The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(72)

“That’s good,” Janet said comfortingly. “That means your mind is still your own.”

Then she patted me and stepped away, her voice going brisk. “Enough stories for tonight. And enough Stories. The best thing you can do now is eat something and try to get some sleep. And wash yourself. You’re riper than cheese.”

I didn’t think that was the truth serum talking. It was just the truth.





26


Ellery Finch was in my dreams that night, alive then dead, and trying desperately to tell me something. Plumes of red smoke unrolled from his tongue when he opened his mouth. Twice-Killed Katherine whispered in my ear, and the green ground of the Hinterland rose up to meet me. I slammed into waking on a worn-out sleeping bag in front of the fire.

The first thing I did was sit up straight and peel off my shirt. The white had inched up my shoulders some, but it hadn’t reached my neck. I could still hide it away. I stood gingerly, as if moving too quickly might cause the freeze to spill over into my chest. Soon enough it would, I guessed, no matter how carefully I moved. When I pressed two fingers gently to my sternum it made my heart feel like it had brain freeze.

I could hear the companionable sounds of Janet and Ingrid in the next room, making food and talking low, laughing. Ingrid stepped lively when she saw me, handing me a mug of something that looked like coffee but smelled and tasted like kasha. She watched me like I might freeze her heart in her chest, or spit up diamonds.

Janet’s instructions for finding the Spinner were frustratingly vague. “Let it be known that you’re in this world, and the Spinner will find you,” she said. “It’s very likely the Spinner already knows.”

The dodgy pronouns still had me convinced I was walking right into Ron Weasley’s worst nightmare. “So I walk around yelling, ‘It’s me, Alice! I’m back!’?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Ingrid startled at Janet’s tone, watching me like I might take offense. “You just … let your sense of this world take over. It doesn’t matter where you’ve spent your life, you are of this place. Stop thinking of yourself as a tourist.”

She gave me a clean tunic thing to replace my ripped, disgusting sweatshirt, but I refused to part with my jeans. Just slipping them back on made me feel more human. More Earth human. When I finally left the cottage, giving Janet a grateful hug that made Ingrid very nervous, they lingered in the doorway like they were sending me off to school.

I walked toward the trees, shifting and whispering in the rinsed morning light. When I got close their whispering resolved, for a moment, into words.

Not this way.

I stopped short. A sweet release started in my limbs, the feeling a tree must get in spring, when its sap unfreezes and starts to run. When I blinked, I could see faces in the bark—funny ones, wizened ones, lovely ones. I blinked again and it passed, but the feeling remained. Following some inner compass, I turned away from the woods, walking back toward the cottage, then past it.

I didn’t know from acres, but Janet and Ingrid’s cottage backed onto enough cleared land that it took me at least ten minutes to cross it. It was covered in rambling vegetable gardens, an orchard of fruit trees, outbuildings, and long stretches of meadow where goats ripped at grass or watched me with their oblong eyes. I got the feeling they could talk to me if they chose, but they had nothing to say.

At the end of the property was a low white fence, and beyond that a dirt road. I hopped the fence and turned left. A girl in cutoffs passed me on a bicycle. When I turned to watch her go, she was watching me, too, peering back over her shoulder.

The road ambled along between stands of green. I tried to clear my mind and hold on to the feeling that had put me on this path, with mixed luck. I was always shit at meditation, no matter how often Ella made me try it. I smelled salt on the air and almost turned toward it—somewhere, not too far away, was a fairy-tale sea. But the Hinterland sense humming through me said it wasn’t the place I needed to go.

Once, through the trees, I saw a woman who looked like a sleepwalker, beautiful and wearing a blood-colored dress. Her hooded eyes met mine with interest, and she gave a tiny tilt of her head. It filled me with a stupid pleasure. It’s just like one Prius driver nodding to another, I told myself, but it was more than that. Something had changed since yesterday—I wasn’t lost. When the ground suddenly dipped, tipping my step down into a bowl of grass dotted with creamy pink blossoms, I felt like I’d seen it before. And when I came upon a boy all in white lying fast asleep, curled around a silver mirror, I felt like I’d been expecting him. The air around him was thick with magic, shimmering like a mirage over a hot black road. I tiptoed around his body and back up the other side.

I passed a few cottages, an army-green all-weather tent, and a lean-to made of flowering branches. Beneath it sheltered two long-haired children, who watched me pass with hopeless eyes. I hurried my step, thinking they were Stories, but once they were out of sight I wasn’t so sure. When I saw a Tudor-style tavern on a patch of overgrown grass, I couldn’t tell if it was curiosity or instinct that made me stop.

Judging by the sun, it wasn’t even noon yet, but the place was nearly full. When I walked in, less than half the heads bothered turning.

It was, without a doubt, a refugee bar. The crowd looked like the backpackers at a European hostel crossed with the cast of Medieval Times. I saw Converse sneakers and backpacks, peasant skirts and blue jeans. A girl wearing a tunic similar to mine was holding an ancient flip phone in her hand, rubbing a thumb over it like it was a good-luck charm.