Finch scanned the row of doorbells before punching the one for 7F. A few seconds later, something garbled came through the intercom box.
“What do—sa wait—?”
We looked at each other. Finch rang the bell again.
This time, the voice on the intercom was clearer. It sighed.
“What does Ilsa wait for?”
“She waits for Death,” Finch said smoothly, speaking into the box.
A pause, then the nasal screech of the buzzer. Finch kept peeking at me from the corner of his eye, looking smug.
“You can say it if you want,” I said. There was no elevator in sight, or even a lobby, just a narrow flight of stairs covered in sad gray carpet. Looked like we’d be huffing it to the seventh floor.
“Say what?”
“That your Hinterland knowledge got us in. I had no idea what Ilsa waited for.”
He shrugged. “You could guess, though, right? When in doubt, the answer is always Death. With a capital D. That’s the trick of the Hinterland.”
We didn’t talk again till we reached Ness’s floor, conserving our energy for the climb. On the final landing, I bent over to pant and curse Whitechapel for offering Mindful Breathing and Krav Maga electives rather than compulsory PE.
“How you doin’, slugger?” Finch punched my arm lightly, and I waved him off. The door in front of us creaked open, just a bit, and we startled back.
Though her face was washed clean of makeup, I recognized Ness right away. She stood wedged between the door and its frame, looking at us with unfocused eyes.
She wore black jeans and a Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes sweatshirt, stained down its front with runnels of what I hoped was coffee. Her eyes were wide and cloudy blue, her hair a nest of dark curls shot through with gray, though she seemed a little young to be graying already. I was surprised, though, by how old she did look. Her bio pic must’ve been taken a decade ago. Her eyes ran vacantly over Finch and settled on me. I saw her fingers tighten on the door.
“You’re the one who messaged me?”
I nodded.
“Althea’s … granddaughter, it would be? The one who threw an orange at me at the Fairway?”
“Oh. Yeah. Can I come in?”
“Just you.” She stepped back from the door, with a distinct air of It’s your funeral.
I followed, giving Finch an apologetic shrug.
“Hey, wait.” He wedged himself against the doorframe. “Alice.”
“It’s fine, Finch.”
“Is it?” His voice went low. His eyes—big, protective—made my neck go tight. This was what happened when you started to need someone: they got used to it.
“I’m good,” I said tightly, and shoved him out of the way so I could close the door.
Hopefully it felt like a friendly shove.
Ness’s apartment made William Perks’s bookshop look like a Zen garden. The smell of it was a claustrophobic sucker punch of nag champa, old takeout, and dirty hair. Underneath it wound a base note of sage, familiar from Ella’s purifying rituals.
Once I got over the reek, I started to take in the details. It was a studio, a big one. Most of the floor space was taken over by sealed-up cardboard boxes and stacks of books, and every spare surface—the dining room table, the bed, the sagging green velvet armchair—was covered in stuff. Balled-up clothes, pizza boxes, craft supplies. Lots of craft supplies. I hoped Ness was practicing art therapy; she looked like she could use it.
“You want tea?” she asked hoarsely. She looked at me sidelong, her eyes darting skittishly away when I tried to look back.
“No … kay,” I said, twisting my response as her eyes narrowed. She turned her back and stalked over to switch on the electric kettle balanced at the edge of her minuscule kitchen counter. I wondered but didn’t ask how long the water had been sitting inside it.
As we waited for it to boil, I looked for a place to sit. There was a folding chair pushed up to the table that held nothing worse than a stack of newspapers, so I went to move them onto the floor.
A headline on the top one caught my eye. Police Launch Probe into Upstate Killings. While Ness slapped a box of Lipton onto the counter, I sat down and began to read.
The tiny hamlet of Birch, New York, has lately been at the center of a statewide investigation, following three unsolved killings over the course of seven months …
“Lemon or cream?”
My head snapped up. Ness’s milky blue eyes pinned mine. “Er. Sugar?” How old would the cream be? How shriveled the lemon? Sugar, at least, was safe.
As Ness turned back to jiggle an open Domino bag over my cup, something made me rip the article from the newspaper’s front page and tuck it into my skirt pocket. When the tea was ready, Ness used her arm to sweep aside some of the junk on the kitchen table, and tipped the contents of a second folding chair onto the floor. She set a white-and-orange Zabar’s mug in front of me and sat.
“So,” she said. “What do you want?”
Not small talk, any more than she did, apparently. “I read the last post on your blog, and I’m hoping you can tell me how to find the Hazel Wood.”
“Hah!” She threw back her head and yelled it, like people do in books. “Tell me three good reasons you need to go. Three is a fortuitous number in fairy tales. But you already knew that.” She screwed her face up and glared at me.
“What if I gave you one really good one?”
The vacancy in Ness’s blue eyes was burning off like fog. “How old do I look to you?” she said. A non sequitur.
I lifted one shoulder. If she wanted to be flattered, she was asking the wrong girl. “I don’t know. Thirty … five?”
“I’m twenty-six years old.”
I wrapped my hands tight around my mug and looked at her. The gray threads in her hair, the delicate lines around her eyes. I’d heard of people’s hair going white from trauma, but this was something else.
“You got in, didn’t you?” My voice was hushed. “How did you do it?”
Ness leaned forward, letting her hair fall over her face. “We got in,” she said tonelessly, “because they let us in. We’d have looked forever if they hadn’t. They killed Martin, but they let me live. I still don’t know why.” Something came into her face, the analytical light she must’ve once lived by. “Why didn’t they kill me? Why did they let me go?”
“Who killed Martin?” I managed, leaning forward so the table’s edge pressed into my rib cage. “Was it the Hinterland?”
She peered at me, her voice settling into a pedantic singsong. “When you spend a night in a fairy hill, you come out and the world is seven years older. But when the Hazel Wood let me out, nothing had changed. Only one night had passed. Our car was still there. With Martin’s … his coffee cup. In the holder. The coffee was still drinkable. But I was changed. I’d aged in a night—seven years, if I had to guess.” She touched her fingers to faint crow’s-feet on each side. “Just look at me.”
I looked. It was all I could do for her.
“The point is, I wouldn’t help you get into that place if you had three hundred reasons,” she said fiercely.
“I told you, I only have one. They’ve got my mother. I have no choice. I know you think it’s crazy, but I have to go. Anything you can tell me might help.”
Ness shook her head convulsively. Then she said something in a small, singsong voice. “Look until the leaves turn red, sew the worlds up with thread. If your journey’s left undone, fear the rising of the sun.”