The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(80)

When the brothers stopped to make camp, they left me on the horse—tied, upright, unmoving. As if from the bottom of a well, I heard the older brother’s laughter, the crackling of a fire. Much later, hands untied me from the horse, laid me flat beneath a tree.

When they were asleep, the ice that sat like frozen coals in my stomach shifted. The freeze came slowly undone. My lips and eyes thawed, my fingers pricked, and I started to shake. When I felt strong again, I slid free of my ropes and walked over to the older brother. He was even uglier in sleep, his face twisted by cruel dreams. I hung over his sleeping body and fitted my lips to his. I blew my ice into him, along with my hate. He went with a shocked flutter and a rotten-tasting sigh, his heart frozen before he could struggle.

I returned to the horse and listened for the follower. I listened even in the frozen half-sleep I couldn’t fight back, which came over me the moment I was still.

The hours passed, the light turned silver, and the younger brother’s shout broke the air when he found his brother dead.

His boots stomped over the thawing ground. Some deep, moving part of me braced itself for a kick that didn’t come.

Instead, the brother crouched and blew warm breath onto my eyes.

As fast as they thawed, they froze over again, but I managed to shift them in their sockets. For the first time since they’d taken me, I was looking at the man’s face. At his dirty red hair.

“Hello, Alice,” he whispered.

I stared and stared, recognition crashing into me. My words came out in a hiss, and my fingers moved feebly in the air over my chest.

“Try,” he whispered, so quiet it was almost a breath. “Remember.”

He was a man I’d seen twice before he’d come with his brother to present me with ice, but I couldn’t remember how or where. Not family, not servant, not soldier. Who was he? I saw the dusty blue side of a carriage, a hoop fallen on grass.

That wasn’t quite right.

I saw a rusty blue Buick, the Hula-Hoop I’d been spinning doggedly over my hips when he pulled up beside me.

“Hi,” he’d said.

I’d ignored him, annoyed he made my hoop fall.

“I’m a friend of your grandmother’s,” he told me. “The writer, Althea Proserpine. She wants to meet you. Will you come with me to see her?”

My head snapped up. “Does she have horses?”

“Lots of them. And a swimming pool. She wants very much for you to visit, Alice.”

I’d let the hoop roll to a halt and climbed into his car. I clicked the heels of my white cowboy boots together like Dorothy, for luck, and we were off.

The memory crashed through the delicate webbing that kept my world together. I shivered and thawed on the grass, sending off meltwater and seized with visions. A woman in white denim overalls studded with cigarette burns. The sound of her quiet cursing, waking me to a sea of brake lights stretched out on the road ahead. Go back to sleep, Alice.

Her name. What was her name? The memories boiled up—Christmas lights on a whitewashed wall, slipping my legs out from beneath hers in early morning. The smell of coffee beans, cheap macaroni, burning sage. The sour crunch of my ankle when I jumped from a crabapple tree and she wasn’t quick enough to catch me. The feeling of her beside me in the world, the invisible searchlight that stretched between us.

“Ella,” I wheezed from my frozen throat.

The man didn’t hear me; he dipped his ear closer. “Do you remember me?”

“Blue Buick.”

He grinned. “We’re changing it already,” he whispered. “It’s almost broken. I needed you to come back here, so you could help me break it.”

“Why…”

“Because I’m not a page in a book,” he said, cradling my head.

Then he screamed, a high rabbit sound that boiled the last of the ice from my blood.

He fell onto me, pinning me to the ground. I was still weak, and it took longer than it should’ve to get free. It took an age. When I finally struggled out from under him, I saw the ax in his back. Behind him stood his brother, humped and frozen and watching me out of dead eyes. All around us the air thrilled with silver sparks, so bright I squeezed my eyes shut. I could still see them against the hot red of my eyelids: a glowing tapestry of threads. Tiny, even brighter flickers of light ran like spiders around the hole we’d snagged in it: a hole the shape of the redheaded brother who’d tried to change our story. I winched my eyes open and saw the raw threads being snipped and stitched back into place by invisible fingers.

A handful of tiny, spidery points of light jumped toward me. I shrieked and scrambled back, my movements dulled by cold. One of the lights reached my temple, burning through it like a fleck of ash thrown off by a bonfire. First I felt it on my skin, then under it, burrowing there and rearranging my brain.

“Ella,” I gasped, holding her in my mind’s eye. Her brown eyes, her long blonde hair … no! That wasn’t her, that was the other mother. The one who made my cruelty grow like a vine.

More of the sparkling things jumped at me, as the redheaded man moved limply on the ground. His brother fell back to earth, dead again once he’d done what the story needed him to do.

“Spinner,” I whispered. I remembered her now, how I’d followed her like a lost dog into the twisted heart of the Hinterland. Into the story I meant to break free of, long, long ago. Because this wasn’t a life I’d been living, it was a story.