Monster Garden

  It’s a kiss, my first kiss, but it feels more like an explosion of lips and teeth and tongue, his hand on my chin and my hands around his neck, pulling him in close, so close I can smell someone’s perfume on him and I hate it, hate the way he tastes like bittersweet rosemary, hate the way his tongue darts like lava into my mouth, searing me all the way down to my core and leaving a scorched path in its wake that aches with ash, wanting to be filled again and again. I bite into his lower lip, demanding more, thinking I can goad him into giving me more, even if I’m nowhere near as beautiful as the woman he’s slept with - the women he sleeps with - even if I’ve never done anything like this with anyone before I want to do it with him, even if I wish I didn’t want to…I want to.

  MONSTER GARDEN

  a novel by Sara Wolf

  Also by Sara Wolf

  The Lovely Vicious Series

  Love Me Never

  Forget Me Always

  Remember Me Forever

  The Bring Me Their Hearts Series

  Bring Me Their Hearts

  For M. Keep going, no matter where you are.

  May James expects to graduate, even if it means eating ramen seven days a week and flipping burgers. She’s prepared to do anything to succeed – anything except feed three beautiful fae with her touch alone. May is a Brightened, one of the few gifted humans who have abilities that can influence the gorgeous and intimidating fae who walk the earth. But when the enigmatic Vilmor Van Grier offers her sixty-thousand dollars to feed the eight high fae he’s collared with his own Brightness, May must contend with the magical reality of Vilmor’s estate – the Monster Garden, her own powers, and the infuriating-but-volcanically-irresistible fae named Dane.

  If power can collar the fae, can love free them? Or will they be forever trapped in the Monster Garden?

  ***This book is a hate-to-love story that contains language and situations which may be inappropriate for minors below the age of 18. Please read responsibly.***

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Sara Wolf. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact [email protected].

  -1-

  This is the 347th time I’ve told the assholes upstairs to turn down their shitty music. I’ve tried to leave nice notes, I’ve tried to lead by example and play my rare wine-and-bubblebath-night music softly, I’ve tried everything short of lighting a firecracker and shoving it under their Kappa Theta Pi door.

  Tonight we get desperate. Tonight is the bang-my-broom-on-my-ceiling-slash-their-floor night. I despise conflict with every fiber of my being and I also don’t believe in pissing off the people I live near just as, you know, a good don’t-get-murdered rule of thumb. I grew up on an organic farm commune in Oregon surrounded by hippies who popped pot brownies like tic tacs - I’m the least aggressive person I know!

  Which is saying something, because I don’t know many people. I’m about as good at making friends as I am at getting violent on plaster with a broom handle - disgustingly awful.

  “You’ve been partying for three. Days. Straight,” I mutter through clenched teeth as I do my best to balance on the rickety chair. Being 5’3 doesn’t get me much lateral traction, but I make up for it in inventiveness. “Maybe spend your college education doing something other than ruining mine? Just a thought!”

  My neighbors upstairs kindly smash something heavy on the floor, and my heart jumps up in my throat. I can hear them laughing faintly over the music.

  “If I was buff, and also a man, and if I had, like, a taser on me, you’d all be toast. Electrically-burned toast.” I sweep my black bangs out of my eyes and slam the broom handle on the ceiling again, but the bad death metal just keeps blasting, vibrating my entire tiny studio apartment so hard I see the resident cockroaches crawl around the duct-tape I put over the cracks in the walls.

  “Aw beans. On electrically-burned toast,” I grumble. My stomach grumbles with me, and I sigh and stand down from the chair, dragging it back to it’s place in the corner. Sorry, tum. We don’t get paid until next Wednesday.

  I flop on my beat up paisley couch and stare at the ceiling as it thumps with the music and the cheers. The smell of cigarette smoke from one of their guests wafts straight into my window, and I gag and hurry over to close it.

  Immediately, a half-drunk voice rings out; “Fuckin’ prude!”

  Laughter follows it and I sink into the couch and pull the throw-blanket up over my head as my impending failure flashes before my eyes like I’m dying and these are my last moments. I won’t get to study in peace, I won’t remember anything for the final, and I’ll flunk out of Oregon State and that’ll be it - all of Mom and Dad’s money down the drain for nothing. I was smart in high school - straight A’s in AP classes, but college piled it on so hard and I fast and I was so anxious about not failing I ironically nearly failed my freshman year, and I sure as shit didn’t qualify for any scholarships after that.

  Failure wouldn’t be such a bad thing if Mom and Dad didn’t scrape together everything they had to send me to college, if they didn’t call me with cheery voices trying to cover up the fact they were struggling to pay the mortgage and my tuition. Mom tried to hide it, but I know Dad got a second job at the county office doing their tax work because I see him check in there every day on Facebook because he’s a dad and never learned how to turn check-ins off. The second I realized how bad it was I got a job at a fast food place and moved out of the dorms and found this dinky apartment complex on the east side of town where the artisan cupcake shops haven’t taken over and everything’s still cheap. It’s not super sketchy, but at least once a month the police bust down someone’s door, and there’s always a guy sitting on the steps outside selling ecstasy and other club drugs. He always latches on to me, but what about forgot-to-shower brown hair in a messy bun and sweatpants makes me look like I do party drugs? The world will never know.

