The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(63)
Althea looked at me, eyes bleak. “She knew I was a bridge. She didn’t know you were one, too.”
It hit me like delayed pain. It had always been me. My black energy leaking into the air like blood, and the Hinterland like sharks on its trail. All the years we’d spent running, we were running from me.
“So they’ll always find me?” I whispered. “No matter where I go?”
“They are you. You’re all made of the same stuff.” Her voice was almost sympathetic. “It’s hard, isn’t it, to find you’re not at all the thing you thought you were?” She pointed at herself, her words poison-tipped. “Intrepid adventurer.” Then at me. “Real live girl.”
I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t believe in a world outside of that room. “So what happens to a girl like me?” I asked dully. “If the letter had worked, if she’d brought me back. What would you have done with me?”
“But it did work after all, didn’t it? It just worked slow. It made you stand still, long enough for those monsters to corral you into the Halfway Wood. But—you survived it. And you came here, to me, of your own free will. Did you not?”
The sharpened look in her eyes made me wary. “I … don’t know. I wanted to come here. But I didn’t want it like this.”
“We never do, do we? When we get what we want?” Then she peeled off her gloves and seized my hands. Her grip burned worse than Katherine’s, and I gasped, trying to wrench myself free.
“This is what happens to girls like you.” Her words were half curse, half plea. “She’s tried so long to get you back, Alice-Three-Times. And as long as you’re on the wrong side of the woods, she won’t let me die.”
“Who?” I could barely hear my own voice over the pain. “Who won’t let you die?”
She ignored me, looking up like the ceiling was the sky, and a vengeful god was watching her. “I’m giving her back to you!” she cried. “Now will you let me go?”
The heat spread up over my arms and down my chest, squeezing me in its fist till my vision burst open and swung with stars. I felt the tremor in Althea’s fingers, saw the wide yellows of her eyes, and her mouth shaping itself around some final words I couldn’t hear. A plea, an apology. A promise, a lie.
Then I was falling end over end like Carroll’s Alice, through space or water or clouds or atoms. The pain passed, and I felt alive, breath in my chest and blood in my muscles and nothing hurting. The room was gone, Althea was gone, and I was rushing through bracing air. When I landed with a numbing jolt, I was in the Hinterland.
24
I was back in the forest. But this was a forest that made the Halfway Wood feel like a Polaroid. It made the woods on Earth seem like the pencil sketches of a blind man who’d read about trees but never seen them.
In the Halfway Wood I wondered whether the trees could hear me, whether they could speak. Here they seemed practically to breathe. I’d landed with my back against a trunk as wide as a car, front to back, its bark covered in knots that suggested an implacable face. It dropped a rain of seeds into my lap. They were crescent-shaped and pinkie nail–sized, burnished the color of a harvest moon.
I looked up at the sky like I might see Althea’s face there, watching me through a rip in the blue. Then I stood up and started walking. What else was there to do? I was numb. Three degrees removed from the world I’d grown up in—a world that wasn’t even mine.
Finch is here. I remembered it with a feeling like jerking back from the brink of sleep. The Halfway Wood had tried to make me forget. Althea’s junk drawer of a house and the woman herself, going mad in a yellow room. But Finch was here. He’d lived, and he’d bled out in an in-between forest, and now his corpse was cooling in a world he’d wished for.
Was he buried? Was he burned? What did a place like this do with its dead? Thoughts of him made my fingers curl and ache. I shoved them into my pockets and walked through a world where everything—everything—seemed alive.
The sun was vast and low and not so bright that I couldn’t make out something happening in the fire of its surface, the tracings of a story so distant I’d never read it. Flowers furled into pellets or went lurid as I passed, sending out vapor trails of scent—cardamom, iced tea, Ella’s shampoo. This new world was too strange, too lucid; it made my mind explode in a dandelion puff. Everything had a revelatory crispness, like a new day seen through the lens of a coffee-fueled all-nighter. I started reciting stuff in my head to keep my thoughts within safe borders: The track lists of my favorite albums. The names of all the Harry Potter books in order. The places we’d lived, one by one. Chicago. Madison. Memphis. Nacogdoches. Taos.
It kept my mind wrapped around a thin blue wire of sanity and denial. But it was slipping. Ella, I knew now, was in the place I’d left behind. And I was in an alien world, surrounded by trees whose sentient interest in my passing ranged from distant friendliness to a ruffled annoyance that made me picture a dog smelling someone else’s pet on your clothes. I had Earth all over me. But underneath it, if Althea was to be believed, I was Hinterland.
I believed her. If for no other reason than how good my body felt moving through this wood. The air was crisp, almost autumnal, but everything in sight was lavishly green or flowering. The light was an ambient, suffused gold, and it did something funny to the shadows: they looked like black stamps. My own shadow gave the distinct impression of keeping up with me just to see what I’d do next; if I proved to be boring, I suspected it would ditch me.