The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(40)

Not many kids came through from the Hinterland. Hansa had been one of them. Creepy Jenny was another, with her baby-doll face and those keen little in-turned eyeteeth. And then there was the Trio.

In the Hinterland they’d had other names: the Acolytes of the Silver Dagger. The Red, the White, and the Black. But here, everyone just called them the Trio. They weren’t little girls, exactly, that was just the form they took. It was odd to see one of them alone, but these were odd times.

I only knew about them what Sophia had told me: that in the Hinterland they’d answered to their own kind of deity. Here, they’d found their way to the Christian God, though I doubted it was a mutual thing. They hung out at a church in Midtown, and tended to show up when they had a message for you—the garbled, prophetic kind. The kind you’d damn well better heed. I waited a little longer, but the girl didn’t come back. When nothing worse showed, either, I headed to where I knew I could find her.



* * *



Times Square in the morning looked oddly clean. Massive video billboards cycled silently overhead, and tourists clustered on the corner of Forty-Fourth and Broadway. The place I was looking for was weathered stone with a big rose window, its imposing face half lost behind construction scaffolding. A church, lovely and unlikely, tucked among the anonymous hotels and overpriced diners above the square. The schedule by the entrance said I’d missed matins, but when I tried the doors they opened.

Ella never took me to church, and there’d been a time when I was fascinated by them. I couldn’t believe they were free, that anyone was allowed to walk inside a place that looked so much like a museum or a castle.

This one’s entrance was cool and hazy with incense. Beyond it was the great glittering mouth of the church itself, yawning wide to reveal its treasures: rows of polished pews and the Virgin in her nook, mosaicked arches and filigreed screens and wooden carvings of figures who must’ve been holy men, but could just as easily have been depictions of the Green Man, the Erlking, the King of May. Saints glared out through solemn eyes, and stained-glass windows cast dim jewels over the ground, and I was starting to see how an ex-Story could find solace here, in a building so replete with ancient tales.

There were a few tourists here and there, lighting candles or taking sneaky photos, dwarfed by the gold-and-marble altarpiece. Nobody who could be the Trio, I thought. Slowly I walked to the front of the room, a faint tock tock tock taking up slow residence in my head.

It was the sound, I realized, of heels on wood. Looking over the pews I saw that they weren’t quite empty: three heads just peeked over the top of a bench on the left side. The heads were hooded, from left to right, in red, white, and black. One of them must’ve been kicking her feet against the pew like … well, like a bored kid in church. I was a few rows away when the kicking stopped and the heads clicked on their necks like something out of Camazotz, turning in unison to look at me.

“Hello,” said the child in red.

“Alice-Three-Times,” said the child in black.

The child in white said nothing, but you could tell she was thinking plenty. She showed her milk teeth in a smile that made me colder than consecrated stone.

I scanned them, trying to figure out which had been following me. The one in red, I thought. She’d changed her hoodie.

“Hi,” I said, a little breathless. “I think you have a message for me.”

Red and Black leaned forward to look at each other. White kept staring.

“Well? What is it?”

“You can ask us anything you’d like.” Red.

“Perhaps we’ll answer. Perhaps not.” Black.

White said nothing, but the other two tilted their heads into her silence, and laughed.

“Is that the message?” I slid into the pew in front of theirs and turned around, facing them over its back. They had eerie little oatmeal box faces, like an illustrator’s idea of how a wholesome child might look. If the illustrator were terrified of wholesome children.

Red studied my face. “You’re afraid of something.”

“Isn’t everyone?”

She smiled, a little meanly. “You have more to be afraid of than they do.”

“Okay. Does it have something to do with the murders?”

“With the deaths, you mean,” said Red.

Black bowed her head. “We honor their sacrifice.”

“What sacrifice?” I said. “I’m talking about murder. The four Hinterlanders who were killed.”

“Great change requires great sacrifice.”

“And tales change their shape, depending on who’s doing the telling.”

I tasted metal. “Don’t talk about this in riddles, all right?”

All three held up their left palm, oath-giving style, as Red and Black talked between them.

“No riddles. You say it’s murder.”

“But we say they chose to die, and knew what they were dying for.”

“They go on to a great reward, in a better world.”

I seized on Red’s words. “A better world? What world is that?”

“The world of the kingdom of Heaven,” she said primly.

Black spoke next. “If they can make it. We do pray for all of you, not just our self.”

“Thanks,” I said dryly. “So you’ve thrown the Spinner over for God?”