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The garden party guests flooded the woods bordering Hemlock Pond, dashing through the trees in search of the beacon of the golden path, and Hart ran among them. But instead of following the path to safety, he took it straight to the Rose Garden. He darted through the circular archway as everyone else fled, because he knew where Lowell had gone. For Lowell, every path led to the Wish Garden.

But rather than racing through the well-worn passageways of the hedge maze, Hart made it past just one corridor before something stopped him in his tracks. A jagged darkness in the leafy wall that he couldn’t make out. Turning on his phone’s flashlight, he could see it clearly for what it was. He reached tentative fingers into the emptiness where green leaves should have been, but the phone light only illuminated the brown skeleton of branches, like a body cleanly sliced in half. Lowell had slashed the hedge.

And when Hart stepped through the rip in the wall, kicking up pieces of leafy debris, he saw that this wasn’t the only wall that Lowell had destroyed. He must’ve done it earlier, before Hart had even found him in the Rose Garden, because the damage was too extensive to have just happened. This wasn’t a maze any longer—not with this new shortcut, crudely hacked like a prisoner’s craggy escape tunnel. Hart climbed through the serrated new pathway, sharp stubs of bare branches snagging on his skin and clothes as he went. But he couldn’t feel any of it. His body, his thoughts—all of Hart had gone numb.

When he reached the end of the carved passage, there was nothing left to do but open the wooden door of the Wish Garden.

Just like in the Rose Garden, Hart found Lowell with his back to him, surrounded by flowers. Somewhere on the way from the party to the Wish Garden he’d disposed of his shirt, and every muscular ridge of Lowell’s pale back glinted in the moonlight, rippling with too much sinew, the skin stretched tight like a drum. His shoulders slumped with the weight of the machine dangling from his hand. A cordless hedge trimmer.

The amount of energy Lowell had clearly siphoned from the garden was a mirror of how much energy the garden had drained from him . It explained why he seemed so disoriented, swaying like a willow in the wind. From the look of him, Hart realized it wouldn’t take much. One push and Lowell would go down like timber. But Hart had to approach this situation carefully. The teeth of the trimmer could bite through bone just as effortlessly as it could through hedge.

Hart took a beat to calm his breathing and spoke in as level a voice as he could. “Lowell. Please. Put it down.”

Lowell turned slowly at the sound of Hart’s voice. His face, already glazed with blood and sweat, now shone with tears, too. A rose thorn was still embedded in one of his cheeks. But he clearly couldn’t feel it. He glanced at the trimmer, long as his arm, like he’d forgotten he was holding it.

Hart treaded carefully, baiting him with an easy question. “Where have you been?”

Lowell blinked, wiped the back of his hand over his eyes, smearing red across his face like the eye black he wore for football games. Hart inched toward him. “You know, before Rose died, she was really worried about you. She was asking everyone if they’d seen you.”

Lowell’s chest heaved with the force of a wail and he squeezed his eyes shut, freeing a stream of tears. “I was hiding,” he said. “Look at me.”

He said it with the beseeching tone of someone desperate for you to both look and look away. The abs on his torso were too many and bulging, like the muscles were alive within him, straining to break through his skin.

A rustling made them both turn. Heather rushed into the garden, eyes wide with fear. But she froze in place the second Lowell pointed the trimmer at her like a pistol. “You did this to me!” he shouted.

Hart shot his arms out, one in Lowell’s direction, the other in Heather’s. You couldn’t make wishes for other people, so Heather couldn’t have done this to him. Not directly. But Hart knew that there was some truth to Lowell’s words. She’d enabled him.

“I tried telling you how the garden works,” Heather said. “I tried telling you what would happen if you took it too far.”

This was exactly why they were told never to show the garden to anyone. This was why it needed to stay private. Heather had been too lax with their family’s secret, and now there was a monster holding a hedge trimmer to it.

“I only wanted to be taller,” Lowell said, sounding so much like a child, even with his new deep voice. It was a meager wish, but Lowell’s face crumpled under the strain of it. His body was evidence of all the damage an innocent desire had wrought. “I wanted to be stronger. I wanted to be more than what I was.” He shrugged, letting the tip of the trimmer glance the ground.

“Do you know how easy it is to sneak in here?” he asked.

Hart nodded. There were no gates around the garden, not even around the hedge maze, because that would only draw attention to it. It hid in plain sight, and the only deterrent to anyone who stepped inside its walls was the labyrinth itself. Its difficulty discouraged anyone from trying to solve it.

