The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,48

me, the hinges creaked open.

A heady, giggling sense of madness threatened to swallow me up, followed by aching tiredness—a gluey, dizzying darkness that pulsed behind my eyes—but I didn’t have time for it. Bad.

I ran on shaking legs, flashing past a few startled guests, past display cases with their neat brass labels, and flung myself down the staircase.

The scene in the foyer had changed: Havemeyer was gone, the front door still standing open behind him, and Mr. Locke was speaking to one of his hulking manservants in a terse, low voice. The man was nodding, wiping his hands on a white towel and leaving behind rust-colored smears. Blood.

“Bad!” I’d meant to scream it, but my chest had gone airless and tight.

Their faces swung toward me. “What have you done?” Now I was almost whispering.

Neither of them answered me. Havemeyer’s man was looking at me with an unnerved, blinking expression, like a man who doubted the evidence of his own eyes. “I locked her in, sir, I swear I did, just like Mr. Havemeyer said—how’d she—”

“Be quiet,” Locke hissed, and the man’s jaw snapped shut. “Get out, now.” The man scurried out the door after his master, looking over his shoulder at me with fearful suspicion.

Locke turned back to me, his hands rising in either placation or frustration, I didn’t care which. “Where’s Bad?” There still wasn’t enough air in my lungs, as if my rib cage were caught in a giant fist. “What did they do to him? How could you let them?”

“Sit down, child.”

“The hell I will.” I’d never spoken to anyone that way in my life, but now my limbs were shivering with something hot and towering. “Where is he? And Jane, I need Jane—let go of me!—”

Mr. Locke had crossed to the stairs and grabbed my chin roughly, fingers pressing into my jaw. He tilted my face upward, eyes on mine. “Sit. Down.”

My legs shuddered and folded beneath me. He caught one arm and half carried me into the nearest side room—the Safari Room, a parlor filled with taxidermied antelope heads and masks made of dark, tropical wood—and slung me into an armchair. I clung to it, reeling and dizzied and still racked with that sick exhaustion.

Locke dragged another chair across the room, rucking up the rug beneath its feet, and sat so close in front of me his knees pressed against mine. He leaned back in a posture of false calm.

“I’ve tried very hard with you, you know,” he said conversationally. “All these years spent caring for you, polishing you, protecting you… Of all the items in my collections, I’ve treasured you most of all.” His fist closed in frustration. “And yet you insist on flinging yourself into danger.”

“Mr. Locke, please, Bad—”

He leaned forward, arctic eyes on mine, hands resting on the arms of my chair. “Why couldn’t you learn to mind your place?” His voice went low on the last three words, heavy with some foreign, guttural accent I didn’t recognize. I flinched; he leaned away and drew in a long breath.

“Tell me: How did you get out of your room? And how in the name of every god did you find out about the aberrations?”

Does he mean—Doors?

For the first time since I’d heard those awful boot-on-flesh sounds, Bad was driven entirely out of my mind. But nothing seemed to replace it except the distant thought that Mr. Locke had certainly not given me The Ten Thousand Doors.

“It wasn’t your father, I think we can be fairly sure. Those tepid little postcards barely had enough room for postage.” Locke snorted through his mustache. “Was it that damned African?”

I blinked at him. “Jane?”

“Oh-ho, she does have something to do with it, then! I suspected as much. We’ll track her down later.”

“Track her—? Where is she?”

“She was dismissed this morning. Her services, whatever they might have been, are certainly no longer needed.”

“But you can’t! My father hired Jane. You can’t just get rid of her.” As if that mattered. As if I could get Jane back through some technicality or loophole.

“Your father no longer employs anyone, I’m afraid. Dead people rarely do. But that’s not our chief concern right now.” Somewhere in the conversation Locke had lost his wrathful edge and become clipped, cool, dispassionate; he might have been presenting at a board meeting or dictating orders to Mr. Stirling. “In fact, it hardly matters how you came by your information at this juncture; what matters is that you know entirely too much, entirely too independently, and