The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(19)

I knocked with my uninjured hand. When Daphne finally opened the door I stepped back before I could stop myself. I’d never seen her without her lipstick on. Bare, her mouth was the same color as her skin. Her red hair and long red robe flickered around her like flame over bone, and her skin breathed a multitude of sins. I was grateful she was wearing her veneers.

“Morning,” she said, leaning into the doorframe and looking at my chin. “Take a fall?”

“Something like that,” I said. “Actually, you don’t have any Band-Aids or anything, do you? Or some painkiller?”

She turned without answering, and I followed her in. Her room had a baroque little sitting area and a tiny kitchenette by the windows. Through half-open French doors I saw a tumbled bed, a pair of long legs sticking out of white sheets. Daphne shut the doors when she saw me looking.

“You came all the way here just to get patched up? I thought your mama would want to do that for you.” She put a sugary venom into the word mama.

I put my hands up. I wasn’t taking her bait, either. “You don’t have to do anything. I’m just here to talk.”

“What about?”

“I got attacked by someone on the train. I’m pretty sure they were trying to kill me.”

I told her all of it, and it was like I was telling the story to myself, too. I don’t think I fully believed it had happened till I said it out loud. Halfway through I had to sit down, a hand over one eye, my vision glittering with the beginnings of a migraine.

She kept her mouth shut till the end, fiddling with a matchbook and staring at a point over my shoulder. “Say the rhyme again,” she said.

I did. It was circling in me like a restless dog.

“They were trying to kill you.” Her voice was dangerous. “You’re sure of that.”

I thought about it. They’d been reaching for me, hadn’t they? I came at them, but they’d reached first. “Yeah. I’m sure.”

She was angry. I couldn’t say how I knew it, she was perfectly composed. But her anger made the hair rise on my arms. It made the air thicken.

Then she leaned back, legs flashing beneath her robe as she crossed them. “So why’d you come to me?” She laughed at my expression, the sound of it catching like rock sugar in her throat. “What? I know you don’t like me. I thought I’d be the last one you’d ask for help.”

“I’m not asking you for help, I’m telling you because they listen to you. It didn’t end with Hansa, they need to know that. You have to tell them.”

“I have to, do I?” She eyed me. “You’re paler than I am. How much blood did you lose? Look, I’ll play nurse if you keep it a secret.”

There was something surreal about watching her gather up a grubby first-aid kit and a cup of hot water and a wad of brown coffee shop napkins. She gestured at me to peel back the T-shirt from my side, which hurt about as much as getting scratched. The mass of napkins softened to sludge as she blotted.

“I don’t think you need stitches, but you got opened up pretty good. It might close quicker with a drop of glue. You want me to send someone down to the store?”

“Hell, no.” I was staring through tears at the ceiling. “I’m not a birdhouse, I’ve got skin.”

“Suit yourself.” She painted livid stripes of Mercurochrome across my ribs, each feeling like the rough scrape of a cat’s tongue. Even in this crummy light, her hair looked like treasure. Her hands were blunter, more capable than I’d figured they’d be. Slowly, almost resentfully, I could feel myself blooming in her direction.

“I heard what happened in Red Hook,” she said, not looking at me.

I let a few breaths go by. So she knew what I’d done, while I still didn’t.

“What’d you hear?”

“That you’re not the nice little girl you’ve been pretending to be.” She assessed me, top to bottom. “What I’m wondering is, why now? After all these months of good behavior?”

It took me a minute to decide what kind of honest I should be. “Because he deserved to be scared. Because nobody else was going to.”

“So it was a good deed?” She put away the disinfec tant and started unwrapping a stack of Band-Aids. “I guess I can’t blame you for trying to play out your tale.”

I dug my nails into my palms. In my tale, he ended up dead. “I don’t really know my tale.”

“Really? Your mother doesn’t want you to know, is that it?”

She’d already brought Ella up twice. I didn’t like that. “My mother…”

I paused. My mother what? My mother survived the Hazel Wood. She survived Althea Proserpine. My mother’s not scared of you.

Saying it felt too close to a dare. “My mother’s got nothing to do with it.”

Her long fingers pressed a Band-Aid over my side, then another. “You’re afraid of knowing, then.”

But that wasn’t it, either. Not anymore. Finch had told me half my tale—the tale of Alice-Three-Times—in a diner on Seventy-Ninth Street. His hands around a coffee cup, the whole place leaning in. He loved those stories. His love was a halo. If I was going to hear the end of mine, I wanted him to be the one to tell it. And if that was never gonna happen, I could live without knowing.