Echo North(16)

The wolf was gone.





CHAPTER EIGHT

WOLF?”

I stepped from the safety of the bedchamber, but the hallway was empty. It stretched ordinarily, innocuously, to the left and right, the lamp flickering steadfastly from the wall. There was no hint of last night’s fire, of anything magical whatsoever.

“Wolf?”

Fear weighed me down like sodden clothes in a river. He’d said he would guard the door—how long had he been gone? How long had he left me to the mercy of the house?

“Wolf!”

I ran, left toward the dining room, down carved ivory stairs and up narrow, creaky ones, round corners and through passageways I swore I’d never seen before. I passed door after door shimmering in bright shades of blue or green or violet. One door seemed to be made of grass; another, flowers. I ran past fiery doors and snowy doors, through a corridor of rain, down a spiral staircase that chimed a different bell-like note with every step. “Wolf!”

But I couldn’t find him.

I collapsed, gasping for breath, against a gem-studded wall. Emeralds dug into my back and a whispering breeze tangled warm around my ankles. Somewhere in the distance a woman laughed, and a sighing harp filled the spaces between. I was lost in a labyrinth, searching for the monster at the end of the maze.

And then I looked up and saw a black door at the end of a dim, narrow corridor. I’d had no desire to open any of the other doors, but this one beckoned me. It was smooth, and hard as obsidian.

It opened soundlessly at my touch. I stepped into an inky black chamber that seemed to stretch forever into darkness, baubles of multicolored crystal in all shapes and sizes hanging from some unseen ceiling. There were birds and bears, abstract coils, globes that pulsed with light—it was like a field of curious stars suspended in the moment of their falling.

The baubles brushed my shoulders as I passed through, some warm and some icy cold, some so sharp they sliced through my blouse and left hot lines of pain in my skin.

I reached the back of the room where I wasn’t even expecting there to be a back and found a tall, whirring object that had a glass face and a thousand spindly spider arms grinding and clicking. I recognized the object, for all its strange otherworldliness, as a clock. The glass face held something inside of it, and peering closer I saw it was a lock of pale hair, tied with ribbon, and a dark smear of dried liquid that could only be blood.

Horror crawled down my spine, and I turned to find the wolf at my back, his fur standing on end, fresh crimson spots marring the white.

A growl tore from his throat. He lunged at me.

I yelped and scrabbled sideways, grabbing one of the swinging crystals to keep from falling. But it was knife-sharp and I let it go, gasping. Blood seeped from both palms.

“Get out,” snarled the wolf. “GET OUT!”

He lunged again and I leapt past him, ducking under the baubles, stumbling in my haste. The crystals tangled in my hair and I had to claw myself free.

And then I was back out in the corridor with the wolf hard on my heels, the black door slamming behind us.

I cringed away from him but he just stood there, sides heaving, ears pinned back against his head. “You must not go there,” he spat. “Swear you will never go back. Swear it.”

I trembled, but faced him. “What is this place?”

“Swear it!”

Beyond the black door came a faint tinkling music; my shoulders and hands pulsed with pain.

I stared at him, at the blood in his fur, the flash of his teeth, the coiled tension in his body.

“SWEAR IT!”

But I’d had enough of making promises I didn’t understand.

I turned and fled.



I RAN BACK DOWN THE corridor, my heels pounding into the floor. The gem-studded wall had vanished, and I bolted instead into a tunnel of twisted branches and leaves, spongy moss beneath my feet, swirling red and gold as if it were patterned carpet.

The wolf came hard behind me, anything he might have been shouting lost in his guttural barks and my thundering heart.

“Somewhere safe,” I pleaded as I barreled out into a glass passageway, veins of blue and silver liquid tracing intricate patterns under the transparent floor. “Somewhere safe.”

I half fell down a nearly invisible glass staircase and into a blue wood door inlaid with bits of colored glass. It swung soundlessly inward and snicked shut again when I’d tumbled through. Three heartbeats, ten, thirty.

The door stayed closed, and the wolf didn’t follow. I scrambled to my feet and took a steadying breath—had the house somehow answered my plea for sanctuary? A sense of calm settled over me.

I stood in a huge, airy room. High paneled ceilings stretched twenty feet or more above my head, illuminated by a dozen sparkling chandeliers. Several elegant couches were arranged in the center of the chamber on a blue-and-gold carpet emblazoned with birds. Set into the back wall was a second blue door.

It might have been a drawing room in some grand house, except for the dozens and dozens of mirrors that obscured every inch of the walls. Some were rectangular, some oval, some oblong, most of them as tall as me. They refracted the light from the chandeliers, making it hard to look directly at them, and giving the whole place a glistening, dizzying quality. Silence reigned so complete my ears rang with it.

I had no desire to leave the serenity of the room and face the wolf—or the house—so I moved left away from the door, brushing my fingers along the mirrors as I passed. All of the frames were made, unusually, of leather, some soft and supple, some old and cracked. I couldn’t place why they seemed familiar until I noticed that every mirror had a little gold description plate, many at the top, a few at the bottom or tilted sideways along either edge. Book spines—they reminded me of book spines.