Every Heart a Doorway (11 page)

“Jack…” Kade’s voice was low and horrified. “Please tell me you’re not saying what I think you’re saying.”

“Hmm?” Jack looked up. “I’m not
psychic,
Kade, I don’t even believe that psychics
exist
. There is no possible way I could read your mind and know what you think I’m saying. I’m simply talking about the manner in which Loriel’s eyes were extracted.”

“You mean removed?” asked Christopher.

“No, I mean extracted,” said Jack. “I’d need to open her skull to be sure, and I don’t have a proper bone saw, which makes that a difficult task, but it appears that her eyes were fully extracted, all the way along the optic nerve. Whoever assaulted her didn’t just pluck them out like grapes. They used some sort of blade to separate the eye from the muscles holding it in place, and once that was done, they—”

“Do you know who did it?” asked Kade.

“No.”

“Then please, stop telling us how it was done. I can’t take it anymore.”

Jack looked at him solemnly, and said, “I haven’t gotten to the important part yet.”

“Then please, get there, before the rest of us throw up on the floor.”

“Based on the damage to the skull and the amount of bleeding, she was alive when her eyes were taken,” said Jack. Silence greeted her proclamation. Even Nancy put a hand over her mouth. “Whoever did this subdued her, removed her eyes, and let the shock kill her. I’m not even sure her death was the goal. Just getting her eyes.”

“Why?” asked Christopher.

Jack hesitated before shaking her head and saying, “I don’t know. Come on. Let’s prepare her for burial.”

Kade retreated back to the far side of the basement and stayed there as the others got to work. Nancy undressed Loriel, folding each piece of clothing with care before setting it aside. She somehow doubted that these clothes were going to make it into the general supply. They would probably need to be destroyed along with Loriel’s body, just for the sake of safety.

While Nancy worked, Jack and Christopher pulled an old claw-footed bathtub out of a corner of the basement and into the center of the room. Jack uncorked several large glass jugs and poured their greenish, fizzing contents into the tub. Kade watched this with dismay.

“Why does Eleanor let you have that much acid?” he asked. “Why would you
want
that much acid? You don’t need that much acid.”

“Except that it appears I do, since I have just enough to dissolve a human body, and we have a human body in need of dissolving,” said Jack. “Everything happens for a reason. And Eleanor didn’t ‘let’ me have this much acid. I sort of collected it on my own. For a rainy day.”

“What were you expecting it to rain?” asked Christopher. “Bears?”

“There was always a chance we’d get lucky,” said Jack. She pulled several plastic aprons off a shelf and held them out to the others. “You’re going to want to put one of these on, and a pair of the gloves that go with them. Acid is not a fun exfoliator unless you come from Christopher’s world.”

Wordlessly, Nancy and Christopher donned their plastic aprons, rubber gloves, and goggles. Jack did the same, and together they lowered Loriel into the fizzing green liquid. Kade turned his face away. The smell was surprisingly pleasant, not meaty at all: it smelled like cleaning fluid, faintly citrus, with a minty undertone. The bubbles increased as Loriel disappeared beneath the surface, until the liquid was completely opaque, obscuring her from view. Jack turned away.

“It’ll take about an hour to reduce her to a skeletal state,” she said. “I’ll neutralize the acid and drain it off when she’s done. Christopher, do you think you can handle her from there?”

“She’ll dance for me.” Christopher touched the bone in his pocket. Nancy realized there were small indentations in the surface. Not holes, not quite, and yet it still managed to suggest a flute. The tunes he played on that instrument wouldn’t be audible to the living. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t be real. “All skeletons dance for me. It’s my honor to play for them.”

“All right, clearly the two of you”—Jack gestured to Nancy as she stripped off her gloves—“were meant to be together. If you can’t find your doors, you should get married and breed the next generation of creepy world-traveling children.”

Christopher’s cheeks turned red. Nancy’s didn’t. It was a pleasant change.

“Maybe we should figure out why people are dying before we start trying to set up a breeding program,” said Kade mildly. “Besides, I met Nancy first. I get asking-out dibs.”

“Sometimes I suspect you learned all your hallmarks of masculinity from a Neanderthal,” said Jack. She removed her apron, hanging it on a nearby hook. “Everyone please take off the gear you borrowed. That stuff is expensive, and I only get to place three orders a year.”

