The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,44

he’d ever mentioned that one day he would take me along with him, but the words clotted in my throat. I swallowed. “For what?”

That stern, very-nearly-irritated expression returned to her face. “Things can’t just keep on forever the way they are, January. Things must change.”

Ah. This was it, then. She was going to tell me that she would be leaving soon, returning home to the highlands of British East Africa and abandoning me alone in this little gray room. I tried to squash the scrabbling panic in my chest. “I know. You’re going.” I hoped I sounded cool and adult, hoped she didn’t notice the way the sheets were balled in my fists. “Now that—now that Father is dead.”

“Missing,” she corrected.

“Excuse me?”

“Your father is missing, not dead.”

I shook my head, rising up on one elbow. “Mr. Locke said—”

Jane’s lips curled, and she made a gesture like a woman swatting a gnat. “Locke is not God, January.”

He might as well be. I didn’t answer but knew my face had gone mulish with denial.

Jane sighed at me, but her voice when she spoke again was softer, almost hesitant. “I have reason to believe—your father made certain assurances—well. I haven’t given up on Julian, not yet. Perhaps you shouldn’t, either.”

The black Thing seemed to curl closer around me, an invisible nautilus shell protecting me from her words, hope-laced and cruel. I closed my eyes again and rolled away from her. “I don’t feel like coffee. Thank you.”

A sharp indrawn breath. Had I offended her? Good. Maybe she would just leave without pretending to miss me, without false promises about staying in touch.

But then she hissed, “What’s that?” and I felt her hand fumble in the sheets at my back. A small squarish something slid out from beneath me.

I sat up and saw The Ten Thousand Doors clutched in her hands, her fingertips white where they pressed into the cover. “That’s mine, if you don’t—”

“Where did you get this?” Her voice was perfectly level but oddly urgent.

“It was a gift,” I said defensively. “I think.”

But she wasn’t listening. She was riffling through the book with hands that shook slightly, eyes skittering across the words as if they were some vital message written just for her. I felt a strange, illogical jealousy.

“Does it say anything about the irimu? The leopard-women? Did he find—”

A harsh rap-rap-rap on the door. Bad stood, one white tooth bared.

“Miss Jane? Mr. Locke would like a private word with you, if you please.” It was Mr. Stirling, sounding as usual like a typewriter that had somehow learned to walk and talk.

Jane and I stared at one another. Mr. Locke had never, in her two years at Locke House, spoken a private word to her, nor more than a dozen public ones. He regarded her as a regrettable necessity, like an ugly vase one is obliged to keep because it was a gift from a friend.

I watched Jane’s throat move, swallowing whatever emotion made her palms leave dark, damp patches on the leather-bound book. “I’ll be right there, Mr. Stirling, thank you.”

A professionally tuned throat-clearing noise sounded on the other side of the door. “Now, if you please.”

Jane closed her eyes, jaw rolling in frustration. “Yes, sir,” she called. She stood, tucking my book in her skirt pocket and resting her palm against it as if reassuring herself of its existence. In a much quieter voice, she hissed, “We’ll talk when I return.”

I should’ve grabbed on to her skirts and demanded an explanation. I should’ve told Mr. Stirling to shut his mouth, and enjoyed the stunned silence thereafter.

But I didn’t.

Jane swept into the hall and everything went silent and still again, except for the agitated swirl of the dust motes disturbed by her passage. Bad hopped to the floor, stretched, and shook himself. A mist of fine bronze hairs joined the dust, glinting gold in the sunbeams.

I fell back into the mattress. I could hear the neat snick of the gardener’s shears outside on the grounds. The distant burr of a motorcar trundling past the wrought-iron gates. The too-fast patter of my heart, fluttering against my ribs like someone knocking frantically at a locked door.

Mr. Locke had told me my father was dead. Accept it, he’d told me, and I had. But what if—?

Sour exhaustion welled in my limbs. How many years of my life had I spent waiting for my father, believing he would return tomorrow or the next day? Rushing to collect the mail, searching for his neat handwriting in