The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(32)

The way she said the word caught at him. Like home meant just one place to her, and she knew exactly where to find it. “Where’s home?”

“It’ll take more than one drink to get me to tell you that.” She smiled, but he didn’t think she was joking. “I came over here to ask you about that thing you’re messing with. That—” She squinted. “What is it, a fox? Mind if I take a look?”

Finch took his hands off it, like, be my guest.

“Tale-made, right?”

He nodded grudgingly. It was the first time he’d heard the term.

“I thought so.” She picked it up, inspected it. With a jerk, she yanked its central tail.

The fox gave a whirring shudder as she placed it in the center of the table. They watched it rearrange itself, the tails elongating, becoming two arms and a pair of molded-together legs, the eyes transforming, disconcertingly, into breasts, and a head sprouting from the body of the thing as it went from apple to hourglass.

It had become a metal woman, with a sly, foxy face.

Finch picked it up, held it to his ear to see if he could still hear the hum. “How did you know it could do that?”

“Better question is, what else can it do?” She flicked the thing onto its side. “Do you have any more like it?”

Finch thought of the glass rose, the fish scales, the rest of the cache he kept under his bed. “I might. Who’s asking?”

The girl put out a hand. “Iolanthe. Happy to meet you.”

He shook it, taking in her ice-haired prettiness, the shallow bowls of her clavicles and the unearthly planes of her face. He was starting to think she might come from someplace farther than New York.

“Ellery,” he said. “Finch.”

“Well, Ellery, the truth is I don’t want to die here. And I think you and I might be able to help each other, if”—she pointed at the metal figure—“you’ve got more tale-made treasures like that.”

“Nobody wants to die here,” he said. “Everyone’s trying to escape. What does the fox have to do with it?”

“Think. What do you need to escape?”

“A door.”

“Money and a door. I know a place where we can make some coin off that fox and anything else you might’ve picked up. How’s this: I get forty percent for taking you there and making the introduction. And for giving you the idea in the first place.”

“Is your buyer in the Hinterland?”

She smiled, relaxed but with a hint of the shark beneath it. “My buyer is not.”

“Meaning you can get us out of here? You know a safe way out, a guaranteed way?”

“I do.”

“You get thirty percent.” Finch took the red bottle and drank. The liquid inside tasted like rum made out of electrocuted sugarcane. “And I get to bring two people out with me.”

Iolanthe pulled out a pocket watch on a long chain and consulted its face. From where Finch sat, it looked completely blank. “Forty percent, and I can personally guarantee the safe passage out of your two people. But they can’t come with us.”

Her hand, when Finch shook it, felt rough and solid, the hand of a woman who’d navigated alien waters in search of tales to tell.

She held his fast. “Meet me here tomorrow at sunrise. Bring your two friends and anything you’ve got to sell. And say your goodbyes. It’ll be the last you’ll see of this place.”





17


A twenty-four-hour diner held down a corner two blocks from the apartment, serving bottomless drip coffee and cheap breakfast combos to construction workers and old people in jogging suits. I knew Sophia would be late, so I skimmed a few chapters of The Changeling while I waited. When she finally showed, she looked small, the larger-than-life outline of her rubbed down. She still wore the dress she’d had on at the party, the fabric so dark I couldn’t tell if it had bloodstains.

“Trip,” she said, falling into the seat across from me. It was her nickname for me—Alice-Three-Times, Triple, Trip—and I always felt a blend of affection and irritation when she used it. When the waitress came, Sophia revived a little, ordering chocolate-chip waffles and mushroom omelets and Canadian bacon for the both of us. I could already see her calculating how to get away without paying the bill.

“We are paying for this breakfast.”

She winked, but it was half-hearted. “Is it breakfast if the sun’s not up?”

The food came, and it looked to me like pieces of a plastic playset. I watched the chipped glitter of her nails around fork and knife, too up in my head to swallow more than milky coffee.

What was Finch doing right now? Where was he doing it? Outsized possibilities played across my eyelids. Sometimes the image of you hits me so hard and sudden I believe the only explanation is you’re thinking of me at that exact moment, too.

“Hey.”

My focus snapped, breath drawn in like I’d been caught at something.

There were half-moons in her lip where she’d bitten it. The skin around her eyes was blue paper. “You got me here. Why aren’t you talking?”

“Jesus, Sophia.” The words slipped out sideways as I focused, really focused, on her face. “You look like shit.”

“Back at you.”