“Do I get a say in this?” asked Nancy, shooting an amused look over at Kade. She didn’t mind flirting. Flirting was safe, flirting was fun; flirting was a way of interacting with her peers without anyone realizing that there was anything strange about her. She could have flirted forever. It was just the things that came after flirting that she had no interest in.

“Maybe later,” said Jack. “Right now, we need to get out of here. The acid will do some off-gassing as it breaks down her tissues, and I don’t want to fill my lungs with Loriel. Besides, I shouldn’t leave Jill alone for too long.” She sounded uneasy.

“I’m sure no one will hurt your sister,” said Nancy. “She can take care of herself.”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” said Jack. “When you spend years with a vampire, all those lessons about ‘don’t bite the other children’ sort of go out the window. If they corner her because they’ve decided I’m guilty, she’s liable to hurt someone just so she can get away. I’d rather not get expelled right after I’ve disposed of a body. Seems like a waste of good acid.”

“All right,” said Nancy, pulling her apron off over her head. “Let’s go.”

Since they were no longer trying to spare their fellow students the sight of Loriel’s body, the foursome walked up the interior stairs, emerging into the deserted hallway. Kade looked in both directions before turning to Jack and asking, “Where would she go?”

“How would I know?” asked Jack. She sighed when the others stared at her. “I’m her
twin
. I’m not her keeper. I’m not even her friend. We mostly stick together out of self-defense. The other girls think she’s weird, and they think I’m weirder. At least when we present a united front, they’re less likely to do things to us.”

“Things?” asked Nancy blankly.

Jack fixed her with a look that was equal parts pitying and envious. “You didn’t get a hazing phase. That’s the real reason Eleanor put you in with Sumi. Once Sumi liked you—or at least tolerated you—no one else was going to cross the line, because everyone knew better than to mess with Sumi. She was vicious. Nonsense girls always are. Jill and I…”

“I remember when you got here,” said Christopher. “I thought your sister was hot, you know? So I offered to show her around the school, figured maybe I could get in good before one of the other guys showed up and started talking about his magic sword and how he’d saved the universe or whatever. I’m a dude with a flute no one can hear. I have to be persistent.”

“She laughed at you, didn’t she?” Most people would have been surprised by the gentleness of Jack’s tone. She wasn’t the sort of person who seemed inclined to gentleness.

Christopher nodded. “She said I was a cute little boy, but that she couldn’t lower herself to be seen with me. Like, that was her opening statement. Not ‘thanks, no thanks,’ not ‘my name’s Jill.’ Just straight to ‘you’re a cute little boy.’ I stopped trying after that.”

“She was trying to save you, in her way,” said Jack. “Her Master was the jealous sort. She used to try to make friends with the kids from the village below his castle. Jill liked having a lot of friends around. Believe it or not, she used to be the gregarious one, even if it was a nerdy sort of friendly. She’d run you to ground to tell you about the latest episode of
Doctor Who
. This was early on, before she’d embraced the lacy dresses and the iron-rich diet. Back then, she thought we were just having an adventure. She was the one who thought we were going to go home someday and wanted to learn as much as she could.”

“And you?” asked Kade.

“I gave up on wanting to go home the second Dr. Bleak put a bone saw in my hand and told me he would teach me anything I wanted to know,” said Jack. “For a while, Jill was opening doors and looking for a road home, and I was the one who never wanted to leave.”

“What happened to the kids from the village?” asked Christopher. “The ones she tried to make friends with?”

Jack’s expression went blank. It wasn’t coldness, exactly, more a means of
distancing
herself from what she was about to say. “We lived in the grace and at the sufferance of a vampire lord. What do you
think
happened to the kids from the village? Her Master didn’t want her talking to anyone he couldn’t control. I think he only spared me because Dr. Bleak begged, and because he pointed out the wisdom in keeping a self-replenishing source of blood transfusions for Jill. We’re twins. If anything happened to her, I could be used for spare parts.”

Nancy’s mouth dropped open. “That’s
horrible,
” she squeaked.

