The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(66)

Ghost within, ghost without.

I’d thought one night that I’d seen Daphne in my room, as I was waking from a bad dream. My chest hurting like something broken. I’d been right.

“Who are you?” I took her in, the blood-and-cream beauty of her. “What were you?”

She flashed her awful teeth. “Wicked stepmother.”

“Tell me the truth.”

She let her chin rise. “I was a queen.”

“No, you weren’t.”

She smiled. She grew a little smaller, I swore she did. “I was a maiden.”

“No. You weren’t.”

When she shifted, the light played unkindly over her skin, sudden wrinkles by her lips.

“A crone, then.”

“No,” I whispered. “You weren’t that, either.”

“Clever, clever.” Her eyes were blue. She’d always had the Spinner’s eyes, and I’d looked right past them.

“You didn’t have a tale, did you?”

“I had every tale,” she said.

“Oh. Oh, my god,” Finch said, half a step behind me but figuring it out now.

The Spinner smiled at him, shrugging Daphne off like a coat. Not much about her changed. Her hair was still red, her eyes as blue as they’d ever been. But the role she’d played for months was gone.

“Not a god,” she said, winking at him. “And certainly not yours.”

“You used her like a weapon. Used me.” I looked at little Alice, and wondered if she’d minded. If killing for the Spinner made any impression on her at all.

“This is why you pulled me back in?” I asked. “Why you kept an eye on me?”

“Pulled you back in?” she said scornfully. “You never left. You were always where I could reach you. But I wanted you nearer, I wanted you scared, I wanted you to see the damage you could do. Back when you were just mine.”

“What did you tell them to make them die for you? What did you tell Hansa?”

“I told them who I am. I told them about the Night Country, that they could help me build a new world. Was I lying?”

“They loved you. They thought you were protecting them!”

“I lit your candles,” she said. “They’re mine to blow out.”

My voice was thick, the arm holding my phone up starting to quiver. “Where’s Sophia?”

The Spinner looked past me, her Cheshire smile growing. The stranger Finch arrived with had been silent through everything, leaning against the door.

“Iolanthe,” the Spinner said. “It’s good to see you.”

The woman inclined her head.

“Waiting on your payment, are you?”

“That’s right.” The stranger’s voice was steady, her face honed as a blade. She wouldn’t look at Finch.

“On delivery, as promised.” The Spinner brought a hardback out from somewhere and winged it over. “I wish you a happy homecoming.”

The stranger caught the book against her chest, turned toward the door, then paused. “I am sorry,” she said to Finch, still not looking. “I couldn’t say no. But I kept my promise, didn’t I? Here you are, back with your girl.”

“You dirtbag,” he said in a dead voice. “You absolute piece of shit.”

The stranger shrugged. She walked back to the door they’d come from. Stepped through, closed it, and was gone.

“Where were we?” The Spinner smiled at us, pleas ant and distracted. I couldn’t believe I’d ever thought she was less than she was.

“A new Hinterland,” I said. “That’s what you’re making, aren’t you?”

Her laugh was scathing. She looked bleached in the light. “A new Hinterland? Just like that? You think it’s so easy, to build a world? To wrestle with the dark and the light, to hang its stars and balance its moon and coax each blade of grass to grow? To fill it with pretty monsters who tell themselves stories, live their stories, are the stories, to make the time go and the sun rise and the heart of it hold?

“The heart of it.” Her gaze clicked to Finch. “You ripped out my heart.”

His face looking back at her was calm. He looked like someone who’d been waiting on bad news for a very long time, and was relieved it had finally come.

“You play a long game,” he said.

“I’ve got nothing but time,” she replied. “Nothing.”

I looked between them and saw there was a chapter in their history I hadn’t read.

“Tell him,” she said to me. “Tell him the tale of the Night Country.”

He shook his head, once. “I already know it.”

“Not the neutered nursery story Iolanthe used on you like a hook,” she snapped. “The tale of my Night Country. Of how I made the Hinterland. The very first tale I ever told.”

“Where’s Sophia? Tell me that.”

The Spinner leaned over and said something into little Alice’s ear. The girl nodded and ran out of the light. I felt sick watching her go, seeing the way she held her spindly arms out from her sides, chin tilted down, the stance familiar from every photo Ella took of me in those purgatory years between ten and thirteen.

Silence, then a heavy click. Banks of fluorescents switched on overhead, illuminating what had been hiding in the dark.