The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(59)

Ten stories up, the elevator opened onto a hallway spilling over with strangers and sound, the door across the way held open by a woman’s back. She leaned against it in spike heels and a short red dress, eyes tilted up, laughing at something a man was yelling over the music. As I edged past her, into the apartment, she looked at me and stuck out a pointed tongue. Quick as a wink, then her attention was back on the man. My feet stuttered but I couldn’t place her before she let the door swing shut.

Stepping into the party felt like stepping into a mouth. There was art on the walls that looked real and a bar set up in the corner, which already made it way fancier than any party I’d ever creeped around the edges of, and either everyone was having fun or they were determined to look it. The music filled my head, loud and bright and beating like a heart, and I’d been there two minutes but already I couldn’t breathe. Across the room, doors opened onto a patio. I tunneled toward it.

It was cooler outside, the air braided with cigarette smoke and performative laughter. I put my elbows on the railing, looking out. The sky was black with a red echo, like Ella’s hair after she rinsed it with henna. A pair of women to my left were laughing too hard to talk, and on my other side a man sat on the railing smoking a joint, his feet hooked around the bars. I hadn’t seen Sophia yet, and was starting to wonder if she was here. This wasn’t her scene. She didn’t know people like this.

I’m here, I texted. Where are you?

I waited for her answer, watching a guy with pornographic chest hair struggle to get a lighter out of his painted-on jeans. My phone twitched twice.

We’re everywhere

We’re all around

Dread dusted my skin like moths’ wings. I looked up and combed the crowd.

Nobody I knew. Good-looking strangers in expensive clothes, with haircuts so ugly you just knew they cost two hundred bucks. I took a last breath of the balcony’s weird red air, and plunged back into the party.

It took a while for me to notice them.

There was no dance floor, but people danced in pockets, here and there. And wherever the dancing was too wild, too off-key, wherever it struck a note of odd discord, I saw them. A dark clock of them, counting down in a circle around me. Hinterland.

The man with the blue-black beard and trim suit running his tongue up a woman’s neck: Hinterland. The girl who looked about fifteen, in a dress that might’ve been a nightshirt, jumping in place and screaming like she was at a punk show: Hinterland. And the narrow-cut boy in black, and the crone with the razor-blade smile, and the woman in the tiny green dress, her hair the color of fresh blood. Daphne. Blazing a rippling path through the party, tugging people’s heads to turning.

Behind me, someone trailed their fingers over my bare arm and I swung around, expecting to see Sophia. It wasn’t Sophia, but I knew her. I’d last seen her in the hotel lobby. Dark skin and silvery hair, her eyes lined in the same starry color. She was one of the seven sisters who moved together in a pack, always gloved, always whispering. Her gloves were off tonight, her nails filed to rose-thorn points. She smirked at me, mouth malevolent, then slipped on through the crowd, her hands seeking exposed skin. The way she moved made it look like she was dancing, but it was deliberate. She executed a dizzy turn, running an index finger over a woman’s clavicle.

She wasn’t alone. Her six sisters moved like pewter-headed matchsticks through the crowd, one of them climbing the stairs to the loft, all of them touching, touching, people turning around in confusion or anticipation, smiling at them or pulling away.

I looked at my arm where her touch had been, expecting to see something left behind: a bruise, a trail of iridescence. There was nothing.

“I can’t believe she touched you.” Sophia spoke into my ear.

Relief threw me off balance. I grabbed her arm. “You’re here.”

“I told you I would be.” Her face was tense. “Alice, you should go.”

“Not till we talk. I’ve been looking for you, where’ve you been?”

“I’m sorry about that. I really am. But right now, you need to go, or things are gonna get bad for you.”

“Things aren’t bad enough?”

She nodded toward the sister who’d touched me. “In the Hinterland their touch could make you hallucinate. They could make you see anything. They’re not as strong here, but still. You should go.”

My heart went hummingbird. “But they’re touching … they’re touching everybody. What are they trying to do?”

She spoke the words slowly, like she wanted me to really hear them. “Whatever they want to do.”

There were easily a hundred people here. More. What would the sisters make them see—make us see? And what would it do to all these bodies, in this tight space?

“Why are you here, then?” My voice was small. “What are you trying to do?”

Her gaze flicked over my shoulder. “I’m looking for a friend.”

I grabbed her hand. “You found me. Come on. There’s stuff I have to tell you, and I have to tell you now.”

“I can’t go, but you’d better. They can only mess with your head if you’re close.”

I had more to say, but just then every light in the room—every bulb and candle flame, the glowing end of every cigarette, the lit screen of every phone—shuddered and lifted. Blue and silver and orange and gold, rising to a soundtrack of gasps and screams. They shook out damp-looking wings made of light.