Never After (School for Good and Evil x Reader)

Chapter 11

I climbed through a cornflower thicket and slid between two periwinkle trees into the West Clearing, approaching my group from behind.

They turned all at once. They took in my bloodshot eyes. The crimson spattered on my clothes, my hand, my face. They gaped with horror.

Sophie was there, too, with her shorn hair. "What happened?"

"Nothing," I replied, eyes flaming.

Sophie shrank back.

"Where's Agatha?"

"Oh, um, they haven't let her out of her room," Dot said. "Too bad she'll miss the Flowerground. If Yuba can call the conductor, that is." She nodded at the gnome, grumpily jabbing at a blue pumpkin patch.

"All aboard!" Yuba called.

I turned to see Tedros open the top of an ordinary blue pumpkin like a teapot and vanish inside.

Sophie squinted. "What in the—"

Something poked my hip and I looked down. Yuba thrust a Flowerground pass at me and opened the pumpkin lid, revealing a thin caterpillar in a violet velvet tuxedo and matching top hat, floating in a swirl of pastel colors.

"No spitting, sneezing, singing, sniffling, swinging, swearing, slapping, sleeping, or urinating in the Flowerground," he said in the crabbiest voice imaginable. "Violations will result in removal of your clothes. All aboard!"

A vine shot up and yanked me in.

I plunged through dazzling pinks, blues, yellows, as more tendrils lashed and fastened around me like safety belts. I heard a hiss and wheeled to see a giant green flytrap swallow me. Vines jerked me out of its mouth into a tunnel of hot, blinding mist and hooked me onto something that kept me moving while my feet and arms dangled freely in the ivy harness. Then the mist cleared and I saw the most magical thing I'd ever seen.

It was an underground transport system, big as a whole village, made entirely of luminescent plants. Dangling passengers hung on to vine straps attached to glowing, different-colored tree trunks covered in matching flowers. These color-coded trunks wove together in a colossal maze of tracks. Some trunks ran parallel, some perpendicular, some forked in different directions, but all took riders to their precise destinations in the Endless Woods. Sophie stared in shock at a row of unsmiling dwarves, pickaxes in belts, clinging to straps off a fluorescent red trunk labeled ROSALINDA LINE. Running in the opposite direction was the glittery green ARBOREA LINE, with a family of bears in crisp suits and dresses among the riders hanging off shamrock vines. I peered down my HIBISCUS LINE to see the rest of my group swinging from an electric-blue trunk. But only the Nevers were strapped into harnesses.

"Flowerground's only for Evers," Dot called out. "They have to let us on 'cause we're with the school. But they still don't trust us."

Besides the Flowerground's strong, soothing pace and delicious scents, there was an orchestra of lizards for each line: the TANGERINE LINE lizards strummed bouncy banjo guitars, the VIOLET LINE ones played sultry sitars, and the lizards on my line piped up-tempo jingles on piccolos, accompanied by caroling blue frogs. Lest riders grow hungry, each line had its own snacks, with bluebirds fluttering along the HIBISCUS LINE, offering blue-corn muffins and blueberry punch.

Muscles unclenching, I forgot about riddles and beasts as vines pulled me up, up, into a churning wind wheel of blue light. My body felt wind, then air, then earth, and arms unfurling into the sky, I bloomed out of the ground like a hyacinth—

And found myself in a graveyard.

Headstones the color of the bleak sky swept over barren hills. Shivering classmates spouted from a hole in the ground next to me.