The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,76

another kind of Threshold: lightless and endless, a silent galaxy without stars or planets or moons. Except I wasn’t passing through; I was just—suspended. Waiting. I remember a vague sense that it was a nice place, free of monsters and blood and pain, and I’d quite like to stay.

But something kept intruding. A warm, breathing something that nestled against my side and rooted in my hair, making small, whimpering sounds.

Bad. Bad was alive, and he needed me.

So I rose up out of the black and opened my eyes.

“Hello, you.” My tongue was cottony and thick, but Bad’s ears pricked. He made that whining sound in his chest again, somehow inching closer to me despite the absence of spare inches, and I laid my cheek on the warm slab of his shoulder. I made a motion to throw my arms around him but desisted with a small yelp.

It hurt. Everything hurt: my bones felt bruised and aching, as if they’d been forced to bear some impossible load; my left arm was too hot and throbbing, wrapped tightly in strips of sheet; even my blood beat sluggishly in my ears. In all, it seemed a fair price to pay for rewriting the very nature of space and time and crafting a Door of my own making. I blinked away an urge to laugh or possibly cry, and looked around.

It was a small cabin, like Samuel had said, and a little forlorn: the stacks of blankets were musty, the cookstove was rusting in orange flakes, the windows were cobweb-clogged. But the smell—oh, the smell. Sunshine and pine, lake water and wind—it was as if all the smells of summertime had soaked into the walls. It was the perfect, scientific opposite to Brattleboro.

It was only then that I noticed Jane, sitting at the foot of my bed with a steaming tin mug in her hands, watching Bad and me with a quirk at the corner of her mouth. Something about her had changed in the week we’d been apart. Maybe it was her clothes—her usual stodgy gray dress had been replaced by a calf-length skirt and loose cotton blouse—or maybe it was the sharp glitter of her eyes, as if she’d dispensed with a mask I hadn’t known she was wearing.

I found myself suddenly uncertain. I looked at Bad’s back as I spoke. “Where did you find him?”

“On the beach, in that little cove past the house. He was…” She hesitated, and I glanced up to see that the quirk in her mouth had flattened out. “Not in very good shape. Half-drowned, beaten bloody… It looked to me like someone dropped him over the bluff and hoped he’d drown.” She lifted one shoulder. “I did the best I could for him. I don’t know if that leg will ever be right.” My fingers found clipped patches of fur and stubbly lines of stitches. His back leg had been splinted and wrapped.

I opened my mouth, but no words emerged. There are times when thank you is so inadequate, so dwarfed by the magnitude of the debt, that the words wilt in your throat.

Jane, in case you ever read this: Thank you.

I swallowed. “And how did… how are you here?”

“As you might have surmised, Mr. Locke called me down to his office to inform me that my services would no longer be needed. I became… agitated, and was escorted from the grounds by that damned eerie valet of his, without even packing my things. I came back that night, of course, but you were already gone. A failure for which I am”—her nostrils flared—“deeply sorry.”

She gave her shoulders a shake. “Well. Brattleboro is a white institution, I’m told. I was not permitted to visit you. So I went to the Zappia boy, figuring Italian is close enough to white, but his visitation was also denied. Apparently he delivered my package by more, ah, efficient means.” Her smile reappeared and widened enough to show the slim gap between her teeth. “Quite a devoted friend, isn’t he?”

I didn’t find it necessary to respond to that. She continued, primly. “And a very nice young man. He gave me this address, a place to think and plan, a place to sleep, since I was no longer welcome at Locke House.”

“I’m sorry.” My voice was small, feeble-sounding in my ears.

Jane snorted. “I’m not. I have despised that house and its owner since the moment I arrived. I tolerated it solely on the basis of a bargain your father and I struck.