Finch woke up just as we hit Birch, sheepishly running the heel of his hand over his mouth.
“Where are we? How long have I been sleeping?” He peered out the window as the bus turned into a wide concrete lot encircling a shack-sized bait shop. “Oh. We’re here.” The jagged energy that had come off him in waves on our walk from the motel was back.
The old men pushed past us, sour-smelling and laughing at some granddad joke we hadn’t heard. The driver gave me a hard look as I left the bus. I glared at him, wondering suddenly if he was Hinterland. If he’d done something to the radio. He wasn’t, I decided. He hadn’t.
Behind me, Finch held back. “What’s your next stop?” I heard him ask, as I stepped out onto the pavement. “You turning right around and going back?”
“You bet. But you can’t chicken out on hiking now, son.” The driver leaned forward to peer at me. “Your girlfriend doesn’t look like she’d take it quietly. Just get out of those woods by dark, alright?”
Finch turned, his shoulders raised high, and wouldn’t look at me as he walked down the steps.
“What was that?” I asked.
Finch stared past me, to where the old men were filing into the bait shop. He started to say something, but shrugged instead.
I turned away. If he was going through some existential fan dilemma, I wanted no part of it. I still had to figure out how to shake him before we got too close to the Hazel Wood.
Through the trees at the back of the lot, I could see the hard glitter of water. It made me thirsty. “Want to find a convenience store before we walk to Birch?” I started, turning, then cut off. Finch was standing behind me, too close, eyes wide and jaw set. I startled away from him.
“Damn it,” I said, my heart hopscotching. “What?”
He smiled at me. He smiled like a dog who doesn’t want to get kicked but will take it if he is. “I messed up.”
Adrenaline made my stomach kick and my eyes go dry. “What do you mean?”
“We need to walk—we need to get to the highway.” His voice was high and too fast as he stared at the pavement where the fisherman’s bus no longer was. “Maybe we can hitch. We need to … if we can just get back to the city. I’ll explain on the way. I should’ve explained last night.”
“Explain what?” I planted my feet on the pavement, gripped his arm. “We’re standing here till you tell me.”
“I made a promise,” he said. “But I don’t want to keep it.”
“You need to stop threatening not to take me to the Hazel Wood. At this point I can find it on my own.”
“Not a promise to you,” he said. “A promise to them.”
Them. The word hit me like a blackjack. “What. The fuck. Are you talking about?” I grabbed the front of his jacket.
“I thought … I thought it might help you.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is. You don’t understand yet. They told me not to tell you…”
“Tell me what? Who told you not to tell me what?”
“I can’t.” He looked around nervously, a tremor in his jaw making his teeth clatter. “They’re probably listening right now. We need to go.”
“Just tell me. No riddles, no excuses.”
He shrugged, the gesture heavy with disgust. “I wanted my life to change. I wanted for it to be real. And it is. But I don’t think this is worth it.”
It struck me, suddenly, that no amount of bottomless funds should’ve been enough to convince me to lead an Althea Proserpine fan to the Hazel Wood. It struck me, too, that I didn’t know that much about Finch.
I wrestled back my rage and sudden fear, trying to make my voice reasonable. “If you don’t tell me what you did, I can’t help you fix it.”
“Oh, no,” he said, the words bottomless and bleak. “They’re already here.”
His eyes flicked past me, just as I registered the quiet purr of an idling car. I turned and had time to see its bright paint job and the figure at the wheel—wait, there were two of them, someone was in the passenger seat—before Finch yanked me behind him, sending a hot pain through my shoulder.
“Go,” Finch said, his voice ragged. “Run!”
Off balance, I stumbled to the dirt.
The car exhaled heat like an animal from its yellow sides. It was the cab I’d seen creeping on me outside of Whitechapel. And there was its dark-haired driver, the boy from the diner. He pushed the hair from his face with a gloved hand.
His passenger stepped onto the gravel, staring at me with lantern eyes. It was Twice-Killed Katherine. She wore the same black gloves the boy did.
I froze. I knew if I moved, I would give myself away—a shake in my knees, or my voice.
“I’m sorry,” Finch was saying. “I’m sorry. They just said to get you to the Hazel Wood. That’s all! You were going anyway, you asked for my help…”
“Don’t pretend this was for me. Since when? Since when were you working for them?”
The boy was watching us, amused. Katherine looked like she couldn’t hear us at all.
“Working for them? No, it wasn’t…”
“Since when?”
“Since the bookseller’s,” he said, small. “They talked to me while you were passed out. They kept you … they kept you under a little longer.”
“Thank you for your service, Ellery Finch,” the dark-haired boy said. “Ready for your reward?”
“No,” Finch said. His dark skin looked bloodless. “I don’t want it.”
“What reward?” I spat.
“What all children want,” the boy said mockingly. “Entrance to fairyland.”
My fault, I thought. My fault for trusting a fan.
Ella came to me then—the way she always looked for the good news in the shit sundae. Because maybe this wasn’t all bad. Finding these people, or whatever they were, was what I wanted, wasn’t it?
It was hard to remember that with Katherine’s eyes crawling over my skin.
I elbowed Finch aside. “I’m looking for my mother—Ella Proserpine. I know you have her. I want her back.”
“She thinks we’re mother-nappers, isn’t that funny?” the boy said.
Katherine sucked her teeth like an old woman. “You’re sure this is her? This little house cat?” She lunged at me, teeth bared, and I gasped.
She stopped short, laughing. “See? Skittish as a mayfly.”
But her lunge wasn’t why I gasped. I did it because of what she’d called me: house cat. Like she knew the sticky, long-ago insult that still swam in my brain.
I felt suddenly like a child, moving through a forest of adult knees, hearing their conversations far over my head. None of this made sense, none of it had any context. All of them, even Finch, were treating me like a child—to be protected. To withhold information from.
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.