The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(67)

Traveling around the Hazel Wood had given me vertigo, but this felt different. It felt exhilarating. When I looked up, I was standing in front of the red-painted door of a pretty cottage. The woods were at my back, and it was nearly night.





25


Without trees in the way, I could see the sky. The moon’s face was clearer here, that of a beautiful woman with grief lines around her eyes and mouth. Stars tried to crowd in around her, but she kept them at a distance.

The door clicked open, letting out flickering warm light and the civilized smell of cooking meat. The woman who stood in the doorway looked farm strong and fiftyish, her hair in a fat, chest-length blonde braid pulled over one shoulder. She eyed me with open displeasure.

“Are you Janet?” I asked at the same time she yelled, “Janet, one of your strays!” Then, “Make yourself welcome.” She said it grudgingly, standing away from the door.

I walked into a room so warm with food and fire I could’ve cried. I nearly stretched my hands toward the blaze in the open hearth on one end of the large, plain room, before remembering and fumbling the glove onto my bare hand behind my back.

“Look at that,” she said. My heart jumped, but she was inspecting the ink that showed over my collar—the top of my spiky tattoo. “How does a new arrival have a Hinterland flower on her skin?” Her voice rang with a stronger version of the clipped accent I’d heard on the Hershey’s man.

“I didn’t know it was a Hinterland flower.” But it made sense. I’d always been fascinated by the piece of alien flora climbing my mother’s arm, and never understood her horror when I had it inked on my own in tribute. Now I got it: this place was in me, of me. The tattoo meant she had to see it on me, too.

“Let her breathe a minute, Tam, she just got here.” The woman who said it had come through a door in the back of the room. She wore overalls that were more patches than denim, and her wet, graying hair hung loose down her back.

“You’re Janet.”

“I am. And this is my Tam Lin. Though you can call her Ingrid.” She gestured at the blonde, who’d come protectively to her side.

I nodded to show I got the reference, though I wondered what their story was, that it fit. “Someone told me you were the one to see, if I were a refugee.”

“Someone was right, if you’re a refugee. I’ll admit the tattoo is surprising. You’re sure you’re a new arrival?” Her voice was good-natured, but her eyes were sharp. She took in the gloves I was wearing, the cheap, shiny material of my new jeans, whatever was left of the eyeliner I’d put on that morning.

“I’m sure.”

Ingrid muttered a word I’d never heard before, in a voice I didn’t like.

“Here.” From a cabinet against the wall Janet pulled out an opaque bottle and three thin-necked glasses, laying them out on a wooden table that had had a former life as a stump. She opened the bottle and poured an inch of liquid into each. It hit the glass like vapor, then resolved into something clear and colorless. “Ingrid will like you better if we drink to our friendship first.”

Janet was better at subterfuge than her girlfriend. She lifted a glass easily, but Ingrid gripped hers like it was a bomb, watching carefully to see if I would take a sip.

I’d lost my fear of fairy food since Althea told me a bedtime story in the dark, but that didn’t mean I wanted to drink something that was probably brewed in a bathtub. “Is it poison?” I asked.

Janet grinned. “You’ve a wretched poker face, Tam. Here, look—to your health.” She took a swig, pressed her lips together.

I sniffed mine—no scent—and did the same. It passed over my tongue like water, but landed in my chest like liquor. Then the taste hit. “Apple Jolly Ranchers,” I said, confused. They were my favorite candy when I was little. “Or, wait. Flowers. Violet candies. No, no, it’s like butterscotch sauce.” I saw Ella, simmering sugar and butter in the pan. “Now it’s sort of, God, it tastes like a latte.” Specifically, the off-menu kind I made for myself at Salty Dog, with honey and lavender syrup. I felt like Violet Beauregarde, babbling about what she was tasting right before she blew up like a blueberry. “What is that stuff?” I gasped.

“Truth serum, more or less.” Janet smiled sympathetically at my expression. “We might’ve believed you without it, dear, but this keeps everyone honest.”

“But you took it, too.”

“We don’t have many secrets between us, Tam and I. And it’s more sportsmanlike this way. You look like absolute hell, I have to say. Maybe let that mess on your head grow out a bit.” She clapped a hand over her mouth.

“It works quick,” I said dryly.

“You’re a pretty girl,” she amended. “But you could do with a bath and a night’s sleep.”

“A year’s sleep, you mean.” Then I squashed my mouth shut, before all kinds of observations popped out. You look like you should be on a crystal healing retreat in Ithaca. Did you know your house smells like fire and blood?

“Where did you come from, and why? You can give us the short version.” Ingrid’s tone was clipped.

“No fair,” I said. “She didn’t drink any.”

“Chop more firewood for us, love?” Janet said. It was only half a question.