headed for the Door Ilvane had destroyed in Japan, or even the Door the Society had closed in Colorado. I’d thought he didn’t know about this first Door, except as a passing reference in my father’s story, closed decades before.
Oh, hell.
“I have to go. Right now.” I was already standing, already reeling toward the door with Bad scrabbling to catch up. “Which way to that old hayfield? Never mind, I’ll find it—it was on the river, wasn’t it?” I rummaged freely through Lizzie’s things as I spoke, tugging out drawers wedged tight in the summer heat, looking for—yes. A few faded pages of newsprint. I jammed them back into my pillowcase with everything else: Ilvane’s greenish compass, my silver coin-knife, my father’s book, Samuel’s pen. It would have to be enough.
“Hold up, girl, you’re half-dressed—” I was three quarters dressed, at least—I just wasn’t wearing shoes and my blouse was buttoned sideways. “What do you want with that place, anyhow?”
I turned back to face her. She looked so shrunken and fragile in her rocking chair, like something plucked from its shell and slowly fossilizing. Her eyes on me were red-rimmed and anxious.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. I knew what it felt like to be always alone, always waiting for someone to come home. “But I have to go. I might already be too late. I’ll come back to visit, though, I swear.”
The lines around her mouth twisted into a bitter, hurting sort of smile. It was the smile of someone who has heard promises before, and knows better than to believe them. I knew what that was like, too.
Without thinking I crossed back to the rocking chair and kissed my aunt Lizzie on the forehead. It was like kissing a page in an ancient book, musty-smelling and dry.
She huffed a half laugh. “Lord, but you are just like your mother.” Then she sniffed. “I’ll be here when you come back.”
And I left my mother’s house with the pillowcase clutched tight in my hand and Bad flying like a sleek bronze spear at my side.
The Ash Door
He was already waiting for me, of course.
You know that feeling when you’re in a maze and you think you’ve almost made it out, but then you turn the corner and bam, you’re back at the entrance? That warped, eerie feeling of having fallen backward in time?
That was how it felt to see the overgrown field and the black-suited shape waiting for me in the center of it. Like I’d made a mistake somewhere and circled back to the day when I was seven and found the Door.
Except the scene had changed, subtly. When I was seven the grasses had been orange and autumn-dry, and now they were several hundred shades of green and studded with yellow bursts of goldenrod. I’d been neatly dressed in blue cotton, terribly alone except for my pretty little pocket diary, and now I was barefoot and dirt-grimed, with Bad padding beside me.
And I’d been running away from Mr. Locke then, rather than toward him.
“Hello, January. Sindbad, always a pleasure.” Mr. Locke looked a little travel-rumpled but otherwise precisely the same: square, pale-eyed, supremely confident. I remember being surprised, as if I expected him to be wearing a black cape lined with red silk or twirling a long mustache with a sinister smile, but he was just comfortable, familiar Mr. Locke.
“Hello, sir,” I whispered. The will to be polite, to maintain civility and normalcy, is fearfully strong. I wonder sometimes how much evil is permitted to run unchecked simply because it would be rude to interrupt it.
He smiled in what he must have believed was a charming, friendly manner. “I was just starting to suspect I’d missed you, and you were already gallivanting off God-knows-where.”
“No, sir.” The jagged tip of the pen pressed into my palm.
“How lucky. And—good Lord, child, what have you done to your arm?” He squinted. “Tried to copy Daddy’s tattoos using a butcher knife, did you?”
The next No, sir caught in my throat and refused to come out. My eyes had fallen on the weedy, mostly vanished circle of ash that had once been my blue Door, and standing before me was the man who had burned it down, betrayed my father, locked me away—and I didn’t owe him good manners. I didn’t owe him anything at all.
I unbent my shoulders and raised my head. “I trusted you, you know. So did my father.”
The joviality slid from Locke’s face like clown paint washing away in the