The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(53)

“Hey. Vega. Wake up.”

No response.

Gingerly I walked toward the bed, wondering if she was messing with me. “Vega. Hi, good morning. Night. Whatever.” I poked where I thought her shoulder might be. “Excuse me. I’ve had a very shit night, and I need my bed back.”

Nothing. My body was trying to tell me something, pumping a queasy poison into my stomach and my limbs, telling me no good would come of staying in this room, but I didn’t listen. Instead I pulled the blanket back, and back, peeling it away from the figure on the bed.

First I saw the full fall of her flossy hair, then her startled, mottled face. Ice crystals gathered under her skin, bruises raised like the ghosts of old traumas. Her mouth hung open and there was so much

Blood. A broad black road of it. Maybe there’d be even more if she hadn’t been frozen like a butchered animal before she was cut. Before she was plundered. The blood came from her mouth, from the root of her stolen tongue.

If I screamed, I couldn’t hear it over the sound in my head.



* * *



Bare feet and a towel, running down the carpeted hall. The elevator or the stairwell, each felt equally perilous; I chose the elevator. Four floors up and down the hall to Daphne’s room.

Her caps were off, and her lipstick. The fine needles of her teeth flashed behind her pale mouth.

“Another?”

I nodded, wordless.

In my room she turned on every light, pulled the blanket over the dead, opened the window. Took a bottle from her robe pocket and put it into my hand while she made a phone call. I drank it down. Much later, when my head was clear enough to think, I figured it must’ve been something more than alcohol, something she got from Robin, I’d bet, because from that point on I felt okay. I felt detached, like I was watching a movie. The liquor turned up all the lights in my head and took the fearsomeness from the shadows. The room filled with people whose faces I couldn’t keep straight, till I realized they were three people with the same face: the creepy milk-pale brothers who lived with Sophia.

They’ll take care of it, Daphne told me, her words pressing funny on my ears.

It was the body. It was a woman who was alive a few hours ago, till she made the mistake of talking to me.

More activity, lights turned higher—no, it was the sun coming up. Then the room was empty and my bed was stripped, and when I looked at my face in the mirror the imprint of Daphne’s lips lay over my temple, like she’d tried to kiss the worst of my thoughts away.

Her words before she kissed me came trickling through, hours after she’d spoken them. They’ll think it was you. Then the kiss, cold and glittering, as the room turned gray. Watch yourself carefully now, they all think it’s you.



* * *



I let myself into Sophia’s building, twitching with nerves and sleeplessness. Banged on the apartment door till Jenny opened it, then immediately slammed it with a shriek.

“Go away, murderer!”

“Jenny, goddammit, I didn’t do anything! Get Sophia!”

“What, so you can murder her? No way!”

I rested my head against the door and changed tactics. “You really think I can’t kill you through a door? I’m fucking dying to. Get her.”

A few seconds of silence before she spoke. “She’s not here. And that’s not my fault, so you just leave me alone!”

I believed her. Jenny would sell her own mother up the river for a peppermint stick.

Now I was walking down Seventh Avenue, tracing my night, looking for pockets of lost time. I reviewed my path at the wake, ran my nails over the sealed black box that held my memories of the night I broke into the apartment in Red Hook. I hadn’t seen my attacker on the subway, but I’d heard them. I couldn’t have been fighting myself in the dark.

Unless I was losing more than just time. Unless some crucial part of me had come undone.

I was heading back to the bookstore, planning to sleep behind the desk till Edgar got in. The hotel was two kinds of haunted for me now, and whoever killed Vega had no trouble getting into my room.

I saw her right away when I turned onto Sullivan Street. Half a block down, back against the bookstore’s front window. When she spotted me she stood up straight and rushed forward, her arms half open like she didn’t know if she wanted to hug me or hit me.

“So you are alive. You unbelievable, irresponsible, thoughtless asshole.”

I was already crying. Just the sight of her face had done it.

“Mom,” I said, and ran into her arms.



* * *



I didn’t know till that morning that some bars stayed open twenty-four hours.

I don’t think either of us could’ve handled the grind and chatter of a coffee shop, and I didn’t want to talk on the street. So we found a no-name place with a lit Amstel sign in the window and an unlocked door. Inside, we breathed the sour overlay of decades of spilled beer and watched a bartender cutting limes down at the far end of the gouged-to-shit bar. The only other patron was slumped next to the sleeping jukebox, one hand around a bottle.

“Tell me,” she said.

And I did. I was exhausted, clinging to reason. I wanted someone to hold all the unwieldy, sharp-edged pieces of my slipshod investigation, to tell me what they meant or just to take the weight for a while. I wanted someone to tell me I was good, way down at the very bottom where it counts, and not capable of the things some of them thought I’d done.