The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(6)

I looked around the room. Most everyone had their backs to me now, watching him, and the faces I could see held their secrets.

“So I thought I’d come back,” he went on. “To a place where no one notices no one. The women here are even worse, but they’re easier to get rid of when you’re through. Less to take care of. I don’t even have to leave, I can stay in one place.”

I could’ve misread his words, if I’d wanted to. But I was a Hinterland woman listening to a Hinterland man. I understood that he’d hurt women, and would continue to hurt them if he could. When I looked at Daphne her face was easy. Still. She could’ve been listening to anything.

“I’m glad to be back,” he said, shifting in his overalls and slicing his face into an ugly grin. “They’re pretty here, I’ll give them that. And it feels like a bit of home, in this room.”

Nobody clapped, or said anything, but he whipped off his hat anyway, giving a little bow. As he leaned over, dirty red hair flopped over his forehead.

And I tasted again, with perfect clarity, the rot of his mouth in the Hinterland. The taste of death and hate and the rancid leavings of his last meal.

I knew this man, because his tale had been my own.



* * *



“Alice-Three-Times,” the tale had been called. Again and again I’d lived through it in the Hinterland, a place that ran on the telling of tales. It was written down decades ago by my mother’s mother, Althea Proserpine, and bound within the pages of a book: Tales from the Hinterland. I’d been the princess in the story, this man the suitor who’d won me. To be his wife, or his servant, or worse. In the tale, I killed him before we got far enough to find out, tipping ice into his veins with a kiss. I didn’t know any more than that, because someone had made it his mission to free me from the story.

But in this world, outside the broken borders of the place that bonded me and this violent man, I ran. Crouching down so he wouldn’t see me, I shoved through the crowd of my kin. Past Daphne, who looked at me sharp, then pounding down the steps to the street.

The low gray sky had finally broken. Clouds slopped loose of each other like soaked-through paper, letting in a steady rain. I kept running when I hit the sidewalk. Maybe the raindrops should’ve felt cleansing, but they were warm as tongues, warm as blood. I stopped under a bodega’s green awning and tried to pull myself together.

I’d fought for this life. Normal. Boring. All the days proceeding in an orderly fashion. I’d been imprisoned fighting for it, broken my mother’s heart on my way to it, ripped through cosmic walls to win it. I hated all of them for reminding me how flimsy my normal could be: Daphne. That awful man. Whoever had killed poor Hansa.

What if it was the man from my tale who’d done it? It seemed possible. I’d only met one figure from my story in this world before: the man’s younger, better brother. Once when I was six years old, and he coaxed me into a stolen car, and again when I was seventeen. But I hadn’t seen him since. Not all of us had left the Hinterland after my broken tale tipped over like a domino, knocking the rest of the world askew. After I got out—after someone long gone helped break me out—the tales fell apart faster than the Spinner could spin them. There was a time I’d thought the Hinterland was gone completely, but I learned that it was still out there, still bleeding, like a slashed-up magical apple dripping its juice. Only its doors were now closed.

I stood beside a cooler of watermelon halves stuck like oysters in ice, smelling rain and exhaust and cut tulips. I closed my eyes just long enough to trace the memory of his face: the boy who helped me break free.

When this place felt too hot and bright, too busy too angry too iced with electric lights, I thought of Ellery Finch, traveling through other worlds. Finding them behind hidden doors, under acorn caps, inside steamer trunks. It was nice in there, inside this daydream. I used to never let myself think of him, but lately I figured, what’s the harm? It’s better than a meditation app.

When I was calm again, when I’d hardened my skin against the trio of deaths, against the man’s words and the violence inside them, I started walking. When I was sure nobody from the meeting had followed me, I got on the subway.

And I wondered. I wondered what it said about me now that I’d run from the man in the meeting, when in the Hinterland, I’d killed him.





4


Ella wasn’t home when I let myself in. Our AC was broken and she kept insisting she could fix it, which meant there was a scatter of tools by the overturned window unit and the air was so hot it practically wobbled. I stood in front of the fridge in rain-soaked clothes and ate a slice of leftover pizza, fanning the freezer door back and forth. I’d moved on to gelato out of the tub when something made me stop: from the back of the apartment, a quiet creak. The singular sound of a foot placed carefully on old floorboards.

I put the ice cream down. Behind me, the fridge strained and settled. Outside, a mockingbird imitated a cell phone. And from the back of the apartment came another creak.

My breath switched from automatic to manual. I walked down the hall, peering into the quiet rooms. Mine, Ella’s, our bathroom the size of a crow’s nest.

“Hello?”

My voice dropped like a pebble into the quiet, and I knew I was alone. A shaken-up idiot in an empty apartment, hallucinating the thing I was always waiting for: the return of bad luck.