The Night Country

by Melissa Albert

  I went still as snow.

  There was so much I’d remembered wrong. He was leaner than he had been in my mind. Hungrier. He moved like someone hungry and restless. His jeans were worn to whiteness. He’d cut off his hair.

  He hadn’t seen me yet. I had a little time to get my head around this. I had a few more seconds to get it right.

  36

  They were back on Earth. He knew it the way you know the shape of your body in the dark. He knew it by the specific way its gravity worked on him; he’d forgotten exactly how the air felt here, but his body remembered.

  He let that air run through his fingers and felt a nameless grief pass through him. For something lost, something found. He was no stranger to nostalgia, but the feel and flavor of his abandoned world made a new kind of music in him, an endless complicated pain in his heart.

  Io had stopped a few yards in front of him. She was looking at someone standing just beyond the door, the light of the last world shining full on her face.

  A girl. She was petite, dressed like him: old jeans, tight T-shirt. Her hair was messy and brownish and she stood at odd attention, like she’d just received an electric shock. All that he took in at a glance. What he really saw was the way she was looking at him.

  Like she knew him. Like she wanted to rush him. Hide from him. Kill him, maybe. Her gaze was so ferocious he didn’t notice at first how pretty she was, and when he did it was the beginning of the next revelation. The big one.

  She was older. (His heart tugged; they’d lost time, more than he’d thought.) Sun-freckled and toughened. Her face held different things, and she’d only looked at him this way once, just once: right before she turned and left him, to walk off the edge of another world.

  He tasted her name on his tongue.

  37

  My old idea of him and the reality standing here in front of me warred for a moment then crashed, into this boy—this man—with scarred brown skin and radiant eyes and his face flickering confusion, slipping past fear, then lighting up like a thousand fireflies, soft against the dark.

  “Alice,” he said.

  His names filled my mouth. I didn’t know which one to say, and I thought if I spoke I’d cry instead. He stepped past the silent, flat-eyed stranger, coming so close I could see the dark line on his neck, where a knife had dipped in. I saw the swallow under it, the nervous pulse.

  If I could talk with my fingers, I thought. If I could just touch him, there, where his life had almost slipped out, and there, the place I’d scratched when he dragged me free of my tale, and there, where a dream version of me had kissed him once, in a pulsing ballroom in the Hazel Wood. Each touch would be a letter. I wouldn’t have to use any words. And maybe he did read my mind, just a little, because he swallowed again, and spoke.

  “Did you get my letters?”

  I opened my mouth, and my voice betrayed me: all my confusion and relief and fragile joy were in it. “Ellery,” I said. “Finch. I got all your letters.”

  He smiled at me. Goofy, incandescent. He put his hands up and I knew what he wanted me to do was press my palms to his and let our fingers entwine. When I did, his folded so far over mine they nearly reached my wrists. He started laughing, and I did, too.

  Laughing. It was hard to remember the last time I’d laughed over something good all the way through. But it scrubbed up against the rawest parts of me. I’d been something else the last time he saw me. Lost, yes. Messed up and confused. But full of hope. On my way home to Ella, love like a beam on water lighting my way. And he’d been a wanderer. Lost in his own way, but questing. He’d had a fairy tale land at his feet, and no reason to leave it.

  What were we now?

  “Hey,” he said, catching the moment when my laugh turned south. He hesitated half a second, then pulled me in tight. It was such a human thing to do, it caught me by the throat. He smelled like a man who’d been on the road a good long while, with unsteady access to soap. He’d been back a minute, and already he was holding me like he knew me, like we weren’t strangers at all.

  He’d always had more armor than me, and less.

  The woman behind him cleared her throat.

  “You gonna introduce us?”

  Remembering she was there made me remember everything else. I shrugged out of Finch’s arms, face hot, glad the light behind the door was fading.

  “How did you find me?” I asked him.

  “I didn’t. We were looking for a place called—I told you about it in my letters—we’re looking for something called the Night Country. I didn’t know we were coming here. That you’d be right here.” He looked at the woman behind him.

