The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(60)

Dragonflies. The size of postage stamps and playing cards, rising over our heads. The crowd looked up, mouths open in awe or shock or fear. When people lifted their phones to take photos, the fresh illumination gathered itself into winged form and flew away.

“Are you seeing this?” I asked Sophia.

She shook her head.

I should leave. I knew I should leave. But it was just so beautiful. The dragonflies moved like the Hinterland stars, they wheeled and sparked. People lifted their hands and the insects lit on them softly, catching their faces in cupped circles of light. When I lifted mine, Sophia slapped them down.

“Whatever you’re seeing isn’t real,” she snapped. “Pull yourself together.”

I watched a man in a flat cap catch a dragonfly between his palms, tilting it from hand to hand like a Slinky. Then he yelped.

“It bit me!”

He shook his hand hard, but the thing held on. It got bigger. It curled its wings around his hand. The music was loud, his scream louder, but I swear I could hear his skin sizzle.

More screaming. From across the room, then just behind me, then over by the door, like car alarms going off in rounds after a thunder clap. The dragonflies scuttled up sleeves and down shirtfronts, wrapped themselves around faces and necks and—I turned my head away, horrified—slipped into screaming mouths.

On the wall behind Sophia hung a massive canvas painted the mellow green of verdigris, its bottom half covered with little black slash marks the shape of swollen penne pastas. From the corner of my eye, I saw them tremble. I saw them move. My skin creeped and a scream pooled in my throat as they swarmed into a ball, then marched in a teeming black line off the canvas and over the wall.

Ella and I had roaches in Texas. Big fuckers, the kind that scattered when you turned on the kitchen light. The kind that flew, skimming over your hair and making you lose your mind. I wanted to lose my mind right then. I pointed wordlessly at the wall, pressing my lips together tight.

Sophia looked. “There’s nothing there,” she said grimly, grabbing my arm. “Time to go.”

But we couldn’t. The crowd had become a mob. There was more happening here than I could see; the sisters must’ve planted a different nightmare in each head. A woman in a beaded dress clawed at her front, ripping at the stitching, beads flying off her like water drops. A man bent over his knees, vomiting up a stream of light, like he’d swallowed a dozen vindictive dragonflies. Someone writhed on the ground, another person stamped and screamed. Panic spread like tear gas, till you couldn’t tell who the sisters had touched and who was just infected by the screaming.

And above it all, around it, their faces blissed out or wicked or utterly unconcerned, the Hinterlanders. Felix was there, I might’ve seen Robin. The seven sisters moved like priestesses, possessed, and Daphne was up on the bar, dancing madly, wrapped in her falling red hair.

Godless. Nora’s words at the wake came back to me, an icy jet turning my stomach cold. With the Spinner long gone and the Hinterland dead, she’d feared its creatures and their acts would grow wilder, godless.

It’s happened, I thought. We’re here. Then the chain of little paint bugs was skittering toward me, over fallen bodies and around dancers, and I couldn’t help it: I screamed.

Sophia pressed her hands over my eyes. “You’re fine,” she said. “You’re fine. Nothing real is happening here. I’ve got you, got it? You’re fine.”

I couldn’t see her, but her hands were warm as a compress, her winey breath sour on my face. The rational line of her voice drew me back from terror, and other thoughts got in. I remembered why I was there, what I needed to tell her. I steadied myself.

“When we get out of here—I need to talk to you.”

“Talk now. Distract yourself.”

Screams of anguish, sugary laughter.

“Death, Soph. If he … if he found you. If he wanted you to—would you go with him?”

“Alice.” She said it with such tenderness.

My knees bent a little, but I stayed up. “You could wait,” I said. “Till I’m old. If I get old. We could go down together.”

“Is that what you wanted to say to me?”

“That, and … I don’t think they’re being murdered. Or, I don’t think that’s all it is.”

She kept her hands over my eyes. Around us the partygoers shifted and shrieked, we rocked like a boat on a tide.

“I talked to my mom. She told me a story.” I wasn’t sure how to tell it, didn’t want to try to in the middle of this haunted room. “Have you ever heard a tale called ‘The Night Country’?”

Her hands fell from my eyes. Her face was too vulnerable, soft as a mollusk. “What did you say?”

Then a scream came from above, and we both looked up.

A woman teetered at the edge of the loft, in a blue dress and bare feet. She was half screaming, half laughing, hysterical and high, her hands grappling at some invisible thing around her throat.

“Oh, shit.” I held up a hand. “Oh, wait—”

She went down. Sideways, almost slipping over the railing but instead she hit the stairs, tumbling in an awful slapstick pinwheel.

I didn’t see how it ended. Sophia wrapped an arm around my neck and the other around my waist and pulled me in tight.

I spoke into her shoulder. “Tell me. Tell me that wasn’t real.”