Jane continued. “I found the ivory door and went through. I thought at first I had died and passed into the world of spirits and gods.” Her lips parted in an almost-smile, and her eyes crimped with some new emotion—longing? Homesickness? “I was in a forest so green it was almost blue. The door I’d come through was behind me, set among the exposed roots of a vast tree. I wandered away from it, deeper into the woods.
“I know now how foolish that was. The forests in that world are full of cruel, creeping things, many-mouthed monsters with a bottomless hunger. It was mere luck—or God’s will, as the mission workers would have it—that I found Liik and her Hunters before anything else found me. It didn’t feel all that lucky at the time: I stepped around a tree trunk and found an arrowhead inches from my face.”
I covered my gasp with a cough, hoping to sound less like a small child listening to a campfire story. “What did you do?”
“Not a damn thing. Surviving is often a matter of knowing when you’re beat. I heard rustling behind me and knew others were emerging, that I was surrounded. The woman holding the bow was hissing at me in a language I didn’t know. Apparently I didn’t look like much of a threat—a hungry girl-child, wearing a white cotton shift with the collar torn off—because Liik lowered her weapon. Only then could I get a proper look at them all.”
The hard lines of Jane’s face softened, just a little, warmed by fond reminiscence. “They were women. Muscled, golden-eyed, impossibly tall, with a kind of rolling grace that made me think of lionesses. Their skin was mottled and spotted and their teeth when they smiled were sharp. I thought they were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.
“They took me in. We couldn’t understand one another but their instructions were simple ones: follow, eat, stay, skin this creature for dinner. I patrolled with them for weeks, maybe months, and learned many things. I learned to creep through the woods in silence, and to oil bowstrings with fat. I learned to eat meat raw and blood-warm. I learned that all the ogre-stories I’d ever heard were true, and that monsters lurked in the shadows.”
Her voice had gone rhythmic, nearly hypnotic.
“I learned to love Liik and her Hunters. And when I saw them change—their skins sloughing and shifting, their jaws lengthening, their bows clattering forgotten to the forest floor—I was envious, rather than afraid. I’d been powerless my whole life, and the shape of the leopard-women as they leapt into battle was the shape of power written on the world.” I didn’t think I’d ever heard such emotion in Jane’s voice; not when a book ended poorly or the coffee was burned or a party guest said something scathing behind their gloved hand. Hearing it now felt almost intrusive.
“The patrol ended, eventually, and the women took me home: a village surrounded by fruit trees and farmlands, hidden in the cauldron of a dead volcano. Their menfolk greeted them in the streets with fat babies on their hips and fresh beer in clay pots. Liik spoke to her husbands and they looked at me with pity in their eyes. They led me to Liik’s home and fed me, and I spent that night and the next and the ones after that sleeping in a pile of soft furs surrounded by the gentle snoring of Liik’s children. It felt”—Jane swallowed, and her voice sounded briefly constricted—“like home.”
There was a small silence. “So you stayed there? In the village?”
Jane smiled, crooked and bitter. “I did. But Liik and her Hunters did not. I woke one morning to find that all of them had gone back to the forests, to the patrol, and left me behind.” She’d gone very brusque; how much had that second abandonment hurt? “I knew enough of the language by then to understand what the husbands were telling me: the forest was no place for a creature like me. I was too small, too weak. I should stay in the village and raise babies and grind tisi-nuts into flour and be safe.” Another crooked smile. “But by then I was very good at running away. I stole a bow and three skins of water and made my way back to the ivory door.”
“But—”
“Why?” Jane rubbed her finger along the wood grain of the table. “Because I didn’t want to be safe, I suppose. I wanted to be dangerous, to find my own power and write it on the world.”
I looked away, down to Bad now growling phantom-growls in his sleep. “So you left the leopard-women’s world. Where did you go?” People never got to stay in their Wonderlands, did they? Alice and Dorothy and the Darlings, all dragged back to the mundane world and tucked into bed by their handlers. My father, stranded in this dull reality.
