young Amazon reveling in the thrill of the hunt, a hunting cat prowling through the jungles of another world—“Mr. Locke always kept his collections in very good shape.”
Of the four of us—five of us? Did Havemeyer count?—only Jane seemed fully in possession of her own body. Bad hopped in agitated, three-legged circles around Havemeyer and made whimpering, muttering sounds, apparently complaining that he’d been cheated of a good fight. I sank back to my knees beside Samuel, who was stirring weakly, grimacing and twitching as if he were locked in some unpleasant dream battle. I felt my pulse thud-thudding through my bleeding, bandaged arm and thought, inanely: It’s not like our story papers at all, Samuel. Shouldn’t there be more blood? More fuss?
Jane didn’t seem concerned. She laid a cool hand against my face and met my eyes with a weighing expression, like a person checking a recently dropped china doll for fractures. She nodded once—a questionable diagnosis, because I felt pretty fractured—and began moving purposefully around the cabin. She unfolded a moth-chewed sheet beside Havemeyer, rolled his body neatly onto it, and hauled him out the door. There was a series of unpleasant, meaty thunks as he cleared the threshold—Thresholds are awfully dangerous places, I thought, with a semihysterical hiccup of laughter—and then nothing but the shush of something heavy dragging through pine needles.
Jane returned with two rusting buckets of lake water, her sleeves rolled up to the elbow, looking for all the world like an industrious housewife rather than a murderess. She saw me and stopped, sighing a little. “See to Samuel, January,” she said softly.
It seemed to me she was also saying: Pull it together, kid, and maybe Everything will be all right. I nodded, a little shakily.
It took half an hour to get Samuel settled, even with his dazed cooperation. First I had to wrangle him to the bed and coax him sufficiently awake to crawl into it. Then I had to convince him to relax his feverish grip on my wrist—“It’s all right, you’re safe, Havemeyer’s—well, he’s gone, anyway—that hurts, Sam, Jesus”—and then build up the fire and pile extra blankets over his still-shivery legs.
There was a wood-on-wood scrape as Jane dragged a chair beside mine. She used a handful of skirt to scrub her still-damp hands. The blotches they left behind were stained pale pink.
“When he hired me to look after you,” Jane said softly, “your father told me there were people following him, chasing him. He said one day they might catch him. And then they might come for his daughter, whom he kept as safe as he could.” She paused, and her eyes flicked toward me. “I told him, by the way, that daughters do not want to be kept safe, that they would prefer to be with their parents—but he did not answer.”
I swallowed, quelling the child in me that wanted either to stamp her foot and say How come? or to throw herself into Jane’s arms and wail inconsolably. Too late for either.
Instead, I said, “But what was my father even doing? And if there were mysterious villains following him around the world—and I guess I shouldn’t roll my eyes, because you did just shoot an actual vampire—who are they?”
Jane didn’t answer immediately. She leaned forward and picked my father’s leather-bound book from the floor beside the bed. “I don’t know, January. But I think they may have caught up with your father, and come for you. And I think you ought to finish this book.”
How fitting, that the most terrifying time in my life should require me to do what I do best: escape into a book.
I took The Ten Thousand Doors from her hand, tucked my feet beneath me, and opened the book to the final chapter.
Chapter Six
The Birth of Julian Scaller
A man shipwrecked and saved—A man hunting and hunted—A man hoping
Yule Ian drifted in roiling darkness, unanchored from his body. This was, he felt, for the best, and he determined to remain adrift as long as he could.
It wasn’t easy. The darkness was marred sometimes by strange voices and lantern light, by the inconvenient demands of his body, by dreams that left him gasping and awake in a room he didn’t know. Once or twice he heard the piercing, familiar crying of a baby and felt a stabbing in his chest, like broken pottery shards grinding against one another, before diving back into oblivion.
But—fitfully, reluctantly, slowly—he felt himself healing. There were hours at a time now when