“There’ve been some deaths lately.”
“Some … deaths?” She said it like you’d say, Some rain.
“Three since the beginning of spring.”
“Who died? How did they—”
“Killed. The Prince of the Wood first. Then Abigail.”
The prince I’d known a little. Aggressively handsome, with hair like a pony’s mane and a brick of urgently white teeth. Abigail, though. I felt shitty that I couldn’t even put a face to the name.
“And a third was killed last night: Hansa the Traveler.”
I startled. I’d met Hansa in the Hinterland. I knew she was in New York, but the last I’d heard she was living with two older ex-Stories, attending a charter school on the Lower East Side. The news shocked me into forgetting who I was talking to. “But Hansa’s a kid. And she’s actually got—she had a chance. Who would hurt Hansa?”
“What does being a kid have to do with it?”
“It’s horrible,” I said quietly. Hansa had been a little girl when I met her in the Halfway Wood. The moon’s granddaughter. “What happened? How did they die?”
Shadows moved beneath the blue of Daphne’s eyes. Looking at them too long felt like staring into infested water. “Death is death.”
“What does that mean?”
She ignored me, turning toward the door, imperious. “Now you know. And now we’ve made peace. Come on, come be with your people.”
I peered through the glass at the staircase behind it, water-stained and disappearing into the shadows of the second floor. With a longing as palpable as thirst, I did not want to go up there.
“Thanks for telling me. But I can’t right now. I’ve gotta work.” I tried out the lie for the second time that day.
“No, you don’t.” She opened the door. “Your last shift was Thursday, and you work again tomorrow. But you don’t work today.”
I couldn’t say what my face looked like when she turned around to smile at me.
“I take care of my people, even the prodigal ones. Don’t worry about a thing, princess. I’ve always got eyes on you.”
3
I followed her upstairs, because what else could I do?
Run. Hide. The thoughts were listless.
There is nowhere I am free from them.
The words came unbidden, a hard spike of realization that set my blood to humming. Nauseous with nerves, I walked into the tea-scented air of the psychic’s shop.
I’d learned quickly who to avoid back when I was coming here each week. The scary ones weren’t the ones covered in ink to their eyes, or flipping a knife over their knuckles like they were in a bad prison movie. They were that kind-eyed man in the well-cut suit, the faintest tint of blue in his cropped black beard. That boy with the hard-baked smile, no taller than me. The steel-haired woman who whispered that she had a telephone line open to the Spinner, who was going to let us back in any day.
My heart squeezed when I saw Sophia sitting cross-legged on a window seat in the back, next to a guy with the prettiest lips I’d ever seen. I’d been kind of a shit friend since spring: giving up the Hinterland meant pulling away from her, too. Being here after months away felt the same, but different. The air was lightly electrified, bodies shifting like cattle before a storm. Heads dipped, mouths pressed close to ears to whisper.
They were looking at me. Flatly, or with suspicion. I didn’t think I was imagining it. When I reached Sophia, she did a double take.
“What the hell are you doing here?” she muttered.
I blinked, surprised. “Hi to you, too.”
Her eyes stayed hard, but she linked an arm through mine.
“What’s with everyone?” I asked, low. “What did I do?”
“Most things have nothing to do with you.”
After talking to Daphne I was uneasy; now my skin was starting to crawl. “You heard about the deaths?”
“Later.” She spat the word like a bullet.
I wasn’t going to get anything else out of her. I looked to the front of the room, where a fortyish guy had taken the floor. I guess Hansa had been the first order of business; the rest of the meeting would play out like they always did, like any support group meeting anywhere.
The man up front was a stranger, but I could tell at a glance he was one of the scary ones. He was the exact size and shape of a nightmare: the man in the alley, the body crouched over yours in the dark. It was hot up here but he wore a dirty stocking cap anyway, and too-big overalls.
“That’s how I ended up here again,” he was saying. “Another woman—it’s always a damned woman. It becomes hard to hide it, too. Every time one of them makes me do it, it’s move on, start again. I want to live somewhere small, somewhere I can be alone. Like it was back home. Just me, and a woman when I want one. But they’re different here, everything’s different here, and every time I have to hide it.”
I looked around the room. Most everyone had their backs to me now, watching him, and the faces I could see held their secrets.
“So I thought I’d come back,” he went on. “To a place where no one notices no one. The women here are even worse, but they’re easier to get rid of when you’re through. Less to take care of. I don’t even have to leave, I can stay in one place.”
I could’ve misread his words, if I’d wanted to. But I was a Hinterland woman listening to a Hinterland man. I understood that he’d hurt women, and would continue to hurt them if he could. When I looked at Daphne her face was easy. Still. She could’ve been listening to anything.
“I’m glad to be back,” he said, shifting in his overalls and slicing his face into an ugly grin. “They’re pretty here, I’ll give them that. And it feels like a bit of home, in this room.”
Nobody clapped, or said anything, but he whipped off his hat anyway, giving a little bow. As he leaned over, dirty red hair flopped over his forehead.
And I tasted again, with perfect clarity, the rot of his mouth in the Hinterland. The taste of death and hate and the rancid leavings of his last meal.
I knew this man, because his tale had been my own.
* * *
“Alice-Three-Times,” the tale had been called. Again and again I’d lived through it in the Hinterland, a place that ran on the telling of tales. It was written down decades ago by my mother’s mother, Althea Proserpine, and bound within the pages of a book: Tales from the Hinterland. I’d been the princess in the story, this man the suitor who’d won me. To be his wife, or his servant, or worse. In the tale, I killed him before we got far enough to find out, tipping ice into his veins with a kiss. I didn’t know any more than that, because someone had made it his mission to free me from the story.
But in this world, outside the broken borders of the place that bonded me and this violent man, I ran. Crouching down so he wouldn’t see me, I shoved through the crowd of my kin. Past Daphne, who looked at me sharp, then pounding down the steps to the street.
The low gray sky had finally broken. Clouds slopped loose of each other like soaked-through paper, letting in a steady rain. I kept running when I hit the sidewalk. Maybe the raindrops should’ve felt cleansing, but they were warm as tongues, warm as blood. I stopped under a bodega’s green awning and tried to pull myself together.