Jane gave a great, scornful ha. “I went straight to the nearest British outpost, stole a Lee-Metford rifle and as much ammunition as I could carry, and went back through my ivory door. Two weeks later I walked back into the village, my rifle over my shoulder and a stinking, blood-crusted skull under my arm. I was hungry and thin again, my cotton shift was a tattered wrap around my waist, I’d broken two ribs in the battle—but I could feel my eyes burning with pride.” They were doing so now, gleaming dangerously through the cabin shadows.
“I found Liik in the village street and rolled the ogre skull at her feet.” The gap between her front teeth winked as her smile widened. “And so I patrolled with the leopard-women for the next twenty-two years. I had twelve kills to my name, two husbands and a hunt-wife, and three names in three languages. I had an entire world, full of blood and glory.” She leaned toward me, eyes fixing on mine like a black hunting cat, invisible tail lashing. Her voice when she spoke again was lower, rougher. “I would have all of that still, if your father had not arrived in 1909 and closed my door forever.”
I found myself wholly, profoundly speechless. Not out of shyness or uncertainty, but because all the words had apparently been shaken out of my skull and left nothing behind them but a dull, staticky buzzing sound. Maybe if we’d had longer I would’ve recovered, said something like My father, closing Doors? or maybe How do you know? or, perhaps most honest and necessary of all: I’m sorry.
But I didn’t say any of that, because there was a sudden pounding at the cabin door. A chill, drawling voice called: “Miss Scaller, my dear creature, are you in there? We never finished our conversation.”
There was a single, crystalline moment of stillness.
Then the latch lifted and the cabin door swung toward us. Jane’s chair clattered backward as she stood, hands plunging into her skirts. Bad clawed to his feet, hackles high and lips peeled back. My own body felt as if I’d been submerged in cold honey.
Havemeyer stood on the threshold. But he was hardly the same man who’d attended Society meetings and snubbed us at Christmas parties: his linen suit was wrinkled and faintly gray with too many days’ wear; his skin was flushed; something about his smile had gone sickeningly wrong. His left hand was a wad of wrapped gauze, soggy brown with blood. His right hand was bare.
But it wasn’t Havemeyer who brought me stumbling to my feet, my hands reaching uselessly toward the door. It was the young man he half dragged beside him, battered and dazed.
Samuel Zappia.
Samuel’s hands were bound behind his back and his mouth had been jammed with cotton gauze. His skin, normally the color of browned butter, had gone a sick yellow, and his eyes reeled in his skull. The prey-animal panic in them was familiar to me; if I’d looked into a mirror after Havemeyer touched me, I’d have seen the identical expression on my own face.
Samuel blinked into the gloom of the cabin. His eyes focused on me and he made a hoarse sound through the gauze, as if the sight of me had been an invisible blow.
Jane was in motion. Everything about her promised violence—the angle of her shoulders, the length of her stride, her hand emerging from her skirt with something dully gleaming—but Havemeyer raised his bare right hand and placed it around Samuel’s neck, hovering just above the warmth of his skin.
“Now, now, ladies, settle down. I shouldn’t like to do anything regrettable.”
Jane wavered, hearing the threat but not understanding it, and I found my voice. “Jane, no!” I stood shakily, bandaged arms outstretched as if I could restrain either Jane or Bad if they lunged for Havemeyer. “He’s some kind of, of vampire. Don’t let him touch you.” Jane went still, radiating red tension.
Havemeyer gave a short laugh, and the laugh was just as wrong-seeming as his smile. “You know, I feel similarly about that appalling animal beside you. How did he survive? I know Evans isn’t bright, but I thought he could at least drown a dog properly.”
Rage curled my nails into my palms and hardened my jaw. Havemeyer’s not-smile widened. “Anyway. I’ve come to continue our conversation, Miss Scaller, as you missed our previous appointment. Although I confess my original purposes have been somewhat amended since your little magic trick.” He waved his bandaged, bloody left hand at me, eyes flashing with malice. I watched the muscles of Samuel’s neck move as he swallowed.
