The Night Country

4

Ella wasn’t home when I let myself in. Our AC was broken and she kept insisting she could fix it, which meant there was a scatter of tools by the overturned window unit and the air was so hot it practically wobbled. I stood in front of the fridge in rain-soaked clothes and ate a slice of leftover pizza, fanning the freezer door back and forth. I’d moved on to gelato out of the tub when something made me stop: from the back of the apartment, a quiet creak. The singular sound of a foot placed carefully on old floorboards.

I put the ice cream down. Behind me, the fridge strained and settled. Outside, a mockingbird imitated a cell phone. And from the back of the apartment came another creak.

My breath switched from automatic to manual. I walked down the hall, peering into the quiet rooms. Mine, Ella’s, our bathroom the size of a crow’s nest.

“Hello?”

My voice dropped like a pebble into the quiet, and I knew I was alone. A shaken-up idiot in an empty apartment, hallucinating the thing I was always waiting for: the return of bad luck.

In the bathroom I washed my face, splashing water into my eyes, my mouth, swishing the ice cream off my tongue. My heart was still banging like an offbeat drum. When I came up dripping I saw a face in the mirror behind me.

I saw the blue and white and black of it, the pale smear of teeth. I stopped breathing, and didn’t breathe again till I had them pinned to the bathroom wall, my hands pressed like butterfly wings over their throat.

Ella’s throat. Her blue eyes and black hair. Skin pearling up with sun freckles. It happened so fast she didn’t look shocked till I’d already pulled away.

We stared at each other. I heard a dog barking through the open windows, and a child’s cut-glass scream.

“I snuck up,” she said, a little breathless. “I startled you.”

We nodded in unison, like a pair of metronomes. “Sorry,” I said, then coughed and tried again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know who it was.”

She reversed her way out of the bathroom, like she didn’t want to turn her back on me. “You’re home early. You didn’t have to work after all?”

It took me a second to remember, to understand. “I didn’t,” I said. “I got it wrong.”

We waded through dinner, through small talk of graduation and Ella’s coworkers at her nonprofit gig, eating to the sound of one of our old car tapes. I’d gotten her a vintage cassette deck for her birthday so she could play the music she loved to listen to on the road: PJ Harvey and Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill, and bands with names like paint colors—Smog, Pavement, Gabardine. We stayed at the table long enough to pretend the thing in the bathroom hadn’t happened. She’d put my graduation flowers in an empty pickle jar. I kissed her cheek and made a big thing about carrying them to my room.

I tried to lose myself in the solitary mysteries of A Wild Sheep Chase, but my eyes kept going to the door. To the window. Around midnight I heard Ella’s radio go quiet. At one I finally got up, giving in to the itch running under my skin.

I moved through the house like a thief. Ella was breathing easy in her bed, and the front door locks held. Nobody hid behind the shower curtain, or in the shadows of the couch. Hansa was still dead somewhere, and the awful man from my tale wasn’t, because no world ever balanced itself just right.

In the kitchen I brewed coffee by the city’s borrowed lights, sweetened it with honey and cooled it with milk, then dropped in ice. June came in through the windows, slinky and edged with a gasoline tang. There was a mimosa tree in the yard; when I pressed my forehead to the screen I could see breeze pouring itself through the blossoms.

In my fairy tale I’d been a black-eyed princess, unloved. My hands were filled with a killing cold, my touch was death. When I left the Hinterland I took the barest chip of it with me. But I’d let that last little bit melt away.

I didn’t want to mourn the loss of the thing that made me wicked, but hearing about three ex-Stories being killed made me feel disarmed without it. My head was full of formless black thoughts I couldn’t allow to settle. I didn’t want to think about things I couldn’t have, that I shouldn’t want.

I took the coffee back to my room. In the minutes I’d been gone, the room had filled up with the scorched-earth scent of unfiltered cigarettes. I unlatched the barred window that let onto our fire escape and stuck out my head.

“Those things’ll kill you,” I said.

Sophia took a last drag and stubbed the butt out on her shoe. “Funny.”

She dropped into my room, then did what she always did: started to case it, like a criminal or a cop. Ran a finger over the spines of my books, took a sip of my coffee. Moved over to the dresser and picked things up, inspecting them one by one. Dr Pepper lip gloss. A bloom of blue hibiscus. The rosette my mother had made from the dirty silk of the dress I’d worn home from the Hinterland. I didn’t know what she’d done with the rest of it.

