The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(23)

“Mom,” I said, my voice a rasp.

She looked at me quickly, and smiled.



* * *



My phone was thick with texts from Sophia. The oldest just said my name.

Alice

Are you feeling this

Text me back

Text me back

Text me back

CALL ME

Then one from a number I didn’t recognize.

Sophia’s apartment tonight at 10. We’re having a wake.

It was from Daphne. It had to be. Drawing all of us to one place: me, her, Sophia, the rest. The figure from the subway might be there, too. Maybe they’d bring their rhyme and a hidden knife. Maybe they’d want to finish what they started.

I texted back.

Do you think that’s a good idea?

She never replied. When I called Sophia, her phone was dead, which wasn’t unusual but worried me all the same. I told myself I might not go, that I shouldn’t go, but I knew I would. I had to. I had to grieve for the Hinterland.

After a day spent lying low, drinking chicken broth and watching TV and picking at Thai takeout, I put on black jeans and black high-tops and a black T-shirt. I tried a Zelda Fitzgerald thing with my hair and a New Wave thing with my eyeliner, and I got both of them halfway right. I tucked a pocketknife into my jeans.

When I told Ella about the wake, she nodded, then turned away. We were still being delicate with each other, unsure where we stood after our fight. My sickness had drawn us into a tentative détente.

I stared out the window on the cab ride up, seeing nothing. When I closed my eyes I saw the faces of the stars, the moon in her declining phases. The Hinterland was dead. Hansa, the Prince, and Abigail were dead. I could’ve been dead, too. My brain sputtered, trying to forge a connection among those pieces. It was there, it had to be. But I couldn’t see it. When we got to Sophia’s, the driver had to tell me twice.

She lived in Lower Manhattan in a seedy old building you could tell had once been gorgeous. At some point it had been gutted, mostly rebuilt, then abandoned. It reminded me of those half-finished development projects you find sometimes off the highway. Ella and I used to pull over to explore them: cracked black streets petering to nothing, lonely cul-de-sacs, empty houses looking like they’d been dropped by a neat-fingered tornado.

I let myself in—the street door lock was broken—and climbed to the seventh floor.

The apartment where Sophia lived with five other ex-Stories had good bones, but that was about it. Construction dust clung to the corners, and patches of exposed drywall freckled the rooms. It was a temporary place, loose and rotten. Usually it was empty as an ice rink, but tonight it was haunted by forlorn figures. The long windows were bare and moonlight poured through, casting everyone in silver. Pockets of candles lined the sills and clustered like mushrooms on the ground; if we ended the night not dead in a fire, that’d be ten points for Slytherin.

There were more of us here than I thought still existed. Meetings were usually twenty, twenty-five of us, tops. But there had to be forty Hinterlanders in this room, with more arriving. I felt like a rat lifting its head to watch a tide of other rats running from a storm drain, and shuddering.

The murderer could’ve been anyone. That reedy boy, all deep dimples and curls to his shoulders, stone-cold putting away vodka like a sailor. That woman with the crown of blue-black hair, who looked like a consumptive Snow White and glared at me before I could turn away. Had it been her whispering to me in the dark?

There were cliques here and there—packs of siblings, some pairs—but mainly we were a roomful of loners, unmixed. I saw the three brothers who lived in the pin-neat room next to Sophia’s lined up against the wall drinking beer, T-shirts tucked in and pale hair pasted to their paler skulls. They looked like inbred royal cousins, perishing in the corner of some dusty Flemish painting. Genevieve was there, sitting alone on a windowsill drinking from a bottle of Stoli, her ridiculous Ren Faire sleeves almost dipping into a clutch of candles. Across the room, the Hinterland’s creepiest kid, Jenny, perched on a stool wearing a ruffled dress, eyes ticking back and forth to see who was noticing her.

Even among the loners, I felt out of place. The eyes that met mine were cold, or slid away too fast. I nodded at a few whom I knew, whom I’d talked with sometimes when I was a part of things, and two of them looked right past me. The third stared a moment before spitting through her teeth.

Well, fuck Daphne. Whatever she’d been telling them about me, it had clearly worked.

“Alice.”

I turned and smiled, my first genuine smile of the night. My favorite of Sophia’s roommates had an executioner’s build and the hard hatchet face of a murderess. But Nora’s looks lied. She talked with the prim rhythms of a grammar primer, was fascinated by Earthly religions, and was deeply shy. I liked her a lot.

“My condolences to you on our loss,” she said. Her tone was dry.

“Same to you,” I said carefully. The Spinner had unwound Nora’s story a long time ago. While she wouldn’t talk about it, anyone could look at her and know she’d been built for villainy. It made me hate the Spinner more, to think of Nora’s gentle nature bottled inside a weapon.

“Look at that,” she said, jerking her chin at something over my shoulder. “A bit full out for a funeral, isn’t it?”

Daphne, her lips red, her eyes bedded in sparkling shadow. She wore a brief black dress that made her skin and hair look like something you’d display on velvet in a jewelry shop window. I felt the oddest stab of irresolution, seeing her again in her lipstick and glitter. It struck me that I spent more time than I should deciding whether and how I despised this woman.