The Hazel Wood: Chapters 13–18

Everyone is supposed to be a combination of nature and nurture, their true selves shaped by years of friends and fights and parents and dreams and things you did too young and things you overheard that you shouldn’t have and secrets you kept or couldn’t and regrets and victories and quiet prides, all the packed-together detritus that becomes what you call your life.

Passing out felt like doing just that: giving up, floating into the ether.

Paranoia so quick and overwhelming I’d passed out. How hard would Audrey mock me if she could’ve seen me swooning—and being caught by Ellery Finch?

I waved him away, toward the bodega we’d stopped at to get food.

Audrey continued, in the most subdued voice I’d ever heard her use.

My voice sounded so devastated it almost made me hyperventilate.

And if she were dead—I believed this to the bottom of my being—I would know it. She couldn’t die without it rending me in some way I would feel.

I was unsurprised to learn that the Hazel Wood exists on no map, and is as estranged from Google Earth as true magic is from most university English programs today—hence the sad dearth of contemporary Proserpine scholarship.

“Because it’s called the Hazel Wood, hack!”

The Honda took the brunt of several canine attacks, and I’ll admit I was surprised by how quickly New York’s upstate homeowners are willing to pull a gun on a scholar who seeks only information, and whose independent study relies on grant money and donations.

When, ten minutes later, we reached a pair of tall, green-metal gates, we knew we’d found our destination: the gates were decorated with a stylized hazel tree.

When we exited the car, the air felt balmy—by my estimation, it was a full twenty degrees warmer than it had been when we left the diner.

A few seconds later, something garbled came through the intercom box.

On the final landing, I bent over to pant and curse Whitechapel for offering Mindful Breathing and Krav Maga electives rather than compulsory PE.

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....

“Tell me three good reasons you need to go. Three is a fortuitous number in fairy tales. But you already knew that.”

The vacancy in Ness’s blue eyes was burning off like fog. “How old do I look to you?” she said. A non sequitur.

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..."

I sucked in a breath when I saw her pupils up close—they were faintly ovoid, like the eyes of a goat.

We never left town at opportune times.

Finch eased ahead at a steady clip, and the radio turned into a soothing drone as I drifted into the fugue state of the emotionally exhausted long-distance traveler.

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.

But Lisbet said nothing as her sister took her wrist and used it to paint a door.
She painted the sides of it first, in two continuous lines, scraping Lisbet’s wrist across the stone. She lifted her as high as she could to paint a lintel over the top.

On every table were plates of rotting meat, or blackened flowers with livid yellow pollen dripping from their hearts.

Do with it what you will, the voice said, but don’t squander your sister’s gifts.

She could see the boy walking toward her, his step tentative but his eyes eager.

His voice was soft and soporific, relaying distant horrors.

A heady flash of déjà vu froze me in my seat.

We rolled over something that made the body of the car jounce hard.

But Finch stayed staunchly, solidly unified.

At some point in the past thirty-six hours, he’d joined the tiniest, saddest clique of people, of which Ella had previously been the only member: people I, Alice Crewe, couldn’t bear to see die.

I switched my gaze to the ceiling, eyes on the mealy yellow circles of plastic stars till he was in the shower.

I dipped my nose toward the anemic smell of packaged Folger’s, and recoiled.

A tide of water sluiced out.

It lapped around my shoes, brackish and full of specks of green and gray.
“It’s seawater,” Finch said wonderingly, right as a fat silver fish flopped out onto the asphalt.

“If you hurry,” she added ominously, “you might catch today’s bus.”

There was a bitter filament in his voice that the joke couldn’t hide.

I sped up, grudgingly, my bag bouncing against my hip.

“‘In bed asleep while they do dream things true.’” His voice was fervent.

As soon as I was convinced he really was out, I dug out the feather, the comb, and the bone. They looked prosaic in daylight.