The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(71)

“Everyone knows who you are. You’re almost as bad as Althea—you’re like a seam ripper moving around out there, letting the beasties through. Not that they manage out there long. None of the Stories can, but you.” Her eyes were alert; I could practically see her brain ticking. Suddenly I could see her at twenty-six, beautiful and quick and squeezing people for information on the doors between the worlds. “Alice-Three-Times. How did you do it?”

“I didn’t do anything. My … Ella. Althea’s daughter. She took me when I was a baby, from the Halfway Wood. Then she just ran with me. We moved a lot—bad things happened when we stood still. What do you mean, I’m a seam ripper?”

“Ella Proserpine. I remember hearing about her, even before she took you. Poor thing grew up wild in the Halfway Wood, in and out between worlds. She’s probably half mad by now.” Her eyes widened as she took in my expression. “Oh. What an idiot I am. All these years later—she must be like a mother to you.”

“She is my mother.” It was painful to think of Ella now—the narrow shape of her, always too skinny, the delicate face and ant-black hair inherited from a dead man. Her life in three sharp pieces, two of them nearly unknowable: The broken puzzle of the Hazel Wood. The perilous fringes of the Hinterland. And an escape that was its own kind of trap—a fugitive’s life on the road.

“Yes. Of course. She would’ve had to be, to do this for you. To take you away and keep you away—how curious.” Janet’s eyes were distant. “Do you know your story? ‘Alice-Three-Times’?”

“Part of it.”

“The leaps. In your age. Did they happen out there?”

Ella kept a stack of Polaroids in a fireproof metal box in our car’s glove compartment. Me stone-faced at age two, solemn at eight, glowering at fourteen. Me in the ocean, me on a bike, me with my fingers dipped in sugar water, reaching for a butterfly.

I shook my head. “No. I just grew up.”

Janet bit her nail, looking about nineteen. “So she pulled you onto another clock, and held you there. Maybe that’s it.” She sat up and held her fingers out straight, hovering them just over mine. “Tam, bring us a bowl of water. Alice, can I touch your hands?”

I nodded, and she brought her fingers lightly down on mine. She winced and drew them back. When Ingrid brought the water in a shallow clay dish, Janet told me to dip my fingers in.

I did. Nothing happened.

“Tell me again about Althea,” Janet said. “You say she was absent all your life?”

“Absent is a strong way to put it. I just … never met her.”

“Hmm. That boy you told me about. Ellery Finch.”

A beat. “What about him?”

“He was killed in front of you.” Her voice was cool. “And you did nothing to stop it. Could you have stopped it?”

The liquor was still working on me, and it made the words come before I could think. “I could have. I’m Alice-Three-Times, aren’t I? I think I could have.”

The words glittered in the air like gnats. I brought one wet hand to my mouth.

“I’m sorry,” Janet said, and she really looked it. “That was a stupid question. And ‘truth serum’ wasn’t the most precise way to put it. It’s more like—it works on what you think you know, not what’s necessarily true…”

Her sympathy closed in on me like smoke. “Don’t try to make me feel better about this. And don’t talk to me like I’m a child!” My voice went hard, and the water where my right hand still sat ran with ribbons of crackling freeze, hardening all the way up the sides of the bowl.

“Dammit!” I pulled my fingers out, rubbing them raw against new ice. Ingrid looked at me with frank awe, like I was a household saint. The patron saint of cold drinks, maybe.

“Dammit,” I said again. “How am I supposed to shower?”

“You have bigger problems, I think.” Janet studied me, her eyes faraway. “Alice, roll up your sleeves.”

I pushed them back tentatively, then quicker as horror flooded my heart, finally ripping the sweatshirt off over my head.

My arms were death-white to the shoulders. They looked like mannequin limbs, like deep-water creatures, like nothing that belonged to me.

I thought of the Briar King, gasping as my cold swept through him. What would happen when it climbed higher? Toward my throat? Into my lungs? My breath came short and fast.

Janet moved behind me, placed a comforting hand on my neck, where hopefully my skin still looked like skin. “Don’t panic. If anything, it’ll make it spread quicker.”

“The Spinner will know what to do,” Ingrid said. Her shoulders were hunched respectfully; I was worried she might try to genuflect in my direction.

“Maybe so. Alice, you’ll go to the Spinner in the morning.”

“Go where?”

“Hard to say. But if the Spinner wants to speak with you, it’ll happen.”

I had a horrific image of a giant spider in a sticky web. “Wait. The Spinner is human, right?”

Janet wiggled her hand in the air. “Eh. Again, hard to say.”

“I’m sorry.” I said it to Ingrid. Fear had chased the anger away, and now I just felt meek. “For bringing this into your home.”