The Night Country

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.