The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(70)

Trees. Birches elms sycamores, saplings delicate as wrists. The Spinner tried to stop herself but couldn’t, reeling into the place their trunks had been—they were already gone. Stars blinked on like track lighting, then off again. We both stopped, waiting to see what the dark would spit out next.

A golden retriever burst from the air, ran a sloppy circle and vanished. A set table, a newspaper fluttering its pages. There was a pause, darkness bleeding back into the cracks the phantoms had made. I could hear her breathing. Then:

A city. Not all at once, but piece by piece. A yellow cab. A trashcan. A street cart and a cherry blossom tree and a building traced in mist and silver, rising into clouds the color of steamed milk. In a space the size of a single block, blistering the air, the city flashed and faded.

In the middle of it all, Finch kneeled with his head bent down, fingers dug into dirt, flower vines winding from his wrists to his shoulders. His hair was shot through with white, and when he lifted his chin, my heart folded over.

He looked like someone had stirred gray paint into his skin. Tendons stood out at his temples, his lips were scored. His eyes were losing their light.

“Finch,” I said, my voice as cracked as the teacup he held in one hand, squeezed into shards. Blood ran through his fingers.

“It’ll kill him.” The Spinner’s voice was bitter as walnut skin, relentless. “It’ll be a hard death. He’ll be skinned away from himself piece by piece. A new world is a void, it’s a hunger. I withstood it—I shaped my world, poured into it all the things I could afford to lose. He doesn’t know how. It’ll hollow him out like an egg.”

Finch heard her. His chin snapped up. All the swarming, erratic pieces of his city scattered and faded, till nothing was left but me and him and her and the velvety grip of the dark. When he spoke, his words laid themselves against the air.

“Once upon a time.

“Once upon a time there was a monster. She called herself a spinner, and she was. But she destroyed things, too. She made a world and called it hers, but didn’t understand it when the people she filled it with wanted more. More than blood and death and a story they couldn’t change.” He looked at her. “She gave them all the worst parts of being human and none of the things that made it worth it.”

The Spinner stood perfectly still, watching him through hooded eyes.

“So a hero came to the world she’d made.”

She laughed. I did, too, but mine came soft and surprised.

“The hero unraveled a corner of her world, and the whole thing fell to pieces.”

“It won’t work,” she said, her voice wound through with warning.

“So she made another,” he continued, dogged, his eyes desperate points in his weary face. He still gripped the ground. “She did terrible things to make it, but in the end it wasn’t hers. It pledged itself to the hero instead. And the world turned on her.”

Nothing happened. I could feel all three of us waiting, but the dark stayed dark.

“You’ll die,” said the Spinner. “You’ll die killing the world that made you. Oh, this is better than I planned.”

“The world found out her secrets,” he whispered. “It showed her as she really was. It showed her to the light.”

A light snapped on. Not a sun or a lamp but something in between, a molten ball of smokeless fire. By its illumination, the Spinner changed. Her hair shook out in yellow waves, her skin went the color of amber. She looked like me, once upon a time. Like a fairy-tale princess.

But her eyes. Still a frozen blue, they held the weight of centuries in them. Her shell was young, but the eyes peering out of it told the truth. She felt her face, fingers running over its contours. I could hear her thoughts clicking like beads.

Under her hands, her features solidified, strengthened. She looked older now, Ella’s age. Then older still, grown and beautiful, lines at the eyes.

“Oh,” she said. For the first and only time, I saw her look surprised.

Her skin loosened. It dropped at the chin and creased at the mouth. Those frightening eyes faded, wrinkled at the corners, and receded into seamed pockets, clouded over with a milky film.

“Stop it,” she said. Her voice was an old woman’s, but commanding. “Stop it now.”

Her bones warped and contracted, settling into arthritic curves. Her voice creaked like a stair. “If I die, my children go with me. If you kill this body, you’re killing them, too. You’re killing Alice.”

A beat passed.

“Wait,” he said. He didn’t lift his head.

The world waited. The Spinner didn’t die, she stood there in stasis. But I ran.

His hair was white all the way through, and I ran to him. Skidded to a stop in his patch of dirt. Before I could reach for him, a fence grew up between us, glittering with barbed wire.

“Don’t touch me,” he said, ragged. “I might kill you. I might dissolve you. You’re a Story. I’m a Spinner.”

I held on to my own arms. “Okay,” I said. “It’s okay.” Words were meaningless. They were all I could give him.

“Alice,” he said. He’d always liked saying my name. “What should I do?”

I looked at the slope of his shoulders and the soft of his mouth and the faded crackle of his beautiful eyes. “You should finish the story.”