I didn’t want to mourn the loss of the thing that made me wicked, but hearing about three ex-Stories being killed made me feel disarmed without it. My head was full of formless black thoughts I couldn’t allow to settle. I didn’t want to think about things I couldn’t have, that I shouldn’t want.
I took the coffee back to my room. In the minutes I’d been gone, the room had filled up with the scorched-earth scent of unfiltered cigarettes. I unlatched the barred window that let onto our fire escape and stuck out my head.
“Those things’ll kill you,” I said.
Sophia took a last drag and stubbed the butt out on her shoe. “Funny.”
She dropped into my room, then did what she always did: started to case it, like a criminal or a cop. Ran a finger over the spines of my books, took a sip of my coffee. Moved over to the dresser and picked things up, inspecting them one by one. Dr Pepper lip gloss. A bloom of blue hibiscus. The rosette my mother had made from the dirty silk of the dress I’d worn home from the Hinterland. I didn’t know what she’d done with the rest of it.
“Can’t sleep?”
I shook my head, though she wasn’t looking. She’d always had a knack for showing up when I was restless. Or maybe she showed up even when I wasn’t, and I slept right through it.
“So,” she said, inspecting herself in the mirror bolted to my closet door. “You ran away.”
“Oh, screw you,” I said, and buried my face in my pillow. I felt the bed dip as she sat down beside me, then poked me between the shoulder blades till I turned.
“I’m not giving you shit, I swear. I just want to know why.”
Why had I? What had I felt seeing him again, remembering how it felt to be bound together inside our tale? Disgust, fear, those were easy. Anger, too. But there was something else: a serrated sort of curiosity. It was bad enough I couldn’t make myself feel nothing, I didn’t want to feel that.
“I killed him,” I said to the ceiling. “I’ve killed him a hundred times. Wouldn’t you have run?”
She stared at me till I looked back, her eyes two distant planets. “You killed him because he deserved it. I bet he deserves it here, too.”
I studied her, a tickling, terrible thought blooming. “Soph. You know … you understand that it’s permanent here, right? When you’re dead, you’re dead.”
“Of course I know that,” she said, suddenly savage. “Alice, why’d you have to come back around today? Of all days.”
“What do you mean? What’s wrong with today?” She didn’t answer. “Ask Daphne why today. She’s the one who dragged me there.”
“Dragged you. Kicking and screaming, right?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means stop pretending you don’t have a choice.” Her voice was hard. “Because of all of us, you’re the only one who does. To be part of us, or not. So. Coming back today, does that mean you made your choice?”
“Jesus, I showed up to one meeting.”
“The way Daphne runs things now, it’s not … Alice, you don’t come and go.”
“Daphne. She doesn’t really want me there. She checked—I think she checked today to see if I could still do it. You know. To see if I still had the ice.” I laughed a little, around the urge to cry.
Sophia didn’t laugh with me. “Do you?”
“What? No. You know I don’t.”
She studied me for a moment without speaking. “Here’s what I don’t get about you,” she said. “In your tale, you had all the power. You were a monster in the Hinterland. Why now are you pretending to be a mouse?”
She didn’t say monster like I’d say monster. She said it with reverence, like it was a title. Like she was saying queen.
“I’m not a mouse.” I looked down at my hands and remembered the sight of them flexing over my mother’s throat. The exhilaration of it, that came before the shame.
“I’m not,” I repeated, “a mouse.”
“Good,” she said. “Because you can’t afford to be. Something very bad is going on.”
“I know about the murders. Daphne told me.”
“She didn’t tell you everything.”
Her pause had dark things in it. Things with teeth.
“They weren’t just killed. There’s something else.”
My shoulders went high. Whatever she said next, I wasn’t going to like it.
“Whoever killed them, they took something away. Like, a part.” She breathed out hard and lit another cigarette. She wasn’t supposed to smoke in here, but I didn’t stop her. “They took the prince’s left hand. Abigail, they took her right. And they took Hansa’s left foot.”
My toes curled in, automatic.