  “How did this happen? Was it me? I wanted—” He turned back to me, smile so sweet and shy. “I wanted this. Did that mess up the magic?”

  He didn’t even look afraid. He still had the wrong idea about magic. He still thought it could be nice.

  My stomach twisted. “This makes no sense. Finch, this can’t be a coincidence. Why are we both here?”

  Behind me, and very close, came that sugary giggle.

  The joy on Finch’s face lost its footing. “What was that?”

  “Shh.” I lifted my phone, letting the beam of its flashlight scatter the dark. I scanned the room once, twice. The third time it snagged on a face.

  A pale oval, peering out of a drawn-up hood. It belonged to a child. She held one arm in front of her. Her chin was down, her eyes cast to the ground. And my insides went shivery, because I’d been wrong.

  It wasn’t the Trio who’d been following me. They’d never sought me out at all. The little girl I’d seen trailing me around the city was right here.

  “Who are you?” I took a step toward her. “Where’s Sophia?”

  The child let her hood fall. Beneath it was a mass of blond hair.

  She looked up.

  And grinned as I finally got it, as I finally understood who I was looking at. The figure in the subway car, in Central Park, on the street. The giggle on the phone, so horribly familiar. The only creature with ice in her hands, enough to kill.

  She was me. A younger me, me at age twelve. Feral and princess-haired. She wore flowered shorts and iridescent yellow jellies and a green hoodie. Her eyes were black from end to end.

  “You.”

  “You,” she echoed back, and snapped her teeth.

  I took a step, heart pounding, head floating off my neck with the strangeness of it. Her mouth hung open a little and her gaze was as oily-flat as a selkie’s. When we were close enough to touch, I reached out a hand. After a beat she reached back. Her fingers in mine were a curious numbness, smooth and small.

  “Do you know me?”

  She put one foot atop the other, balanced. “I am you.”

  “How do you exist?”

  “How do you?”

  I felt like a person pacing at a locked gate. I didn’t know the words to get in. But I knew now that she was the ghost who haunted me. The one the Trio had told me to seek. The ghost of a past I once thought I could get clean of.

  “Wait.” Finch’s voice was stricken. “That’s you. I thought I saved you.”

  I remembered then that he’d watched me grow up. In the Hinterland, trying so hard to reach me.

  “Why did you do it?” I asked her. “Are you building a night country?”

  She narrowed her black eyes. “What’s that?”

  My head was filling up with hot sand. “You tried to kill me. On the subway. Why?”

  “Nuh-uh.” She was indignant. “I just wanted to meet you. Scare you. She said I couldn’t let you see my face.” My phone light made pinpricks in her beetle-shell eyes. “She said you’d be punished if I did.”

  “Who did?”

  “Oh, don’t play dumb.”

  A new voice came out of the dark. The speaker stepped into the flashlight’s beam, beside little Alice. Arms folded, teeth sharp, red hair piled into a heavy topknot. There was a hunting knife in her belt. The light was in her eyes, but she seem
ed to see us.

  “Alice,” she said. “Ellery.”

  His name in Daphne’s mouth filled my stomach with oil.

  “How?” I spat.

  Daphne smiled at me, jack-o’-lantern wide. “Don’t you mean why?”

  “I know why. I know about the Night Country. I should’ve known it was you. I should’ve known your giving-a-shit act was an act. I’m asking how—how are there two of me?”

  Daphne put a hand on little Alice’s shoulder. Alice looked at that hand like an animal debating whether it should bite.

  “Silly girl,” Daphne said. “There are three of you.”

  I felt Finch flinch beside me. He’d read my tale. I hadn’t. “What are you talking about?”

  “She was always inside you. All I had to do was ask her to come out. When you were sleeping, sweet in your bed. And your mother down the hall.” Daphne bent over her knees like someone coaxing a dog to come closer. “I just talked into your ear till you tossed, till you walked into a dream you couldn’t wake from, and I led her out of the deep. Alice-Three-Times, three little monsters like stair steps. The littlest one is still hiding.” She gestured at my chest. “Can you feel her there? Does she burn?”

