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.”