The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(47)

“Right. Long after they could possibly be traced to you.”

“Yeah, but what about the forty-ninth guy?”

“Save your tears for the fiftieth. Would you rather I pay you in stock?”

Iolanthe elbowed him hard. He took the fairy gold.

Before they left, Grandma June caught up Iolanthe’s blank-faced watch in her knobby fingers. “How about this? Looking to sell?”

Iolanthe snatched it back and shoved it down the front of her dress. “Not today, grandmother,” she said in a voice like iron.

After that, Finch decided he’d keep an eye on that pocket watch, too.

When they walked out, his treasure bag was empty, the unsold walnut in his jacket and the general’s pen in the front pocket of the new shirt the needle had sewn for him. It was nice. A little piratey, but soft. A first day of school feeling was coming over him, that imminent sense of being left behind. This, he figured, was where he and Iolanthe parted ways, once they’d split up the money. He wondered whether one of those books in the gray library told a tale that would drop him back on Earth, and whether he was ready, finally, to read it.

But Iolanthe said nothing as they made their way up the street. It was nighttime now, the sky scattered with strange stars, and half the shops were closed. The windows still lit held darker promises than they had before the stars came out.

Finch didn’t stop to stare. He was too distracted. He felt the metal of the general’s pen, warm through the weave of his shirt. He felt the weight of it, heavy as words unspoken.

In his mind, he was already writing a letter.





25


Come home.

Ella’s last text to me before I’d turned off my phone. And I wanted to, so badly. I wanted to kick the bottom of our front door to unstick it when I came in, and fit my fingers into the grooves of the fugly hand-thrown pottery mugs we ate our yogurt from. I wanted to see the crown of Ella’s hair under the living room lamp, the sides of the couch too high to know what she was reading till I came in close. I wanted her to flip back to the pages with folded corners, to read aloud the lines she’d liked and had saved for me. I wanted to slip back into our domestic routine like it was warm wax.

Instead I walked on shaky legs to the parking garage’s elevator, my body feeling like it had been run through a laundry wringer. I texted Sophia as I went.

If you’re working on clearing my name work faster. Hansa’s parents just threatened to kill me with a wrench.

Then, because it looked a little more dire typed out than I thought it would: I’m sorry btw. Does it suck that your best friend’s such an asshole?

Seriously though I’m sorry

She still hadn’t gotten back to me when I walked into the hotel lobby. Felix was gone from behind the desk, replaced by a pink-haired woman I’d never met. Even her brows and lashes were the color of bubblegum. She looked like something in a bakery window, a cake that bit you back. When she spotted me her face went from bored to pin-sharp. She had a phone in her hand, and I was pretty sure she used it to take my photo. I threw her a dirty look as the elevator doors closed.

The air inside it pushed against my ears. As the elevator rose the pressure climbed, climbed, then cracked like an egg when the doors opened. I was left rubbing away the memory of pain, and the sense that I’d been about to hear something when the pressure let up. That if I’d just listened closer, words would’ve broken through.

The hallway was empty as ever, and I wondered who slept behind these doors. Who read or stared or waited for some unfathomable thing. Were they fearful? Were they angry? Were they trying to figure this out, too?

In my room I checked under the bed and inside the closet before stepping into the shower, because I’d been on the receiving end of vigilante justice once today already, and that was enough. The shower I took was so cold it made me gasp, but when I stepped out, the mirror was fogged all the way over. I stopped, one foot out and one foot in, because words were written in the fog in slashed uppercase letters, like a scattering of toothpicks.

YOU’RE NOT LISTENING.

I stared a few seconds, my skin prickling over in goose bumps so sudden they hurt. Then I banged my elbow yanking my towel down and around me, and slipped out of the bathroom sideways. I pulled clothes on over damp skin, the grossest feeling in the world, and hightailed it to the lobby.

The pink-haired photo-taker was still at the desk. She looked a little scared as I stalked over, a little thrilled.

“Hey. Is this hotel haunted?”

Her face relaxed. “Oh. Yeah. Of course it is.”

“By who?”

Now she looked downright skeptical. “Really? By us. By Hinterland. You think only the living came through?”



* * *



The ex-Stories carried ghosts with us. The figurative kind, mainly—all those who hadn’t made it here, or hadn’t chosen to come. The echoes of our stories, all the things we’d done or hadn’t when the Spinner still held us in her grip.

Some of our ghosts, though, were literal.

Fairy tales were thick with them. Slain brothers, punished parents, a skin-crawling volume of dead brides, all those white-wrapped girls perched on the spindle point between maidenhood and the wedding night. I couldn’t believe I’d never considered that some might have slipped from the Hinterland after the rest of us.