The Night Country

by Melissa Albert

  She looked pointedly at Daphne, and my stomach went cold.

  “You understand, I think, why I fear their acts will grow godless.”

  I looked around at my kin, the culled-down lot of us. They were capable of such cruelty, such strangeness. They had such a disregard for the rules of this world. Thinking of them gone truly amok—gone godless—made my palms prickle.

  “Listen,” I began. “Something happened to me last night on the train.”

  Just then the room’s chatter dropped to a hush. Nora turned away.

  Daphne stood on a rickety card table in the center of the room, holding up a glinting something. A cup, I thought. No—it was a knife. She waited till the room was silent. Till we could hardly breathe, waiting for her to speak. Then her words cracked the quiet.

  “The Hinterland is lost,” she said. “But we are not.”

  She stood there a moment, knife still held aloft. All the faces of the Hinterland’s motherless children were turned toward her, painted in flickering light.

  “The body is dead, but we are the blood.”

  She glared up at the knife, looking like a figure from some other world’s tarot deck. Then she brought it down, slashing it across her fingertips. She held her hand straight out and let the blood fall down, let everyone see the tears streaming over her cheeks. And despite everything, I did believe her sorrow was real.

  “I grieve our loss,” she said. “I grieve with you. I bleed with you.”

  I could hear other people crying. Even Nora’s face was intent. The man beside us lifted his hand to his mouth and bit the pad of his thumb till it bled, holding it up to Daphne in tribute. A woman copied him. Then another. A rangy guy in blue jeans took out his own knife, used it to cut open his thumb, and passed it.

  I flexed my injured hand, bile rising. I had the irrational thought that the killer, if they were here, would be drawn to the blood. That the drifting iron perfume of it would bring them slinking out of the shadows, weapon raised.

  An arm came around me, and I jumped.

  “Come on,” Sophia whispered. “Let’s go hide in my room.”

  * * *

  She’d told Daphne, I knew. About Red Hook, and what I’d done. She was the only one who could have. But she’d stopped me, too—from killing the man from my tale. On the edge of doing something irrevocable, she’d pulled me back.

  There was a bottle of grape soda waiting for us on the fire escape, next to a handle of bottom-shelf gin and a pair of sooty coffee mugs. Sophia poured a slug of gin in our cups and diluted it with grape. We sat so the bars of the fire escape pressed into our thighs and our legs hung down over the city. It was muggy on the street, but up here the air was witchy and restless, stirring itself into our hair. I could breathe again, away from Daphne, and I wanted to talk about anything but the murders, and the subway, and Red Hook. I wanted to remember what it felt like when fear was just the backbeat to my life, not the only thing I could hear.

  “Here’s to being orphaned. Well and truly, at last.” Sophia lifted her glass, took a gulp, and gagged. “Ugh. The next wake I spring for the good stuff. When this world goes up in flames, we’ll drink champagne.”

  I stuck the tip of my tongue into my cup. “It tastes like unicorn piss.” I felt hyped up and shaky and suddenly soaked in grief. Inside was the wake, and Daphne’s batshit display, but it was out here, with my mercurial, untrustworthy best friend, that I felt I could actually mourn what we’d lost. My skin prickled as I looked down on rooftops and cars and the slow-moving crowns of strangers’ heads. A whole world, gone. It didn’t seem possible. Sophia was looking, too, though I couldn’t guess her thoughts within a mile.

  “Robin’s heart is broken. He really thought we’d get back in someday. He really wanted us to.” Her voice was heavy and light at once. “I always thought it would be me that broke his heart.”

  I lay my head on her shoulder. I would tell her what happened on the subway. Soon, I’d find the words.

  “I saw you on the beach,” she said into my hair. “I watched you watching the stars come down.”

  “What?” I pulled back to look at her.

  She smiled a little and didn’t respond. Then, “Shut up,” she said, though I wasn’t talking. “I need to do a thing I never do.”

  I turned to her and waited. And waited.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “You’re what?”

  “I know. Don’t tell anyone.”

