My mind moved like a cold computer. “I’m here to find Ella,” I said stupidly. “My mother.”
“Your kidnapper. That girl is nobody’s mother.”
For a long white moment my mind wiped clean. I couldn’t even picture Ella’s face. I didn’t know my hand was raised till Althea stepped back, out of range.
“Look at you.” Her laugh was an ugly thing. “Still feral after all these years.”
I dropped my hand, wrapping my arms around myself as Ella came back to me in pieces. Bony hands and breath in the dark and the sharp line of her profile as she drove. She’d never looked like me. I’d never wondered why.
I used to picture a father somewhere, someone Ella had loved, at least for a little while. That was a lie, too.
“I don’t believe you,” I whispered. Another lie.
“You were her favorite story.” Althea’s voice grew gentler, a little. “She liked how angry you were. Like an avenging … well, not an angel.”
“I’m a girl,” I said fiercely. “I’m a person.”
“You’re both, and neither. You’re a story, but that doesn’t make you any less true.”
I felt like I was watching myself from the outside, a girl with blurred edges holding herself like a child. The image stamped itself onto my brain, one of those out-of-your-skin moments that turns into memory while it’s still happening. This is the day my dead grandmother told me my mother wasn’t mine. That I was a character in a story, plucked from another place.
“She ran away from you,” I told Althea, watching the words land like a slap. “We both did. I grew up in the world. I remember it—I remember skinning my knees and reading library books and eating crap food from the gas station. Sick days watching bad TV. I remember life happening in the right order, and, and bus rides, and being lonely. I remember all of it!”
“Do you?”
I stared at her, then down at my hands, rough and chapped and un-fairy-tale-ish. I thought of the way my life faded out behind me, faint scratches on the earth washed away like footprints on dirt.
“You’re crazy,” I said. “And you’re dead. And I’m here to take Ella back.”
“Take her back? From who?” She smiled at me coquettishly, a ghost of what she once looked like, back when hers was a face to look at. She’d become very old since she was a woman telling her daughter a story in the dark.
“From the Hinterland,” I said unsteadily. “They took her.”
Althea shook her head. “I assure you, they did not. You’re the one they wanted, Alice-Three-Times. She was just”—she flipped her hand—“a distraction.”
Bait. Finch was right. Ella, wherever she was, had been bait.
“So where is she, then? If not here, where?” My voice rose. “I don’t care if you’re a ghost or a memory or a, I don’t know, a hologram, but please. She’s your daughter. Please tell me how to get her back.”
“You think I’m a ghost? I haunt this old memory palace, and it haunts me, but I’m not dead.” She grabbed my hand, shoved it against the sloping bread-dough skin beneath the yellowing stripes of her shirt, right where her heart would be.
A dim beat fluttered against my fingers.
Alive.
“But … but the letter…”
“It reached you? I wasn’t sure it would. The death letter was to get her to bring you back.” She laughed, harsh and sad. “Even that wasn’t enough. So why now? What made you come back now?”
My heart crunched in on itself. After everything, I still wanted to think all of it had been her—that she’d sent cold fingers into the world to draw me here. Because she … what? Loved me? Wanted me? Stupid Alice. I liked to think I’d put my old dreams behind me, but here I was talking to one, and she made me feel five years old.
But Ella loved me. My mother. My kidnapper. The Thief, Hansa had called her.
She was still mine, maybe more now that I knew it had been a choice. My longing for her rearranged itself in my chest. It felt like a new-hatched thing, wet-feathered but fierce. I set my jaw and let it be the lifeline that would pull me from the quicksand of this hot, close room, the smell of dust and the night crawling over the windows.
“Ella was gone,” I said. “They took her somewhere—somewhere in New York, maybe, I don’t know. And the book—your book. It was haunting me. Twice-Killed Katherine. She … got me to come.” I found I couldn’t tell her about Finch. Seeing Althea like this would have broken his heart.
“Of course she found you. You are a walking, talking bridge to the Hinterland. Anywhere you go, the wall between the worlds grows thin. They get through. They do damage.”
“She tried to kill me. She tried to make me cut my own wrists in the woods. Why?”
“Ah.” Her eyes turned bright. “Clever Katherine. There’d be a grave cost to pay if they killed you themselves, but if you spilled your own blood in those woods? Alice-Three-Times? It would burn a door between worlds that would never fade. Their vicious holidays out there would never end.”
Alice-Three-Times. The name seared and burrowed into me.
She looked at me with something approaching respect. “So you made it through the woods without a guide. Life out there hasn’t rendered you completely helpless. You must be a bit like her—like Ella.”
“I am,” I said, biting off the words.
She sucked on the cigarette I’d forgotten she was holding. “Ella never could resist a lost lamb—especially not you in your basket, with those awful black eyes. I tried to return you myself, before they killed her getting you back.” Her eyes darkened. “But Ella hated me for it, and she took you away. Far from them, far from me. Like I was a boogeyman, too.”
“But they’re not black. My eyes. They’re brown.” I said it stupid and hopeful. Like it was a loophole I could use to slip back into my real life.
“That happened after you left the Hazel Wood. It was enough to make Ella believe she did the right thing. She wrote to me, back when letters still washed up here once in a while—she said it was the Hinterland draining out of you. Saving you, giving you a real life, became her purpose. Did it work? Did you get one?” Her voice swerved sharply from desolation to hope—stunted and sad, but hope nonetheless.
I remembered the rootlessness, the travel, the cursed incidents that followed us from place to place. I felt in my back the bars of every sofa bed we ever crashed on, the heavy gaze of our hosts when we’d outstayed our welcome, and the ache of sleeping in our car for days on end, pretending I didn’t know we were homeless.
I saw Ella. Gripping my arms and counting down with me from one hundred, bringing my anger back within its borders. The blanket forts she built for me in guest rooms, resigning herself to sleeping without a pillow so I could forget we were a burden for a night. The crow’s-feet starting at the corners of her eyes, so out of place on a woman who never really grew up. Who chose saving me, running with me, over having a real life of her own.
“Yes,” I said. “It worked. I’ve had a wonderful life. I have a wonderful life.”
Althea tilted her head back, looked at me through lowered lashes. “And did she—did Ella ever talk about me?”