For a few heartbeats, everything in the world outside my skin felt dulled and slow. I watched it all. Finch, so slumped and weary he was barely standing. The boy, his hands in his pockets but his face avid and ready. Katherine, poised near me like she would bite.
I chose Katherine.
“I’m not,” I said to her, “a house cat.” And I slapped her across the face.
Both of us gasped in unison. My hand where it touched her burned, and the burn spread. It was like gasoline had replaced my blood, and striking Katherine was the match.
The boy cursed, and Katherine scuttled backward, holding her cheek. I kept staring at my hand, trying to shake off the awful crawling fire. “What did you do to me?”
“Katherine, you idiot,” the boy said, clipped.
She shook her head and wouldn’t look at him, letting her hair fall over her face.
“What did you do to me?” I screamed again. I put my hands to my face to feel if I was shriveling, the way the man she’d attacked in Manhattan had shriveled. Terror made me forget what Finch had done, and I turned to him. “Did she kill me? Finch, am I dying?”
He moved to put an arm around me, then yelped and drew back. “You’re so cold,” he whispered. His eyes were sad and bottomless.
We were standing in the middle of the lot, where nothing moved. No cars came by, no fishermen spilled out of the bait shop. The breeze was turned down to nil; the sun hovered in the stillness like a pinned insect.
“We’re doing everything out of order, aren’t we?” the boy said. His voice pretended to be bored, but I heard the thin file of rage running under it. He rubbed his palms together, looking at Finch and I like we were steak.
I grabbed Finch’s hand, ignoring his cry of pain at the burn of my fingers, and we ran.
We ran away from the trees, toward the highway. I had a dim idea of jumping in front of the next car when I got there. Idiotic. The world had paused like a tape deck; I couldn’t even hear birdsong.
“Alice!” The Hinterland boy’s voice was a savage yelp. It sounded like something that didn’t come from a human throat. I couldn’t help it; I turned.
He threw up his arm and … the ground folded like a fan. Or maybe it was the trees that moved, shivering over the pavement like a horror movie cut, distant then there, all around us.
My chest was a bellows with the air squeezed out, but I tried to run anyway. The breaths I sucked in were bitter as helicopter seeds. Trees surrounded us, and we ran over tumbled green ground. But the world wasn’t working right, and suddenly we were running toward them, the boy and Twice-Killed Katherine, hiding behind her fading hair. She held a knife, and I was running too fast to do anything but pitch myself forward. I skidded to a stop at her feet, Finch tumbling down beside me.
The knife glinted at the level of my eyes. I opened them as wide as I could, because suddenly the worst thing that could happen was for death to take me unaware. But she didn’t strike—she handed the knife to me, her gloved fingers pressing it into my palm. But careful, careful not to touch me too long. Even under the leather I could feel the way she startled back from my skin.
“Kill. Yourself,” she hissed, before stepping out of range.
“What?”
The boy’s mouth hung open, and I saw something terrible in his eyes. The shadows of toothy, waiting things, like all of him was hungry. “Kill yourself, Alice,” he said, like it was a chant. “Kill yourself.”
I had a vision of the knife’s tip piercing my wrist, letting out the fire burning under my skin in a shining flood. I shook it away.
“Alice, no, no, please, oh, please.” Finch was almost praying, down on the ground.
“Why would I do that?” I asked dully. The question was real. I wanted to know.
“It’s you or it’s both of you,” Katherine said. “You or both of you. You or both of you!”
“Alice, they can’t make you do anything,” Finch said, his voice harsh and smoky with fear. “They can’t even touch you!”
“Shut your mouth,” Katherine hissed. Her foot flashed as she kicked him with the bladed side of her boot, leaving a thin line of blood running over his cheek.
Finch fell back with a cry, curling in around his wound. Katherine and the boy flanked me, standing just out of reach. No part of their skin was bare but their faces.
When my hand hit Katherine’s face, it had burned me—it still burned—but it hurt her, too. Why?
“Why can’t you touch me?” I asked.
