She’d looked past him then, right at me.
“We aren’t like the creatures who were made in this world. We aren’t meant to debase ourselves with them. To live a human life is to forget who we are. To forget who we are is to be an enemy to ourselves. To each other.”
“You,” she said, pointing at a man in a frumpy hand-knit sweater. “Stand up.”
He rose slowly, shaky in his frost-stained boots, and my heart dropped.
Because the thing was, these meetings weren’t just for ex-Stories. They were for anyone still drifting after leaving the Hinterland behind. People from this world, who’d found their own doorways in and out again, different from us but bonded to us all the same. The man in the snowflake sweater was one of them. Not Hinterland, but human.
“I’m not trying to…” he stammered, “I’m not here to…”
“Shhhh.” The woman pressed a finger to her lipsticked mouth, then smiled behind it. “You walk a very narrow path. And the woods are full of wolves. And the wolves have sharp teeth. And we’ve had no one to bite for a very, very long time.”
She closed her eyes. “I want to live in a world of wolves. When I open my eyes, I won’t see a single lamb.”
Snowflake Sweater grabbed his coat and fled. A pair of teen girls in black lipstick followed, holding hands, and a man with dreadlocks hidden under a shapeless hat. An old woman in wire-rims shuffled out after them, slow enough to make her point.
I felt half of myself leave with them. The half of me that opened my eyes to my mother’s face when I woke from bad dreams. That burrowed all the way into the heart of fairyland to find my way back to her, when the Hinterland tried to take her away. But I didn’t move. I waited to see what would happen next.
When they were gone, the woman opened her eyes with a baby-doll click. She smiled, a flash of needle teeth.
“Hello, wolves.”
* * *
The meeting had broken up pretty quickly after that, everyone still buzzing with a bent energy. I hated the way they looked so jacked and cocky, like they’d just won some kind of war. I tried to sneak out without talking to anyone, but the new woman caught me by the stairs.
“You’re Alice, right?”
She was even more startling up close. Her eyes were the silver-blue of shallow water, like the Spinner’s had been. More than one ex-Story had those eyes.
“Nice show,” I told her. “Very dramatic. You make all that wolf shit up on the spot?”
She wrinkled her nose a little, like we were just teasing each other. “I’ve heard about you. The girl with the ice. The one who broke us free.”
She said it so slyly I couldn’t tell how she meant it. I’d been the first one out of the Hinterland, yeah. The one, I’d learned, whose escape left a snag in the weave, allowing the other Stories to crawl out after me. Not that they thanked me for it.
“That’s right. You’re welcome.” I made to elbow past her.
“Is it true what I heard, that you live with some woman?”
I paused. Some of the hypnotic hum had gone out of her voice; I realized she could turn it on and off.
“In Brooklyn, right—cute place on the second story? I like it. I like the blue curtains on your woman’s bedroom window.”
I grabbed her arm. Half to hold her there, and half to steady myself. “What are you getting at?”
She looked at my hand, then up at my eyes.
“It’s all gone, isn’t it? The ice?” The wicked lightness had left her voice. She looked at me with something like disgust, speaking loud enough that all the stragglers could hear it.
“I said I didn’t want to see any lambs here.”
Her name, I later learned, was Daphne. She was the very last Hinterlander to come through. The one who tightened the ranks and broke all attempts at assimilation against the rocks. Within weeks, according to Sophia, she had all of them on a string. Even Soph, I think. Though she wouldn’t tell me much.
I didn’t stick around for it. Till graduation I hadn’t seen Daphne again in the flesh, but she visited me sometimes in dreams. There was a night I woke up panting, my chest feeling crushed and tight, like the devil was sitting on it. I swear I saw her standing by the bed, streetlight catching on her pointed teeth and red hair. But when I turned on the lamp there was nothing there.
Daphne’s threats were a good thing in the end: they made me do what I should’ve done ages ago. I gave the Hinterland up for good, and set about making my life an entirely human one.
* * *
It was half past eleven on a Sunday. If Daphne wasn’t waiting for me, I knew where to find her: packed into the muggy air of the psychic’s shop, along with Sophia and the rest of them. It was meeting day.
Something in my stomach twanged as I approached the building for the first time in months. It was shabby brick and a foggy glass door, with a palmist’s sign above it and a staircase just behind. But all I could see as I walked up was Daphne. Leaning against the brick with her legs crossed, her eyes hidden by the smoky circles of street-vendor shades. When she saw me coming she gestured at me to hurry up.
“Hey, you,” she said in that smoky, bullshit voice. “It’s been a minute.”
I approached slowly, stopped a few squares of sidewalk away. “What do you want?”
“I want to make amends,” she said. “I think you got the wrong idea about me.”
“I’m pretty sure I got the right one. Tell me what you actually want.”
“That was a nice ceremony. Is Ella real proud?”
That dark thing that lived below my sternum stirred. “Get my mother’s name out of your mouth. If you want something, want to talk to me, want anything from me, you don’t mention her again. You don’t go near her again. Ever. Got it?”
Quick as a whip, she grabbed my hand. Squeezed it once, then dropped it. Checking, I think. I shouldn’t have cared what she thought, but for a minute I wished I was what I used to be: full of ice to my fingernails, and ready to bury her in it.
“If you were my daughter,” she said, “here’s what I’d teach you first: never let ’em know how to hit you where it hurts.”
I felt my cheeks going hot. “Fuck’s sake, you’ve won. You warned me off. I stayed away. Why are you still bothering with me?”
She lifted her sunglasses, trapping me in the twin tractor beams of her eyes. “Oh, sweetie. What makes you think watching out for you is any bother?”
A man walking by us slowed, turning so he could keep staring at Daphne as he went. She kept her shades up, smiled at him sweetly, and popped off her top veneers, revealing a double-row of filed-down shark teeth.
“Mother of God!” the man yelped, half stumbling over a stoop, then sprinting away.
She used a pinky to push the veneers delicately into place, turning her attention back on me. “Let me start again. I’m not trying to make an enemy of you. I want you here because Hinterland blood is precious, more now than ever. Despite what you might think, you’re still a part of us. And I need you here for us, the way we’re here for you.”
I stared at her. Half the creatures gathered up those stairs would knife me for a hot dog. “Where is this coming from? Why now?”