by Lily Webb
“The protective spells on the inn just fell,” Blair whispered, her grip on my wrist limp, and I bolted out of Delia’s room without a second thought.
Chapter Fourteen
I crashed into the banister and hung my head over the edge. “Kiki!” I shouted down six floors, hoping my voice would get to her before the metamorph snuck away. My worst fear had already come true; the copycat must’ve disguised themselves as me or Jadis and somehow convinced Kiki to lower the protective spells she and Blair had cast around the inn.
Without a second more to spare, I dashed to the stairs, unable to wait for the elevator, and clattered down two flights of them to the third floor with Blair, Delia, and Jadis shouting after me. It was probably beyond reckless of me to be running off on my own with the metamorph on its way out of the inn, but I didn’t care; I refused to let them get away.
I skidded to a stop outside room 321, Tara’s, and pounded on the door. “Tara! If you’re in there, open up!” I demanded and waited, panting like a dog, for an answer that never came — no voice, no moans, no pounding on the walls — confirming what I already knew but didn’t want to believe: Tara was the metamorph.
When I spun on my heel to head back for the stairs, a deep black, otherworldly portal ringed by fire opened up in the floor, blocking my path. A moment later, a swirl of red and blue soared out of it, squealing and flapping.
“Lox! Keez! Oh, am I glad to see you two,” I said, and meant it.
“Human girl! Kiki in trouble!” Keez screeched manically.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, dread swelling in my stomach.
“Come with imps!” Lox shouted, and the two imps zoomed around behind me, then crashed into my back, sending me falling forward into their portal. The scream that started deep in my lungs snuffed out as I fell through an all-encompassing blackness so silent that I wondered if I’d entered a vacuum in space. A moment later, I crashed onto my hands and knees on the kitchen’s stone floors, and Lox and Keez popped out of the floor beside me. They landed on my shoulders, pulling and tugging at them to get me back on my feet.
“Hurry! Hurry! Kiki need human girl!” Keez howled as she began pulling on my left ear. Dazed and confused, I used the huge wooden table that ran the length of the kitchen to pull myself up, and the imps buzzed away into the prep room, so I had no choice but to follow them.
We crashed through the door and I clapped a hand over my mouth at what I found. At the back of the room, an exact copy of myself stood chatting idly with Kiki. I didn’t know what to say or do, so I just stood staring until Kiki finally noticed me there. She glanced from the copy of me talking to her to the real me and back again, a look of horror spreading across her face.
Unfortunately, the metamorph picked up on it and whirled to face me. I felt like I was looking into a mirror; the impersonation was so perfect that had I not already figured out there was a copycat in the inn, I might’ve thought I was going crazy.
Without warning, the metamorph darted behind Kiki and wrapped one arm around her neck, holding her in place, while their other hand clamped over her mouth to keep her from making a sound.
“Let her go!” I shouted, but the metamorph tightened my — its? — grip around Kiki, so I held out my hands slowly and nonthreateningly. “Listen, we know you’re a metamorph, and we don’t want to hurt you. Just let Kiki go, tell me where Feal and Emile are, and we’ll let you leave. No harm, no foul.”
A silver-white aura shone from around the copy of me, and in the blink of an eye, Emile stood where I had a moment before. “If you hadn’t gone snooping around, that might’ve worked, but I have to make you all disappear now,” Emile said, and a shiver washed over me. Though Delia swore metamorphs weren’t violent, as I stared at the one now posing as Emile and considered what he’d said, I found that hard to believe. “No one can know I’m alive. No one.”
“Wait, please! We can keep secrets. That’s part of the appeal of this inn. People of all stripes come here to disappear,” I said, desperate to buy some time for Blair and the others to catch up. If the metamorph attacked me in Emile’s form, I had no way to defend myself.
“Why do you think I chose it?” Emile asked. “Things were perfect, and they could’ve stayed that way if you hadn’t shown up.”
“They can still be that way. We can work something out. You can stay here for as long as you—”
“No!” Emile snarled, jolting me and making Kiki whimper.
“Selena! Selena, are you there?” Blair’s voice carried into the kitchen, and Emile growled. Lox and Keez buzzed nervously around my head, calling to Blair because they knew I couldn’t. “Selena, oh, thank Lilith you’re—” Blair started, but I never heard the rest because Emile lunged, still gripping Kiki. Something hard slammed into my midsection at warp speed, and the world around me turned into an incomprehensible blur of sight and sound.
I kicked and screamed, desperate to free myself, but I might as well have been pounding my head against a solid stone wall for all the good it did me. Then, as abruptly as it’d started, the whipping world halted as I bounced on something soft, and I blinked a few times as my vision came back into focus. The smell of rotten food and filth registered first, and I shuddered as I realized where the metamorph had taken Kiki and me: back to Tara’s room where we sat back-to-back on her disgusting, stained mattress. But why here, of all places?
“What are you doing?” I screamed at the metamorph as they stomped toward the closet and yanked its door open. The air zipped around me as the metamorph retrieved us, and before I knew it, they were hauling us both to the closet. “What are you doing?” I repeated. “Let us go! Let us—”
Kiki and I thudded against the back of the closet and the door slammed, sealing us in total darkness. Frantically, I pounded against the door with my fists and feet like a caged animal until Kiki wrapped her arms around me, sapping me of my energy. “It’s okay, Selena. We’ll figure it out.”
