I searched on my phone for deaths upstate new york. The first hit was the article I’d seen at Ness’s.
Police Launch Probe into Upstate Killings
The tiny hamlet of Birch, New York, has lately been at the center of a statewide investigation …
“What are you looking at?”
“Birch,” I said. “Birch, New York. That’s where we should go.”
“Why? What did you find?”
“The jogger murders upstate.”
His eyes went wide. “Hinterland?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. They’ve been going on for months, and they’re all messed up in some way. Like, Twice-Killed Katherine messed up.” I hesitated, scanning the tree line. “What did you mean, not vampires exactly?”
Finch faked a shudder. “‘Jenny and the Night Women.’”
I remembered the name from Althea’s table of contents. “How does that one go?”
“Jenny’s a spoiled brat farmer’s daughter who doesn’t like the word ‘no.’ She meets a creepy little kid in the woods who tells her how she can get back at her parents—prick their heels while they’re sleeping, wash a stone in the blood, and bury it under their window. She does it, and it lets the Night Women in. Which is, you know, a pretty big mistake.”
Something was sparking in my mind, an ancient, paper-flat memory trying to rise. I ran a finger over the nick in my chin. “Is there a story about—” I tried to think, but reaching for the memory was like trying to catch minnows with my fingertips.
Chicago. The raking sound of Ella’s scream. Light around a door …
“A door,” I finished. “There’s a story in the book, something to do with a door. How does that one go?”
“‘The Door That Wasn’t There.’ Why that one?”
“Just tell me.”
He hesitated, ducking his head to look out at the trees. “Okay. Here’s what I remember.”
16
There was once a rich merchant who lived at the edge of the woods, in a tiny town in the Hinterland. He spent most of his time traveling but was at home long enough to give his wife two daughters, the eldest dark and the youngest golden, born one year apart.
Their father was distant and their mother was strange, often shutting herself up in her room for hours. The girls could hear her speaking to someone when they pressed their ears to the door, but only the eldest, Anya, ever heard anyone answer. The voice she heard was so thin and rustling, she could almost believe it was leaves against the window.
On a winter’s day when Anya was sixteen, their mother locked herself in her room and never opened the door again. After three days the servants broke it down, and found—nothing. The door was bolted, the windows locked. Winter howled outside, but the girls’ mother was gone. All she’d left behind was a bone dagger on the floor, in a puddle of blood.
Anya heard the servants whispering about it, and snuck into the room to see for herself. The stain put in her a fear of blood so intense, she took to washing out her monthly rags in the dark.
The servants sent word to the girls’ father that his wife was dead, or gone, or worse, and for a long time heard no reply. Until the first warm day of spring, when he drove up in a carriage the girls had never seen.
Inside it was their new mother. She stepped down onto the cobblestones and smiled at them. She was smaller than Anya, with a heap of pale hair and blue eyes that switched coldly from one stepdaughter to the next.
For six months their father stayed home, besotted with his new wife and tolerating his daughters, who ran as wild as they’d learned to in all the years they’d raised themselves, with both parents out of sight.
Until he grew bored of the stepmother, just as he’d once grown bored of his wife—just as he’d always been bored of his daughters. He kissed the stepmother goodbye, nodded at his daughters, and was gone.
It didn’t take long for the stepmother to grow impatient. She snapped at the girls, slapped them at the slightest provocation, carried scissors in her pocket to cut off hanks of their long hair when they displeased her. Every time she left the house, she locked the girls up—to keep them from misbehaving, she said. She kept them in their mother’s room, where the windows were rusted shut and the dark stain on the floor taunted Anya like a vile black eye. Their mother’s bed had been chopped into firewood at their father’s command, all the pretty things she’d surrounded herself with locked away. They were just two girls in an empty room with a poisonous blot on the floor.
At first their stepmother stayed away for a few hours at a time. Then for whole days, then entire nights. The first time she left them locked up from dusk to dawn, Anya beat on the door and screamed till her throat and fists were raw, but no one came.
When the stepmother finally opened the door, she wrinkled her nose at the smell and gestured at the chamber pot. “Empty it,” she said. Kohl and rouge melted into candy swirls on her cheeks; she wouldn’t meet her stepdaughters’ eyes.
Finally there came a day when she locked them in with a bowl of apples and a jug of water and never came back. The sun rose and fell, rose and fell. On the third day Anya looked out the window and saw the servants walking away from the house one by one, their belongings on their backs.
The house was empty. The apples were eaten, the water long gone. The windows stayed shut and the glass wouldn’t give, even when Anya smashed at it with her boot.
That night the sisters lay together in the middle of the floor, trying to keep each other warm. Then Anya heard a sound she’d nearly forgotten. It was a sound like leaves rustling together outside the window.
It came from the bloodstain on the floor. Slowly she inched her way toward it, resting her ear just over it and holding her breath.
It was deep, deep in the night when the rustling resolved into a voice.
You will die, the voice told her.
Anya rolled back onto the floor, angry. I know, she replied fiercely, in her mind. We’re half-dead already.
You will die, the voice said again. Unless.
And it told her how she could save herself and her sister. How she could remake the world just enough so that they could live.
It would take blood.
The next morning Anya told her sister, Lisbet, what she’d learned: they must make a door. Their mother wasn’t dead, she was gone—she’d used magic to make a door, and it had taken her far, far away. Their mother’s blood had spoken to Anya, and told her how to make a door of their own, to meet her.
It will take blood, she told Lisbet, but it can’t be mine.
It was a lie. She wasn’t bad, she was frightened. The idea of opening her own veins filled her with a sick terror that felt like falling, forward and forward without end. She ignored the bitter taste of the lie in her mouth.
She took the bone knife from the place the voice had told her she’d find it: behind a loose brick inside the cold fireplace.
It can’t be mine, she said again, because I’m the sorcerer. I must make the door, and you must sacrifice the blood for it.