Katherine sneered down at me, unmoving. The boy was the weak link. His eyes flicked to her face and back to mine.
“Wait. You’re scared of me, aren’t you?”
“Scared?” she said, furious and low. “Of you? You’re next to nothing. You’re almost as bad as him.” She pointed at Finch. “All you’re good for now is to spill your blood and make us a damned door. Now kill yourself, or he gets it, and your mother next.”
A door? I lunged at her with the knife awkward in my hand, held like I was about to slice bread. She moved lightly out of my way, kicking my hand so it sang with pain and the knife arced up and away. It clattered at the boy’s feet. He picked it up and looked at Katherine.
“Kill the lamb,” she said.
I saw the horrible confusion in Finch’s eyes. They went dumb with animal terror as the dark-haired boy forced him to his knees. One hand peeled back Finch’s chin, the other held the knife.
I had no weapon but my bare skin and Katherine’s cold fire running through it, so I launched myself at the boy’s uncovered face.
He recoiled from me with a shout, drawing the knife over Finch’s throat in one convulsive sweep.
Fear dropped from Finch’s eyes, replaced with blank shock.
The blood was a line then a smear then a red curtain falling.
“There goes our bargaining chip,” Katherine said, her voice distant. “Ever heard of a bluff?”
Time slowed. Finch was a spilled cup, just before it hit the ground. A precious something dropped into the dark beneath a subway grate. A tangled mess of infinite possibilities, countless threads, cut at the quick by silver scissors.
He was down.
I screamed, crawling forward to press my hands over his opened throat.
“Your fault, Alice,” Katherine said. It was almost a whisper. She took the bloody knife and dropped it at my side. “Kill yourself.”
I thought about it for a moment. I did. But Finch’s eyes held mine, bright and questioning. Not dead yet, but dying.
“It’s okay,” I said, stupidly.
The boy who’d cut Finch’s throat was pacing beside us. “Katherine?” He said it like a question before crouching to lift Finch, hoisting him over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry. I cried out and reached for Finch’s dangling hand, but the boy jerked him away. He lifted the knife from the dirt and twisted it in the air like a conductor’s baton. The air shifted and lightened where he stabbed, peeling back from itself to reveal a rift as livid as Green River soda.
Finch’s body was limp over the boy’s shoulder as he stepped into the bright green gloaming. Then he was gone, and the boy with him. The last spatter of his blood hit the grass when he’d already disappeared.
I stared at the place where I’d seen Finch dying and screamed. It took a while for the sound to come. When it did, Katherine leaned over me and I screamed again, holding up palms painted in blood, trying to press them to her face.
She made a frustrated sound and flicked her hand. Something came winging toward me: her cruel little bird, unfolding from empty air. It darted at my eyes and I threw out an arm. I felt a tug at the edge of my … it was hard to explain. The edge of my self. Like my soul was pressing against the walls of my body, ready to be sucked out like a yolk through a pierced eggshell. The sun tilted down, as if someone had thrown it off course with a baseball bat.
The last thing I heard was the rasp of Katherine’s voice, so close it seemed to be coming from inside my head. “By your hand,” she said,
“you’ll die tonight.” Then I fell into a numb black sea.
20
Ella drove. Her face was lost in shadow, her hands lit white spiders on the wheel. She hummed a song that at first seemed tuneless, before it resolved into something that lilted and spun back on itself in an eerie round.
“Mom,” I said.
She flinched. “I thought you were sleeping.”
“What’s that song?”
After a long pause, “A nursery rhyme. My friend taught it to me when I was little.”
My mom didn’t talk about her childhood, not ever. I held my breath, then dared a question. “Were you a little girl like me?”
I was very young. Six at the oldest.
“What do you mean?”
I tried to put into words what I meant. Did her insides match her outsides? Was the way my life dripped off me like water, barely leaving a mark, normal? Did the bad luck chase her, too, or had it only come around after she’d had me?
But I couldn’t say any of that, because I didn’t want to see her cry. She wanted me to be happy. Each new place was a fresh chance, a field of unmarked snow she gave me to run through. And maybe everyone felt this way when they moved on—that everything they’d left behind smeared together like watercolors and washed away.
