The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(64)

She was close. She was with someone I knew, I knew that laugh and could almost place it. I would find them both, I would dig through the dark. There was nothing in front of me but shadows and faint wedges of moonlight. I opened my mouth, took a step.

A door bobbed up from empty air.





34


Finch thought sometimes about the things he missed.

Showers. Real coffee. Soup dumplings. New books. Opening his eyes under the serene blue roof of a chlorinated pool, seeing the wobble of the distant lights. He missed dogs. The closest thing the Hinterland had was a roving tribe of mad cats, who slipped serenely into and out of the tales and looked so knowing he’d tried a few times, quietly, to start a conversation with one of them. No dice.

Despite all that, he didn’t think he really missed life on Earth. He told himself he was glad to let it go.

But when Iolanthe’s words opened a new door, and the molecules of the next world came through, he knew. When he breathed in the chemicals and metal and dead skin dust of the place that had made him, he understood he’d been telling himself another lie.





35


The door wasn’t there, then it was. A crooked rectangle like a child’s rendering, its seams all lined with light. It hung there a moment, defiant.

Then—it opened. Behind it was a wedge of chilled gray air the color of stone. Another day stood through that door. Another world. Was it the Night Country?

A woman stood in the doorway.

First she was just a shape, singed at the edges with light. Then she was a stranger stepping through, all dressed in shabby black, her pale blond hair in braids. Her eyes had the amoral shine of a cat’s. If she was surprised to see me, she gave no sign of it. She was a puzzle I might’ve kept staring at, but there was someone else coming in behind her.

Someone dazed and thin and taller than I remembered. His eyes were wide and his arms outstretched like he was walking into cold water.

I went still as snow.

There was so much I’d remembered wrong. He was leaner than he had been in my mind. Hungrier. He moved like someone hungry and restless. His jeans were worn to whiteness. He’d cut off his hair.

He hadn’t seen me yet. I had a little time to get my head around this. I had a few more seconds to get it right.





36


They were back on Earth. He knew it the way you know the shape of your body in the dark. He knew it by the specific way its gravity worked on him; he’d forgotten exactly how the air felt here, but his body remembered.

He let that air run through his fingers and felt a nameless grief pass through him. For something lost, something found. He was no stranger to nostalgia, but the feel and flavor of his abandoned world made a new kind of music in him, an endless complicated pain in his heart.

Io had stopped a few yards in front of him. She was looking at someone standing just beyond the door, the light of the last world shining full on her face.

A girl. She was petite, dressed like him: old jeans, tight T-shirt. Her hair was messy and brownish and she stood at odd attention, like she’d just received an electric shock. All that he took in at a glance. What he really saw was the way she was looking at him.

Like she knew him. Like she wanted to rush him. Hide from him. Kill him, maybe. Her gaze was so ferocious he didn’t notice at first how pretty she was, and when he did it was the beginning of the next revelation. The big one.

She was older. (His heart tugged; they’d lost time, more than he’d thought.) Sun-freckled and toughened. Her face held different things, and she’d only looked at him this way once, just once: right before she turned and left him, to walk off the edge of another world.

He tasted her name on his tongue.





37


My old idea of him and the reality standing here in front of me warred for a moment then crashed, into this boy—this man—with scarred brown skin and radiant eyes and his face flickering confusion, slipping past fear, then lighting up like a thousand fireflies, soft against the dark.

“Alice,” he said.

His names filled my mouth. I didn’t know which one to say, and I thought if I spoke I’d cry instead. He stepped past the silent, flat-eyed stranger, coming so close I could see the dark line on his neck, where a knife had dipped in. I saw the swallow under it, the nervous pulse.

If I could talk with my fingers, I thought. If I could just touch him, there, where his life had almost slipped out, and there, the place I’d scratched when he dragged me free of my tale, and there, where a dream version of me had kissed him once, in a pulsing ballroom in the Hazel Wood. Each touch would be a letter. I wouldn’t have to use any words. And maybe he did read my mind, just a little, because he swallowed again, and spoke.

“Did you get my letters?”

I opened my mouth, and my voice betrayed me: all my confusion and relief and fragile joy were in it. “Ellery,” I said. “Finch. I got all your letters.”

He smiled at me. Goofy, incandescent. He put his hands up and I knew what he wanted me to do was press my palms to his and let our fingers entwine. When I did, his folded so far over mine they nearly reached my wrists. He started laughing, and I did, too.

Laughing. It was hard to remember the last time I’d laughed over something good all the way through. But it scrubbed up against the rawest parts of me. I’d been something else the last time he saw me. Lost, yes. Messed up and confused. But full of hope. On my way home to Ella, love like a beam on water lighting my way. And he’d been a wanderer. Lost in his own way, but questing. He’d had a fairy tale land at his feet, and no reason to leave it.