“That was the Moors.” Jack shook her head. “It was cruel and cold and brutal and beautiful, and I would give anything to go back there. Maybe it broke me in some deep, intrinsic way that I am incapable of seeing, just like Jill can’t understand that she’s not a normal girl anymore. I don’t care. It was my home, and it finally let me be myself, and I hate it here.”

“We pretty much all hate it here,” said Kade. “Even me. That’s why we’re at this school. Now think. Your sister isn’t in the basement, so where would she go?”

“She might still be in the dining hall, since it’s harder to pick on her when there’s supervision around,” said Jack. “Or she could have gone out to sit in the trees and pretend that she’s back at home. We spent a lot of time outside there, for one reason or another.”

“We saw her there yesterday,” said Kade. “Nancy and I will go check the trees; you and Christopher check the dining hall. We’ll meet back at the attic no matter what we find.”

“Why the attic?” asked Christopher.

But Jack was nodding. “Good call. We can go through your books while Loriel finishes stewing. Maybe there’s something in there about why someone would be harvesting parts from world-walkers. It’s a long shot. At this point, I’ll take it. Come on, bone boy.” She turned and strode down the hall, every inch the confident mad scientist’s protégée once again. Any vulnerability she had shown was gone, tamped down and covered over by the mask she wore.

“Thanks for sticking me with the scary girl,” said Christopher to Kade, and ran after her, pulling the bone flute from his pocket.

“You’re welcome,” Kade called after him. He offered his arm to Nancy, grinning. “C’mon. Let’s go see if we can’t find ourselves an Addams.” His drawl grew thicker, dripping from his words like sweet and tempting honey.

Nancy set her hand in the crook of his elbow, feeling the traitorous red creeping back into her cheeks. This was always the difficult part, back when she’d been at her old school: explaining that “asexual” and “aromantic” were different things. She
liked
holding hands and trading kisses. She’d had several boyfriends in elementary school, just like most of the other girls, and she had always found those practice relationships completely satisfying. It wasn’t until puberty had come along and changed the rules that she’d started pulling away in confusion and disinterest. Kade was possibly the most beautiful boy she’d ever seen. She wanted to spend hours sitting with him and talking about pointless things. She wanted to feel his hand against her skin, to know that his presence was absolute and focused entirely on her. The trouble was, it never seemed to end there, and that was as far as she was willing to go.

Kade must have read her discomfort, because he flashed her a smile and said, “I promise I’m a gentleman. You’re as safe with me as you are with anyone who’s not the murderer.”

“And see, I was just trying to decide whether I thought you might be the killer,” said Nancy. “I’m really relieved to hear that you’re not. I’m not either, just for the record.”

“That’s good to know,” said Kade.

They walked together through the deserted manor. Whispers sometimes drifted from the rooms they passed, indicating the presence of their fellow students. They didn’t stop. Everyone had their own concerns, and Nancy had an uneasy feeling that by helping Jack destroy Loriel’s body, she had just placed herself firmly in the “enemy” camp for anyone who had been a friend of Loriel’s when she was alive. Nancy had never made so many enemies before, or so quickly. She didn’t like it. She just didn’t see a way to undo it.

There was no one outside. The lawn was empty as she and Kade walked toward the trees; even the crows had flown away, off to look for some richer pickings. Everything was silent, eerily so.

Jill wasn’t in the trees. That was almost a disappointment: Nancy had been fully expecting to step into the sheltered grove and see the other girl sitting on a root, posed like something out of a gothic novel, with her parasol blocking out any stray sunbeams that had dared to come too close. Instead, the sun shone down undisturbed, and Nancy and Kade were alone.

“Well, that’s one down,” said Nancy, suddenly nervous. What if Kade wanted to kiss her? What if Kade didn’t want to kiss her? There was no good answer, and so she did what she always did when she was confused or frightened: she froze, becoming a girl-shaped statue.

“Whoa,” said Kade. He sounded genuinely impressed. “That’s some trick. Do you actually turn into stone, or does it only seem like you do?” He prodded her gently in the arm with one finger. “Nope, still flesh. You’re holding really, really still, but you’re not inanimate. How are you doing that? Are you even breathing? I can’t do that.”

“The Lady of Shadows required that everyone who served her be able to hold properly still,” said Nancy, releasing her pose. Her cheeks reddened again. This was all going so
wrong
. “I’m sorry. I tend to freeze up when I get nervous.”