The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,86

remained vague and distant.

I think I must have been whispering words (no, no, Samuel, please) because Havemeyer tsked. “There’s no need for hysterics. He’s perfectly fine. Well, not perfectly—he was quite uncooperative with me when I tracked him down last night. But I was insistent.” The not-smile returned. “All I had to go on when you vanished—taking some of me with you, of course—was his little love note. Which you so heartlessly left behind at Brattleboro, and which he so foolishly composed on the back of a Zappia Family Groceries receipt.”

Hold On January. Such a small, brave act of kindness, repaid with suffering. I’d thought only sins were punished.

“He’ll recover, if nothing else unfortunate befalls him. I’ll even leave the dog alone, and your maid.” Havemeyer’s voice was confident, almost casual; I pictured a butcher calling a reluctant cow onto the slaughterhouse floor. “Simply come with me now.”

I looked at Samuel’s pale face below me, at Bad with his splinted leg, at Jane, jobless and homeless on my behalf, and it occurred to me that, for a supposedly lonely orphan girl, there were a surprising number of people willing to suffer on my behalf.

Enough.

I slid Samuel off my lap as gently as I could. I hesitated, then let myself brush a dark curl of hair away from his clammy forehead, because I was probably never going to get another chance and a girl should live a little.

I stood. “All right.” My voice was a near-whisper. I swallowed. “All right. I’ll go with you. Just don’t hurt them.”

Havemeyer was watching me. There was a kind of cruel confidence in his expression, the swagger of a cat stalking something weak and small. He reached his bare hand toward me, white and somehow hungry-looking, and I stepped toward him.

There was a scrabbling behind me, a snarl, and Bad leapt past me in a streak of bronze muscle.

I had a sudden movie-reel memory of Mr. Locke’s Society party the year I was fifteen, when it had required the intervention of several party guests and a butler to dislodge Bad’s teeth from Havemeyer’s leg.

There was no one to intervene this time.

Havemeyer made a shrill not-very-human sound and staggered backward. Bad growled through his mouthful of flesh and planted his feet as if they were playing tug-of-war for possession of Havemeyer’s right hand. If Bad hadn’t been already injured, if his splinted back leg hadn’t folded beneath him, maybe he would’ve won.

But Bad stumbled, whimpering, and Havemeyer ripped his hand away in a spatter of blackish blood. He clutched both hands to his chest—the left one bound in gauze, missing three waxen fingertips, the right one now punctured and torn—and looked at Bad with an expression of such wrath that I knew, with perfect clarity, that he would kill him. He would bury his ruined hands in Bad’s fur and hold on until there was no warmth left in him, until the amber light of his eyes went cold and dull—

But he was unable to do so, because there was a metallic click, like flint-stones striking—and then a sudden thunderclap.

A small hole appeared in Havemeyer’s linen suit, directly above his heart. He blinked down at it in confusion, then looked up with an expression of absolute incredulity.

Darkness bloomed around the hole in his chest and he fell. It wasn’t a theatrical or graceful collapse, but more of a sideways, melting-candle slump against the doorway.

He took a hideous, wet-sounding breath, as if he were sucking tar through a straw, and met my eyes. He smiled. “They’ll never stop looking for you, girl. And I promise”—the tar-sucking sound again, as his head slumped forward—“they’ll find you.”

I waited for the next gargled breath—but it didn’t come. His body looked somehow smaller as he lay there, like one of those desiccated spider-corpses that collect in windowsills.

I turned slowly around.

Jane stood with her legs planted wide, arms raised and perfectly steady, both hands wrapped tight around—

You know how it feels when you see a familiar object out of its usual context? As if your eyes can’t quite make sense of the shapes they’re seeing?

I’d only ever seen that Enfield revolver in its glass case on Mr. Locke’s desk.

A single coil of oily smoke rose from the barrel as Jane lowered it. She inspected the revolver with a cool, detached expression. “I’m a little surprised it fired, to be honest. It’s an antique. But then”—she smiled, a vicious, gleeful smile, and I suddenly saw her as she must have once been: a