  Ghost within, ghost without.

  I’d thought one night that I’d seen Daphne in my room, as I was waking from a bad dream. My chest hurting like something broken. I’d been right.

  “Who are you?” I took her in, the blood-and-cream beauty of her. “What were you?”

  She flashed her awful teeth. “Wicked stepmother.”

  “Tell me the truth.”

  She let her chin rise. “I was a queen.”

  “No, you weren’t.”

  She smiled. She grew a little smaller, I swore she did. “I was a maiden.”

  “No. You weren’t.”

  When she shifted, the light played unkindly over her skin, sudden wrinkles by her lips.

  “A crone, then.”

  “No,” I whispered. “You weren’t that, either.”

  “Clever, clever.” Her eyes were blue. She’d always had the Spinner’s eyes, and I’d looked right past them.

  “You didn’t have a tale, did you?”

  “I had every tale,” she said.

  “Oh. Oh, my god,” Finch said, half a step behind me but figuring it out now.

  The Spinner smiled at him, shrugging Daphne off like a coat. Not much about her changed. Her hair was still red, her eyes as blue as they’d ever been. But the role she’d played for months was gone.

  “Not a god,” she said, winking at him. “And certainly not yours.”

  “You used her like a weapon. Used me.” I looked at little Alice, and wondered if she’d minded. If killing for the Spinner made any impression on her at all.

  “This is why you pulled me back in?” I asked. “Why you kept an eye on me?”

  “Pulled you back in?” she said scornfully. “You never left. You were always where I could reach you. But I wanted you nearer, I wanted you scared, I wanted you to see the damage you could do. Back when you were just mine.”

  “What did you tell them to make them die for you? What did you tell Hansa?”

  “I told them who I am. I told them about the Night Country, that they could help me build a new world. Was I lying?”

  “They loved you. They thought you were protecting them!”

  “I lit your candles,” she said. “They’re mine to blow out.”

  My voice was thick, the arm holding my phone up starting to quiver. “Where’s Sophia?”

  The Spinner looked past me, her Cheshire smile growing. The stranger Finch arrived with had been silent through everything, leaning against the door.

  “Iolanthe,” the Spinner said. “It’s good to see you.”

  The woman inclined her head.

  “Waiting on your payment, are you?”

  “That’s right.” The stranger’s voice was steady, her face honed as a blade. She wouldn’t look at Finch.

  “On delivery, as promised.” The Spinner brought a hardback out from somewhere and winged it over. “I wish you a happy homecoming.”

  The stranger caught the book against her chest, turned toward the door, then paused. “I am sorry,” she said to Finch, still not looking. “I couldn’t say no. But I kept my promise, didn’t I? Here you are, back with your girl.”

  “You dirtbag,” he said in a dead voice. “You absolute piece of shit.”

  The stranger shrugged. She walked back to the door they’d come from. Stepped through, closed it, and was gone.

  “Where were we?” The Spinner smiled at us, pleasant and distracted. I couldn’t believe I’d ever thought she was less than she was.

  “A new Hinterland,” I said. “That’s what you’re making, aren’t you?”

  Her laugh was scathing. She looked bleached in the light. “A new Hinterland? Just like that? You think it’s so easy, to build a world? To wrestle with the dark and the light, to hang its stars and balance its moon and coax each blade of grass to grow? To fill it with pretty monsters who tell themselves stories, live their stories, are the stories, to make the time go and the sun rise and the heart of it hold?

  “The heart of it.” Her gaze clicked to Finch. “You ripped out my heart.”

  His face looking back at her was calm. He looked like someone who’d been waiting on bad news for a very long time, and was relieved it had finally come.

  “You play a long game,” he said.

  “I’ve got nothing but time,” she replied. “Nothing.”

  I looked between them and saw there was a chapter in their history I hadn’t read.

  “Tell him,” she said to me. “Tell him the tale of the Night Country.”

  He shook his head, once. “I already know it.”

