The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(4)

He was the man who’d spirited me away in his blue Buick, the man I’d imagined was my father. His red hair was hidden, but I knew his eyes. Then I’d been little and only knew he was a grown-up. Now I could see how young he was—twenty, twenty-five at the outside. It was ten years since I’d seen him, and he looked exactly the same: impossibly young. It was impossible. But I knew with certainty it was him, and that he was here because of me.

As all of this hit me, he was already standing up, grabbing his book off the table, and striding out of the café. Before the bells on the door stopped jingling, I was after him. Someone’s laptop cord crossed my path, and I nearly sent the thing flying; by the time I finished apologizing and wrenched open the door, the man was out of sight. I looked up and down the quiet sidewalk, my hands itching to hold a cigarette—my mom and I had quit when we moved in with Harold.

But he was gone. After a few minutes, I went back inside.

On the table he’d left an empty cup. A balled napkin. And a feather, a comb, and a bone. The feather was dark gold, with a lacy glass-green tip. The comb was red plastic. The bone must’ve come from a chicken, but it had the shape of a human finger bone. It was bleached perfectly clean. The trio was laid out like a hieroglyph, a vague pi shape that impressed itself on my brain as I swept it all into my apron pocket.

“Okay, what was that?” I’d never seen Lana so curious about me before. “Girl, your … your lips look white. Did that guy do something to you?”

He kidnapped me when I was six. I think he might be a Time Lord. “Nobody. I mean, he was nobody. I was wrong, I thought I recognized him but I didn’t.”

“Nope. Nothing you just said is true, but fine. You’re going to sit here, and I’m going to bring you some food, and you’re not working anymore till you stop looking like crap. Oh, except I have to leave in twenty minutes, so hopefully you’ll look better by then.”

I sat down hard, my knees giving out partway. One of the engagement ring women frowned at me and tapped her cup, like we were the kind of place that did free refills. Oh, just tempt me, I thought, but I was too weak to get mad.

Too scared. Call it what it is, Alice. Maybe I could’ve talked myself into believing what I wanted so badly to believe—that he was a man I’d never seen before, who looked a little like someone I’d met briefly a decade ago. And maybe I could have forgotten about him altogether, if it weren’t for the book I’d seen in his hands as he sped out the door.

I hadn’t seen the book in years, but I knew what it was the instant I spied the familiar green cover.

He’d been reading Tales from the Hinterland, of course. Of course he had.





3


I was ten the first time I saw the book. Small enough for a pocket and bound in green hardback, its cover embossed in gold. Beneath its strange title, my grandmother’s name, all in uppercase.

I was already the kind of girl who closed my eyes and thumped the backs of furniture looking for hidden doors, and wished on second stars to the right whenever the night was dark enough to see them. Finding a green-and-gold book with a fairy-tale name in the very bottom of an otherwise boring chest of drawers thrilled me. I’d been poking around the attic of a family we were staying with, a loaded couple with a two-year-old son who didn’t mind hiring a live-in nanny with a kid of her own. We’d stayed in their spare bedroom the whole first half of my fifth-grade year, miraculously without incident, until the husband’s increasing friendliness to Ella made her call it.

I’d sat cross-legged on the attic’s tacky rag rug and opened the book reverently, tracing my finger down the table of contents. Of course I knew my grandmother was an author, but I’d been pretty incurious about her up to that point. I was told almost nothing about her, and assumed she wrote dry grown-up stuff I wouldn’t have wanted to read anyway. But this was clearly a storybook, and it looked like the best kind, too: a book of fairy tales. There were twelve in all.

The Door That Wasn’t There

Hansa the Traveler

The Clockwork Bride

Jenny and the Night Women

The Skinned Maiden

Alice-Three-Times

The House Under the Stairwell

Ilsa Waits

The Sea Cellar

The Mother and the Dagger

Twice-Killed Katherine

Death and the Woodwife

Being named Alice, of course I’d flipped straight to “Alice-Three-Times.” The pages rippled like they’d once been wet, and smelled like the dusty violet candies my mother loved and I hated. I still remembered the story’s first line, which was all I had time to read before Ella came in, tipped off by mother-radar, and ripped the book from my hands.

When Alice was born, her eyes were black from end to end, and the midwife didn’t stay long enough to wash her.

It was so creepy it made my heart squeeze, and I was glad to see Ella. I didn’t understand why her eyes were so bright, why she was breathing so hard. “This book isn’t for children,” she said shrilly.

I wasn’t sure what to say. My mom never told me I was too young for anything. When I asked her where babies came from, she told me in Nature Channel–level detail. If her friends tried to change the topic of conversation when I walked into a room, Ella would wave away their concern. “She knows perfectly well what an overdose is,” she’d say. “Don’t insult her intelligence.” Then, more likely than not, she’d tap her glass and tip her head toward the kitchen, where I’d dutifully shake her up a perfect martini.