  “For what, though? For loitering outside my bedroom window? Being late for everything ever? Never paying for anything, even though you carry an old-man cash roll in your purse?”

  “You think I’d apologize for that?” She looked genuinely offended. “I’m sorry about … about what happened. In Red Hook.”

  I arched my foot, let my shoe slip off my heel, daring it to drop to the street. “Which part of it?”

  “I knew you just wanted to scare him. I knew you didn’t want to kill him.”

  The cocktail in my stomach was turning to acid. “I didn’t kill him. You stopped me.”

  “I thought you couldn’t remember.”

  “Just tell me. Tell me that’s what happened.”

  Her nod was shallow, her voice hoarse. “I didn’t want to, though. I wanted to let you. Because I could almost see him.” She looked at me, pleading. “He was so close, Alice, I could smell him. That burning red-dust smell.”

  “See who? Who was close?”

  “Death.”

  She’d told me her tale when we first met, but we hadn’t talked about it since. It was about a girl who faced off against Death, and the price she paid for it: her death was taken away. She, Sophia, became deathless. I don’t think she slept, either; even that little death was withheld from her. I tried never to think about it, but now it was a knife of cold air sliding between us. Because how did someone live when they knew they’d never die? I guessed I was learning.

  “You didn’t, though,” I said. “I mean, you did. You stopped me.”

  “Right.” She slopped more cocktail into her cup, then stood abruptly. “But I’ve been thinking. What if things are different for me, now that the Hinterland is gone?

  “What do you think?” She kicked off her shoes and put one narrow foot on the first rail of the fire escape, then the other. Her dress was a thin cotton sack. I could see her body inside it, outlined by the city’s lights.

  “I think you should sit down and drink with me.”

  “I thought I’d find him here one day,” she said. “I thought I’d find Death and convince him. But he never came to any meetings.” Her laugh was fringed with hysteria. She perched on the top rail of the fire escape, looking down at me.

  “You still could.” I pushed up onto my knees. “Maybe he’s here tonight.”

  “Maybe he’s the one who’s been killing us. Maybe he’s coming for me next.” She kicked a leg over. Seven stories of open city sang beneath her foot, summer smudged and readying its hands to catch her. I had to look straight up to see her face. Her hair hung down and her eyes were empty tunnels and she looked like a corpse already.

  “What if I don’t want to wait anymore?”

  As she kicked her other leg over, I surged up, locking my arms around her waist. At the same time we heard a thin, nerve-racking scream from inside the apartment. It sent us startling back onto the fire escape, my hip landing hard on metal and the lip of the windowsill catching my shoulder blade. My injured ribs hurt so bad I could only breathe in sickening sips.

  Sophia stood, unsteady. “I think that was Jenny. What do you do to make Jenny scream like that?”

  Her face was neutral, her posture straight. In the way she turned away, I could tell what just happened was going to be another thing we never talked about.

  I wasn’t scared just then. In the relief that followed Sophia’s aborted flirtation with Death—or her successful attempt to fuck with me, I couldn’t know for sure—a scream just seemed like a scream. We followed the rising buzz
of voices, past Sophia’s bedroom and toward the next window.

  It opened onto a bathroom, big and old-fashioned and kept fastidiously clean by the brothers. Just below the window was a claw-foot tub lined with more lit candles, and dishes holding fat chunks of apothecary soap.

  When I saw Genevieve lying in the tub my first thought was that she looked frosted. Her skin veined blue, her mouth hanging open, her legs folded to the side like a mermaid’s tail. The skin around her lips was blackened and the whites of her eyes pocked with broken vessels.

  Frozen. She’d been frozen from the inside out.

  Jenny stood in the doorway, her face blank, like the scream had scoured the fear from her and left her empty. Hinterlanders pressed into the spaces around her, trying to get a better look. They didn’t see Sophia and me, framed in the window like Lost Boys.

  Then Daphne was there. Slipping into the bathroom and crouching beside the tub. She touched Genevieve’s face with careful fingers. Slid them down.

  I was cold. Colder even than I’d been when the Hinterland was dying. If I screamed now, I didn’t know if I could stop. “What is she doing?” I whispered.

