Finch turned, his shoulders raised high, and wouldn’t look at me as he walked down the steps.
“What was that?” I asked.
Finch stared past me, to where the old men were filing into the bait shop. He started to say something, but shrugged instead.
I turned away. If he was going through some existential fan dilemma, I wanted no part of it. I still had to figure out how to shake him before we got too close to the Hazel Wood.
Through the trees at the back of the lot, I could see the hard glitter of water. It made me thirsty. “Want to find a convenience store before we walk to Birch?” I started, turning, then cut off. Finch was standing behind me, too close, eyes wide and jaw set. I startled away from him.
“Damn it,” I said, my heart hopscotching. “What?”
He smiled at me. He smiled like a dog who doesn’t want to get kicked but will take it if he is. “I messed up.”
Adrenaline made my stomach kick and my eyes go dry. “What do you mean?”
“We need to walk—we need to get to the highway.” His voice was high and too fast as he stared at the pavement where the fisherman’s bus no longer was. “Maybe we can hitch. We need to … if we can just get back to the city. I’ll explain on the way. I should’ve explained last night.”
“Explain what?” I planted my feet on the pavement, gripped his arm. “We’re standing here till you tell me.”
“I made a promise,” he said. “But I don’t want to keep it.”
“You need to stop threatening not to take me to the Hazel Wood. At this point I can find it on my own.”
“Not a promise to you,” he said. “A promise to them.”
Them. The word hit me like a blackjack. “What. The fuck. Are you talking about?” I grabbed the front of his jacket.
“I thought … I thought it might help you.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is. You don’t understand yet. They told me not to tell you…”
“Tell me what? Who told you not to tell me what?”
“I can’t.” He looked around nervously, a tremor in his jaw making his teeth clatter. “They’re probably listening right now. We need to go.”
“Just tell me. No riddles, no excuses.”
He shrugged, the gesture heavy with disgust. “I wanted my life to change. I wanted for it to be real. And it is. But I don’t think this is worth it.”
It struck me, suddenly, that no amount of bottomless funds should’ve been enough to convince me to lead an Althea Proserpine fan to the Hazel Wood. It struck me, too, that I didn’t know that much about Finch.
I wrestled back my rage and sudden fear, trying to make my voice reasonable. “If you don’t tell me what you did, I can’t help you fix it.”
“Oh, no,” he said, the words bottomless and bleak. “They’re already here.”
His eyes flicked past me, just as I registered the quiet purr of an idling car. I turned and had time to see its bright paint job and the figure at the wheel—wait, there were two of them, someone was in the passenger seat—before Finch yanked me behind him, sending a hot pain through my shoulder.
“Go,” Finch said, his voice ragged. “Run!”
Off balance, I stumbled to the dirt.
The car exhaled heat like an animal from its yellow sides. It was the cab I’d seen creeping on me outside of Whitechapel. And there was its dark-haired driver, the boy from the diner. He pushed the hair from his face with a gloved hand.
His passenger stepped onto the gravel, staring at me with lantern eyes. It was Twice-Killed Katherine. She wore the same black gloves the boy did.
I froze. I knew if I moved, I would give myself away—a shake in my knees, or my voice.
“I’m sorry,” Finch was saying. “I’m sorry. They just said to get you to the Hazel Wood. That’s all! You were going anyway, you asked for my help…”
“Don’t pretend this was for me. Since when? Since when were you working for them?”
The boy was watching us, amused. Katherine looked like she couldn’t hear us at all.
“Working for them? No, it wasn’t…”
“Since when?”
“Since the bookseller’s,” he said, small. “They talked to me while you were passed out. They kept you … they kept you under a little longer.”
“Thank you for your service, Ellery Finch,” the dark-haired boy said. “Ready for your reward?”
“No,” Finch said. His dark skin looked bloodless. “I don’t want it.”
“What reward?” I spat.
“What all children want,” the boy said mockingly. “Entrance to fairyland.”
My fault, I thought. My fault for trusting a fan.
Ella came to me then—the way she always looked for the good news in the shit sundae. Because maybe this wasn’t all bad. Finding these people, or whatever they were, was what I wanted, wasn’t it?
It was hard to remember that with Katherine’s eyes crawling over my skin.
I elbowed Finch aside. “I’m looking for my mother—Ella Proserpine. I know you have her. I want her back.”
“She thinks we’re mother-nappers, isn’t that funny?” the boy said.
Katherine sucked her teeth like an old woman. “You’re sure this is her? This little house cat?” She lunged at me, teeth bared, and I gasped.
She stopped short, laughing. “See? Skittish as a mayfly.”
But her lunge wasn’t why I gasped. I did it because of what she’d called me: house cat. Like she knew the sticky, long-ago insult that still swam in my brain.
I felt suddenly like a child, moving through a forest of adult knees, hearing their conversations far over my head. None of this made sense, none of it had any context. All of them, even Finch, were treating me like a child—to be protected. To withhold information from.
For a few heartbeats, everything in the world outside my skin felt dulled and slow. I watched it all. Finch, so slumped and weary he was barely standing. The boy, his hands in his pockets but his face avid and ready. Katherine, poised near me like she would bite.
I chose Katherine.
“I’m not,” I said to her, “a house cat.” And I slapped her across the face.
Both of us gasped in unison. My hand where it touched her burned, and the burn spread. It was like gasoline had replaced my blood, and striking Katherine was the match.
The boy cursed, and Katherine scuttled backward, holding her cheek. I kept staring at my hand, trying to shake off the awful crawling fire. “What did you do to me?”
“Katherine, you idiot,” the boy said, clipped.
She shook her head and wouldn’t look at him, letting her hair fall over her face.
“What did you do to me?” I screamed again. I put my hands to my face to feel if I was shriveling, the way the man she’d attacked in Manhattan had shriveled. Terror made me forget what Finch had done, and I turned to him. “Did she kill me? Finch, am I dying?”
He moved to put an arm around me, then yelped and drew back. “You’re so cold,” he whispered. His eyes were sad and bottomless.
We were standing in the middle of the lot, where nothing moved. No cars came by, no fishermen spilled out of the bait shop. The breeze was turned down to nil; the sun hovered in the stillness like a pinned insect.
“We’re doing everything out of order, aren’t we?” the boy said. His voice pretended to be bored, but I heard the thin file of rage running under it. He rubbed his palms together, looking at Finch and I like we were steak.