The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(20)

But I wasn’t about to give her all that.

“How about you?” I said instead. “What’s your tale?” Sophia and I had speculated on that before. I thought stepmother. Daphne thought queen.

“One day you might earn the answer to that. But not today.” Daphne tilted her head, looked at my bandaged side, and gave it a slap. The pain of it filled my eyes and sent me speechless.

“You’re all patched up, princess. I’ll send you the bill.”

There was more I wanted to ask, more I needed to say, but I couldn’t find it around the pain. Someone tried to kill me, I wanted to shout, but she already knew that.

I was halfway out the door when she said my name. Just the shortened, human part of it.

The sun was higher now, filling the window behind her and making her features indistinct. “You don’t know your tale,” she said, “but I do. You don’t know what you did in Red Hook, but I do. You bit him. You bit a chunk of him clean off. Then you pressed those icy hands to his skin and you nearly killed him.”

Her robe trailed behind her as she moved closer, revealing the spidery sprawl of her limbs. “You didn’t know you could do that here, did you? I bet you didn’t. Hiding out with that woman you call your mother, playing house. I bet you thought you were human all the way through.”

She took another step forward and I stepped back and I no longer had a handle on the game we were playing. “You bit him and you tried to kill him and your friend had to pull you off. You can thank her for that. And don’t worry about retribution, I got that indiscreet fucker out of town. For that, you can thank me.”





10


Eleven missed calls from Ella, starting just after midnight. Four voicemails, a screen full of texts.

It was half past six a.m. when I got home, and she was waiting at the kitchen table. A mug of coffee by her left hand, a filled ashtray and sprawled-out copy of Magic for Beginners at her right, like a goddess with her attributes. She’d never smoked in this apartment before. The scent of coffee and cigarettes in a dim kitchen sent me down a wormhole to the past.

She took me in. My chin and the way I hid my hand and the gait that favored my injured side. The unfamiliar sweatshirt, still bagging in front with a pair of stolen cell phones. Her eyes went big, and I waited for her to cry out, to ask what happened, but she said nothing.

“I thought you quit,” I said finally, nodding at the ashtray.

“Did you?” She took her time tapping out another cigarette before she spoke again. “I think it’s time we have some honesty between us, don’t you?”

I had four steps. From the doorway to the chair across from her, four steps to decide what I’d tell her and what I couldn’t, and how that would play with what I’d already said, and it just wasn’t enough. I stayed standing.

Finally her voice revealed a quiver. “So this is what I rate? You stay out all night, don’t even text, come home looking like a goddamned cage fighter, and now you won’t even sit down and talk to me?”

There were words that would undo this, that would heal what I’d cracked, but I didn’t know them. I shook my head, willing her to understand.

She mirrored me, mockingly. “What? What are you doing? What aren’t you saying? Where have you been?” She put a hand to her head.

“I chose you,” she whispered. “All those years ago. You were a lonely little thing tucked into a basket, and I knew just by looking at you that nobody loved you. I held you. And I took you. I watched you grow. I watched your eyes go clear. Go brown, like mine. You were…” She shook her head. “Your hands were like starfish. The top of your head smelled like dried apricots. Oh, my cranky girl.”

Somewhere in her, Ella knew. She knew I could’ve stayed in the Hinterland two years ago, knew I’d thought about doing it, if only for a moment. It was love that made her hold on to me, but it was something else, too. She’d shaped her life around giving me mine. Sometimes that sacrifice was a gift that bit. A rose with thorns.

“I chose you first,” she said, like she’d read my thoughts. “But you chose me back. You got free of it, you came home to me. I’m not an idiot, I know what’s happening here. Why are you letting it right back in?”

She turned realer and realer as I walked, finally crossing the kitchen to stand beside her, in sweats and an old T-shirt and hair more gray by the day. Her spiky beauty was going soft. I could see the end of her days as a warrior. I could see the day coming when she couldn’t stand another fight with me. For me. Love rose up like a noose and circled my throat.

I bent over and wrapped my arms around her, pressing my nose into the space where her neck became her shoulder. It smelled of rosemary and iron, like a ward against fairies.

“I love you.” I said it quietly, right up into her skin, but she heard me anyway. After a moment, her arms lifted to hug me back. Her hair stuck to my cut face and my side tugged against the Band-Aids but I was afraid of what might happen if I pulled away.

“I never wanted to spend my life in New York anyway,” she said.

I shot up. Her face was defiant. I’d seen that expression before.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We’ll go somewhere beautiful.”

Oh, shit, I’d heard that voice before. That exact promise.