My last, wavering sight was of three odd, pale objects lying in a row on the floorboards. They looked like the white ends of some unusual mushroom, or maybe candle stubs. I’d already closed my eyes and begun to drift into a pain-hazed sleep when I recognized them for what they were: three white fingertips.
I was somewhere else for a while. I don’t know where, exactly, but it felt like 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 Maybe it was her clothes—her usual stodgy gray dress had been replaced by a calf-length skirt and loose cotton blouse—or maybe it was the sharp glitter of her eyes, as if she’d dispensed with a mask I hadn’t known she was wearing.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. He asked me to protect you, in exchange for… something I wanted very badly.” Her expression turned inward, burning with a kind of bottomless, bleak rage that made my breath catch. She swallowed it away. “Which he is no longer in a position to provide.”
I wrapped my arm tighter around Bad and made my voice as even and neutral as I could. “So you’ll be leaving now. Going home.”
I saw her eyes widen. “Now? And leave you sick and injured, hunted by gods-only-know-what? Julian might’ve broken the terms of our deal, but you and I have an entirely separate arrangement.” I blinked at her, stupidly. Jane’s expression softened as much as I’d ever seen it. “I am your friend, January. I will not abandon you.”
“Oh.” Neither of us spoke for a time. I let myself fall back into a sweaty half doze; Jane prodded the cookstove to life and reheated her coffee. She returned to the edge of the bed, scooting Bad’s hind end aside and perching beside me. She held The Ten Thousand Doors—ruffled-looking, smeared with rust-red stains—on her knees, one thumb stroking the cover.
“You should sleep.”
But I found I couldn’t, quite. Questions buzzed and hummed in my ears, gnatlike: What had my father promised Jane? How had they met, really, and what was the book to her? And why had my father come to this gray, dull world at all?
I fidgeted beneath the quilt until Bad sighed at me. “Would—do you think you could read to me? I just finished the fourth chapter.”
Jane’s gap-toothed grin flashed at me. “Of course.”
She opened the book and began to read.
Chapter Five
On Loss
Heaven—Hell
No one really remembers their own origins. Most of us possess a kind of hazy mythology about our early childhood, a set of stories told and retold by our parents, interwoven with our blurred baby memories. They tell us about the time we nearly died crawling down the stairs after the family cat; the way we used to smile in our sleep during thunderstorms; our first words and steps and birthday cakes. They tell us a hundred different stories, which are all the same story: We love you, and have always loved you.
But Yule Ian never told his daughter those stories. (You will permit me the continued cowardice of third-person narration, I hope; it is foolish, but I find it lessens the pain.) What, then, does she remember?
Not those first few nights when her parents watched the rise and fall of her rib cage with a kind of terrified elation. Nor the hot, raised feeling of fresh tattoos spiraling beneath their skin, spelling out new words (mother, father, family). Nor the way they sometimes looked at one another in the predawn glow, after hours of pacing and rocking and singing nonsense songs in half a dozen languages, with all their emotions written raw on their faces—a kind of stunned exhaustion, a slight hysteria, an unspeakable longing to simply lie down—and knew themselves to be the most profoundly lucky souls in ten thousand worlds.