  Sophia crouched beside me like a gargoyle. “Looking for the missing piece.”

  She was right. With Genevieve’s body split between moonlight and dark, it was hard to tell. But Daphne’s clever hands found it: Genevieve’s right foot was gone, hacked off at the ankle.

  My knees were wet. I looked down and saw that I was kneeling in blood. The windowsill was black with it. Whoever had killed and cut Genevieve must’ve come out this way, the stump of her foot draining as they went. The world fell away and I saw—

  Finch. At the edge of the Halfway Wood.

  with his throat sliced and

  I swallowed, brought a hand up to cover my eyes.

  falling forward

  onto dirt and grass and

  “Death was just here,” Sophia said in my ear, her voice almost dreamy. “He must’ve been laughing at me.”

  The figures in the doorway weren’t looking at Genevieve anymore. They were looking at me. Even Daphne, mouth pressed thin and bloody hands steadying herself on the tub’s high side.

  “Alice-Three-Times,” one of them hissed. Jenny’s eyes bored into mine.

  Grape and gin boiled in my stomach, clawed up my throat. I turned around and vomited through the bars of the fire escape.

  13

  When I could stand again, Sophia was gone. I rinsed my mouth with grape soda and splashed my hands with gin.

  Ice. Genevieve had been killed with ice.

  Who else could do it? I’d thought I was the only one. I’d thought, too, that the cold was a piece of me that was gone. But I’d summoned it in Red Hook, and again on the train. A thought skittered through my brain like a cockroach: that this murder was a message. Someone forging my signature on a girl’s death. There’d been four deaths now. One was a warning, two a coincidence, and three completed the fairy-tale set. But four. Four was an open door. An invitation to more.

  The lights were on, the rooms emptying out. I kept my head down, but the possum glint of eyes still pricked at me. Daphne called my name as I hurried to the door, and someone grabbed my arm—the upper part of it, over my T-shirt sleeve. I ripped it from their grip.

  I wasn’t walking right. I jerked over the pavement like a marionette, forgetting then remembering to put one foot in front of the other. I looked up at Sophia’s fire escape, imagining her diving from it. Or pushed, by whoever had killed Genevieve, sliced off her foot.

  Who else could kill with ice? Had the Prince and Abigail died this way, too? Had Hansa? I was sharply, suddenly certain that she had. I remembered the way Robin looked at me the day after she died. Sophia asking if I still had the cold in me.

  At least she’d believed me when I told her I didn’t. Then—Red Hook. Why would she believe me now? Why would anyone?

  Who else could fucking do it?

  I walked by habit to the subway entrance and stopped. The stairs descended, disappeared to the left, and I knew where they were going but I didn’t know, and even though the danger was behind me it felt like it was ahead, too. I swam in it.

  If I were a different kind of girl I’d call Ella right now. Mom. Come get me. I could almost taste the words. But I couldn’t do that to her. She was more fragile since the two years she’d spent looking for me when I was lost in the Hinterland. The grief of almost losing me had hardened her, yeah, but it was the kind of hard that cracked.

  So I took a few breaths. Hobbled away from the subway and toward the street. Got into the first cab that stopped. I waited out the driver’s attempts at small talk, sitting in the back seat and soaking in the scent of car tree and old leather. By the time I got home I was okay. I was. I could walk without looking like a broken toy and I had just enough in me to make it to my room.

  But I didn’t go there. I went to my mother’s. I stood beside her bed like a kid who’d had a nightmare, till she shifted, groggy, and sat up.

  “Alice?”

  She was exhausted, too. Neither of us had slept much lately. One look at her weary, laugh-lined face and my armor melted and ran. I climbed in beside her and curled up there and cried. She wasn’t much bigger than me but she wrapped me up. We rocked and she said soothing nothings. The words I said back started out too blurry to hear but resolved into this: Don’t ask me. Don’t ask me. Please, don’t ask me.

  I must’ve smelled like vomit and grape and blood. But she didn’t ask me. She nudged me toward the shower and brought me fresh clothes, and there were clean sheets on my bed, too, the ones I’d sweated through peeled away.

