The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(71)

The Spinner waited, vision iced over with cataracts. She didn’t beg.

“A cage,” he said, in his roughed-up voice. “The hero captured the monster, and he caged her. She was so dangerous he used a whole world to hold it. The cage had golden bars, and in it the monster slept. She slept for an eternity. She didn’t hurt anyone, and she dreamed of fairy tales.”

The cage closed her in like a nightingale. The Spinner had no final words. She shuffled forward half a step, then lay down. She didn’t move again.

Finch let out a breath. The fence between us dissolved, the light going out with an audible click. And he fell onto his side.

When I touched him I didn’t die, or dissolve. His breath came shallow as varnish and his skin looked yellowed in the glow of the bars. I worked by their light, peeling his fingers back from the broken china, picking out the shards and wiping the blood away. My own arm had stopped bleeding, now it just hurt. His eyes were half closed and his breath came at odd intervals.

“Finch.” He didn’t answer.

He could die here. He could die here in the dark, and I would be all alone.

So I let myself fall, slowly. I let my head drift to his shoulder and closed my eyes.

“I loved your letters,” I told him. “I’m bad at talking. I’m bad at just about everything. But I loved your letters. I wrote back to you, in my head. I’ve told you so much, I can’t even remember what I’ve really said and what you don’t know yet.”

All my heart was in my words. My bruised, inhuman heart.

“Did you feel it?” I whispered. “Did you hear it, when I talked to you?”

A pause, then his cheek brushed over my hair as he shook his head.

“That’s okay. I can tell you everything again. But we need to … we need to stand up and find the door. Before…”

Before there was nothing left on the other side to find.

“Okay.” I felt his breath as he said it.

Slowly I tilted my chin up. Too shy to look at him till the last moment.

His eyes weren’t soft anymore. They were focused and steady and they held me in their light. In them I could see all the Finches I had known. The fanboy and the wanderer and the traitor and the hero. He said my name again, and raised his hands to cup my face.

A sudden breeze slid over my neck. I reached up and felt the bare length of it, and the shorn ends of my hair.

My body tingled like a bumped funny bone. My hair was shorter, cut right up to my skull, like it was when I’d met him. When I looked down I was wearing tight black jeans with holes over the knees. A blue striped shirt. Things I wore when I was seventeen.

Finch snatched his hands away. “Shit. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know how it works.”

“It’s okay,” I said again, numbly. Lying through my teeth, through the horror of being remade by him. Of being reminded that here, I was nothing but Story stuff.

“No, it’s not. I’m not—I don’t want to change you, I just…”

“Stop,” I said, with more force. “Let’s find the door.”

“I’m the Spinner.” He said it like he was sorry. “This is my world. I can make the door.”

He didn’t look strong enough to make anything, but he stood up slowly, holding his hands out like a conductor.

The door he made was plain, unpainted wood. It wasn’t there, then it was. We stared at it, and we looked back to where the Spinner lay in her cage. She slept on.

Finch reached for my hand, before remembering. “Hold on to my shirt,” he said.

I grabbed him by the T-shirt, and hooked a finger through the frayed loop of his jeans. That was how we walked out of that world.





41


We stepped through into cold and the smell of dust and a flare of white light I tried to blink away, before realizing it wasn’t light, it was color. The warehouse wasn’t the place we’d left, fluorescent-lit and enunciated. It was smudged out, a pale ruin. We stepped over a clatter of little bones: all that was left of the creature the Spinner had made, who’d scratched at the Night Country door and let us in.

“How far do you think it goes?” His voice was as wrung-out as the room.

My phone was dead in my pocket. I wrapped my hand around it anyway. “I don’t know.”

“I did this,” Finch said. He spun in place slowly. “I did this.”

“Don’t you dare. Anything that’s left, it’s because of you. You did that.”

His bones pressed too close to the surface of his skin. Both of us were filthy, we stank of blood. I reached up and peeled away a petal that had stuck to his cheek, and thought of the letter he’d sent in the heart of a flower.

“You need to end it. You need to close the door.”

“End it?”

He looked so confused my heart spiked. “What’s wrong? Don’t you think you can? Do you not know how?”

“I know how to do it,” he said, sharp and certain. “I can feel how to do it. But … you heard what the Spinner said.”

The Spinner. Daphne. The monster and the woman who never existed. They blurred in my mind, a double image. “She said a lot of things.”

“You know what I’m talking about. If I end it—if I kill the world, and the Spinner in it—what happens to you?”