The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(30)

More silence.

“It wasn’t me. You know that, right?”

The connection was bad, her voice sounded far away. “I know you,” she said.

I didn’t know what that meant, or whether it was meant to be comforting. I guess I didn’t care. “We need to talk. Meet me at the diner in half an hour.”

It would’ve been a whole thing getting out if Ella was still awake. But she’d crashed on the couch, her feet slung up over the back and our old afghan thrown over her legs. I wanted to kiss her forehead, take the crack-spined copy of Tender Morsels off her chest. But if I tried that she’d pop out of sleep like a jack-in-the-box.

So I just watched her. Watched the dark mass itself over her head like the gathered detritus of her dreams. There was a time when I could’ve guessed at their contents, but that time had passed. I’d been holding myself back, letting her grow strange to me.

And tonight, I’d done something worse: I’d come home to her. Even after what happened on the subway, even after seeing Genevieve dead in the dark, I’d traced my steps back to Brooklyn. Not knowing who was watching me, whether they’d try one more time to hurt me, whether I was leading death to her door.

The annihilating anger that made me reckless in Red Hook, that saved my life on the train, was folded away. What I felt now was clinical and bright, more promise than threat.

I wasn’t going to be a victim anymore. A monster, either. I was going to find the creature who’d turned me into both, in that subway car in the dark.





16


The breaking of “Hansa the Traveler” was an end, and it was a beginning. It was the start of Finch’s new career: he was a scavenger. A thief. As the tales kept breaking and people started panicking and the roads and trees and even the tavern were crawling with recent ex-Stories, confused and enraged and stinking of burnt sugar and exploded flashbulbs, Finch was moving through the cracked landscapes they left behind. Before the tales and everything in them could turn into black holes, he walked their disintegrating halls.

From a fading farmhouse he took a blown glass rose and a child’s leather boot. From the bottom of an abandoned coracle he took a bone fishing hook, a little tarnished mirror, and a handful of iridescent fish scales, big as his palm and diamond hard. In an overgrown pear grove he found a dancing slipper, worn through. It looked like one of the beat-up Capezios his junior high girlfriend used to wear with her jeans. Deep in the trees, from a murder cabin straight out of The Evil Dead, he took what looked like a ginger root, colored a deep, burnished maroon. But the thing felt so vile, even through the old leather of his bag, he ended up throwing it out his window in the middle of the night.

When I wake up there’s gonna be an evil beanstalk out there, he thought, lying back in bed. It’s like I’ve never read a fairy tale.

The beanstalk didn’t show, but he still had things to worry about.

He was living with Janet and Ingrid in their cottage, which smelled like rosemary and soil and a tinge of the goat pen Ingrid was bad about wiping off her boots. It drove Janet nuts. They’d given him a home, helped make the Hinterland feel like a home, and now they were talking about leaving.

Everyone was, those days. The Stories were shaking loose and the sinkholes were getting worse and Lev was only the first death—the first disappearance. It was possible, Alain liked to say hopefully, that he was still alive. Maybe he’d slipped right back through to Earth. Maybe that was what everyone should do: show a little faith that the sinkholes worked like doors. It was a popular theory nobody ever tested on purpose.

No, their continued survival depended on the Spinner. They were waiting for her to step in, to rebuild her world, tale by tale. Surely the wound Finch had made in it wasn’t mortal. Surely she’d show herself at last, and open a door. The ex-Stories had their own ways out of the Hinterland, but none of them seemed inclined to talk. The refugees were trapped together like rats on a splintering ship.

Everyone had a theory about the Spinner: that she was an ex-Story herself. That she was just another human, or had been, once upon a time. Someone swore she was the Empress Josephine. There was an old straight-edge dude who hung around the tavern sipping water, who claimed the Spinner used to send him to Earth for cases of gin, satin pajamas, paperbacks and chocolate bars and black tea. Finch believed it.

“She’s not human, not Story, and not to be trifled with or depended upon,” Janet said briskly. “We need a contingency plan.”

But that was just talk. Even Janet couldn’t muscle up an escape route where none existed.

People were starting to lose faith. There were town hall meetings almost daily, and patrols were set up around some of the bigger sinkholes. Janet did her best to impose a curfew. Still, people were lost. The Hinterland’s refugees were wanderers by nature; Finch wasn’t the only one pressing his luck, poking around the changing land.

Then came the night when they were packed into the tavern, sardine-tight and hiding out from a rare rainstorm. The weather had gone off since the Stories started to break. Alain was in the back checking on a batch of home brew when he gave a holler, and Finch knew.



* * *



It was a rounded little hobbit door set in a place that had been solid wall, the top of it coming to Finch’s thigh. Janet looked at it with her hands on her hips.

“Let’s not be hasty,” she said.