I turned slowly in place, alone in a clearing in the deep dark woods.
That was when I entered a fairy tale.
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21
The clearing I stood in was perfectly circular. I could see that once the car was gone. Something about the trees was off, and it took me a moment to place it—they didn’t rustle in time with each other, or with the mild breeze that made my chapped lips tingle, but one by one. The way they shook their heads and shushed their leaves convinced me they were having a conversation.
My body shook with sorrow, with rage—rage at Finch’s killers, and rage at Finch for his stupidity.
But he was dead. My body hadn’t caught up with my mind.
I lurched blindly from the clearing, scraping past a stunted dogwood tree. Its heart-shaped blossoms trailed velvet tongues along my neck. I shuddered and hurried my step, trying to outrun the thought that circled my mind like a hangman’s rope: What if I wandered this place for one night, like Ness, only to be ejected a day later, and seven years older?
I saw Finch’s face every time I closed my eyes. The walls of my mind were painted with his blood. It stained my palms and stiffened the sleeves of my sweatshirt.
“It’s okay,” I whispered to myself. “It’s okay.” I counted to ten and did a few yoga breaths. Red ran down Finch’s shirt. I couldn’t stop it I couldn’t stop it I couldn’t— “Stop it. I couldn’t stop it.” I made a sound I didn’t recognize, like a laugh and a wail at once, and it scared me quiet. I slapped my own face the way Ella used to when she was too tired to drive.
“It’s over. Nothing to stop. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” Nonsense words. Was this what going insane felt like? Was I really in the woods, or was I still dreaming in the back seat of my abductor’s car, going somewhere even worse?
A tree flung a stinging branch of green buds across my cheek. The hurt woke me up, and for a while all I could focus on was shielding my face from branches, and trying not to trip over hidden things in the dark. The air was so close and dense among the leaves it felt like the trees were breathing on my skin.
He’d still be alive. If you’d just done it. Katherine’s whisper unfolded from empty air. I slapped at it like a mosquito and sped up, welcoming the pain of a skinned knee and scratched palms, and the secret rustle of creatures that drowned out anything else.
Finally I broke free onto a creek bank. I sucked in mouthfuls of cool, wet air, propping myself against a willow tree whose branches poured themselves into the water a few yards from my feet.
I took stock of what I had. My bag was long gone, dropped in the dust of the parking lot. I still wore the cheap jeans and sweatshirt from Target, the sleeves pulled down over my hands. In my pockets, a Kit Kat wrapper and—I realized with a start—the feather, the comb, and the bone.
They felt cool in my hand and gave off an electric, intangible hum, like tuning forks. I looked around furtively and shoved them back in my pockets.
Then something wrapped itself around the bare skin between my jeans and my low-tops and yanked.
I slammed down flat, gasping, in cold mud. I spat it out and twisted till my legs were pretzeled and I could see what had me.
For a horrible, frozen second, I thought it was a corpse. It had the translucent lantern skin of a creature found in the deepest parts of the ocean. It was person-shaped, mostly, though nobody could mistake it for human. It clung to my ankle and watched me with the dull impatience of a dog waiting for its food bowl.
Terror chipped my rational mind into a furious glitter. I kicked and shrieked, aiming for the thing’s horrible face. But its grip was ironclad.
When my foot hit water, plunging in all the way to the ankle, I instinctively curled my free leg up, away from the creek. The thing smiled, and tugged a little harder. My fingers found a loose stone and flung it. I missed and found another one. This time it hit with a clunk.
But not the creature. It hit the water, which a moment ago had flowed fast and black and quiet. The creature looked around, too, one hand still wrapped around my leg.
From where my foot was submerged, a trail of thin green ice spread out like a flume, full of captured bubbles. The thing looked at me, some shallow intelligence sparking behind its eyes. It let go and slid backward, into a slushy pool surrounded by freeze. I yanked my foot free of the ice, looking around to see who had saved me. There was a rustle in the bushes on the other side of the creek, maybe. I wasn’t sure.
“You still can’t pass.” The creature’s voice was a swallowed thing full of glottal stops and touched with an unplaceable accent. It looked more like a girl now that it wasn’t trying to eat me. Its muddy hair was braided, its mouth almost prim.
“Why?”
“This is my byway. I might let you wander the shore till you’re dead.” Its laugh was full of pin-sharp teeth.
“Or I’ll walk across the ice.”
The thing looked around at the meltwater already rising. Whatever strange magic had frozen it was already fading away. “You can try.”
“What if I give you something?”
It froze, its fish-belly eyes suddenly interested. “Your hair? Your fingers?”
I thought of the paintings of mermaids I’d loved to look at when I was little—bird-winged women crawling over doomed ships, pensive Waterhouse girls running silver combs through their hair.
I pulled the comb from my pocket. It had been plain red plastic when I found it at the coffee shop, and again when I looked at it under the willow tree. But now it glinted like mother of pearl. I ran a fingertip over the unfamiliar carvings in its handle.
The redheaded man had left these things behind for me to find. Katherine wanted me to die in these woods, but someone else had stuffed my pockets with fairy-tale tricks. I thought of Ella, the blade in the bouquet. These woods weren’t going to kill me, or drive me mad. Because I wasn’t Ness. I was Ella’s daughter. I was the granddaughter of Althea Proserpine.
I held the comb up so moonlight skated over its teeth. “I’ll give you this if you let me cross to the other side. Unharmed. Meaning you don’t get to eat or otherwise remove any part of me.”
Fairy tales teach you the importance of precise communication. The thing looked disappointed by my thoroughness, but it was already reaching for the comb. When I passed it into its fingers, it slipped into the water and disappeared.
First I kneeled on the bank. I scooped up enough melt to wash the blood from my hands, reaching for a prayer, a poem, a goodbye that felt right. But all I could think of was the Vonnegut quote Finch had inked onto his skin. I never asked him when he’d gotten it, or why, and now I never would.
Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.
I whispered the words, rubbing at blood that looked black in the moonlight. I closed my eyes and held his face in my mind and said it one more time. And a third, because Finch would’ve wanted things done right in a fairy tale.
Then I stood and pressed a testing toe against the ice. It was already spring ice, midway between freeze and slush. But the shore was so close. I took off across it at a run, sliding and nearly making it before my leg plunged through a sour spot. I felt the numb pain of frigid water and the teasing grip of the creature’s fingers, then it shoved me out of the cold and sent me sprawling onto the opposite bank.