The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(73)

Parts of the borough were evacuated. A national emergency was called. Schools closed and flights were rerouted and the bridges all ran one way, clogged up with people trying to get out. The subway, I heard, was an absolute shitshow.

I didn’t disappear when Ellery Finch killed off his night country. I didn’t disintegrate or burn into ash. His world didn’t die screaming, or in flames. After all the blood and dismemberment, the death and the waste, it whined and rolled over beneath his hands. It winked out.

The door did, at least. I had to trust him when he told me the world was gone.

I’d opened my eyes and found Finch standing in front of me, looking at me like I was a door, too. The kind he wanted to walk through.

Hand in hand, we’d made our way out into the city, to see how far the damage spread. We found a world rendered in gray scale, littered with sleepers. Near its edges were silent police cars whirling their carnival lights, officers slumped inside them. Beyond that, a press of camera crews and bystanders, too thick to walk through without being caught.

We stole a car—borrowed it. Its driver-side door was open, the keys still in the ignition. We drove it slowly through the crowd, who scrambled away from us like the car was infected, too. It took some tricky driving to get clear of the ones who tried to follow us. I wanted to take it all the way to Brooklyn, but Finch argued that overstretched the definition of borrowed.

My phone didn’t work, neither of us had a watch, and we couldn’t tell if it was dusk or dawn. The sidewalks were full, the city ground down to observe the arrival of some strange disaster. We couldn’t get a cab to stop for us, didn’t dare try the train. Later we learned more than twenty-four hours had passed while we were in the Night Country. The sun was rising over an altered world as we walked together over the bridge.

We didn’t understood yet how big it all was. That even if we’d had a working phone between us, cell service was out around the city. We walked all the way home, Finch so weak by the end I worried I’d have to carry him. The keys still in my pocket were a miracle, but the apartment was empty when I let us in.

It was hours before she came home. Finch ate the ice cream from the freezer and all the pasta we had in the cabinet, with butter and pepper and Parmesan. I brewed him cups of coffee and watched him run his eyes over the surfaces of all the things he must’ve thought he’d never see again. We played every Beatles album we had. We took showers one at a time and stared at each other when we thought we might not get caught and it wasn’t till I was in clean clothes and he was in a towel and Ella’s biggest, oldest T-shirt that we kissed again, in the dark of the hall, because it’s harder to be brave when you’re not facing down the end of the world.

Her purse was gone, and her phone and her keys. That told me she’d gone out, that she’d be back, and I was too exhausted to believe anything else. I felt her imprint on the space, and I felt Sophia’s, too. Finch didn’t ask why I ducked my head out to check the fire escape, but he opened his arms when he saw I’d started to cry.

He let himself sleep, finally. I took the cushions off so we could both fit on the couch, Sam Cooke playing low and the pale sun dropping. All day we’d heard sirens come and go, like the whole city couldn’t settle, but now it was quiet at last, that incomplete, city kind of quiet.

I was drowsing off, too, when she came in like a hurricane, feet pounding up the stairs and key a panicked jangle in the lock, because she’d seen the lights on from the street.

I didn’t tell her much right then. Ella knew—she knew what had happened had something to do with me, and the Hinterland, and the hunch I’d been chasing. She’d been running around town looking for me, for other ex-Stories, anyone who could help her track me down.

She never found them. Neither did I. Whether they were lying low after what happened at the party, or had gotten wind of what Daphne really was and skipped town, or whether it was something else completely, they were unfindable. The hotel when I visited it a few days later was a ghost town, the lobby empty and the halls quiet. Half the keys were still behind the desk; Finch and I tried a few of the rooms, just to see. But the dust was already gathering. The whole place had a whiff of the condemned. And I wondered. What had really become of them, what manner of gone they were.

But first. There, in our apartment, hours after the cataclysm. Ella rushed me, so fierce I really thought she’d slap me this time, but she just pulled me in. Then she saw Finch, dead to the world, and pressed a hand to her mouth. I remembered then that I’d told her nothing about his letters.

“That’s him, isn’t it? That’s the boy who saved you.”

In the Hinterland, she meant. From my story. I didn’t know how to tell her everything he’d done, everything he’d saved. I just kissed her cheek, and reminded her.

“You saved me first.”

They liked each other. Once he’d woken up bleary-eyed and blinking, to the smell of the microwave burritos I’d run to the corner for. Of course they did. They had some very weird shit in common, and Finch was smart enough not to mention her mother.

Two days later I drove him to the Upper East Side. The city was a sluggish blend of empty and overrun, with an apocalyptic, carnival feel. We’d coast for a mile, treating red lights like stop signs, then spend twenty minutes crawling down a single block.

I sat on the hood of the car while he went up to see his dad. He was gone one hour, two. I jogged a couple of blocks to find a sandwich. After the third hour, I became paranoid: that his dad would try to keep him. Against his will, away from me. But when he finally came out, his father came with him. The man looked smaller than I’d imagined. Gray hair, shoulders bowed, hands gripping the back of his son’s shirt as he held him. They held each other long enough that I knew to look away.