“Can’t sleep?”

I shook my head, though she wasn’t looking. She’d always had a knack for showing up when I was restless. Or maybe she showed up even when I wasn’t, and I slept right through it.

“So,” she said, inspecting herself in the mirror bolted to my closet door. “You ran away.”

“Oh, screw you,” I said, and buried my face in my pillow. I felt the bed dip as she sat down beside me, then poked me between the shoulder blades till I turned.

“I’m not giving you shit, I swear. I just want to know why.”

Why had I? What had I felt seeing him again, remembering how it felt to be bound together inside our tale? Disgust, fear, those were easy. Anger, too. But there was something else: a serrated sort of curiosity. It was bad enough I couldn’t make myself feel nothing, I didn’t want to feel that.

“I killed him,” I said to the ceiling. “I’ve killed him a hundred times. Wouldn’t you have run?”

She stared at me till I looked back, her eyes two distant planets. “You killed him because he deserved it. I bet he deserves it here, too.”

I studied her, a tickling, terrible thought blooming. “Soph. You know … you understand that it’s permanent here, right? When you’re dead, you’re dead.”

“Of course I know that,” she said, suddenly savage. “Alice, why’d you have to come back around today? Of all days.”

“What do you mean? What’s wrong with today?” She didn’t answer. “Ask Daphne why today. She’s the one who dragged me there.”

“Dragged you. Kicking and screaming, right?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means stop pretending you don’t have a choice.” Her voice was hard. “Because of all of us, you’re the only one who does. To be part of us, or not. So. Coming back today, does that mean you made your choice?”

“Jesus, I showed up to one meeting.”

“The way Daphne runs things now, it’s not … Alice, you don’t come and go.”

“Daphne. She doesn’t really want me there. She checked—I think she checked today to see if I could still do it. You know. To see if I still had the ice.” I laughed a little, around the urge to cry.

Sophia didn’t laugh with me. “Do you?”

“What? No. You know I don’t.”

She studied me for a moment without speaking. “Here’s what I don’t get about you,” she said. “In your tale, you had all the power. You were a monster in the Hinterland. Why now are you pretending to be a mouse?”

She didn’t say monster like I’d say monster. She said it with reverence, like it was a title. Like she was saying queen.

“I’m not a mouse.” I looked down at my hands and remembered the sight of them flexing over my mother’s throat. The exhilaration of it, that came before the shame.

“I’m not,” I repeated, “a mouse.”

“Good,” she said. “Because you can’t afford to be. Something very bad is going on.”

“I know about the murders. Daphne told me.”

“She didn’t tell you everything.”

Her pause had dark things in it. Things with teeth.

“They weren’t just killed. There’s something else.”

My shoulders went high. Whatever she said next, I wasn’t going to like it.

“Whoever killed them, they took something away. Like, a part.” She breathed out hard and lit another cigarette. She wasn’t supposed to smoke in here, but I didn’t stop her. “They took the prince’s left hand. Abigail, they took her right. And they took Hansa’s left foot.”

My toes curled in, automatic.

“Where’d you hear that?” I was whispering now. “Does everyone know?”

“I don’t know who knows. Robin told me, he didn’t say where he got it from.”

I didn’t ask, but she passed her cigarette to me anyway. It’d been ages since I’d had one, and the nicotine hit my blood like sickness. I smoked it down to my fingertips, thinking, trying not to think. I looked out the window, searching for the white sailing ship of the moon. But the sky was thick with cloud cover, and the moon was just a rock here anyway.

“You’ve been gone,” Sophia said. “You’ve been trying to walk away. And I get it. I do. You’ve got more in this world than the rest of us, and that’s nice. But there’s something starting here. So either you’re out of this, all the way, or you’re in it. And if you’re in, it’s time to remember who and what you are. Or you might not survive it.”

I would feel guilty later. Later, I would think of my mother lying defenseless down the hall, and my window swung foolishly open to let in Sophia, the night, and whatever else might come. But right then, I looked into her flat, beautiful eyes.

“What am I?”

“First tell me you’re sure. Be sure.”

I wasn’t sure. About anything. But I nodded my head.

“You are not a victim, or a damsel. Or a girl who runs.” She gripped my hands. “You’re Alice-Three-Times.”

“I don’t remember how to be that way.” I squeezed back. “I forgot. I had to.”

Her smile came out like a sickle moon, all edge. “I’ll help you remember.”