“Where’d you hear that?” I was whispering now. “Does everyone know?”
“I don’t know who knows. Robin told me, he didn’t say where he got it from.”
I didn’t ask, but she passed her cigarette to me anyway. It’d been ages since I’d had one, and the nicotine hit my blood like sickness. I smoked it down to my fingertips, thinking, trying not to think. I looked out the window, searching for the white sailing ship of the moon. But the sky was thick with cloud cover, and the moon was just a rock here anyway.
“You’ve been gone,” Sophia said. “You’ve been trying to walk away. And I get it. I do. You’ve got more in this world than the rest of us, and that’s nice. But there’s something starting here. So either you’re out of this, all the way, or you’re in it. And if you’re in, it’s time to remember who and what you are. Or you might not survive it.”
I would feel guilty later. Later, I would think of my mother lying defenseless down the hall, and my window swung foolishly open to let in Sophia, the night, and whatever else might come. But right then, I looked into her flat, beautiful eyes.
“What am I?”
“First tell me you’re sure. Be sure.”
I wasn’t sure. About anything. But I nodded my head.
“You are not a victim, or a damsel. Or a girl who runs.” She gripped my hands. “You’re Alice-Three-Times.”
“I don’t remember how to be that way.” I squeezed back. “I forgot. I had to.”
Her smile came out like a sickle moon, all edge. “I’ll help you remember.”
5
Since leaving school, Sophia had stopped messing with New York boys. I understood now that being human, being with humans, was something she’d tried on like clothes. They’d never fit her right. Now she had a sort of boyfriend among the ex-Stories. Or he might’ve just been who she called when I wasn’t answering her texts.
Robin lived in a low-ceilinged Crown Heights apartment with a business school dropout named Eric, a rock-thick bro who thought his roommate was weird because he was from Iceland. They slept in twin beds shoved into a single room, so they could give their second bedroom over to a growing operation.
It was nearly three in the morning when Sophia let us in. Eric was slumped in front of their flat-screen playing a first-person shooter game, pit stains yellowing his Pussy Riot T-shirt.
“Ladies,” he said, pausing the game. That was a sign of great respect in Eric’s world.
Sophia inspected the desiccated pile of pizza crusts on the coffee table. “Where’s Robin?”
“You know. Messing around back there.” He darted a look at me and unpaused the game. “Tell him I ate his pizza.”
I think Sophia liked Robin because he never slept, either. We found him crouched in the back bedroom, fiddling with something I couldn’t see. Plants slumbered beneath the singed halo of grow lights, lined up in tidy green rows.
“Ilsa!” he said when he saw Sophia. He always used her Hinterland name, and she always corrected him.
“Sophia.” She nudged him with the toe of her shoe. “Alice is here, too.”
He unfolded from the ground, all six and a half wiry feet of him. Everything he felt beamed directly out of his face, and right now he was watching me with an uncharacteristic wariness. “You’re all right?”
“I’m good. You?”
“I’m well.” His jaw was tight. “Better than some. Aren’t I breathing?”
“Robin.” Sophia voice snapped like a rubber band.
It’s hard to stare down a beanstalk, but I tried it. “Do we have a problem?”
He shook his head, turning away. The way he did it hurt a little. I’d always thought he liked me.
Sophia ran a careful finger over a plant with spade-shaped leaves. “What’s wrong with this guy?”
Robin’s eloquent face darkened. “Not just that one.” He swept a hand over his sleeping garden. “All of them.”
I leaned in, throat thickening in the mossy air. The plants were limp. Dropping dead leaves. Some were speckled gray and white, some were as brown as my mother’s underfed rosemary bush. These were the plants Robin dried, ground, baked, and steeped, to be smoked, inhaled, eaten, or drunk—Hinterland plants, every one. He’d harvested them in a seam of trees that used to be in the Halfway Wood, where the door the ex-Stories escaped through once stood. I’d never tried any of them, but I’d heard what they could do to your body, to your head.
“Poor things,” Sophia murmured, her face almost tender. “What happened?”
