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.
OceanofPDF.com
20
Ella drove. Her face was lost in shadow, her hands lit white spiders on the wheel. She hummed a song that at first seemed tuneless, before it resolved into something that lilted and spun back on itself in an eerie round.
“Mom,” I said.
She flinched. “I thought you were sleeping.”
“What’s that song?”
After a long pause, “A nursery rhyme. My friend taught it to me when I was little.”
My mom didn’t talk about her childhood, not ever. I held my breath, then dared a question. “Were you a little girl like me?”
I was very young. Six at the oldest.
“What do you mean?”
I tried to put into words what I meant. Did her insides match her outsides? Was the way my life dripped off me like water, barely leaving a mark, normal? Did the bad luck chase her, too, or had it only come around after she’d had me?
But I couldn’t say any of that, because I didn’t want to see her cry. She wanted me to be happy. Each new place was a fresh chance, a field of unmarked snow she gave me to run through. And maybe everyone felt this way when they moved on—that everything they’d left behind smeared together like watercolors and washed away.
I looked away from her drawn-tight face, watching our headlights slice through fog. “Books. Did you like books?”
Her shoulders dropped a little. “I did. I liked to read everything but fairy tales.” She sighed, sounding older than salt and way too young to be a mother, all at once. “Hours to go, love. Get you some sleep.”
My eyelids dropped like she’d anchored them with stones. I was falling asleep, or waking up, or some combination of the two. I wasn’t in the car with my mother, I was somewhere else, and she was very far away. My mind clawed its way to consciousness.
“Wake up.”
The sun shone red through my eyelids. I opened them a fraction and cringed. It was too bright. A gloved hand slapped my face, once, twice, three times. The third was a crack that made my ears ring, and my eyes snapped open wide.
I was in the back seat of a car, and it was night. Twice-Killed Katherine crouched over me, shining a Maglite in my face. Her teeth were small and milky blue, like baby teeth.
I could’ve tried to hurt her, but I didn’t. Finch’s death lay like a heavy stone on my chest. I saw him go in flashes, when I blinked and when I didn’t. The careless slice of the knife, the wanting eyes. The relentless crumple to earth.
Katherine hung over me a moment longer, her breath stinking of week-old roses. “He’d still be alive,” she whispered in my ear, “if you’d just done it.” She scrambled backward like a spider, tugging me with one gloved hand.
I followed mutely. I felt every breath and the ache of my hip where I must’ve banged it. My mouth tasted like dead coffee and the air smelled prickling and green and my head ached like a hangover and my skin felt electrified. I was here, aching and alive, while Finch bled out somewhere in the Hinterland.
“What’ll you do with his body?” My voice guttered and clogged.
Katherine slammed the car door, a gunshot sound I flinched from. She looked at my face like it was something she was trying to place. A puzzle piece that wouldn’t fit anywhere.
“Don’t waste your worry,” she said. “You’re here.”
I looked around wildly—for the Hazel Wood, a gate, a road. Anything. All I saw were trees, pressing in around a clearing barely big enough for the car. I couldn’t see where we’d come from, or how we’d get out. “I’m where?” I asked, my voice cracked. Thirst rose up in me again, more desperate this time.
“You’re in the Halfway Wood,” Katherine said. “And here you’ll wander. Till death is preferable, and you choose it.”
She grabbed my arm and flung me in a wide half-circle, like we were at a square dance. I stumbled forward a few yards and down to my knees. By the time I struggled up, she was in the cab. I lunged at the door and was thrown back as it rocketed into a wall of trees. They parted obligingly, then sealed back into place as neatly as a curtain.