The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(44)

Then she was lifting me, easy as a puppet, hauled up under my armpits. When I was back on my feet she moved next to the man, looming over him by a head. He flexed his hands around the wrench, and she held her own hands up like they were weapons, like they were as deadly as mine. I believed it.

“Tell me to my face you didn’t kill my daughter.”

I looked straight into her wild blue eyes, ready to deny it. As they met mine, caught mine, I felt an aqueous click in my brain. A hypnotic tug that reeled me in and sent me tumbling headlong down a cool blue hallway the exact color of her eyes. When she spoke the words again, they came from inside my head.

Tell me you didn’t kill my daughter.

I couldn’t look away, couldn’t blink, couldn’t move anything but my mouth.

“I didn’t kill Hansa. I didn’t touch her.”

Her pause was long, and I was falling. Or maybe I was suspended, in an endless tunnel of light. My body felt warm and weightless, sheathed in calm, panic scrabbling at its underside. Then a jerk behind my belly button heaved me up and out of that serene blue place, dropping me back onto the rooftop of a Manhattan parking garage, sweat-sticky and spitting curses on my hands and knees.

“What was that?” I half screamed.

The man looked down at me, impassive, the wrench now at his side. But the woman was even angrier, crouched beside me.

“If you didn’t kill her, who did?” Her breath was hot on my face.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out!”

“I’ll know if you’re lying. Do you want me to find out if you’re lying?”

“No, no.” I put up a hand, scrambled backward. “I’m not lying. Whoever did it, they’re trying to make it look like it was me. Whoever did it, they tried to—”

Kill me, too, I was going to say. But suddenly I wondered. If whoever was doing this was trying to frame me, why would they want to kill me? Which half was I wrong about?

“Tried to what?” she said, pushing her face into mine.

“They’re trying to do something,” I said, changing course. “Why else would they do what they did, taking pieces away?”

Her big vivid mouth went bloodless. Behind her, the silent man shifted.

“You’re going to find out who did it,” she said. It wasn’t a question, it was marching orders. “And when you find out, you’re not going to do anything else about it until you come to me.”

I made myself look right at her when I spoke. “If you do one thing for me first.”

“You think you’re in a position to bargain?”

“I just have a question. If you’ll answer it. I just want to know…” I swallowed, trying to put my suspicion into words that wouldn’t enrage her. “What was Hansa like at the end?”

“At the end?” She glared at me. “She was curious. Funny. Odd. Happy. She was a child.”

I nodded, but I couldn’t think how to ask the question I really wanted the answer to: Would she have martyred herself? If so, for what?

“Not at the end, though.” The man spoke for the first time. His voice was soft. The woman turned on him, and a little steel went into it. “You know it’s true.

“At the end she was angry.” He looked at me. “She didn’t want to lie about who she was anymore. What she was. She didn’t understand why we had to.”

I braced myself. “Is there any chance she might’ve … chosen this? That it might’ve been part of something bigger, even if she didn’t really understand it?”

The woman’s body was taut as a tiger’s. I didn’t dare look at her. But the man seemed to be thinking, turning over my words. “Our daughter did not want to end,” he said carefully. “Never, never would she choose that. But. It’s possible whoever took her life tricked her. That final day, next to her body, we found a packed bag. All silly things, cookies and books and coins. I think she thought she’d be traveling. Perhaps she believed dying was the first step of the journey. Death isn’t the end, in the Hinterland. I wish we’d taught her better than that here.”

He reached into his pocket, and I flinched. But what he brought out was a compass. He pressed it into my palm, then pulled his hand back fast like he wanted to be clear of it.

“Take it,” he said. “If you’re really trying to find out who did this, use it. It steered Hansa right, till it didn’t. Perhaps it will help you.”





24


The door they’d come through clung for a moment to the air. Through it Finch could see the weary illumination of the last world, turned grayer by the contrast. Then it winked out like a firefly.

He turned, and for a delirious moment thought they were back in the Hinterland. But this place had a shabbier, used kind of feel—less cozy medieval, more Dickensian. They stood at another crossroads, a six-cornered intersection of rubbly little streets lined with lit windows. The sky was an early evening color, and it was a relief after the dead world to breathe in cooking smells and breezes and even the murky contents of the standing puddles between cobblestones.

Iolanthe, too, breathed like she’d set down a heavy load. “Glad to be out of there. You good?”

Finch nodded wordlessly. He wasn’t sure he was. He wasn’t sure he was made for travel like this, barely leaving a footprint in one place before you were off to the next.