The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(67)

In the tale it sounded tidy as doll parts. Two hands, two feet, two eyes, a tongue. In reality it looked like a massacre. Like aftermath. The pieces were laid out in the vague outline of a body, it was true, but it looked so sloppy, so utterly profane. The ground bucked under my feet as I half walked, half swam toward the horror, scanning the pieces till I found what I was looking for.

The eyes. Dark gold, clipped from the optic nerves, their big-cat color unmistakable.

“Sophia.” I said it like a prayer, passing a hand above them. Like I could close them, seal this last piece of her away from harm. The Spinner was the one who’d truly made Sophia deathless. Of course she was the only one who could give death back.

Finch kneeled beside me, throat clicking dryly as he tried to pull me up, pull me away. But I stayed. I saw Hansa’s small foot and Genevieve’s rough one, corded with scar tissue. Vega’s chattering tongue, gone still. And I realized something was missing.

“My heart.” I looked at the Spinner. “That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? So you can take my heart.”

“Not exactly,” she said. Then she leaped at little Alice. Roped her hair around her arm, dragged her head back, and drove the hunting knife into her chest.





38


My own chest exploded with pain. My head fell back, and my vision went white. Into the whiteness came something glittering. Ice: the distant ceiling of an ice cave. Then it changed, to the moving roof of a grove of trees. I blinked and it changed again: I saw the face of a crying child, in a misty wood. My tongue tasted like honey, like salt. I saw the four of us from far overhead: Finch crouching over me, and the Spinner over little Alice, hoodie peeled back, the front of her black with blood. When Finch screamed my name, I didn’t know which one of us he was calling for.

Then I was back in my body, in my head, looking up at him.

“Jesus, are you okay?”

I tried to nod, but he was holding my face too tightly.

“She was a kid. She was a kid.” His eyes were shiny with shock. “How could she kill a kid?”

I tried to push up onto my elbows. My mouth tasted like blood and my chest felt like a crushed can but I talked as fast as I could. “She’ll kill everyone. The Night Country is a vampire. Whatever you’ve been told, it kills the world it’s made in. Do you understand me? If she takes Alice’s heart, if she makes the Night Country, this world will fall apart. Like the Hinterland did.”

“No,” he said, his voice stunned and new. Like he’d just remembered something. “It won’t be like that. It’ll go gray. The sky, the earth, all of it. It’ll be like Pompeii, like something out of a nightmare. This is your revenge, then?” He looked to where the Spinner must be. “A world for a world?”

I heard her voice from behind me. “Poetic, isn’t it?”

Finch helped me sit up. I couldn’t look at the boneless crumple of my younger self. The black-eyed shell of me, what I would’ve been if Ella hadn’t stolen me away, hadn’t loved me. Instead I looked at the Spinner, holding a freshly harvested heart in upraised palms, looking like a sorceress, like Circe, so packed full of malevolent magic the air around her seemed to ripple.

I leaned over and snatched up the closest piece: Hansa’s foot, scraps of purple polish still clinging to its toes. I pulled my arm back, but before I could chuck it—to stall her, at least—the Spinner was running at me with the knife.

She ran it down the sunburnt line of my arm. The blade was a brute, dulled on the chamber of little Al ice’s chest. The Spinner dropped the heart in place with her other hand, then braceleted it around my arm and slid it over the slice, squeezing. I screamed at the rusty pain of it. Finch lunged at her, but she’d already let me go.

“And blood to bless it,” she said, half shrieking it, and shook out her hands.

Drops of blood, my blood, flung themselves over the pieces. The foot I’d let fall when she cut me, the sci-fi meat of the heart. Sophia’s golden eyes. Finch was talking in my ear, he was tending to my bleeding arm, but all I could hear was silence.

The silence of a turned corner. The wait between the drop and the crash. Maybe it won’t work, I thought desperately. Maybe she forgot one thing, did one thing wrong.

Then the singing began. Pure tone, high and sweet and cold as a spring. It came from Vega’s tongue.

I would never be able to explain it, how the air shuddered against the song. How it unpeeled itself, allowing something to crawl free of nothing. The tongue sang itself two rows of bright teeth. It sang itself a skull and the stacked ivory checkers of a spinal cord, the cage and cradle of ribs and pelvis. The long bones of the limbs swarmed toward severed hands and feet, one leg blooming odd and overextended to reach Hansa’s foot where I’d dropped it. The busy bloody tumult of muscle and organ and tendon, so ripe I couldn’t blink, couldn’t breathe, then the relief of skin sliding over it like a paper window shade.

The singing stopped, but the notes still scraped against the air, arcs of hot sharp sound. I didn’t think my ears would ever be empty of it. I was pressed against Finch, both of us so sweaty I couldn’t tell what was him and what was me. When the body stood up we gasped in a breath together.

It was a girl. Bald-headed, its skin a calico patchwork, its eyes my dead friend’s. Its heart drummed so loud we could hear it through its new-sprung skin.