The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(68)

It stood like a child. Back swayed, belly out, Sophia’s eyes in its head a new kind of blank, washed clean of history. Finch was saying things under his breath as we stared, a stream of whispered disbelief, but I couldn’t speak at all. This wasn’t magic like I’d seen—the snarled labyrinth of the Hazel Wood, the unlatched cages of the Hinterland. It was older. Cruder. This magic was a blunt and wily animal, fed on horrors.

The creature began to move. First in a dizzy circle, like it was getting its bearings, bobbing on its one odd leg. Getting used to being alive, if that’s what it was. Then—it began to dance.

None of us could look away: me, Finch, the Spinner. There were things so strange even she had to pay them witness. The creature’s limbs swung on joints loose as baby teeth. Spectral red shoes swirled around its feet, kicking off sparks. It picked up speed, it began to whirl. Every other second it broke from its spin, making darts at the air like a hopped-up cat.

And then I got it: the creature was looking for a weakness. The air here was thinning. Lightening. Lessening: it was looking for the place where it might break through.

We felt the moment when it found it, when those searching fingers made a tear in the world’s skin. The room’s atmosphere swelled and popped with a tinny huff. The Spinner laughed, high and wild.

A black keyhole hung on the air. Floating, detached, I’d say impossible if that word hadn’t been used up. The blackness spread, till it formed an archway high as a church door. The creature turned away from it, opening its mouth wide, like the boy in the fable getting ready to swallow the sea.

It took in a breath. I felt that breath beneath my ribs. All the colors I could see went flabby, watered like a cheap drink. Then it turned and exhaled all the life it had taken into that flat black doorway.

The dark woke up. A wind blew out. It smelled crackling and undone, and filled my hair with static. The patchwork girl moved more clumsily now, her purpose complete. She’d made the dark hungry; now it would feast on its own. She spun as she unraveled, gums receding, molars dropping like dice, jawbone falling after them. Ribs and intestines and tissue nibbled away by the air, till all that was left were the parts she’d been made of, falling to the floor in a harmless patter.

It was done. In the end, I hadn’t stopped it. In the end, I’d barely known how to try. I could feel Finch beside me, his hand clamping a ripped-off strip of his T-shirt around the slice in my arm. I felt Ella distant from me, somewhere else in this city. I imagined her head lifting from her pillow, or from a book, if the eerie turning of the world had left her sleepless.

And I remembered another piece of the story she’d told me.

The Spinner had made the Night Country that became the Hinterland. But it hadn’t become hers till she stepped inside it, imprinting herself on its land. I held that idea in my mind like a key. Like a blade. My mother had always worked so hard to arm me against the dark.

The Spinner moved toward the doorway, her face as soft as I’d ever seen it.

“Hello,” she crooned to it. “Hello, again.”

Her voice had changed. I think it was her true one. I think she might’ve forgotten about us entirely if we’d let her—she had her parasite, her cannibal, she’d fatten it up on New York and everything that lay beyond it, and we’d go out with a whimper. She’d gathered us here to watch her gloat, then to die with this world. That was her revenge.

Finch touched my uninjured arm.

“Don’t,” he said. Like there was anything left to wait for.

I spoke through gritted teeth. “We cannot let her go in there first.”

The Spinner heard me and smiled. “Go ahead, then. Go on.” My confusion made her smile thicken. “You’re a Story, sweetheart. Potential, given form. Through that door is pure potential. You go in there first, it’ll dissolve you like a sugar cube.”

Before she was done speaking, Finch was on his feet. He was running toward the door. He trusted me that much, after everything.

She met him there, knife in hand. I saw him hold back for a crucial second, then duck away as she swiped. I followed, trying to put myself between them, pulling out my pocketknife.

Potential, given form. Fuck that. I held the knife like a killer in a slasher flick and, screaming, brought it down into her shoulder. It went in half an inch and stuck. She bared her teeth but made no sound. Finch had both hands around her wrist, holding back her hunting knife, as she drove a knee into his gut.

We grappled there on the edge of the infant world. But the dark had a mind of its own. It knew who it really wanted, among us three.

It reached for him. I know it did. With bare black arms the Night Country drew Finch into itself, and the Spinner screamed. I saw his feet touch down on the formless ground. I saw it when the place seized hold of him, the way he breathed in like a wave had just slapped him, his eyes going round as shooter marbles. Then the Night Country folded over his head.

The Spinner screamed again. She threw the hunting knife in after him, the knife in her shoulder, ripped out two fistfuls of her hair and threw that, too. She stamped her foot like Rumpelstiltskin. Then, breathing hard, she dove in after him.

Looking into the dark was like looking into black water. As unknowable. As frightening. I braced myself against the iron-laced air, and jumped.





39


Finch always thought he was the center of the story. Who didn’t? And he was heartbroken every time he learned, again, that he wasn’t. That he’d known nothing, or all the wrong things, all along.