The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(10)

Robin held up a palm like he was weighing the air, and began to sing.

Red bird black bird

Damselfly bee

Weave a gown as fine as silk

To cover me



A few seconds passed, then a trio of starlings swept over the roof of the adjacent apartment building, making a beeline for Robin. I ducked as they executed a dizzy circle around our heads, looking as surprised as birds can look, before flying up and shooting off in three directions.

“Holy shit!” I said.

“Lazy damned birds.” Sophia leaned back on her elbows. “No dress.”

Robin’s face was dreamy and sharp at once. “I’ll weave one for you myself, my love. If you will it, I’ll give you anything you want.”

“But never the thing I need.” She put a hand to his face, fingers gently crooked, so they made five fine lines down his cheek as she stroked. “I promise you, one day you’ll love someone who can be won with dresses.”

Ignoring his expression, she turned to me. She’d lit a cigarette and was tangling her fingers in the smoke as it drifted, shaping it into ribbons and daggers and icicles. I blinked and they were gone. She stuck the cigarette in Robin’s mouth, then dug with both hands inside her gigantic street-stall purse, heavy with half-drunk bottles of juice and books I’d given her and makeup shoplifted from the Duane Reade. After a minute, she unearthed a liquid eyeliner pen.

“Sit still,” she said, holding it up.

“Why?”

“Shh.” She crouched in front of me, knees on the concrete steps, smelling of tobacco and coffee and shoplifted soap. Her brows winged out like a silent film star’s, and her eyes tilted toward the golden side of brown. Rays of ochre and whiskey and sand, with nothing behind them. Even when I loved her best, I was chilled by the impenetrable flats of her eyes.

The liner licked over my cheeks. Robin watched us, and said nothing. After a few minutes she capped the pen, blowing lightly on my skin. “There,” she murmured. “That’s perfect.”

She pulled out a little heart-shaped hand mirror, held it up. I heard my breath halt and restart.

Vines. She’d painted my face with vines, in an intricate, swirling freehand.

“Sophia. Are these … these are…”

“Power.” She spoke into my ear. “That fear you felt when you ran away from that man today? That’s the power you’re giving away. But we could make this world fear us, Alice. We could make them so afraid.”

She’d painted my face with the twining tattoos of the Briar King. He was the one who’d let himself into my stepdad’s apartment and stolen Ella away from me when I was seventeen. He might’ve been dead, or he might’ve been anywhere. There was a time when my nightmares wore his face. I’d told her all of this. Sophia knew this.

As I tilted my head from side to side, my mirror self moved a half beat behind me. I was remembering something. Something I’d spent all my months back in New York pushing down and away.

It hadn’t always felt bad to be a monster.

The girl in the mirror was smirking at me. Vines swirled around her eyes like the mask of a robber bridegroom. Beside her, Soph’s gold eyes glittered. We looked right together, like this. We looked like a pair of avenging—well. Not angels.

“I know where he lives,” she whispered.

“Who?”

She stood up. She knew I was bluffing.

The path that forked at my feet was dark and bright. I could walk on with Ella, down the road my diploma had started to pave. Or I could stumble off it, into the briars. Sophia waited for me there, among the thorns and the dark.

“Alice,” she said, and held out her hand.

Be sure.

I took it.





6


Being drunk on the stuff Robin gave us made Brooklyn into a floating place, a green-resined dreamscape. We walked past sleeping brownstones, under the rustling canopies of old trees. My fingertips sparked as I ran them over the peeling skin of a plane tree, and I remembered living in a world where the trees had faces, where they dreamed their sap-slow dreams.

A group of men drinking from brown paper bags was walking toward us. They were hard-eyed and thick and they swelled when they saw us, their step turning to swagger. Until they came close enough to really see us, and shrank under our sight. And I felt, for once, like I might actually look on the outside how I felt on the inside. My blood ran keen and high, too close to the surface of my skin; I felt so alive I knew I must be a magnet for death.

Then the moon’s cold eye caught mine, and I remembered Hansa was cold, too. Thinking of her, of Abigail, of the prince, brought me to the surface of my drunken dream. Where, I wondered, did dead Hinterlanders go now? Were they lost completely? Or were they taken back, to wander, maimed, around some living underworld?

The man from my tale lived in a shitty little house that grew out of trash-strewn weeds, stuck to the end of an industrial block. We’d walked by the open doors of factory-sized buildings to get here, past men in Carhartts working too late, or too early. By the time we reached it I was a kettle set to boiling. A held-in breath, a cresting wave. I wanted to exhale, to crash, to do something reckless. Sophia was in full-on manic mode, her eyes shining like dollar coins.

“Let’s ring the doorbell,” she said, giddy. “Let’s put a rock through the fuckin’ glass!”