The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(9)

“Ilsa!” he said when he saw Sophia. He always used her Hinterland name, and she always corrected him.

“Sophia.” She nudged him with the toe of her shoe. “Alice is here, too.”

He unfolded from the ground, all six and a half wiry feet of him. Everything he felt beamed directly out of his face, and right now he was watching me with an uncharacteristic wariness. “You’re all right?”

“I’m good. You?”

“I’m well.” His jaw was tight. “Better than some. Aren’t I breathing?”

“Robin.” Sophia voice snapped like a rubber band.

It’s hard to stare down a beanstalk, but I tried it. “Do we have a problem?”

He shook his head, turning away. The way he did it hurt a little. I’d always thought he liked me.

Sophia ran a careful finger over a plant with spade-shaped leaves. “What’s wrong with this guy?”

Robin’s eloquent face darkened. “Not just that one.” He swept a hand over his sleeping garden. “All of them.”

I leaned in, throat thickening in the mossy air. The plants were limp. Dropping dead leaves. Some were speckled gray and white, some were as brown as my mother’s underfed rosemary bush. These were the plants Robin dried, ground, baked, and steeped, to be smoked, inhaled, eaten, or drunk—Hinterland plants, every one. He’d harvested them in a seam of trees that used to be in the Halfway Wood, where the door the ex-Stories escaped through once stood. I’d never tried any of them, but I’d heard what they could do to your body, to your head.

“Poor things,” Sophia murmured, her face almost tender. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. I’ve tried everything, but each day more succumb to it. I cannot turn them from dying.”

He still lapsed, sometimes, into talking like an extra in Game of Thrones. At least he came by it honestly.

Sophia crumpled a leaf into powder. “So get some more.”

“There aren’t any more. The ones in the woods, those are dying, too.”

“Strange,” Sophia murmured, and stood. “Tell me you’ve at least got something for Alice.”

“Alice.” The way he said it was halfway to a curse. “What does Alice need?”

The question pricked the wrong places of me. “Nothing from you. Soph, let’s go.”

She ignored me. “Something that’ll help her remember what it was like. What it felt like, in the Hinterland.”

“It seems to me she’s the last one who needs it.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. At the same time, Sophia reached way up and slapped him, midway between a joke and a knockout.

“Cut it out,” she said sharply. “If you want me coming back at all, stop being a shit.”

After a long moment he bowed to me slightly, looking harassed. “Fine. I’ve been rude.” His eyes slid over to Sophia. “I’ve got something that’ll make it up to you.”



* * *



We sat on Robin’s stoop in the quiet of the city in the middle of the night. Streetlight trapped itself inside the old Popov bottle in his hands, half filled with a viscous green liquid.

He tilted it. “The plants I used for this grew everywhere back home. They didn’t feed on sun. This works better under starlight.”

“What happens when I drink it?”

He grinned, looking like the devil he might’ve been in the Hinterland. “Only one way to know.”

I didn’t love altered states. I’d already lived in one. The most I went for now was the fuzz of one drink, the clarifying burr of caffeine. But I’d already run from the Hinterland once today. I wasn’t about to do it again.

I took the bottle. Sophia was gimlet-eyed, her hands under her thighs like she was trying to restrain them. The liquor smelled like the hills in The Sound of Music and shimmered over my tongue. It was bubbles in my bloodstream, helium in my head. “Damn,” I whispered.

Robin laughed, took the bottle and drank. He’d loosened up after Sophia slapped him. We passed it around, sitting on the steps, the liquid flashing through me like lights over water.

“Good to feel alive,” Sophia said, tilting her head way back. “While we still can.”

“Don’t,” said Robin, low.

The drink went coppery on my tongue. “She had parents, didn’t she?” I said abruptly. “Hansa?”

Sophia shrugged. “She had some people she lived with. I guess they were raising her.”

“Right. That’s parents. Do they go to meetings? Has anyone talked to them?”

“It’s bad luck to speak of sad things when you drink,” Robin said.

I opened my mouth to respond, and gasped.

I think we all felt it at once, the moment the magic hit our systems. Whatever they felt, for me it was a cold uprush, a scouring wind that came from below my heart. I squeezed my eyes shut, and opened them on a new world.

Brooklyn was still bath-warm and hazy, still concrete and iron and slabs of brown-and red-and cream-colored stone. It was still perched in that formless, deadly deep part of the night. But it was more. The trees stood out in 4D, some extra dimension making them denser, vivid, more articulate. Everything was as stark-edged as a Man Ray photograph, but it was flattened, too, its depth of field all out of whack. The waving buds of a magnolia tree and the town car idling half a block down looked as close to me as Sophia. The world seemed infinitely touchable, manipulable, the street a night-lit realm we could swim through like water.