The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(18)

They must’ve had a knife tucked somewhere. They wouldn’t have come after me with only their teeth and nails. When I imagined that knife going in between my ribs, sliding down my arms to unpeel me, I could only think of pressure and a sudden, sheeting heat. What piece would they have taken from me? My hand. Ice-white and malevolent, curled in like a Hand of Glory. Or my eye, a plucked marble turned black from end to end.

Right foot, said a sensible part of my brain. To make a matched set with Hansa’s left.

Finally anxiety chased me onto a car nearly filled with what appeared to be a single, sprawling tourist family, all of them upsettingly bright-eyed. They looked at me in my hoodie and my sunglasses and my bitten face. The smallest one, too little to be awake at this hour and swinging in dizzy circles around the pole, froze in place when she saw me, making a sound like an injured dog.

I gave her a thumbs-up and sat between a big man in bigger shorts and an alarmed-looking grandpa holding a walking stick. I wondered what stories they were telling themselves about me.

Coke addict, I decided. Clipped her chin falling down in a bathroom.

They wouldn’t be far off. The Hinterland had crept toward me like a waking dream, crashed in like a wave, and receded. I was left adrenalized and salt-starred. Remembering, completely, what it was like to feel power. Not the kind you got drunk on and forgot by morning, but the real thing.

I was sick with it, shivering, busted up in three different ways. And I was high on it, clinging as it left me, feeling the delirious ache of its retreat. I ran over everything that had happened in the dark. The Hinterland rhyme, the smoothness of the skin around the rhymer’s mouth, the nothing feel of their breath. That voice. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I knew it.

The sky was warming to gray when I finally climbed out of the subway. When I peeked at my fingertips, they were warming too, an almost acceptable shade of pale. I bought a bottle of water at a bodega and splashed the blood off my face and hands, but didn’t dare peel my T-shirt away from the mess over my ribs. My gouged-up side was a burn and an ache and a hideous numbness, like it couldn’t decide what kind of awful it wanted to feel. My vision went prismatic as the corner of some asshole’s duffel bag strafed my rib cage as I walked down Bowery.

I wasn’t heading home yet. The place I was going to was one I’d only heard about, and never wanted to visit. I didn’t want to go there now. It was a narrow brick building on a windy stretch of Lower Manhattan, its front laced up with flaking iron balconies. Letters crawled down its side: an H, then an EL, the missing OT between them punched out like front teeth. Of course everyone who lived there called it Hell.

Which was fitting, because all of them were Hinterland. It wasn’t clear what state the hotel had been in when they got there, how its rooms were turned over to them one by one, but they’d made it their squat in the end. I pictured bellhops stuffed in closets, old ladies who’d spent half a century in their rent-controlled rooms shoved out into the streets.

It wasn’t quite five in the morning. The sidewalk in front of the hotel was empty, spangled with broken glass. Across the street, a man with a green juice in one hand and a yoga mat in the other powered by, like a messenger from another planet.

I watched him disappear, then pushed through the tarnished gold and smeared glass of the revolving doors.

It was three steps down into a sunken lobby, but it felt much deeper. There was a subterranean taste to the air, of must and hidden water. The room was lit by a flotilla of lamps on low tables, their stained-glass shades shining like fish.

On a semicircle of long velvet couches, seven sisters reclined like fussy, card-playing cats, their hair the color of old pewter against their dark brown skin. I knew them a little. They liked to tell everyone they’d been princesses, but that wasn’t what I’d heard. They always wore thin satin gloves that stopped just above their wrists, in hard-candy colors. On one girl it would’ve been odd. On seven, it was creepy.

The guy behind the desk sat perfectly straight, hands folded in front of him and fleshy mouth resting in a vulpine half-smile. He was asleep. I brought my hand down hard on the little desktop bell and watched his eyes shutter open. They were cloudy, pupilless, yellow as a cat’s. Then he blinked, belched, and stretched all at once. By the time his eyes fixed on me they were sandy, the same basic color as his skin and hair. In his tacky taupe suit, he was a study in monochrome.

His gaze slid from my torn chin to my fingers. He snuffled at the air, lifting his chin, and looked at the place where my sweatshirt hid the worst of the blood. “Interesting night?”

I didn’t take the bait. “Is Daphne around?”

“Who’s asking?”

“You’re not in the mob, Felix,” I snapped. “The sun’s barely up, I know she’s here. What’s her room number?”

“You don’t know the hours she keeps,” he said starchily, and jerked his head toward the elevator. “Ninth floor, room nine oh three. Knock before you open the door.”

“I know how doors work.”

As I crossed the lobby, one of the sisters gave me a languid wave. At least I thought it was a wave. Those girls would look half asleep running out of a burning building.

The elevator was barely big enough for one, and smelled like an apartment where a chain smoker had made cabbage soup every day for a year without ever cracking a window. To distract myself from the pain in my side I focused on the pain in my chin, then switched to my hand, and around again. On the ninth floor I stepped out into a hallway with the flat look of a trompe l’oeil, like a badly painted set. The door to room 903 was beat up even worse than the rest, its paint scuffed and scored. There was an old bullet hole just below the lock.