  “Not the neutered nursery story Iolanthe used on you like a hook,” she snapped. “The tale of my Night Country. Of how I made the Hinterland. The very first tale I ever told.”

  “Where’s Sophia? Tell me that.”

  The Spinner leaned over and said something into little Alice’s ear. The girl nodded and ran out of the light. I felt sick watching her go, seeing the way she held her spindly arms out from her sides, chin tilted down, the stance familiar from every photo Ella took of me in those purgatory years between ten and thirteen.

  Silence, then a heavy click. Banks of fluorescents switched on overhead, illuminating what had been hiding in the dark.

  In the tale it sounded tidy as doll parts. Two hands, two feet, two eyes, a tongue. In reality it looked like a massacre. Like aftermath. The pieces were laid out in the vague outline of a body, it was true, but it looked so sloppy, so utterly profane. The ground bucked under my feet as I half walked, half swam toward the horror, scanning the pieces till I found what I was looking for.

  The eyes. Dark gold, clipped from the optic nerves, their big-cat color unmistakable.

  “Sophia.” I said it like a prayer, passing a hand above them. Like I could close them, seal this last piece of her away from harm. The Spinner was the one who’d truly made Sophia deathless. Of course she was the only one who could give death back.

  Finch kneeled beside me, throat clicking dryly as he tried to pull me up, pull me away. But I stayed. I saw Hansa’s small foot and Genevieve’s rough one, corded with scar tissue. Vega’s chattering tongue, gone still. And I realized something was missing.

  “My heart.” I looked at the Spinner. “That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? So you can take my heart.”

  “Not exactly,” she said. Then she leaped at little Alice. Roped her hair around her arm, dragged her head back, and drove the hunting knife into her chest.

  38

  My own chest exploded with pain. My head fell back, and my vision went white. Into the whiteness came something glittering. Ice: the distant ceiling of an ice cave. Then it changed, to the moving roof of a grove of trees. I blinked and it changed again: I saw the face of a crying child, in a misty wood. My tongue tasted like honey, like salt. I s
aw the four of us from far overhead: Finch crouching over me, and the Spinner over little Alice, hoodie peeled back, the front of her black with blood. When Finch screamed my name, I didn’t know which one of us he was calling for.

  Then I was back in my body, in my head, looking up at him.

  “Jesus, are you okay?”

  I tried to nod, but he was holding my face too tightly.

  “She was a kid. She was a kid.” His eyes were shiny with shock. “How could she kill a kid?”

  I tried to push up onto my elbows. My mouth tasted like blood and my chest felt like a crushed can but I talked as fast as I could. “She’ll kill everyone. The Night Country is a vampire. Whatever you’ve been told, it kills the world it’s made in. Do you understand me? If she takes Alice’s heart, if she makes the Night Country, this world will fall apart. Like the Hinterland did.”

  “No,” he said, his voice stunned and new. Like he’d just remembered something. “It won’t be like that. It’ll go gray. The sky, the earth, all of it. It’ll be like Pompeii, like something out of a nightmare. This is your revenge, then?” He looked to where the Spinner must be. “A world for a world?”

  I heard her voice from behind me. “Poetic, isn’t it?”

  Finch helped me sit up. I couldn’t look at the boneless crumple of my younger self. The black-eyed shell of me, what I would’ve been if Ella hadn’t stolen me away, hadn’t loved me. Instead I looked at the Spinner, holding a freshly harvested heart in upraised palms, looking like a sorceress, like Circe, so packed full of malevolent magic the air around her seemed to ripple.

  I leaned over and snatched up the closest piece: Hansa’s foot, scraps of purple polish still clinging to its toes. I pulled my arm back, but before I could chuck it—to stall her, at least—the Spinner was running at me with the knife.

  She ran it down the sunburnt line of my arm. The blade was a brute, dulled on the chamber of little Alice’s chest. The Spinner dropped the heart in place with her other hand, then braceleted it around my arm and slid it over the slice, squeezing. I screamed at the rusty pain of it. Finch lunged at her, but she’d already let me go.