  Or the world will know, when I end up pulling the earlobes off the boys upstairs and get arrested for battery and my face is plastered all over the news. Or is it assault? Shit, I have an American Law final in three days, I should know this!

  I curl up on the couch, feeling stupid and weak and overwhelmed. No - come the fuck on, May. You aren’t a freshman anymore. And Mom and Dad aren’t wasting a trillion dollars for you to cry on a couch all night.

  I jump up - first things first; my stomach is a huge whiny baby and it needs sustenance. I shuffle to the kitchenette. It’s tiny, a sink and microwave the only things here, but I keep it as clean as I can. I’m pretty proud of the way the sink sparkles - even if I suck at deciphering logical fallacies, at the very least I can keep a damn sink clean. I pop a Cup Ramen into the microwave and watch it spin.

  “A watched Ramen never boils,” I mutter, and turn to the window.

  It’s the only window I have in my apartment, and considering I live in a concrete jungle with no real companionship except the occasional telemarketer and UPS deliveryman, the window is my favorite thing. It overlooks the gentle sloping hill of the neighborhood, and if you strain your neck enough, you can see the glorious greenery and huge mansions in the distance. Paringway Heights, it’s called? Something snooty, but the way the moonlight and sunlight catches the trees and the beautiful glass walls of the fancy modernist architecture always soothes me. No matter how stressed I am, no matter how much my workload tries to crush me, one look out this window and my heart feels lighter. Someday, I think whenever I look,
I’ll live somewhere nice like that. I’ll be successful - even if I don’t have a fucking Blue’s Clues what I’m going to do with my Bachelors of Arts degree. Someday I’ll live somewhere nice without cockroaches in the walls, I won’t work on my feet for seven hours and come home smelling like burger grease, and I won’t worry about Mom and Dad and they won’t worry about me and I’ll have friends, maybe? Is that too much to hope for? I’ll get good at cooking, and I won’t live counting pennies to my next paycheck and I sure as hell won’t eat Ramen every night of the week.

  Someday, I’ll be better. I’ll look back at this awful apartment and lonely life and laugh like it was all a bad dream.

  I poke at my cactus on the window - his name is Sir Charles I bought him when I was feeling really down one day, and I had a bit extra. He doesn’t need much water, but having something green and alive around makes me feel like I’m alive, too. It’s nice to wake up and make some coffee and see a green thing soaking up the sun happily.

  “Hey Sir Charles,” I stroke the non-needley part of it. “You hanging in there?”

  Just then, an ear-splitting THUD collapses down on the floor above, the boys cheering. I reach for Sir Charles a second too late, and like the world’s in slow motion I watch in horror as his terra-cotta dish plummets towards the tile floor.

  The shatter freezes me in place. No - not Sir Charles! He’s in fragments, dirt everywhere and his dish broken beyond repair, his green flesh splitting open where he impacted the ground. No no no no - my brain locks up like a repeating record and all I can see is red.

  It’s a cactus. I know that. It’s just a cactus. But the tears well up, hot and angry.

  The boys upstairs just keep cheering.

  “That’s it. I’m done. I’m done playing nice!” They can take my peace from me, they can take my grades, they can take my sanity - but they can’t take the one thing that made me smile every morning!

  I grab the broom and throw on a sweatshirt, gnashing my teeth. This is a bad, sleep-deprived idea and bad sleep-deprived ideas lead to confrontation and I hate confrontation and I’m terrible at it but I’m so angry I don’t care anymore. I smash my feet into my flip-flops and take the stairs two at a time, banging both my fists on their door.

  “Hey!” I shout. “Hey! Open up!”

  Nothing. Not even a guy out here smoking. The music just keeps blasting, the singer screaming the chorus hoarsely. I pull my foot back and kick with all my elementary-school soccer practice.

  “It’s your friendly downstairs neighbor!” I shout. “I’ve got cookies!”

  This is a lie. I have approximately one cookie and it’s a broom. But hopefully they’re too drunk to check through the peep-hole. No one’s coming - maybe they just can’t hear me. But they will.

  “Hey, assholes! Open this fucking door right now before I battering ram it open!”

  Nothing. Not even laughter. I take the handle of the broom and slam it into the door.

  “OPEN THE DOOR, YOU MOLDY SHITPILES!”

  I’ve never been this mad in my life - I’ve never shouted at strangers in public in my fucking life but here I am, pretty much a deranged neighbor stereotype. They could call the cops on me any second -

  The music suddenly turns off and all my bravado goes straight down the toilet as I hear footsteps coming to the door.

  “Oh no, oh dear god no,” I groan, looking for somewhere to hide. May, stop - you’ve got no friends and a garbage GPA - don’t add ‘coward’ to the list. Anything but that. It’s cowardice that destroyed Sir Charles and got you in this mess in the first place! I square my shoulders back and clear my throat just as the door opens.

