The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(24)

“Has she told you yet?”

Nora frowned. “Told me what?”

“Not you, I mean all of you—has she told you what happened to me?”

“She tells us lots of things,” she said evenly. “It’s hard keeping track.”

I glanced at her. “How did she hook us, do you think? How did it get to where she snaps her fingers and we all come running? It’s not really what we are.”

Nora had green eyes clear as spring water. Even in the tarnished glow of moonlight and candles I could see them darken. “What we were. What are we now, but the lost children of a dead world?”

That was a bit too much poetry, even for me. “What does that mean? We already left the Hinterland. So it’s gone now—what does that change?”

Her eyebrows went up, like she’d been stung by my stupid. But it wasn’t rhetorical, I was really asking.

“People in this world have a thing they call god,” she said. “Or gods. Yes?”

“Sure. Yeah.”

“And they do good acts and take care to justify their bad ones to please their god or gods.”

“Right.”

“There are some among us who began to think of the promise of a return to the Hinterland as a sort of promise of paradise. They thought of the Hinterland, or the Spinner, perhaps, as a god. With the Hinterland gone, what’s left to serve as our god?”

She looked pointedly at Daphne, and my stomach went cold.

“You understand, I think, why I fear their acts will grow godless.”

I looked around at my kin, the culled-down lot of us. They were capable of such cruelty, such strangeness. They had such a disregard for the rules of this world. Thinking of them gone truly amok—gone godless—made my palms prickle.

“Listen,” I began. “Something happened to me last night on the train.”

Just then the room’s chatter dropped to a hush. Nora turned away.

Daphne stood on a rickety card table in the center of the room, holding up a glinting something. A cup, I thought. No—it was a knife. She waited till the room was silent. Till we could hardly breathe, waiting for her to speak. Then her words cracked the quiet.

“The Hinterland is lost,” she said. “But we are not.”

She stood there a moment, knife still held aloft. All the faces of the Hinterland’s motherless children were turned toward her, painted in flickering light.

“The body is dead, but we are the blood.”

She glared up at the knife, looking like a figure from some other world’s tarot deck. Then she brought it down, slashing it across her fingertips. She held her hand straight out and let the blood fall down, let everyone see the tears streaming over her cheeks. And despite everything, I did believe her sorrow was real.

“I grieve our loss,” she said. “I grieve with you. I bleed with you.”

I could hear other people crying. Even Nora’s face was intent. The man beside us lifted his hand to his mouth and bit the pad of his thumb till it bled, holding it up to Daphne in tribute. A woman copied him. Then another. A rangy guy in blue jeans took out his own knife, used it to cut open his thumb, and passed it.

I flexed my injured hand, bile rising. I had the irrational thought that the killer, if they were here, would be drawn to the blood. That the drifting iron perfume of it would bring them slinking out of the shadows, weapon raised.

An arm came around me, and I jumped.

“Come on,” Sophia whispered. “Let’s go hide in my room.”



* * *



She’d told Daphne, I knew. About Red Hook, and what I’d done. She was the only one who could have. But she’d stopped me, too—from killing the man from my tale. On the edge of doing something irrevocable, she’d pulled me back.

There was a bottle of grape soda waiting for us on the fire escape, next to a handle of bottom-shelf gin and a pair of sooty coffee mugs. Sophia poured a slug of gin in our cups and diluted it with grape. We sat so the bars of the fire escape pressed into our thighs and our legs hung down over the city. It was muggy on the street, but up here the air was witchy and restless, stirring itself into our hair. I could breathe again, away from Daphne, and I wanted to talk about anything but the murders, and the subway, and Red Hook. I wanted to remember what it felt like when fear was just the backbeat to my life, not the only thing I could hear.

“Here’s to being orphaned. Well and truly, at last.” Sophia lifted her glass, took a gulp, and gagged. “Ugh. The next wake I spring for the good stuff. When this world goes up in flames, we’ll drink champagne.”

I stuck the tip of my tongue into my cup. “It tastes like unicorn piss.” I felt hyped up and shaky and suddenly soaked in grief. Inside was the wake, and Daphne’s batshit display, but it was out here, with my mercurial, untrustworthy best friend, that I felt I could actually mourn what we’d lost. My skin prickled as I looked down on rooftops and cars and the slow-moving crowns of strangers’ heads. A whole world, gone. It didn’t seem possible. Sophia was looking, too, though I couldn’t guess her thoughts within a mile.

“Robin’s heart is broken. He really thought we’d get back in someday. He really wanted us to.” Her voice was heavy and light at once. “I always thought it would be me that broke his heart.”