The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(39)

And to dismantle, as it turned out, one entire world.

“I want to see what’s next.” They felt like the safest words he could say. He felt Iolanthe’s eyes on him, and refused to be embarrassed. He brought his arm around Janet, then held the other one out to bring Ingrid in.

It was okay to leave the Hinterland if they weren’t in it. If another world waited for him and Alice was free and he’d drunk so deeply already of this place’s orderly and chaotic magic, he could go. He could let go.

And if he left, part of him whispered, the Spinner couldn’t follow. He’d be free at last of the fear that held him by the neck, the sense that her revenge, when it came, would take him out at the knees.

“Walk through the right doors,” Janet told him. “And perhaps a few wrong ones.”

She tilted her head and ran her thumb tips under his eyes. “When we see each other again, heaven knows where, you can tell me everything. And if this young woman is to be trusted, we can thank you both for our lives.”

Iolanthe’s forearm was already bared. She held the bone knife in her left hand, loose and easy. Tossed it a bit, to get a better grip. With a motion like she was mincing garlic, she made three cuts just above her elbow.

Janet breathed hard through her teeth and Ingrid stepped back, muttering. The cuts welled and spilled, running red over Iolanthe’s sun-browned skin. She stepped closer to the tavern wall and, using her finger as a brush, painted a line of blood in the space between two timbers.

“Stop staring,” she said after a minute. “It doesn’t help.”

The lines she drew were faint, the blood stretched as thin as it could go without breaking. It wasn’t till the line climbed over her head that Finch understood what she was doing.

She was drawing a door. The bone dagger, the blood. The door. Finch knew this story. He’d read it in Tales from the Hinterland.

If Iolanthe was weakened, the only sign of it was the way she caught herself, briefly, against the wall, before pulling a square of fabric from her bag.

“Tie this around my arm?”

Finch did, wincing as he drew the ends together tight.

“Now.” Iolanthe looked close at the dagger, at the words running over its handle, then read them aloud. Their syllables were bright and distant; they swooped and dove like seabirds, lingering on the air before drifting away.

The blood on the wall shifted like a shadow, becoming the seams of a real door. Through those seams, a gray light glowed.

Iolanthe drew her head up and shook out her cloak and looked, for a moment, very solemn. “Ready?”





21


After my first night’s sleep in Hell, I woke up too early with a stranger’s voice in my ear.

A girl’s. Stucco-rough but somehow sweet. I could still hear what she’d said, I could almost remember it …

Then I woke the rest of the way, and it was gone. I thought about swimming up yesterday from my blackout nap, the feeling I’d had that someone was talking to me then. And I wondered.

But not too hard, because I had bigger things to wonder about. First, I reread Finch’s last letter. I read it twice. Then I pushed it aside because I could lose a whole day to that mystery, and there just wasn’t time. I had to figure out who among the Hinterland had ice in their hands and a taste for dismemberment.

I could hear Sophia’s voice in my head. Look at you, Nancy Drew. She’d never say that; she’d never even heard of Nancy Drew. I guessed the voice I heard was really my own. I guessed I should call Sophia to talk about last night, and Ella to beg her forgiveness. I did neither.

I decided what I did have to do was learn what had happened with Hansa. She was the only one of the four I felt like I knew, at least a little, and if I was looking for a pattern here her death seemed the most likely to break it.

But the idea of sniffing around her grieving parents, once I tracked them down, made me feel sick. Even worse was the idea that they might think I’d been the one to kill her. Though Sophia had promised to unsmear my name, I didn’t know how long that would take. Who would and wouldn’t believe her. And whether she was still up for helping me after last night.

When all my thoughts started going into soft focus I put on a clean shirt and headed out for coffee and food. I walked till I found an open pizza place, then ate a big foldable slice of rubbery margherita while searching out caffeine. It was half past seven by then, commuters bleeding from every subway entrance. A thousand different faces to get caught on, but the one that hooked me was a little girl’s. She wore sunglasses and a hoodie and was sitting on the edge of a gutter punk’s blanket, just out of reach of his dog. I couldn’t tell whether they were together, but she was paying him no mind.

Something about her was so familiar. I stared a minute, trying to place whether and where I’d seen her. Then I had it: she’d been waiting at the bus stop across from the diner last night. And the night before that, she’d been in Central Park. Watching me from beside the path.

“Hey,” I said, almost to myself. I started toward her, but didn’t make it too far. As soon as I got moving, she vaulted herself off the blanket and flew down the street.

“Hey! Wait!” I took a few running steps, then stopped. She was already a block away, moving fast as a whippet through the crowd.

My heart pounded and my thoughts went sharp. She could run, but I knew who she must be. And I knew where to find her.