The Ten Thousand Doors of January(86)

I took a step backward. “It—that doesn’t matter. Now, stand up—” I wasn’t sure what I was going to do—march him back into the city and deliver him to Jane like a cat depositing something unpleasant for her owner?—but Ilvane smiled suddenly.

“You know, your father thought to thwart us. Look what happened to him.” He clucked his tongue.

I stopped moving. I may even have stopped breathing.

“You killed him, didn’t you.” All that grown-up-sounding authority had leaked out of my voice.

Mr. Ilvane’s smile grew wider and sharper, foxlike. “He’d found us a fracture in Japan, as I’m sure you’ve realized. It was generally his custom to wander around inside for a day or two and return with a few interesting trinkets for Locke, and then depart. But this time he lingered. And I grew bored of waiting, bored of wearing this hideous thing—” He tapped his breast pocket above the old-woman mask.

“One day he caught sight of me on the mountainside. He recognized me.” Ilvane shrugged, falsely apologetic. “The look on his face! I’d say he went white as a sheet, but with that complexion of his…‘You!’ he cried. ‘The Society!’ Well, really, imagine being surprised after seventeen years of being kept on a leash. Then he said some rather intemperate, tiresome things. Threatened to expose us—who would believe him, I ask you?—raved about saving his little girl, told me he’d keep this door open if it was the last thing he did… All very dramatic.”

My pulse whispered no-no-no. The gun was trembling again.

“Then he rushed back to his camp like an absolute madman. I followed.”

“And you killed him.” Now my voice was less than a whisper, a strangled breath. After all this hoping and waiting and not knowing, after all this—I pictured his body frozen and forgotten, picked over by seabirds.

Ilvane was still smiling, smiling. “He had a rifle, you know. I found it in his things, after. But he didn’t even try to reach it—he was writing when I dragged him out of his tent, writing as if his life depended on it. Fought me tooth and nail just to put his journal back in its box. Honestly, you should be thanking me for relieving you of such an unstable fellow.”

I could almost see his hand, dark and ink-twined, scratching out those last desperate words: RUN JANUARY, ARCADIA, DO NOT TRUST. Trying to warn me.

Now Ilvane’s smile prismed and blurred in my sight.

“I set the fracture ablaze. It was dry pine, went up like a torch. Your father wept, January, he begged, before I shoved him through. I caught sight of his hands, briefly, flailing back through the flames, then nothing. He never emerged.”

Ilvane watched me as he finished, his eyes hunger-bright. He wanted tears, I knew. He wanted heartbreak and despair, because my father was trapped forever in some other world and I was permanently, terribly alone. But—

Alive, alive, alive. Father is alive. Not wracked and rotting on some foreign hillside, but alive, and finally gone home to his own true world. Even if I would never see him again.

I closed my eyes and let the twin waves of loss and joy crash over me, let my legs go limp and my knees crunch to earth. Bad’s nose snuffled worriedly at my neck, checking for injuries.

Too late, I heard the scuffling sounds of Ilvane moving. My eyes snapped open to find him scrabbling sideways for his knife and the copper compass.

“No!” I shouted, but he was already running back toward the city, a black-and-red shadow darting through the grass. I fired the gun high into the night, saw him duck, and heard the echoing pound of his feet on the empty street. He disappeared into the tangle of abandoned houses.

Bad and I tore after him. I hardly knew what I’d do if I caught him—the revolver hung heavy in my hand, and the image of Solomon’s white-draped body flashed sickeningly before me—but I couldn’t let him leave, couldn’t let him tell the Society where I was, where Arcadia was—

Two tall figures reeled into the street ahead. Jane reached an arm out to catch me. “We heard a shot—what—”

“Ilvane. From the Society. Went that way—think he’s trying to get back to the Door—” My words sputtered between gasps of air. Jane did not wait for clarification but simply ran, flowing down the hill in a long-striding lope several times faster than mine. Samuel fell in with Bad and me, stumbling over humped bricks and cracks.

We skidded into the courtyard to find Jane crouching before the feather-curtained tunnel, lips peeled back in a hunter’s triumphant grin. Ilvane stood several paces away, eyes wild and nostrils flared in animal desperation.

“That, I think, is enough,” Jane said coolly, and reached into her skirt pocket for Mr. Locke’s revolver. But then her face went slack. Her leopardess smile vanished.

Because it wasn’t there. Because I’d stolen it from her.

There was a single stretched second in which I fumbled with the gun, sweaty thumb slipping on the hammer, and Ilvane watched Jane’s empty hand emerge from her skirts. He smiled. And then he struck.

There was a slash of silver, the gleam of something wet and wine-colored in the moonlight—and then he was gone, the golden curtain fluttering in his wake.

Jane fell to her knees with a soft, surprised sigh.

No. I don’t remember if I screamed it, if the word shattered against the clay ruins and echoed up the alleys, if there were answering shouts of alarm and running footsteps.