The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(34)

She nodded, and for a moment I thought she understood. Then her lip curled back like a cat’s. “Do you really think that’s how it works? The Hinterland was never a place, it was always us. Wherever you go, that’s the Hinterland.”

Hearing my fears spoken aloud made my anger rise. “I grew up here. I spent my whole life here, I was raised here.”

“How many lives did you spend in the Hinterland? How many dozens? You think you’re special just because somebody from this world loves you? That’s not how it works.”

“That’s exactly how it works,” I spat. “That’s the point of the whole goddamn world.”

“It’s not our world.”

“It’s not yours.”

A waitress came by with a coffee carafe, looked at us pitching toward each other over the tabletop, and kept walking.

“You said I had a choice,” I hissed. “You said I was the only one who did.”

“That’s right. And you made it.”

“I almost killed a man. Here, where it counts. I saw a dead girl in a bathtub, her body frozen. Mutilated. I almost got killed myself. Don’t you care that I could’ve died? I thought you were my friend!”

Her hand shot out and gripped my wrist. “I am your friend. Your fucking friend, your only friend. You ungrateful ass.”

I tried to pull away, but she squeezed tighter, the bones of my wrist bowing like saplings. “You asked me what I do all night. Ask yourself what all of us do. Daphne and Robin and Jenny and the rest of us, do you think we sit around wondering who we are, how to live? Go to funny little part-time jobs, like you? Do you really think we don’t use what we’ve got to live the best we can live, and have fun however we want to have fun, because we can? We don’t have mothers waiting at home for us, making us tea. We don’t have years and years of life in this place behind us and a future ahead.”

She leaned close to me, as close as she could get across the table. Her empty eyes were fathomless, nothing and nothing and nothing all the way down.

“I’m not getting any older. Death will never come for me. Instead I’ll just rot. I can feel the rot coming. It’ll start here.” She pointed at her forehead, at her heart. “I’ll go black and green. I’ve got nothing in my life but time, and I still don’t have time for this: one foot in, one foot out, poor me. How come, with more than any of the rest of us have got, you always make out like you’ve got so much less?”

When I said nothing, she fell back in disgust. She plucked the untouched waffle off my plate and slid out of the booth. “Thanks for breakfast.”

I watched her go. I couldn’t move, couldn’t think of what to say. I sat there in the grainy diner light, breathing in the smell of hash browns and coffee and hot batter, thinking of the day I learned her tale. The day I learned she was deathless.



* * *



We were lying in Prospect Park in the shifting shade of a blackgum tree. It was one of those endless late fall afternoons, breezes mixing cool and cold, everything you could see stuck on the bright edge of dying. And I was happy. Really, uncomplicatedly happy. Watching the hours drift by with my friend, my first real friend, who wasn’t Finch or some kid briefly foisted on me by coincidence—same apartment complex, same lunch period, same need for protective social cover. I felt settled in my skin.

“Dogs in strollers,” she was saying. “Dating people you met on a phone. Coupons.”

She was naming Earthly shit that didn’t make sense to make me laugh. After about the twentieth thing (“Vending machine hamburgers. Why?”) she fell quiet a while, long enough that I thought she was asleep. Then she spoke.

“I want to tell you something.”

Her voice was so serious I started to sit up.

“No. Just let me say it like this.”

I lay back down. I listened to her fingers stripping fallen leaves, the wind imitating the ocean.

“I want to tell you my tale. Of the time when I was called Ilsa, and the night I fell in love with Death.”

I looked straight up into the tree’s skittish leaves, and the pieces of hard sky between them, and listened.





18


I was a girl born for bad luck. That’s what they told me, in the village where I grew up. Full of hard old men and harder women, and winters so lean you could see your bones through your skin by the end of them.

I don’t know how it is for you, but I have memories of my tale from above and below. Do you know what I mean? I remember all the parts of it that the Spinner spun—my brothers dying one by one, my father long gone, my mother growing old in front of my eyes, old before she was thirty. I remember—everything that came after.

But I remember other things, too. Little ones. Things the tale couldn’t have had any use for. Like shooting a rabbit right through the eye on my very first go—I wasn’t even aiming for it, I’d never have gotten within a mile if I’d tried. I cried and cried. One of my brothers painted pretty things for me, made a little doll I liked to carry around by its seedpod head. That can’t have been in your grandmother’s storybook, could it?

That’s not important, though. What I meant to tell you about is Death. He’s a wily fucker, slippery as oil, and he’s been taunting me since I was old enough to know it. I caught him when I was small. I shouldn’t have seen him, only the dying ever do. And he was there for my father, not me. But I saw him, all right, and he knew it, and slipped away like a back-door man. Six times after that he came for my family—for all my six brothers, one by one—but he never had the nerve to let me see his face again.