The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(33)

“Sorry. I just … I wish you could sleep.”

“Don’t. I don’t even remember how it feels.”

I was raw, eroded down to skin and nerve. My eyes filled before I could check myself. “Oh, Soph. What do you do all night?”

“You know, I’ve known you a while now, and this is the first time you’ve ever asked me that.” She said it without judgment, but it still felt like a cut.

“I’m sorry.”

“Does that help me?” She sighed, put down her fork. “It’s harder now. With the Hinterland gone, it feels harder. This world is so dim, I can hardly see. Sometimes when I look at people their death is all I can see.”

“You’ve never told me how I’m gonna die.” Saying the words felt like passing my fingers through flame, daring it to burn me. “Do you know? Can you see it?”

“Ask me instead if I can see your life.”

“Can you—”

“Yes.” Her golden eyes held mine. “It’s the color of oil. Black until you look close, then every color. Sometimes it looks so dark. Sometimes it looks like a pearl.”

“Can you see everyone’s life and death, all the Hinterlanders?”

She tensed. “Are you asking about the murders? If I knew?”

“Not because I’m blaming you. Not because I think it was your fault.”

“Of course it wasn’t my fault. Was it yours?”

She asked the question so lightly. It’ll be okay if it is, her voice said. I’ll like you anyway.

I squared up and looked at her, hands resting on the table. “I’ve got nothing to do with this.”

After a moment she nodded, and returned to her waffle.

“I’ve got proof if you want it,” I went on. “Someone tried to kill me, too. A couple nights ago, on the subway.”

“It’s weird more people don’t die on the subway,” she said equably. Then, “Wait. Are you serious?”

I pointed at my chin, scabbing over. Then I told her everything, right up through my conversation with Daphne in her hotel room.

“So it is one of us,” she said. “I figured. Shit, what if it’s Robin? He loves rhymes, all that high fairy-tale formality. And he’s mad as a hatter, besides.”

“Right, but can Robin freeze people alive?”

“Oh, yeah. Damn. It would’ve made him so much more interesting.” She shuddered, her expression bright. I felt perversely pleased that I’d thrilled her with the story of my own near-death.

“So I’m right? They did all die that way—like Genevieve?”

“That’s what I heard.”

“And you didn’t think to tell me?”

“I didn’t hear about any of it till after Hansa died. Then you showed up at a meeting out of nowhere, and … I wondered. I guess I was waiting, maybe, to see if you had something to tell me.”

“You really thought…” I sighed, laying my head back against the seat. “If you thought I did it, they must all be thinking it.”

“Some of them. Maybe.”

I remembered Robin, all the shuttered faces at the wake. That whisper in the bloody bathroom. Alice-Three-Times. “Some of them, definitely.”

“Let me take care of it,” she said. “I’ll tell them it wasn’t you. They’ll believe it, coming from me.”

I swallowed it down, that little stab of nonbelong ing. I’d chosen to walk away. “Who else could it be? Can anyone else do what I can do? Does anyone else have a reason to want, you know, body parts?”

She gestured dismissively with her fork. “Fairy tale something something. You know how it goes.”

“Right—exactly. It’s like something in a fairy tale. This isn’t just violent, it’s specific. There’s got to be, like, some ice king who used to collect his wives’ ankles running around the city.”

“Their ankles?” She ran a finger through a comet scatter of spilled sugar crystals. “What the fuck would you do with a bunch of ankles?”

“I don’t know,” I said, impatient. “But I can’t go home till I figure it out.”

“Till you figure out—”

“Not the fucking ankles.” I wiped a hand over my mouth, frustration rising. “Did you not see what I saw tonight? Are you not scared?”

“Scared.” She said it thoughtfully, like it was a word she was looking up in a dictionary. “To die, you mean? No, I’m not scared.”

“Well, it’s different for you. You can’t, you know. Die.”

“Yes, I do know,” she said dryly.

I thought about Finch, somewhere far away, remembering a better version of me. Ella on the couch, dreaming of a land of red rocks, where we could see the whole curve of the galaxy from our backyard.

“You told me,” I said carefully, “that I should be sure.”

“Don’t,” she said swiftly.

“Soph. I can’t even go home. Someone tried to kill me, they might try it again. And I always hurt her. My mother. Again and again. I never mean it, but what does that matter? After this, after I figure this out, I think I’ve gotta go. For real this time. Leave the Hinterland behind.”