The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(61)

“Shh,” she said. “Shh.” She tucked my hair behind my ears, the gesture so motherly I went still. Then she kissed me on the cheek, soft and open-eyed, and if I blinked I might’ve missed it: swimming in the lacquered amber canyon of her left eye, a round black absence. Like a freckle on her iris. If it had always been there, I’d never noticed.

The insects crawling around my feet were gone, the wicked dragonflies winked out. Maybe even the sisters had had their fill of fun. Someone turned the music off and the lights on as people blinked at each other, stunned, or started to cry. They clotted around the bottom of the stairs, they pulled out their phones. I looked around for Daphne, but couldn’t find her. Voices rose, and someone flung open the apartment door. Half of them were turning toward it, the other half rubbernecking the woman at the bottom of the stairs.

I was a coward, I didn’t want to see. Didn’t want to know how bad it was, what the Hinterland was responsible for.

“Come on.” When I turned to grab Sophia, she was gone. I looked for her, but the pack of bodies was carrying me toward the door. If I didn’t follow, they might’ve lifted me off my feet.

The scream of sirens came up from below, spiraling and distant and moving in. The crowd moved like a many-headed animal, bypassing the elevator, going straight for the cattle press of the stairs. I lost myself in the pack of strangers, shouting and crying and shoving in their rush, but human to their cores.





32


There was more than one trick to the pocket watch. Iolanthe told him the next morning, when they’d ventured into a pastoral world for breakfast and for the kind of air that felt good to breathe. The book she’d read from to get them there had been in a language of trilling runs and hard stops, which tickled the ear to hear it. When he opened his eyes, they were stepping into a meadow so idyllic it looked like a Thomas Kinkade print.

He lay down beside an honest-to-god haystack while Io went off to drum up some food—jerky, milk in a skin, bread with cheese and honey. All of it, even the bread, even the honey, tasted of goat.

In the lazy golden shade of the haystack, she pulled out her watch. It wasn’t completely blank, he realized: it was pearlescent, colors chasing themselves over its face.

“Wait for it,” she said.

A minute passed, and something showed: a string of numbers like a digital display, pinkish but unmistakably there. They darkened to red as he watched, then faded slowly to nothing.

“Call numbers,” she said. “Corresponding to books in the library, corresponding to worlds. Everywhere, in every world, a version of the Night Country tale exists. When the numbers show like that, someone in that world is reading the story, or hearing it. When the numbers turn solid, you know: that’s a world where someone is building it.”

“It has to be built?”

She’d taken a big bite of goat-flavored something; her “Yes” sprayed him with crumbs.

“And we … what? Jump in there and steal it?”

“Think of the picture book. The girl and the boy work together to make their world. It’s better that way, with more minds.”

“So you’re saying we’d be doing these random strangers a favor by appearing out of nowhere and trying to take over their world?”

She thought about it, dusting off her hands. “Yes.”

“But you say you can build a night country. How? Why don’t we just build one our—”

“Look,” she said testily. “I’ve got the magic watch, I’m telling you how this is gonna go.” Then, seeing his face: “No, no, we’re partners. Sorry, what did you want to know? How do you build a night country? That’s the thing, I don’t know how to do it. But somebody, somewhere does. We’ll find one in time.”

He should walk away. He knew he should. But the key was in the lock. Strange treasures awaited him beyond the door. And he’d already told Alice he was doing it, so. He didn’t want to go to her empty-handed. He had his green stacks of fairy gold, his magic pen, the mysterious walnut. He had a few new tricks—he could make goat cheese, drive fence posts, speak passable German. He’d gotten pretty into whittling for a while. But he didn’t think Alice wanted his carved rabbits that looked a hell of a lot like bears. Instead he would bring her what she loved best: stories. He was collecting all the tales he’d tell her when he got home. He was becoming his own kind of library.

Those were strange days. He and Io dipped into and out of worlds, spending a day or an hour or an evening in misty mountain villages, ruins sliced into gold and gray pieces by the falling sun, cities crisscrossed by elevated trains, or wreathed in strange overgrowth, or veined like Venice with waterways. She chose the books carefully, picking worlds where they’d be safe, where they’d blend in. Finch didn’t know how she knew, and she didn’t tell him.

They talked a lot, but she didn’t tell him much. Only tales of her travels through the Hinterland, and a little bit about her life when she was young—reckless, mischievous, underdisciplined. She loved to hear stories about New York if he could make them funny, but he took her lead, never sharing too much about himself.

A week passed. Two. One navy-blue night, drunk on clear liquor served in tiny glasses in a shanty bar on the edge of a vast red sea, Finch cracked open the walnut he’d taken from the Hinterland, which Grandma June gave back. He wanted to see the dress of stars, the meticulous white cat. What came out instead was a man’s voice, bellows deep and touched with stardust.