The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(40)

“I don’t want to play your stupid game anymore,” I said, turning toward the window. “And who uses a car game as an excuse to brag about having sex with some bitch in a park?”

“Some bitch? She was my girlfriend for eight months. It’s so ugly when girls call each other that word.”

“Oh, my god, Finch, go get a liberal arts degree.”

In a perfect world I would’ve had headphones I could put on right then, and a cigarette I could smoke in his airspace, but this was not a perfect world. I settled for turning my head and staring out the window, letting all the little alphabetized memories fall from my brain like snow.

The silence in the car stretched, stretched, and finally slackened, when it became clear nobody was going to break it. Good.

I was staring into the scrub by the side of the road when traffic let up. Finch eased ahead at a steady clip, and the radio turned into a soothing drone as I drifted into the fugue state of the emotionally exhausted long-distance traveler. Without distraction, Ella’s absence was settling back into my bones. As long as we were moving, the panic abated. Every time I saw brake lights, it kicked back to life.

Scrub turned into trees turned into a thin woods. We veered off the main road and onto something two-lane and winding. Dimly I saw a wobbling light by the side of the road ahead of us, and squinted toward it. A headlamp, on a man in ridiculous bike pants. He was jogging in place, fingers on the pulse beneath his chin. It looked silly, I smiled. Then a dark-skinned woman in a snow-colored dress materialized beside him and put her mouth to his throat.

The car flew past, road and jogger and woman hurtling into blackness behind us. “Did you see that?” I screeched. Finch jumped, the car swerving to the right.

“What?”

“That jogger—that woman—” What exactly had I seen? “Are there vampires in the Hinterland?”

His hands tightened on the wheel. “Oh, my god. Not exactly.”

“Turn around.”

Finch slowed and pulled a U-turn. As we retraced our path, I strained for the sight of a headlamp, or the hump of two shapes in the dim. But there was nothing to see. After five minutes of slow driving, Finch turned us around again.

“You’re sure you saw something? You were kind of drifting off, right?”

I gave him a dirty look, though it was true. Had my overwhelmed mind cooked up some waking nightmare out of scary stories and the dark? I remembered the article I’d ripped out at Ness’s apartment—left behind, along with my school uniform, in the Target bathroom.

“Pull over quick.”

His eyes flicked to the trees, shuffling their leaves in the navy near-dark. “Wait. Let’s get farther away.” He drove ten more minutes, leaving the site of whatever I’d seen far behind us, then pulled the car onto the shoulder and brought his hand down on the power locks. The car ticked to quiet and night pressed close against the windows.

I searched on my phone for deaths upstate new york. The first hit was the article I’d seen at Ness’s.

Police Launch Probe into Upstate Killings

The tiny hamlet of Birch, New York, has lately been at the center of a statewide investigation …

“What are you looking at?”

“Birch,” I said. “Birch, New York. That’s where we should go.”

“Why? What did you find?”

“The jogger murders upstate.”

His eyes went wide. “Hinterland?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. They’ve been going on for months, and they’re all messed up in some way. Like, Twice-Killed Katherine messed up.” I hesitated, scanning the tree line. “What did you mean, not vampires exactly?”

Finch faked a shudder. “‘Jenny and the Night Women.’”

I remembered the name from Althea’s table of contents. “How does that one go?”

“Jenny’s a spoiled brat farmer’s daughter who doesn’t like the word ‘no.’ She meets a creepy little kid in the woods who tells her how she can get back at her parents—prick their heels while they’re sleeping, wash a stone in the blood, and bury it under their window. She does it, and it lets the Night Women in. Which is, you know, a pretty big mistake.”

Something was sparking in my mind, an ancient, paper-flat memory trying to rise. I ran a finger over the nick in my chin. “Is there a story about—” I tried to think, but reaching for the memory was like trying to catch minnows with my fingertips.

Chicago. The raking sound of Ella’s scream. Light around a door …

“A door,” I finished. “There’s a story in the book, something to do with a door. How does that one go?”

“‘The Door That Wasn’t There.’ Why that one?”

“Just tell me.”

He hesitated, ducking his head to look out at the trees. “Okay. Here’s what I remember.”





16


There was once a rich merchant who lived at the edge of the woods, in a tiny town in the Hinterland. He spent most of his time traveling but was at home long enough to give his wife two daughters, the eldest dark and the youngest golden, born one year apart.

Their father was distant and their mother was strange, often shutting herself up in her room for hours. The girls could hear her speaking to someone when they pressed their ears to the door, but only the eldest, Anya, ever heard anyone answer. The voice she heard was so thin and rustling, she could almost believe it was leaves against the window.