The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(52)

It did, for a minute. Finch’s mind sparked like a flint against all the things he wanted. Then the sparks went out.

“It sounds like a nightmare,” he said. Because it did, when you thought about it. A world where you glutted yourself on your own desires till you were as awful as the little girl in the picture book. There were enough worlds that could make you into monsters out there. Why make another one?

“It’s the very last secret,” Iolanthe whispered. She poked him again, this time in the chest. “How many can say they’ve walked through a world made from pieces of their own heart? I saw your face when I talked about sailing the Hinterland Sea. You wanted to do that, too. And now you never will, oh, well. You want to read every book in the library, visit every world. How can you say no to the Night Country? You can’t,” she answered herself. “It’ll be one more thing to haunt you.”

“Don’t touch me,” he said, rubbing his sternum. “Back up, I can’t think.”

She sat on her ass, feet on the floor and eyes amused. “Sorry. I’m drunk. But I’m also certain. I’m inviting you to be my companion. Not that kind of companion, we’ll get you back to this girl. But first: let’s have an adventure.”

“Why would I go with you? I know nothing about you. What’s with the pocket watch? Why didn’t Grandma June let you look through the spyglass? Where do you even come from?”

“You need to hear my sad story to trust me?” She shrugged. “All right. I come from a world you’ve never heard of, so it’s no good my telling you its name. I lost someone I loved and it was at least a little bit my fault, and I ran away from that. I ran so far I couldn’t find my way back. I’ve been gone so long I don’t know what I’d be finding my way back to.” Her voice went a little mean. “How about you? Think that girl will still remember your name? Your face? Time gets slippery when you start walking through doors. She could be married by now. She could be dead.”

Her words were infecting him with a buzzing, low-grade panic. Alice married, Alice dead. Alice thirty years old, say, smiling at him politely. Letters? What letters?

“So why would I let any more time pass?” he asked. “If too much has gone already?”

“Because if you do this for me, with me—if you do this for yourself—I’ll make sure you get exactly where you need to go, and when.”

“That’s something you can do?”

She held up her pocket watch. “I’ve got a few tricks.”

“But why do you…”

“Because I’m scared.” She laughed a little. “I’m finally going to get what I want. And I’m scared now. Don’t make me do this alone.”

The last scavenger hunt Finch had gone on took him to a heavily fortified castle at the foot of the ice mountains. Its moat swam with annihilating mist, but its drawbridge was down.

He’d run across it. He’d moved through a torch-hung hall that felt like something out of a video game. Down a winding staircase into echoing dungeons, and below them into a crypt, each walled-in corpse marked by a bigger-than-life-size statue that peered at him with glimmering enamel eyes. He’d taken a rusted metal crown from the head of a surly-mouthed queen, and a misty orb from the hand of a mage.

Crouching next to this slippery, avid-eyed woman in her faded blacks, Finch felt the same way he had walking through that castle’s courtyard. It was addictive, that cocktail of trepidation and desire, walking on when you knew you should turn back. Saying yes when the right answer was so likely no.

“First promise me,” he said. “After the adventure—promise you’ll get me back to her.”





27


“Pick up your goddamn phone, pick up pick up pick up.”

Sophia did not pick up her goddamn phone. And the ghost hadn’t come back. Not when I’d yelled for her, not when I’d recited “The Raven.” I thought about running out for whiskey, but I didn’t want to waste the time.

Instead, I walked the winding hallway and let myself back into room 549. I’d shower again first, then head to Sophia’s place. I stank, like curdling milk and burnt carnations and the solemn breath of the dead, and my ears rang with the ghost bride’s prophecies. Ghost within, ghost without. Tell her she won’t have to wait too long. I threw the chain and security locks before stripping down and stepping into the shower.

The water took ages to get hot. I looked at it running around my feet and saw

Genevieve in the bathtub, blue and white

I closed my eyes. Counted to ten, twenty, thirty. Imagined Ella’s hands in my hair. Soaped away the outward traces of the night. But when I left the bathroom, I could still smell something awful, like the scent had crawled into my nose and roosted there. Or like it had been in the room all along, covered up by everything I’d just showered away.

I took a step forward, and stopped.

There was someone in the room. In the bed.

“Soph?”

No reply. I watched the long lump under the bedclothes, waiting for them to sit up and reveal themselves. The covers were over their head, but there was something showing on the pillow, the unlikely color of cotton candy.

Hair. Pink hair. I sagged against the wall, relief and confusion striping through me. It was the woman from the front desk.