The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert

Author:Melissa Albert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

18

Finch was having a nightmare.

I heard him in the next bed, making small, sorry sounds. The light that came in around the curtains was the dusty yellow of streetlamps. I couldn’t tell what time it was, and my phone was plugged into Finch’s charger across the room.

“Finch. Ellery.”

He didn’t answer. When I switched on the bedside light he flinched but didn’t wake. Silently I sat up and swung my feet to the floor. I stopped there, waiting for his eyes to open.

They didn’t. My body felt gritty from the motel bed, like I was swimming in the dirt of other people’s bodies and just couldn’t see it. I rolled my neck and watched him.

His head was thrown back and his eyes were moving beneath their lids. Usually when I looked at people too long I started seeing them as component parts: Bony noses. Eyeballs in sockets. Odd cartilage curve of ears and fingers so strange and overevolved and makeup floating just over the skin and what the hell was with pants, and knees, and how did we walk around like all of this was normal?

But Finch stayed staunchly, solidly unified. He was a boy in a bed with his neck stretched long. His mouth shaped itself around words I couldn’t hear, then he moaned with such aching regret I was next to him with my hand on his shoulder before I could think.

“Hey. You’re having a bad dream.”

He sucked in hard through his nose. His eyes shuttered open and hooked on the ceiling, then my face. I watched the dream leave them and sense roll back in.

“Oh!” he said. In his voice were unshed tears, and I thought he might want me to look away. But he grabbed my hand and brought it to his chest and held it.

I let him. The steady pump of his heart through his shirt made me remember the heart was a muscle. Our most important one. “You were having a nightmare.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Alice.” He said my name like a person putting something precious down on a bed of moss.

“For what? It’s just a dream.”

“No, I…” He looked at me so intently I dropped my eyes, watched our hands rising and falling with his breath. “Alice, let’s go back.”

My head jerked up. His lashes were wet and his cheek was creased. My mind shot an arrow from the first time I saw him in his uniform at Whitechapel to right now, wearing a T-shirt and boxers in this bed.

“Back to what?” I asked.

He let his head dip forward till his forehead touched mine. “There are better fairy tales,” he whispered. “If the Hinterland’s real, maybe all of it’s real. We could look for Neverland. Or Narnia.”

I hadn’t cried since the night Ella announced her engagement, but I felt like crying now. “Ella’s not in Neverland,” I whispered back. “Or in Narnia.”

“Maybe she’s not in the Hazel Wood, either.”

I pulled back, my skin feeling cold where it had touched his. “Maybe not. But this is what we came here to do.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.