The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(49)

What do you say to that? “It’s a pretty … it was a pretty dress.”

“It was a monstrosity. I was the first bride, you see. Before they learned to stop wasting the lace. Just a harbinger, really. A lesson for the final bride.”

“What happened to her?”

“Nothing good.”

I crouched in milk, beside the wreckage of burnt flowers, but I didn’t dare move. “Thank you for coming,” I said, too solemn, sounding like the host of the world’s saddest dinner party.

“Took you long enough to invite me.” Her fingers dipped into the mess of the milk. “Next time try whiskey. It made my husband’s breath sour but it looked like a jewel in the cup. I’ve always wanted to taste it.”

“Why did you want to talk to me?”

“I knew your grandmother. In the Hinterland. We were friends.”

Althea. “She wasn’t really my grandmother.”

“All the same. She asked me to tell her my story. I hadn’t known I had one.”

“Well, she wasn’t doing it to be nice. She was stealing it, to make money.”

Her voice cut its teeth against the air. “Two things can be true at once.” She wavered out, then in again, like her attention was elsewhere. It probably was. Maybe she could split herself into two pieces, or three, or ten, make the lights blink on Broadway and a phantom wind whistle down Second Avenue, all while sitting here with me.

“That’s really it? You wanted to talk to me because of Althea?”

“No. I’m willing to talk to you because of Althea. She helped me once, and a debt weighs heavier than a wedding ring. What I have to say has nothing to do with her.”

She closed the lit lamps of her eyes, appearing to breathe in deep. Then she flickered out completely. Every light in the place pulsed, one by one, like her spirit was a kite whipping through them. Then she was back in front of me, gaze keener than the rest of her.

“I forget,” she said, “what we were speaking of.”

“You have something to tell me.” My fingers made impatient indents in my thighs. “You’ve been trying to speak to me.”

“Oh.” She considered, tilting her head to the side. And tilting, till it hung unnatural, and I could see the mottled bruising around her throat. “Yes. I’ve been wanting to tell you that you’re haunted. Did you know it?”

My heart squeezed, quick as a fist. “Haunted by who?”

She reached out one thin blue hand and gently, gently placed it on my chest. The feeling was awful, an ice cream headache right down to my spine. “Ghost within, ghost without. How do you carry it?”

“What are you talking about?” I kept my voice level, just barely. “Who’s haunting me? What do you mean, ghost within? What does this have to do with the murders?”

“I mean just what I say, and that’s all you’ll get out of me.” She smiled, brightening as she did. I could count her freckles now, and see the gap between her front teeth. “I get to speak in puzzles if I like, it’s the purview of the dead.”

I was suddenly curious. “Are you happy, then? You don’t want to … to rest?”

“Rest where? In the Hinterland the dead could walk Death’s halls. We could eat at his table. If we pass on here, we only—”

“Stop,” I said quickly. “Please.” There were still some things I didn’t want to know.

“You’ll learn for yourself in time,” she said coolly. “And when it is your time, consider making a haunting if you can. This world is a far better place to be dead. I love it here. I curdle their milk. Beat the eggs in their shells. Turn their clothes inside out and rattle their windows with stones.” When she smiled, her teeth glistened like bits of sea glass. “Here, they call me nightmare, hallucination, curse. They don’t believe in ghosts.”

“So you really know nothing about the murders? No hints, even? You can tell it in riddles if you want.”

“It’s not such a disastrous thing, dying,” she said tartly. “It’s very nice once you’re used to it.” A tremor ran through her, like she was a flicked water glass, and she started to fade. She was dim as an Edison bulb when her eyes snapped back to me. I could see the long hollow of the hallway, visible behind her lips.

“One more thing. You have a friend who waits for Death. Yes?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “Tell her I talk to him sometimes. Tell her she won’t have to wait too long.”





26


Finch wrote a love letter. At least he thought he did.

Back in the towered castle in the fossil world, in a spare gray bedroom on the second floor, he circled a few times before sitting down, gingerly, on the edge of the bed. He pulled out the silver pen, and for a long time he just thought.

About New York. About the first time he saw Alice, the spark that grew into curiosity, then fascination. That tumbled into and out of nightmare. Her skeptical eyes and cropped hair and husky, hard-won laugh that sounded twenty years older than her voice. He touched the pen to the blank inside cover of I Capture the Castle, the book that was nearest at hand when he’d packed, and the only one he’d taken from the Hinter land. Ink bled steadily into the page from its point, wicking away.