The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(66)

I wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t stop. And wanting it scared me enough that I dropped my hand, breathing hard. Oh, I was cold. I was chilled through to my elbows now. I tucked them into my body like broken wings.

“What did you do to my mother?” I said it slow, so he would hear me.

The tattoos on his face had gone white; now they pulsed and juddered, warming back to black. He bared sharpened teeth at me and rolled his neck. “I can’t tell you a thing, no matter what you do to me. I never remember much from out there. Though I do remember her.” He shivered with pleasure. “Ella Proserpine. The blood in her sings to me. Her father’s blood, her blood—the same. I never forget the sound, not once I’ve heard it.”

Her father … Ella’s father. My skin shuddered back on my bones. Ella’s father died in the Village before she was born, leaving Althea a pregnant widow. Killed by a junkie, supposedly.

Or by something worse. Something shark-stupid and hungry that followed the scent of an old victim’s blood, pulsing in his daughter’s veins.

How much of our bad luck was him? And how much of it was the other monsters of the Hinterland, slipping in like shadows when we stayed in one place too long? I thought of the stack of newspaper clippings in Althea’s sad yellow kitchen, a history of deaths kept by their accidental enabler. The Hinterland’s sociopaths weren’t just our bad luck, they were the curse of anyone who wandered too close to the Hazel Wood, an acid-burned wall between the worlds where terrible things crawled in.

“If you hurt my mother, I will kill you.” I made my voice patient and calm. “I don’t care if you’re invincible here, or royalty. I’ll kill you, and I’ll make sure it hurts.”

“She’s not your mother, Alice-Three-Times,” he hissed. “And I think you’d be very glad indeed if I hurt the woman who is.”

Then his head twitched on his neck, the animal click of a predator scenting prey.

I followed his gaze to a point of moving green among the trees—a girl walking past us, nearly invisible in a leaf-colored dress. My stomach lurched: she stood chin up like a queen, and there was a head slung over her shoulder like a knapsack. She held it by a fistful of its bright yellow hair.

“Some of us have stories to attend to,” the Briar King said. “You’ll forgive me for not tending further to you.”

He gave me a look that made me want to take a shower in Pine-Sol, and set off after the girl.

When he was gone I picked up the glove where he’d dropped it. Stuffed it in my pocket. Ran.

I ran like something with sharp, pointy teeth was on my trail. It took me five minutes of tearing through trees to outrun the feeling of hands grabbing at me, breath on my neck.

The Briar King. I’d touched him, but he’d touched me, too. My hands thrummed with a poisonous feeling, like I’d picked up something toxic from his skin.

When I finally stopped to breathe, bent over my knees, I realized I’d left the path behind. Before I could curse my stupidity, I looked up and saw an old woman sitting cross-legged under an apple tree.

Aside from her eyes, which were bird-black, she looked like one of the old women you see carrying mesh shopping bags full of knobby brown roots in Chinatown, right down to the pink Crocs. She eyed my bare white hand.

“Hello, child,” she said.

“Hello, Grandmother,” I replied, panting. I’d read enough fairy tales to know the address.

“My back aches with the weight of all my years, but I am so hungry. Would you do me a kindness and pull down an apple from that tree?”

She looked spry enough to outrun me, honestly, but I wasn’t about to argue. The tree she sat beneath winked with green apples.

“Of course, Grandmother,” I said politely. The tree held its breath as I circled it, looking for a foothold. Its bark was smooth, its branches higher than my head.

“I grow weak with hunger, Granddaughter,” the woman said pleasantly.

I rolled my eyes when she couldn’t see me, and put one palm on the tree’s trunk.

It shivered at my touch, curling its branches in like petals, then flailing them out again. A bushel’s worth of apples rained down. The woman put up a pink silk parasol and waited it out. After one clocked me on the temple, I went into a hurricane crouch till they stopped.

“Thank you, Granddaughter,” the old woman said dryly, as I passed her a bruised apple. She dropped the parasol and rose to her feet. Her shoes were looking less like Crocs and more like rose-colored slippers, and her tracksuit unfolded into a glittering gown. Her wrinkles dropped away, leaving a face as fine-etched as a cameo.

“You were kind to me when you thought me an inconsequential old woman,” she droned, like a waitress going through the specials for the last table of the night. “I will repay that kindness by granting you a wish. Only one, so choose wisely.”

Despite the warnings of the Hershey’s man, my mind flashed to all the wishes I might ask for. Answers, for one. A magic mirror, to find Ella. Seven-league boots. Finch, alive beside me—but I didn’t think her powers stretched as far as that. So I sighed and followed his advice. “Send me to Janet.”

Her face fell. “Huh. Too easy.” She grabbed my shoulders, turned me around, and shoved. I stumbled forward. For a moment the world blinked around me like a camera shutter. I fell not onto grass but cobblestones.