The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(25)

I lay my head on her shoulder. I would tell her what happened on the subway. Soon, I’d find the words.

“I saw you on the beach,” she said into my hair. “I watched you watching the stars come down.”

“What?” I pulled back to look at her.

She smiled a little and didn’t respond. Then, “Shut up,” she said, though I wasn’t talking. “I need to do a thing I never do.”

I turned to her and waited. And waited.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“You’re what?”

“I know. Don’t tell anyone.”

“For what, though? For loitering outside my bedroom window? Being late for everything ever? Never paying for anything, even though you carry an old-man cash roll in your purse?”

“You think I’d apologize for that?” She looked genuinely offended. “I’m sorry about … about what happened. In Red Hook.”

I arched my foot, let my shoe slip off my heel, daring it to drop to the street. “Which part of it?”

“I knew you just wanted to scare him. I knew you didn’t want to kill him.”

The cocktail in my stomach was turning to acid. “I didn’t kill him. You stopped me.”

“I thought you couldn’t remember.”

“Just tell me. Tell me that’s what happened.”

Her nod was shallow, her voice hoarse. “I didn’t want to, though. I wanted to let you. Because I could almost see him.” She looked at me, pleading. “He was so close, Alice, I could smell him. That burning red-dust smell.”

“See who? Who was close?”

“Death.”

She’d told me her tale when we first met, but we hadn’t talked about it since. It was about a girl who faced off against Death, and the price she paid for it: her death was taken away. She, Sophia, became deathless. I don’t think she slept, either; even that little death was withheld from her. I tried never to think about it, but now it was a knife of cold air sliding between us. Because how did someone live when they knew they’d never die? I guessed I was learning.

“You didn’t, though,” I said. “I mean, you did. You stopped me.”

“Right.” She slopped more cocktail into her cup, then stood abruptly. “But I’ve been thinking. What if things are different for me, now that the Hinterland is gone?

“What do you think?” She kicked off her shoes and put one narrow foot on the first rail of the fire escape, then the other. Her dress was a thin cotton sack. I could see her body inside it, outlined by the city’s lights.

“I think you should sit down and drink with me.”

“I thought I’d find him here one day,” she said. “I thought I’d find Death and convince him. But he never came to any meetings.” Her laugh was fringed with hysteria. She perched on the top rail of the fire escape, looking down at me.

“You still could.” I pushed up onto my knees. “Maybe he’s here tonight.”

“Maybe he’s the one who’s been killing us. Maybe he’s coming for me next.” She kicked a leg over. Seven stories of open city sang beneath her foot, summer smudged and readying its hands to catch her. I had to look straight up to see her face. Her hair hung down and her eyes were empty tunnels and she looked like a corpse already.

“What if I don’t want to wait anymore?”

As she kicked her other leg over, I surged up, locking my arms around her waist. At the same time we heard a thin, nerve-racking scream from inside the apartment. It sent us startling back onto the fire escape, my hip landing hard on metal and the lip of the windowsill catching my shoulder blade. My injured ribs hurt so bad I could only breathe in sickening sips.

Sophia stood, unsteady. “I think that was Jenny. What do you do to make Jenny scream like that?”

Her face was neutral, her posture straight. In the way she turned away, I could tell what just happened was going to be another thing we never talked about.

I wasn’t scared just then. In the relief that followed Sophia’s aborted flirtation with Death—or her successful attempt to fuck with me, I couldn’t know for sure—a scream just seemed like a scream. We followed the rising buzz of voices, past Sophia’s bedroom and toward the next window.

It opened onto a bathroom, big and old-fashioned and kept fastidiously clean by the brothers. Just below the window was a claw-foot tub lined with more lit candles, and dishes holding fat chunks of apothecary soap.

When I saw Genevieve lying in the tub my first thought was that she looked frosted. Her skin veined blue, her mouth hanging open, her legs folded to the side like a mermaid’s tail. The skin around her lips was blackened and the whites of her eyes pocked with broken vessels.

Frozen. She’d been frozen from the inside out.

Jenny stood in the doorway, her face blank, like the scream had scoured the fear from her and left her empty. Hinterlanders pressed into the spaces around her, trying to get a better look. They didn’t see Sophia and me, framed in the window like Lost Boys.

Then Daphne was there. Slipping into the bathroom and crouching beside the tub. She touched Genevieve’s face with careful fingers. Slid them down.

I was cold. Colder even than I’d been when the Hinterland was dying. If I screamed now, I didn’t know if I could stop. “What is she doing?” I whispered.