse.

Marenka tugged a piece of glass from my arm and flicked it away. “I think I know a way to carry him through.”

“Let’s try it.”

She lifted Desmond by the shoulders, hooking her hands under his armpits. I stood between his legs and hooked my hands under his knees. It wasn’t graceful, and it certainly wasn’t easy, but we were more or less single file.

Bliss led the way through, Danelle and Keely close behind her. Isra stayed back, pushing aside more debris as it fell, the Gardener beside her. Not helping, because he couldn’t, really, but getting the more frightened—or frozen—girls to follow us. The smoke was getting worse, getting thicker, and we were all choking on it. Figures moved beyond the outer greenhouse and suddenly a great crack ran along one of the six-foot panes that butted the floor. Someone was swinging an ax at it. We held back, waiting to see if they would get through, and after a few more hits, the center of the pane shattered. Using the ax head, a fireman knocked the rest of the glass out of the pane and threw down a heavy folded tarp over the chunks.

“Come on,” he—she?—yelled through the mask.

Other firemen followed, and two of them took Desmond from us. It wasn’t particularly fresh, but we got the first free air we’d had in forever, and the few girls who weren’t crying already started as they stepped onto crisp autumn grass and felt the cold air wrap around us. Some of them fell to their knees in shock and had to be dragged away.

I was trying to count heads after they took Desmond, and I could see Isra doing the same thing in the outer greenhouse, both of us trying to figure out how many we’d lost before we reached this point. Then there was this . . . this . . .
whump
and another explosion billowed out from one of the rooms and the last I saw of Isra, she was flying sideways in a ball of fire, three of the others still clinging to her, the Gardener on the ground with flames dancing over him. I tried to run to the girls, but one of the firemen grabbed my wrist and yanked me away.