“I don’t know. I’ve tried everything, but each day more succumb to it. I cannot turn them from dying.”
He still lapsed, sometimes, into talking like an extra in Game of Thrones. At least he came by it honestly.
Sophia crumpled a leaf into powder. “So get some more.”
“There aren’t any more. The ones in the woods, those are dying, too.”
“Strange,” Sophia murmured, and stood. “Tell me you’ve at least got something for Alice.”
“Alice.” The way he said it was halfway to a curse. “What does Alice need?”
The question pricked the wrong places of me. “Nothing from you. Soph, let’s go.”
She ignored me. “Something that’ll help her remember what it was like. What it felt like, in the Hinterland.”
“It seems to me she’s the last one who needs it.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. At the same time, Sophia reached way up and slapped him, midway between a joke and a knockout.
“Cut it out,” she said sharply. “If you want me coming back at all, stop being a shit.”
After a long moment he bowed to me slightly, looking harassed. “Fine. I’ve been rude.” His eyes slid over to Sophia. “I’ve got something that’ll make it up to you.”
* * *
We sat on Robin’s stoop in the quiet of the city in the middle of the night. Streetlight trapped itself inside the old Popov bottle in his hands, half filled with a viscous green liquid.
He tilted it. “The plants I used for this grew everywhere back home. They didn’t feed on sun. This works better under starlight.”
“What happens when I drink it?”
He grinned, looking like the devil he might’ve been in the Hinterland. “Only one way to know.”
I didn’t love altered states. I’d already lived in one. The most I went for now was the fuzz of one drink, the clarifying burr of caffeine. But I’d already run from the Hinterland once today. I wasn’t about to do it again.
I took the bottle. Sophia was gimlet-eyed, her hands under her thighs like she was trying to restrain them. The liquor smelled like the hills in The Sound of Music and shimmered over my tongue. It was bubbles in my bloodstream, helium in my head. “Damn,” I whispered.
Robin laughed, took the bottle and drank. He’d loosened up after Sophia slapped him. We passed it around, sitting on the steps, the liquid flashing through me like lights over water.
“Good to feel alive,” Sophia said, tilting her head way back. “While we still can.”
“Don’t,” said Robin, low.
The drink went coppery on my tongue. “She had parents, didn’t she?” I said abruptly. “Hansa?”
Sophia shrugged. “She had some people she lived with. I guess they were raising her.”
“Right. That’s parents. Do they go to meetings? Has anyone talked to them?”
“It’s bad luck to speak of sad things when you drink,” Robin said.
I opened my mouth to respond, and gasped.
I think we all felt it at once, the moment the magic hit our systems. Whatever they felt, for me it was a cold uprush, a scouring wind that came from below my heart. I squeezed my eyes shut, and opened them on a new world.
Brooklyn was still bath-warm and hazy, still concrete and iron and slabs of brown- and red- and cream-colored stone. It was still perched in that formless, deadly deep part of the night. But it was more. The trees stood out in 4D, some extra dimension making them denser, vivid, more articulate. Everything was as stark-edged as a Man Ray photograph, but it was flattened, too, its depth of field all out of whack. The waving buds of a magnolia tree and the town car idling half a block down looked as close to me as Sophia. The world seemed infinitely touchable, manipulable, the street a night-lit realm we could swim through like water.
Robin held up a palm like he was weighing the air, and began to sing.
Red bird black bird
Damselfly bee
Weave a gown as fine as silk
To cover me
A few seconds passed, then a trio of starlings swept over the roof of the adjacent apartment building, making a beeline for Robin. I ducked as they executed a dizzy circle around our heads, looking as surprised as birds can look, before flying up and shooting off in three directions.
“Holy shit!” I said.
“Lazy damned birds.” Sophia leaned back on her elbows. “No dress.”
Robin’s face was dreamy and sharp at once. “I’ll weave one for you myself, my love. If you will it, I’ll give you anything you want.”