I looked away from her drawn-tight face, watching our headlights slice through fog. “Books. Did you like books?”
Her shoulders dropped a little. “I did. I liked to read everything but fairy tales.” She sighed, sounding older than salt and way too young to be a mother, all at once. “Hours to go, love. Get you some sleep.”
My eyelids dropped like she’d anchored them with stones. I was falling asleep, or waking up, or some combination of the two. I wasn’t in the car with my mother, I was somewhere else, and she was very far away. My mind clawed its way to consciousness.
“Wake up.”
The sun shone red through my eyelids. I opened them a fraction and cringed. It was too bright. A gloved hand slapped my face, once, twice, three times. The third was a crack that made my ears ring, and my eyes snapped open wide.
I was in the back seat of a car, and it was night. Twice-Killed Katherine crouched over me, shining a Maglite in my face. Her teeth were small and milky blue, like baby teeth.
I could’ve tried to hurt her, but I didn’t. Finch’s death lay like a heavy stone on my chest. I saw him go in flashes, when I blinked and when I didn’t. The careless slice of the knife, the wanting eyes. The relentless crumple to earth.
Katherine hung over me a moment longer, her breath stinking of week-old roses. “He’d still be alive,” she whispered in my ear, “if you’d just done it.” She scrambled backward like a spider, tugging me with one gloved hand.
I followed mutely. I felt every breath and the ache of my hip where I must’ve banged it. My mouth tasted like dead coffee and the air smelled prickling and green and my head ached like a hangover and my skin felt electrified. I was here, aching and alive, while Finch bled out somewhere in the Hinterland.
“What’ll you do with his body?” My voice guttered and clogged.
Katherine slammed the car door, a gunshot sound I flinched from. She looked at my face like it was something she was trying to place. A puzzle piece that wouldn’t fit anywhere.
“Don’t waste your worry,” she said. “You’re here.”
I looked around wildly—for the Hazel Wood, a gate, a road. Anything. All I saw were trees, pressing in around a clearing barely big enough for the car. I couldn’t see where we’d come from, or how we’d get out. “I’m where?” I asked, my voice cracked. Thirst rose up in me again, more desperate this time.
“You’re in the Halfway Wood,” Katherine said. “And here you’ll wander. Till death is preferable, and you choose it.”
She grabbed my arm and flung me in a wide half-circle, like we were at a square dance. I stumbled forward a few yards and down to my knees. By the time I struggled up, she was in the cab. I lunged at the door and was thrown back as it rocketed into a wall of trees. They parted obligingly, then sealed back into place as neatly as a curtain.
I turned slowly in place, alone in a clearing in the deep dark woods.
That was when I entered a fairy tale.
21
The clearing I stood in was perfectly circular. I could see that once the car was gone. Something about the trees was off, and it took me a moment to place it—they didn’t rustle in time with each other, or with the mild breeze that made my chapped lips tingle, but one by one. The way they shook their heads and shushed their leaves convinced me they were having a conversation.
My body shook with sorrow, with rage—rage at Finch’s killers, and rage at Finch for his stupidity.
But he was dead. My body hadn’t caught up with my mind.
I lurched blindly from the clearing, scraping past a stunted dogwood tree. Its heart-shaped blossoms trailed velvet tongues along my neck. I shuddered and hurried my step, trying to outrun the thought that circled my mind like a hangman’s rope: What if I wandered this place for one night, like Ness, only to be ejected a day later, and seven years older?
I saw Finch’s face every time I closed my eyes. The walls of my mind were painted with his blood. It stained my palms and stiffened the sleeves of my sweatshirt.
“It’s okay,” I whispered to myself. “It’s okay.” I counted to ten and did a few yoga breaths. Red ran down Finch’s shirt. I couldn’t stop it I couldn’t stop it I couldn’t— “Stop it. I couldn’t stop it.” I made a sound I didn’t recognize, like a laugh and a wail at once, and it scared me quiet. I slapped my own face the way Ella used to when she was too tired to drive.
