The Night Country

23

Outside the church, the sun was higher, the heat heavy as a hand. Tourists and commuters in sweat-stained business clothes moved like sleepwalkers. My eyes caught on exposed arms and bellies and feet, the sweat-shining canals flowing between women’s clavicles. The glare of it boiled together with incense smoke, the sad-eyed Virgin, the candles lit like so many life-lights. And the message the Trio had for me: that the deaths weren’t murders, but martyrdom.

Martyrdom to what?

I backed into a square of shade and called a car, unable to bear the prospect of twenty blocks of hard sun, or wading through the morning rush in Times Square. A few minutes later a black sedan pulled up and the driver ducked her head down, looking at me.

Sun-dazzled and suddenly starving, I collapsed into its back seat.

Maybe martyrdom wasn’t the crux of it: I’d almost been killed, and there was nothing I’d been ready to die for. The child in white told me to seek out my ghosts. Maybe that was the real message. But what did it mean? I sighed, craving the solitude of my room, ice water, and a shower. I lay my head against the seat.

And heard the click of the child locks. I looked up.

“What are you—”

“Shut up,” the driver snarled. “Don’t say another word till I say you can. And put your hands up—cross ’em, up on your shoulders, where I can see them.”

Her face, what I could catch of it in the rearview mirror, had a wicked Morgan le Fay look to it, fleshy and lush. Her head grazed the top of the car, all of her built on a grand scale. She was Hinterland, of course, but I wasn’t panicking yet; no chance was she the quicksilver thing who’d attacked me on the subway. Mainly I was kicking myself for getting in the wrong damned car.

“Look, what do you want?”

“I told you to be—hey!” She leaned on her horn and shrieked a string of expletives as a tank-topped school of pedestrians bearing Disney Store bags darted in front of the car.

“It’s Midtown,” I snapped. “What did you expect?”

“Shut up.”

There was such focused rage in the words that I did go quiet. When I tried to sneak a hand to my phone she braked hard, glaring at me, and I pulled my hand back. Traffic was stop and go, past chain stores and Netflix ads and people dressed in unlicensed Anna and Elsa costumes and it all felt so surreal I didn’t really get scared till she veered hard into a parking garage. Past the booth, attendantless, and barreling upward, around and around in dizzy circles through the dim, taking every corner too tight and making me dig my nails into my skin. Then we burst out into sunlight glinting off chrome fenders and pearlized finish, so assaultive after the dark I didn’t see the man right away.

Sitting on the hood of a parked car, holding a dark metal wrench.

And it struck me that I should be arming myself, if I could.

Cold, I was thinking dizzily, squeezing my eyes shut and pressing my fingers into my collarbone. Cold, cold—

The woman flung open the door and dragged me out by my arm and a fistful of shirt, throwing me onto the ground. Glittery bits of it dug into the heels of my hands and my bare knees as I pushed up, tried to push to standing. Then she had me again, her hand palming my neck like I was a kitten. She forced me to kneel and I felt the beginnings of it: that burn in my throat, that ice-pick ache in my eyes. The man stood in front of me with his wrench over his shoulder, black boots planted. Him I recognized. Brown skin, dressed all in green. I’d seen him in meetings before, even heard him talking about his daughter, but it wasn’t till now that I put it together. The cresting cold in me guttered and fled. I pressed my palms, placating, to the ground.

“You’re Hansa’s parents, aren’t you?”

The hand on my neck tightened and jerked, shaking me till my vision snapped with stars.

“Listen to me,” I gasped. “I didn’t do anything, I—”

Then she was lifting me, easy as a puppet, hauled up under my armpits. When I was back on my feet she moved next to the man, looming over him by a head. He flexed his hands around the wrench, and she held her own hands up like they were weapons, like they were as deadly as mine. I believed it.

“Tell me to my face you didn’t kill my daughter.”

I looked straight into her wild blue eyes, ready to deny it. As they met mine, caught mine, I felt an aqueous click in my brain. A hypnotic tug that reeled me in and sent me tumbling headlong down a cool blue hallway the exact color of her eyes. When she spoke the words again, they came from inside my head.

Tell me you didn’t kill my daughter.

I couldn’t look away, couldn’t blink, couldn’t move anything but my mouth.

“I didn’t kill Hansa. I didn’t touch her.”

Her pause was long, and I was falling. Or maybe I was suspended, in an endless tunnel of light. My body felt warm and weightless, sheathed in calm, panic scrabbling at its underside. Then a jerk behind my belly button heaved me up and out of that serene blue place, dropping me back onto the rooftop of a Manhattan parking garage, sweat-sticky and spitting curses on my hands and knees.

“What was that?” I half screamed.

The man looked down at me, impassive, the wrench now at his side. But the woman was even angrier, crouched beside me.

“If you didn’t kill her, who did?” Her breath was hot on my face.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out!”

“I’ll know if you’re lying. Do you want me to find out if you’re lying?”

“No, no.” I put up a hand, scrambled backward. “I’m not lying. Whoever did it, they’re trying to make it look like it was me. Whoever did it, they tried to—”

Kill me, too, I was going to say. But suddenly I wondered. If whoever was doing this was trying to frame me, why would they want to kill me? Which half was I wrong about?

“Tried to what?” she said, pushing her face into mine.

“They’re trying to do something,” I said, changing course. “Why else would they do what they did, taking pieces away?”

Her big vivid mouth went bloodless. Behind her, the silent man shifted.

“You’re going to find out who did it,” she said. It wasn’t a question, it was marching orders. “And when you find out, you’re not going to do anything else about it until you come to me.”

I made myself look right at her when I spoke. “If you do one thing for me first.”

“You think you’re in a position to bargain?”

“I just have a question. If you’ll answer it. I just want to know…” I swallowed, trying to put my suspicion into words that wouldn’t enrage her. “What was Hansa like at the end?”

“At the end?” She glared at me. “She was curious. Funny. Odd. Happy. She was a child.”

I nodded, but I couldn’t think how to ask the question I really wanted the answer to: Would she have martyred herself? If so, for what?

“Not at the end, though.” The man spoke for the first time. His voice was soft. The woman turned on him, and a little steel went into it. “You know it’s true.

“At the end she was angry.” He looked at me. “She didn’t want to lie about who she was anymore. What she was. She didn’t understand why we had to.”

I braced myself. “Is there any chance she might’ve … chosen this? That it might’ve been part of something bigger, even if she didn’t really understand it?”

The woman’s body was taut as a tiger’s. I didn’t dare look at her. But the man seemed to be thinking, turning over my words. “Our daughter did not want to end,” he said carefully. “Never, never would she choose that. But. It’s possible whoever took her life tricked her. That final day, next to her body, we found a packed bag. All silly things, cookies and books and coins. I think she thought she’d be traveling. Perhaps she believed dying was the first step of the journey. Death isn’t the end, in the Hinterland. I wish we’d taught her better than that here.”

He reached into his pocket, and I flinched. But what he brought out was a compass. He pressed it into my palm, then pulled his hand back fast like he wanted to be clear of it.

“Take it,” he said. “If you’re really trying to find out who did this, use it. It steered Hansa right, till it didn’t. Perhaps it will help you.”