The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(54)

I told her about the meeting in the psychic’s shop on graduation day, what I’d drunk at Robin’s. Red Hook, the necklace of blood. I told her about the murders. The shortest version, no details. It was harder to save her when I got to the stalled subway car. She gripped the table’s edge and glared at me, gesturing fiercely for me to continue when I faltered.

The knife, the rhyme; the Hinterland, the ice.

The hardest thing was telling her I’d gone to Daphne when I was hurt, instead of coming home. Then I had to tell her about the wake, Genevieve’s body and the blood on my knees, and that was even harder. I told her just about everything but that Finch was sending me letters. For now, those were just for me.

I thought she’d look wrung out when I was done. Broken. Instead she looked hard, her eyes flinty and her mouth pressed thin.

“It’s not me. I would never—I don’t understand how it’s happening, but it’s not me.”

“Of course it’s not,” she said, her voice so scornful and certain I breathed deeply for the first time in days.

“There’s one more thing.” My stomach turned; it was, quite possibly, the ugliest thing. “The person—the murderer—whoever’s doing this. They’re taking something from each body. They’re taking a part.”

Ella was holding her lime and tonic loosely, rolling it from hand to hand. Now her hands went still.

“What parts?”

Her voice was taut.

“Um. Feet. Hands. And Vega … Vega’s tongue.”

“Oh,” she said in an altered tone.

“What? Does that mean something to you? What does it mean?”

She lifted a hand, signaled to the bartender. Reluctantly he sloped over, tossing a dirty towel over his shoulder.

“Can I get a glass of whiskey, neat?”

“We don’t serve till eight.” He looked pointedly at the clock hanging over the bar, a giveaway from some prescription drug company. “It’s seven forty-five.”

Ella pulled out her wallet and laid two twenties on the bar. “How about you give me the whiskey now, and you take my money at eight?”

He shrugged, poured a long few fingers of Wild Turkey into a Solo cup because it was that kind of place, and took the money.

She picked up the cup and drank half of it down, not even a wince. Then she placed it gently back on the bar.

“Do you want to hear a story?”

In my family, that was a loaded question. I wasn’t so sure I did.

“There’s a tale I almost forgot I knew. Althea told it to me once, a long time ago. Did I ever tell you—” She stopped, shaking her head. “Of course I didn’t. I never told you shit about my mother. I still don’t, even now.”

“It’s okay. It’s hard for you, I get it.”

“No, you don’t. You never will. It’s nineteen years’ worth of complicated, and we’re not getting into it now. I grew up in the Hazel Wood, remember. I grew up in that cracked-up, fucked-up, broken place. Between two worlds. Not of one, not of the other.

“You can’t imagine what it was like, living there with her getting sicker and sicker. And those creatures crawling in from the woods, and me sneaking out, half convinced I was one of them. But that’s—” She took another swallow. “That’s a story for another day.”

It wasn’t. We both knew she’d never tell me the entirety of that tale.

“It wasn’t easy being Althea’s kid, even before we moved to the Hazel Wood. But one thing I’ll say for her, she could spin a hell of a bedtime story. Stick with you for months. Give you nightmares for years.

“Althea and the Spinner, they were … not friends. Old adversaries, at best. They used to meet for tea sometimes, at the edge of the Halfway Wood.” She smiled at the look on my face. “Didn’t expect that? Well, boredom makes strange bedfellows. This was after my stepdad died, long after people stopped coming to stay. Althea would get all dressed up for it, like she was Norma Desmond or something. Even when I was little it was hard to watch. And she’d come home and tell me all the things they’d talked about, like it was this normal social call. I guess for her it was. I guess it was the only kind of social she got. The Hinterland treated me like a mascot, like a little changeling kid—untouchable. Althea, though, they messed with. Or worse than that, ignored. My god, you cannot fathom the depth of her loneliness.

“Okay,” she said, putting down her cup. “Okay. So there was one day when Althea came home from one of her tea parties and told me a story. She told me lots of stories, enough to make you sick on, but this one I remember. Because she told me—and she said this like it was an honor that she knew it, because even if she resented the Spinner she drank her Kool-Aid, too—she said it was the very first tale the Spinner had ever told.

“This story is called ‘The Night Country.’ And it is not a fairy tale.”





28


There’s no shortage of spilled blood in fairy tales. But this is not a fairy tale.

It’s a love story.

In a real world where blood was red as apples, as bitten lips, and spilled just once, there was a girl.

Always. Of course. A girl.

This girl was not a victim or victor. Not a maiden or a princess or a mother or a witch. She was a girl with chapped knuckles and curious eyes that saw everything. She was not a good person, by which I mean she was not good at being a person, which was okay because she lived in a world where girls were not expected to be good at anything. She was uninterested in the limitations of her sex, so she ignored them. Her obsession was with uncovering the workings of her world: what lay beneath.