“Thanks,” I said, sticking out my hand.
He took it, then yelled, pulling his fingers back like I bit him.
“What? What happened?” I asked. He held his fingers to his mouth, staring at me. Staring at my hands.
“Shit,” he said. “You’re Story, aren’t you?”
“Huh?” I looked down at my hands and gasped.
They were the blitzed white of a cheap wedding dress, so pale they were almost blue. My nails were translucent, chunks of carved ice. “What the hell!” I said, jumping backward like I could get away from them.
“I meant no disrespect, my lady!” The man bowed, walking backward. “I didn’t mean to meddle. Good travels to you!”
“Wait!” I cried, and threw out one hand. He froze, like I might have the power to shoot ice rays at him. For all I knew, I did.
“I need gloves,” I said.
He hesitated before shoving his hands into the pockets of his jacket, coming up with worn leather gloves. He balled them up, tossed them to me, and ran.
I caught them against my chest. They were too big and smelled like cheap chocolate, but I felt better as soon as the white of my fingers had disappeared. My heart squeezed when I remembered the story Finch told me in the diner: Alice-Three-Times swallowed ice, and it made her—me—into a frozen zombie. Katherine’s fiery touch in the parking lot—that cold, awful feeling wasn’t hers, it was mine. Her touch, the touch of the Hinterland, woke it up.
It was too much, too strange, too big to think about all at once. So I set off in the direction the man had pointed me. The path took me past a tiny hut built between two massive trees. An old man sat on a stump out front, watching me with distant eyes. He held something pressed to his ear. I nodded at him, jamming my gloved hands into my pockets.
The thing in his hand squawked, and a string of nonsense words came out. Green scene mean. Stick quick trick. Tokyo alabaster red. King queen chick.
“Is that a … is that a transistor radio?”
The man grunted, writing something down on a square of rough paper. He wrote with a Bic.
“Who are you talking to?” I tried again.
He didn’t seem inclined to answer, so I turned away.
“Whoever’s listening,” he said to my back. “In this world or another.”
“Any luck yet?”
The radio crackled again and let out a descending series of hums in a woman’s voice. It sounded like a vocal exercise.
“Heard lots of things,” he muttered. “But no luck.”
I nodded. “Good travels,” I said, because I thought it might be the greeting here. The old man stared at me strangely and went back to his radio.
The light started to change, going tawny as the sharp shadows lengthened. Where the path petered out to a tiny foot road, I nearly collided with a tall man in black. He had a handsome, avid face covered nose to temples in thin, branching tattoos, and he smelled … awful. And somehow familiar.
He was a Story for sure. It came off him like a hum. I stared straight ahead, adrenaline fizzing in my fingers.
“Good travels,” he said.
I nodded and tried to slip by, but he grabbed my hand. Before I could take it back, he tugged off one glove. My stomach lurched: the freeze was climbing. Unworldly white inched over my wrists.
“Hello, little Story,” he said, and grinned. His teeth were thin and needle sharp.
Then I recognized it—his stink, of rot and ruin with a wild green heart. It was a scent from another lifetime. It was the sickening smell of Harold’s apartment the day I’d come home to find my mother gone—here was the one who’d taken her.
Briar King. The name floated to the surface of my mind like a whisper down a phone line. The Hinterland, revealing its secrets to me. Secrets I already knew, because I was of it.
“You,” I said.
“That’s a very good start,” he said. “Me?”
“You took her. Ella Proserpine. Where is she?”
He pouted at me, childish, his gaze growing dim. “Ella, Ella, Ella. I can’t recall the name.”
Every time his mouth formed around her name, my hands pulsed with barbed cold. “In New York, on the other side of the Halfway Wood. You took her, you left something for me—a page out of the book. Tales from the Hinterland.”
His eyes refocused with a snap. “Oh, yes, I do remember her. Ella Proserpine, the thief. And you’re the little Story girl she stole away.” For just a moment, he looked troubled. “But what are you doing here? Katherine had plans for you in the Halfway Wood.”
“I asked you about Ella. Where is she? What did you do to her?”
“It’s hard to remember what happens out there, don’t you find?” He showed his needle teeth, all at once. “Whatever I did, I assure you she liked it. That world is such a good place to have fun.”
I darted forward and slammed my ice-white palm to his neck.
He gasped. Hoarfrost bloomed under my hand, crawled up his neck, snaked into his open mouth.
I wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t stop. And wanting it scared me enough that I dropped my hand, breathing hard. Oh, I was cold. I was chilled through to my elbows now. I tucked them into my body like broken wings.
“What did you do to my mother?” I said it slow, so he would hear me.
The tattoos on his face had gone white; now they pulsed and juddered, warming back to black. He bared sharpened teeth at me and rolled his neck. “I can’t tell you a thing, no matter what you do to me. I never remember much from out there. Though I do remember her.” He shivered with pleasure. “Ella Proserpine. The blood in her sings to me. Her father’s blood, her blood—the same. I never forget the sound, not once I’ve heard it.”
Her father … Ella’s father. My skin shuddered back on my bones. Ella’s father died in the Village before she was born, leaving Althea a pregnant widow. Killed by a junkie, supposedly.
Or by something worse. Something shark-stupid and hungry that followed the scent of an old victim’s blood, pulsing in his daughter’s veins.
How much of our bad luck was him? And how much of it was the other monsters of the Hinterland, slipping in like shadows when we stayed in one place too long? I thought of the stack of newspaper clippings in Althea’s sad yellow kitchen, a history of deaths kept by their accidental enabler. The Hinterland’s sociopaths weren’t just our bad luck, they were the curse of anyone who wandered too close to the Hazel Wood, an acid-burned wall between the worlds where terrible things crawled in.
“If you hurt my mother, I will kill you.” I made my voice patient and calm. “I don’t care if you’re invincible here, or royalty. I’ll kill you, and I’ll make sure it hurts.”
“She’s not your mother, Alice-Three-Times,” he hissed. “And I think you’d be very glad indeed if I hurt the woman who is.”
Then his head twitched on his neck, the animal click of a predator scenting prey.
I followed his gaze to a point of moving green among the trees—a girl walking past us, nearly invisible in a leaf-colored dress. My stomach lurched: she stood chin up like a queen, and there was a head slung over her shoulder like a knapsack. She held it by a fistful of its bright yellow hair.
“Some of us have stories to attend to,” the Briar King said. “You’ll forgive me for not tending further to you.”
He gave me a look that made me want to take a shower in Pine-Sol, and set off after the girl.