“After I got tall, I wanted to clear up my face,” Lowell said. “That was the wish that really changed everything, you know? One day people made fun of my zits and the next they couldn’t anymore. I was living in the dark for so long, and that wish was like turning on a light switch.” He sniffed, took a breath. “After that, I wanted a square chin with a dimple in the middle. It was such a stupid, small thing, but with the garden”—Lowell’s eyes shone, like he was discovering the garden’s powers for the first time again—“I could have it.”

He reached his hand—the one that wasn’t holding the trimmer—up to his face, cupping the cinder block of his chin. “But I didn’t like how it looked on me. So out of proportion to the rest of me. Like suddenly the lower half of my face was much bigger than the top half? I tried to take it back, but that wish didn’t work, for some reason.”

Hart’s eyes found Heather’s. She’d shown Lowell the miracle of the Wish Garden, but none of the rules that came with it.

“So, I tried to wish for other things to make my chin blend in better with the rest of me. And it worked for a while. Until it didn’t.” Lowell’s eyes darkened. “Every time I tried to take my wishes back, or to—to change what I wished for, the wishes didn’t work. They didn’t work.”

He took a step closer to Heather, lifting the trimmer again, triggering Hart to step closer to him, too. Although Lowell couldn’t seem to lift the trimmer much higher than his knees. “Why didn’t they work?” he demanded.

Hart got between Heather and the trimmer. “It doesn’t work that way,” he said.

“Once you wish for something… you can’t undo it,” Heather said, her tone even more remorseful than Hart’s, but laced with the bitterness of experience. It was an aspect of wish-making that Heather knew well. She’d cried about it before, right on Hart’s shoulder.

“Why didn’t you tell me that?” Lowell barked. “You told me there’d be consequences, but you didn’t tell me there were rules . Why didn’t you tell me?”

Hart chanced a glance at Heather, and saw how sorry she looked. There was a whole list of garden rules, and it wasn’t the type of thing you went over at a party when you were drunk. It was a lesson Heather was learning too late.

“I’m a fucking monster,” Lowell cried.

“You are not a monster,” Hart said.

“Don’t patronize me!” Lowell howled, and Hart had to jump back from how close the trimmer came to his legs when Lowell swung it. “I want the garden to take my wishes back.”

The twins gazed at each other, trying to silently communicate a plan, something that would appease Lowell. But all Heather could say was, “I’m sorry, Lowell.”

“That’s not good enough!” Lowell shrieked. The trimmer roared to life, blades spinning around the length of it. Heather let out a squeal, and Hart instinctively shot an arm out behind him to guard her, but Lowell didn’t stalk toward them. He walked instead over to the small dirt path that twined between the flowers, to a pocket of the garden where a clump of bamboo grew nearly as tall as the hedge wall behind it.

“This garden destroyed my life.” Lowell swiped the tears and blood from his eyes, trying to clear them. “So I’m going to destroy it.”

“Don’t do that!” Hart said.

Hart needed the garden. He couldn’t let Lowell ruin his one chance at getting Rose back. His hand went for the pruners in his holster, his clammy palm sliding on the smooth rubber grip. It was out of instinct only, because he knew he wouldn’t have to use them. The garden would get to Lowell before Hart ever could. “You can’t destroy the garden,” he warned Lowell. “Listen to me, Lowell. The garden won’t let you.”

“He’s telling the truth,” Heather said. “The garden will kill you before you ever get a chance to kill it.”

“Kill me?” A laugh ground out of Lowell’s throat. “They’re just plants.”

With a grunt, he lifted the buzzing trimmer and swung it like a baseball bat into the bamboo. But the second the blades hit, more bamboo shot furiously up from the earth, reaching up into the night in a dense thicket.

Lowell stopped moving.

One of the shoots had spiked through the sole of his boot, squelching seamlessly out just above his hip bone. Another shoot pierced the underside of his thigh, coming out to skewer his arm too, like tender meat. Another shoot entered behind the knee and left through Lowell’s neck. Before he could even cry out, bamboo had speared through his entire body, pinning Lowell upright a few inches off the ground like an insect on display.

Heather let out a scream and buried her face in her brother’s chest. She couldn’t look at Lowell, but Hart couldn’t look away. Eyes and mouth wide, pried open in horror, and mimicking Lowell’s frozen final expression. A morbid thought plagued Hart as his stinging, unblinking eyes slowly traced every inch of muscle spiked through with bamboo. That Lowell, stiff and upright, finally got his wish to look like one of the statues that dotted the grounds of Hemlock Hill.