  I climbed in with a feeling of containment, caught up again in the tiny safety net my mother spun around me, that she’d always spun, with love and hope and lies of omission. As I stretched out long with my arms over my head and my wet hair dampening the pillow, my toes just grazed the edge of something tucked into the very bottom of my new-laid sheets.

  The light was out and the room was quiet and it could’ve been anything down there, a sock or an errant bookmark, but its touch sent an electric current up to my thigh. I sat up fast. Flipped the sheets back, then kicked them the rest of the way. With my phone light I scanned the foot of the bed. The thing my toe had touched sat bright in its beam, benign as a sleeping snake.

  A flower. Unrumpled, perfect. It had a corona of blue petals, clustered so tightly you couldn’t see its heart. When it didn’t immediately light up or blow up or emit a poisonous gas, I bent slowly forward to touch it.

  Its petals were scentless. Papery. They were made of paper, the whole flower was. It was origami-light on my palm. After a bodiless, wondering moment, I tugged at a petal. It fell away with a soundless snap. One after another, they all did. The flower’s heart was a saturated pink. One end of it came away, and I saw that it was a scroll of paper. There were words on the scroll, but I didn’t let myself read them till I’d reached its very heart, where the first words were written.

  Dear Alice, they said.

  Dear Alice,

  I didn’t start my last letter this way, and one day I want to tell you why. I promised myself I’d only write to you once, but I remembered I hadn’t even started that letter right—Dear Alice—and I told myself I could write to you just one more time. I might break that promise. I might write to you again. Would you forgive me if I do? I don’t know if you’ll ever read any of this. But I hope you do. I hope, I hope, I hope.

  I pressed two hands to my chest, where my heart beat so fast it was fizzing. Because this time I knew. It was him, it had been him, it was him.

  Him. Reaching across stars and through doors and over distances so unfathomable the idea of them made my skin shiver and sting.

  It was Ellery Finch.

  14

  If you ever have the chance to bear witness to a dying world, don’t.

  Ellery Finch didn’t know what he was doing when he cracked open the golden prison that held Alice Proserpine, Alice Cr
ewe, Alice-Three-Times, and let her loose.

  He learned quick.

  Her departure from the Hinterland left a tear in the skin of his world. For a while there, saving her had been his life. His obsession, his penance. He’d watched her grow up from afar, sealed inside her tale. With some help, he’d sprung her loose. Or he guessed it was Alice, in the end, who’d saved herself. But he’d started the thing.

  It should have been enough. When he said goodbye to her she was wearing a heavy dress that could’ve been a McQueen and shoes that might’ve been spun from cobwebs and her eyes were a raw, desperate brown. The scent of her broken story hung around her still.

  He watched her disappear over the Hinterland’s tricky horizon line, riding away on a rusty red bicycle. When she was gone from sight, the very last tether between him and his old life, the one he’d lived on Earth, snapped. Their tale together was through.

  He had his own life in the Hinterland. Of course he did. That world, the one he’d sacrificed decency and a hefty amount of blood to gain, was beautiful and befuddling, inexhaustible and heedless. Its trees told stories. Its grass was fed by them. Finch had never come so close to having a book hold him back. There were patches of sky where the stars moved like living fireworks, creeks where girls with corpse-colored skin and dirty hair sang like bullfrogs and watched him through hungry eyes. He had friends there, other refugees, who understood without asking that he had more scars than the ones you could see.

  In the days after Alice left, he tried to remind himself why he’d stayed. He and his friends—Alain, a broadly built Swiss guy who worked at the tavern, and Lev, a laconic Venezuelan who ran an occasional smithy—went skinny-dipping in a pool behind a tumbledown castle, lining the shore with lanterns. They trekked through the constant early summer that reigned in the heart of the Hinterland, up across an afternoon of cold spring, over a fiery stripe of autumn, and into the hushed halls of a winter so enchanted and still, walking through the trees felt like church. They camped one night in a cove of glittering sand, where a white-furred stag took to the waters each night, and cried to the stars in the voice of a human soprano.