“It’s over. Nothing to stop. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” Nonsense words. Was this what going insane felt like? Was I really in the woods, or was I still dreaming in the back seat of my abductor’s car, going somewhere even worse?
A tree flung a stinging branch of green buds across my cheek. The hurt woke me up, and for a while all I could focus on was shielding my face from branches, and trying not to trip over hidden things in the dark. The air was so close and dense among the leaves it felt like the trees were breathing on my skin.
He’d still be alive. If you’d just done it. Katherine’s whisper unfolded from empty air. I slapped at it like a mosquito and sped up, welcoming the pain of a skinned knee and scratched palms, and the secret rustle of creatures that drowned out anything else.
Finally I broke free onto a creek bank. I sucked in mouthfuls of cool, wet air, propping myself against a willow tree whose branches poured themselves into the water a few yards from my feet.
I took stock of what I had. My bag was long gone, dropped in the dust of the parking lot. I still wore the cheap jeans and sweatshirt from Target, the sleeves pulled down over my hands. In my pockets, a Kit Kat wrapper and—I realized with a start—the feather, the comb, and the bone.
They felt cool in my hand and gave off an electric, intangible hum, like tuning forks. I looked around furtively and shoved them back in my pockets.
Then something wrapped itself around the bare skin between my jeans and my low-tops and yanked.
I slammed down flat, gasping, in cold mud. I spat it out and twisted till my legs were pretzeled and I could see what had me.
For a horrible, frozen second, I thought it was a corpse. It had the translucent lantern skin of a creature found in the deepest parts of the ocean. It was person-shaped, mostly, though nobody could mistake it for human. It clung to my ankle and watched me with the dull impatience of a dog waiting for its food bowl.
Terror chipped my rational mind into a furious glitter. I kicked and shrieked, aiming for the thing’s horrible face. But its grip was ironclad.
When my foot hit water, plunging in all the way to the ankle, I instinctively curled my free leg up, away from the creek. The thing smiled, and tugged a little harder. My fingers found a loose stone and flung it. I missed and found another one. This time it hit with a clunk.
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br /> But not the creature. It hit the water, which a moment ago had flowed fast and black and quiet. The creature looked around, too, one hand still wrapped around my leg.
From where my foot was submerged, a trail of thin green ice spread out like a flume, full of captured bubbles. The thing looked at me, some shallow intelligence sparking behind its eyes. It let go and slid backward, into a slushy pool surrounded by freeze. I yanked my foot free of the ice, looking around to see who had saved me. There was a rustle in the bushes on the other side of the creek, maybe. I wasn’t sure.
“You still can’t pass.” The creature’s voice was a swallowed thing full of glottal stops and touched with an unplaceable accent. It looked more like a girl now that it wasn’t trying to eat me. Its muddy hair was braided, its mouth almost prim.
“Why?”
“This is my byway. I might let you wander the shore till you’re dead.” Its laugh was full of pin-sharp teeth.
“Or I’ll walk across the ice.”
The thing looked around at the meltwater already rising. Whatever strange magic had frozen it was already fading away. “You can try.”
“What if I give you something?”
It froze, its fish-belly eyes suddenly interested. “Your hair? Your fingers?”
I thought of the paintings of mermaids I’d loved to look at when I was little—bird-winged women crawling over doomed ships, pensive Waterhouse girls running silver combs through their hair.
I pulled the comb from my pocket. It had been plain red plastic when I found it at the coffee shop, and again when I looked at it under the willow tree. But now it glinted like mother of pearl. I ran a fingertip over the unfamiliar carvings in its handle.
The redheaded man had left these things behind for me to find. Katherine wanted me to die in these woods, but someone else had stuffed my pockets with fairy-tale tricks. I thought of Ella, the blade in the bouquet. These woods weren’t going to kill me, or drive me mad. Because I wasn’t Ness. I was Ella’s daughter. I was the granddaughter of Althea Proserpine.
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