The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(3)

“Thanks for coming,” I mumbled.

She gave me a little shake. “I’m your mother. Don’t thank me for being here. Just come home after work, okay? We’ll get the good takeout tonight.”

She cupped my face, her hands cool. Then crisply she turned away, sweeping off through the crowd without looking back. That was a new thing, too: when she sensed herself clinging, she’d cut it off quick. It left me feeling bereft every time, wishing I’d hugged her longer. Wishing I hadn’t lied, and we were on our way to a fancy lunch. But I had, and we weren’t, so once she was gone I made my way to the exit, too.

I thought Daphne would be waiting for me, but I didn’t see her. Families dotted the pavement, siblings batting at each other and moms wearing summer lipstick and dads in khaki pants looking at their phones. I wound around them like a wraith. When I passed a trash can, I peeled off my gown and dropped it in. The sky was soft and low, in a way that made you feel like you were inside when you were out. And there was this feeling in the air, this waiting feeling. Like the square of city I stood on was a mouse, and a cat’s paw hovered just above it.

Things were different now, I reminded myself. Our lives had changed. If they hadn’t, I might’ve called the feeling by another name: bad luck coming.



* * *



Here’s a story I don’t like to tell.

It started on an ugly day last spring, frigid and murderously bright. I walked into a Hinterland meeting late, my fresh-washed hair frozen into pieces. When I first discovered the weekly gatherings of displaced ex-Stories, on the second floor of a psychic’s shop on Avenue A, I thought I’d been saved—from the loneliness of singularity. From being the oddest creature I knew. And the meetings did save me. But they messed me up, too. Kept me from trying too hard, I guess, to be normal. To stop being so damned easy on myself, because who could expect much from a girl created to live in a fairy tale, attempting now to fashion an unmagical life?

I was used to mixing with the same junk drawer of ex-Story oddballs. Even the ones I couldn’t stand were comforting as old wallpaper, drinking instant coffee and kvetching about something or other week after week. But that day a woman I’d never seen was standing at the front of the room. She had the hard, painted-on beauty of an Egon Schiele portrait: dark-lipped and paper-pale, with perfect heroine hair that flowed and bent down her back in flat red colorblock. She was sitting on a high stool with her knees pulled up, sleeves pushed to her elbows, talking. Her talk turned the room’s drowsy air into something crackling.

“We’re infiltrators here,” she was saying. “And we always will be.”

It was about eighty degrees hotter inside than out, and I was sweating through my layers, trying to shuck my coat while balancing a full coffee cup. But the fervor in her words stopped me cold.

“This world is a gray place. A place of small and scattered lives. Disordered. Ugly. Chaotic.” She brought a fist down on her knee. “But us? We blaze. We blaze against it like red ribbon.”

Her voice was a drug. Dense as fog, rubbing its back against your ears like a cat. Everyone in the place was angling closer, warming their hands by her ferocity. Even me: I hated to think about it later, but she tugged at something in me, too.

She’d looked at someone sitting by her feet, a boy I’d never heard speak. His head was always down and his lips were always moving, noiseless. I suspected most of his mind was still lodged inside his broken tale.

“What were you?” she asked him. “In the Hinterland, what were you?”

I couldn’t see the boy’s face, but I could see the panic in his rising shoulders. “I was a prince. Conjured by a witch of dandelions and blood, to fool a princess.” He darted a look around. “Sometimes I can feel the Hinterland sun on me again. Hear the insects whispering in the dirt. I don’t understand why I’m still a boy.”

The woman had looked at him with such ferocity. “You’re not. You are magic, through and through. We all are. Be proud of that.”

She’d looked past him then, right at me.

“We aren’t like the creatures who were made in this world. We aren’t meant to debase ourselves with them. To live a human life is to forget who we are. To forget who we are is to be an enemy to ourselves. To each other.”

“You,” she said, pointing at a man in a frumpy hand-knit sweater. “Stand up.”

He rose slowly, shaky in his frost-stained boots, and my heart dropped.

Because the thing was, these meetings weren’t just for ex-Stories. They were for anyone still drifting after leaving the Hinterland behind. People from this world, who’d found their own doorways in and out again, different from us but bonded to us all the same. The man in the snowflake sweater was one of them. Not Hinterland, but human.

“I’m not trying to…” he stammered, “I’m not here to…”

“Shhhh.” The woman pressed a finger to her lipsticked mouth, then smiled behind it. “You walk a very narrow path. And the woods are full of wolves. And the wolves have sharp teeth. And we’ve had no one to bite for a very, very long time.”

She closed her eyes. “I want to live in a world of wolves. When I open my eyes, I won’t see a single lamb.”

Snowflake Sweater grabbed his coat and fled. A pair of teen girls in black lipstick followed, holding hands, and a man with dreadlocks hidden under a shapeless hat. An old woman in wire-rims shuffled out after them, slow enough to make her point.