The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(73)

The bartender was a massive man wearing a dashiki and an impressive brown beard. When I bellied up to the bar, he was whistling a Beatles song.

“Hi,” he said. “What’ll it be?” His accent was French, I thought. With a touch of Hinterland laid over it.

“What do you have?”

He eyed me hungrily. “New arrival, is it?” His voice carried, and I sensed a ripple of interest in the room. “For you, I’ve got coffee, real coffee, but only if you can pay.”

My hands went automatically to my pockets, empty.

“Not in money,” he said. “In information.”

“About what?” I asked guardedly.

He arched a dark brow and leaned over the bar. This man looked like a Story, but the air around him was thin and breathable, and he smelled like nothing but hops and sweat. “About the world, of course. Ours.”

I had my gloves on and my sleeves pulled down low. “What do you want to know?”

“To start, what year you’re from. Then you get a drink on the house for every post-1972 song you can sing from start to finish. A free meal for each if you let me record you.”

“Leave her be.” A second bartender straightened up from where she’d been crouched behind the bar. “New house rule: no accosting new arrivals till their second time in the bar.”

She smiled at me. Her hair was yellow, and she wore an honest-to-God dirndl that pushed her breasts up. She looked like the St. Pauli girl.

“First drink’s on the house, newbie,” she said.

“But no coffee,” the bearded guy protested. “That’s only for trades.”

“Fine. Tea okay?” She turned and started pouring before I could respond. The tea was a thin brew the color of Mountain Dew. It smelled like pine needles but tasted pleasantly mild.

“Thanks,” I said, trying to peel my eyes off her hoisted chest. The other bartender did not make the same effort. He watched as she hopped over the bar and started gathering mugs and plates from the rickety tables, then spoke to me under his breath.

“Seriously, though. What year is it?”

I told him, and his mouth drew down at the corners. “Oh,” he said bravely. “Well. Did you bring any books with you?”

The other bartender overheard him and rolled her eyes, disappearing through a door behind the bar.

So I told him the plot of Harry Potter. And The Golden Compass. He plied me with free cups of a buttery yellow beer that tasted exactly like kiwis, and I sang rustily for his recorder—“Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Landslide,” “Billie Jean.” The recorder looked like something Alexander Graham Bell might’ve used, a jerry-rigged contraption of tubes, exposed wiring, and a skinny arm scribbling over a soft metal plate.

He saw me looking. “I don’t know how it works,” he confessed, flipping it over to show me its empty insides. “It shouldn’t.”

By then a small crowd had gathered around us, including a bronze-skinned woman with a drowsy, just-woken air to her, whom I read immediately as ex-Story. She was accompanied by a boy of about fifteen, wearing hip plastic glasses. An old man in an antique suit sipped endless mugs of bright green tea and listened to my singing attentively, flashing a parchment-colored smile. There were two barefoot dudes who looked like they’d stumbled in straight from Burning Man and put me on edge. They wore twinned expressions of total peace, but the whites of their eyes were shot through with red. The flora might be different here, but something growing nearby could make you high.

People drifted in and out, and the bartender—his name was Alain, and I had it wrong, he was Swiss—served me a plate of flatbread and stew spiced with something that caught at my throat. The shadows grew long over the bar, until finally he sighed and grabbed a leather satchel from the floor.

“I’m off,” he said. “You’re back to Janet’s tonight?” I’d told him where I came from, though not what I was after. He and everyone else in the bar seemed to know Janet.

I shrugged noncommittally and stretched, reaching inward for the otherworldly sense that drove me here. It twitched to life, half-drowned by liquor and talk and human connection. I’d kept my gloves on, and it almost let me forget I didn’t belong with these people. Unless I could figure out how to become ex-Story, this wasn’t my Hinterland. These weren’t my kind.

And if I couldn’t figure it out?

I could stay. The thought ghosted up from the part of my brain that plugged into the Hinterland like it was a mainframe. It carried with it a hard beat of fear, but beneath it, something else: surrender. After a life of running, always running. Meditating and counting and clinging to Ella’s hands in an effort to stay afloat on an oceanic anger.

I could do it, I thought. If I let myself believe Ella wasn’t back there waiting for me.

But if I let myself believe that, I would drown for good.

After Alain left, the blonde bartender put stubby candles out on the tables, like she was in a Brooklyn restaurant preparing for dinner service. But as I watched her, I realized there was more to it. Something was happening around her hands, some trick of the light. As she moved from table to table, putting the candles down, she flicked her fingers in complicated patterns, like she was signing or weaving or moving them into place for cat’s cradle. One by one, the people at the tables got up and left without a word, grabbing their stuff, dropping money, and slipping out into the night.