“But never the thing I need.” She put a hand to his face, fingers gently crooked, so they made five fine lines down his cheek as she stroked. “I promise you, one day you’ll love someone who can be won with dresses.”
Ignoring his expression, she turned to me. She’d lit a cigarette and was tangling her fingers in the smoke as it drifted, shaping it into ribbons and daggers and icicles. I blinked and they were gone. She stuck the cigarette in Robin’s mouth, then dug with both hands inside her gigantic street-stall purse, heavy with half-drunk bottles of juice and books I’d given her and makeup shoplifted from the Duane Reade. After a minute, she unearthed a liquid eyeliner pen.
“Sit still,” she said, holding it up.
“Why?”
“Shh.” She crouched in front of me, knees on the concrete steps, smelling of tobacco and coffee and shoplifted soap. Her brows winged out like a silent film star’s, and her eyes tilted toward the golden side of brown. Rays of ochre and whiskey and sand, with nothing behind them. Even when I loved her best, I was chilled by the impenetrable flats of her eyes.
The liner licked over my cheeks. Robin watched us, and said nothing. After a few minutes she capped the pen, blowing lightly on my skin. “There,” she murmured. “That’s perfect.”
She pulled out a little heart-shaped hand mirror, held it up. I heard my breath halt and restart.
Vines. She’d painted my face with vines, in an intricate, swirling freehand.
“Sophia. Are these … these are…”
“Power.” She spoke into my ear. “That fear you felt when you ran away from that man today? That’s the power you’re giving away. But we could make this world fear us, Alice. We could make them so afraid.”
She’d painted my face with the twining tattoos of the Briar King. He was the one who’d let himself into my stepdad’s apartment and stolen Ella away from me when I was seventeen. He might’ve been dead, or he might’ve been anywhere. There was a time when my nightmares wore his face. I’d told her all of this. Sophia knew this.
As I tilted my head from side to side, my mirror self moved a half beat behind me. I was remembering something. Something I’d spent all my months back in New York pushing down and a
way.
It hadn’t always felt bad to be a monster.
The girl in the mirror was smirking at me. Vines swirled around her eyes like the mask of a robber bridegroom. Beside her, Soph’s gold eyes glittered. We looked right together, like this. We looked like a pair of avenging—well. Not angels.
“I know where he lives,” she whispered.
“Who?”
She stood up. She knew I was bluffing.
The path that forked at my feet was dark and bright. I could walk on with Ella, down the road my diploma had started to pave. Or I could stumble off it, into the briars. Sophia waited for me there, among the thorns and the dark.
“Alice,” she said, and held out her hand.
Be sure.
I took it.
6
Being drunk on the stuff Robin gave us made Brooklyn into a floating place, a green-resined dreamscape. We walked past sleeping brownstones, under the rustling canopies of old trees. My fingertips sparked as I ran them over the peeling skin of a plane tree, and I remembered living in a world where the trees had faces, where they dreamed their sap-slow dreams.
A group of men drinking from brown paper bags was walking toward us. They were hard-eyed and thick and they swelled when they saw us, their step turning to swagger. Until they came close enough to really see us, and shrank under our sight. And I felt, for once, like I might actually look on the outside how I felt on the inside. My blood ran keen and high, too close to the surface of my skin; I felt so alive I knew I must be a magnet for death.
Then the moon’s cold eye caught mine, and I remembered Hansa was cold, too. Thinking of her, of Abigail, of the prince, brought me to the surface of my drunken dream. Where, I wondered, did dead Hinterlanders go now? Were they lost completely? Or were they taken back, to wander, maimed, around some living underworld?
The man from my tale lived in a shitty little house that grew out of trash-strewn weeds, stuck to the end of an industrial block. We’d walked by the open doors of factory-sized buildings to get here, past men in Carhartts working too late, or too early. By the time we reached it I was a kettle set to boiling. A held-in breath, a cresting wave. I wanted to exhale, to crash, to do something reckless. Sophia was in full-on manic mode, her eyes shining like dollar coins.
The Night Country Page 3