  “Can I help you?”

  The man who answers is definitely not a boy, but he’s close - maybe a year older than me? Two? His sharp jaw practically cuts the gloom of the apartment behind him, his white-blonde hair kept short but with one stray wisp over his forehead, hovering just above his severe dark blonde brows and piercing blue eyes - Jesus H. Christ, do they even make an eye color like that in the human genome? It’s a deep rich blue streaked with green, like the waters of a tropical pool, or a perfect specimen of gemstone - those rare, multi-colored sapphires that sell for millions to like, Middle Eastern oil barons and sheiks. His eyes don’t stun - not like fantasy books with hot guys talk about, and not like romance movies try to emulate. They just pierce, like an Olympic rapier match, like the teeth of a predator through skin - rimmed with dark lashes and narrowed suspiciously. Despite how stunning his eyes are, he definitely dresses like he’d enjoy grungy screamo death metal music. His tall, lean frame is dressed in head-to-toe leather - black leather boots, a black wifebeater that shows off his muscled neck beneath a black leather jacket, black leather pants that hug his long legs and holy shit I took Biology and that is definitely an entire male genitalia at his crotch straining against the leather -

  He’s hot. Fuck me sideways at sixty miles an hour, he’s so hot. I hate thinking it - I’m not the sort of girl who thinks dudes are hot. I’ve never met one that made me think ‘yeah, I’d jump his bones’. While every other girl in high school was squealing about hotness and getting laid I just never got it. I felt left out, and also grateful, because it seemed like a huge hassle and every girl who got infected by it seemed to turn into an idiot.

  I just didn’t get it.

  Until right now. I feel like I can’t breathe, like I can’t even look at him for too long. He’s not a person but a huge chunk of dark pressure I can tangibly feel with my skin. His gaze on me is like fire but my blood is icy and holy shit - I’m talking like one of Mom’s romance books she kept under her bed. Shit. Crap.

  “Crap on a flaming shishkebab - why now of all times?” I groan.

  “What?” The guy quirks a vicious brow and that one motion makes me suck in a breath. CRAP, GOD! Couldn’t you have waited until I graduated before I got hit with the hammer of raw sexual attraction? I’ve got a degree to fucking earn and a life to live.

  God just chuckles at me. And then throws me a bone. The guy at the door opens it a little further, leaning against it with all his svelte body like a panther settles in a tree. He’s so tall - at least a head taller than me, maybe two, and that’s when I realize I’m in flip-flops and days-old sweatpants and a shirt stained with ramen broth and a messy bun and glasses and a huge spate of zits on my chin, clutching a broom in one hand.

  “Beauty and the beast,” His full lips pull into a lazy smirk as he says it. I blink, dumbfounded.

  “What?”

  “Beauty,” He points to himself, then me. “Beast.”

  My hormone-fueled lust instantly cuts off. I might not be able to handle sexual attraction, but insults - oh boy, I’m used to those. Being in the chess club AND the Dungeons and Dragons club in high school will get you used to them real quick. This guy might have rolled a natural 20 in Charisma, but right now I’ve got a resource, and it’s called Rage.

  “Your - Your stupid fucking music is the worst!” I clutch the broom as I yell, like it’s a grounding pole for my pissed-off lightning slash urge to run. “You’ve kept me up for three straight nights with your idiot parties, I can’t study and I have a final soon, you’re so fucking loud you made all the cockroaches in the building come out and you killed Sir Charles!”

  His gemstone eyes flash for a second. “Killed who?”

  “M-My cactus,” I hold my chin higher. “You made that big noise and he fell out of his dish and you killed him so fuck you, turn down your shitty music before I call the cops on you! I’ve been nice for weeks, I’ve been nice ever since I moved in, I’ve been nice my whole fucking life, so just do me this solid and shut up so I can get one night’s worth of studying done, you entire cow’s anus!”

  The last words ring in the empty hall and my chest heaves like I’ve run a marathon. The guy just stands there with his arms crossed, but his crooked smirk is replaced with something like shock. It doesn’t last, his eyes narrowing to slits again as
a laugh vibrates his broad chest. It’s not a nice laugh - it’s a purr and a growl all wrapped up into one.

  “You’re a weird little thing, aren’t you?”

  “I’m a person, not a thing,” I spit. He shrugs.

  “Same difference.”

  He’s arrogant, too. Oh this is just dandy - the only thing worse than my sex drive kicking into overtime is it kicking into overtime for a guy who thinks people are things.

  “You killed Sir Charles, and you’re full of yourself?” I scoff. “You’re lucky I don’t feel like beating ass tonight.”

  “Hmm,” The guy purrs. Before I can even move he leans in, closing the gap between our bodies. My brain screams in one long, high-pitched note as his pale, perfect face looms closer, his nose straight and it hits me then, what he reminds me of - those long, angular guys who walk runways. He smells like leather and gin and rosemary. He moves his mouth to my ear, his breath pleasantly warm against the cool night as he whispers oh-so-softly;