I melted in her arms, defeated, with my eyes squeezed shut against the tears. Though the metamorph hadn’t said it, I knew Kiki and I were going to end up in the same place as Feal and Emile. But when would the metamorph stop? They said they had to make us all disappear, but wasn’t that a slippery slope? Eventually, someone else would wander into Kindred Spirits wondering where Blair and Kiki had gone. They couldn’t keep their secret forever.
“What’s going on?” Kiki whispered, and against my better judgment, my eyes fluttered open. The interior of the closet glowed a silvery-white color, and something tingled and prickled at my fingertips like the crackle of an electric charge.
“I don’t know,” I said as the glow intensified until it was blinding, so Kiki and I clung to each other and I squeezed my eyes shut against the light, though it didn’t do me much good. Darkness swept over my closed eyelids again, and when I re-opened my eyes, it seemed like nothing had changed. Kiki and I were still trapped inside the closet of room 321, so again I pounded on the door, but got no response.
Out of desperation, I pulled my knees up to my face and struck out with my feet against the door with all the strength I could muster, and the door flung open. The closet filled with the soft, ambient light of the moon spilling through the window on the opposite side of the room — only we weren’t in room 321 anymore, made obvious because the room was clean.
“What on Earth…?” I whispered, puzzled, as I climbed on hands and knees out of the closet toward the nightstand next to the queen bed in the room. I glanced at the phone on the nightstand, looking for the room number, and my heart skipped a beat when I saw it etched into the golden plaque on the phone’s base: we’d magically moved from room 321 to room 402.
… And then it hit me — the closet door slamming in Delia’s new room! We hadn’t been imagining things. The metamorph must’ve been using the closets to get around the inn undetected, but how? Room 402 was vacant, which gave me my first clue. Outside of Tara’s room, the closets they hopped between were probably in vacant rooms, so they woul
dn’t risk getting caught — and until we moved Delia to get away from Tara’s moaning, room 510 was also empty.
“Selena, are you okay?” Kiki asked, and I turned to face her. I’d almost forgotten she’d made the trip with me.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Are you?”
Kiki nodded, though she looked supremely confused. She wasn’t the only one. “How in Lilith’s name did we get from one room to another like this?”
“So, you weren’t aware magic linked the closets?”
Kiki laughed and shook her head. “Not at all, though I guess even after twenty years here there are still surprises even Blair and I don’t know about. Sometimes, I swear this inn has a mind of its own.”
If even the inn’s owners didn’t know about it, how did the metamorph learn? I couldn’t come up with an answer, but it didn’t much matter at that moment. “I think this is how we get to Feal and Emile.”
Kiki raised an eyebrow at me. “Really?”
I nodded. “I’m not sure how it works, but these closets must be how the metamorph made the two of them disappear.”
Kiki blanched. “The metamorph? Is that why there were two of you?”
“Exactly. They posed as me to trick you.”
“You — er, I mean, the metamorph — told me that Blair had given you the order to lower the spells on the inn because we were all going to leave and report the disappearances to the Starfall authorities.”
I sighed. “That’s exactly what I was afraid of. While we were trying to figure out who the imposter was and where they were hiding, they went right for the source.”
“I don’t understand,” Kiki said, her face scrunched up. “If the metamorph just wanted to run away, why wouldn’t they have taken off as soon as I lowered the spells?”
“Because they wanted to make sure we wouldn’t be around to spill their secret. They knew we’d come running as soon as the spells fell,” I said. “Delia did some digging for us and figured out that the metamorph in the inn now is probably one of the last — if not the last — of its kind. It doesn’t want anyone to know it’s here, so it can’t just run away. We might tell everyone we’d seen it, leading to a hunt.”
Kiki gulped and reached out for my hands to squeeze them in hers. “Then shouldn’t we try to get to the others before the metamorph does?”
“With Emile’s super speed, there’s no way we can catch them, but we can figure out where they’re hiding Feal and Emile while they’re busy trying to head off the others, which is exactly what I’m going to do,” I said, and beckoned Kiki the rest of the way out of the closet.
With her safely beside me, I kicked the closet door closed and waited with bated breath for something to happen, but nothing did. Frustrated, I stood and paced the room while I racked my brain for how this all fit together. We’d moved, via the closets somehow, from room 321 to room 402, and I would’ve bet my life that the closet in room 510 had a connection too — so what did the three of them have in common? The answer struck before I’d finished asking myself the question.
“Six, six, six!” I shouted, clapping my hands together and making Kiki jump.
“What?” she asked, giving me a puzzled look.
“All the connected room numbers individually add up to six,” I said. “Room 321, Tara’s, the one we came from, probably starts it, which is why the metamorph was so insistent on staying in that room. Three plus two plus one is six. We traveled through the closet there and ended up here in room 402. Four plus zero plus two is six. And I’m positive I heard a closet door slamming when we moved Delia into room 510. Five plus one plus zero is six.”
“Room 666! That’s genius!” Kiki shouted as she connected the dots. “Maybe it’s not a room at all?”
“Exactly. My visions were close to showing me everything, but like Blair said, they can be incomplete or misleading. So, does that mean we can get to room 510 from here, and then maybe from there to wherever Feal and Emile are?”
Kiki shrugged. “There’s only one way to find out,” she said and pulled her wand from her robes.
Inspired by her burst of courage, I wrenched the closet door open and crawled inside. “Are you coming?”
Kiki nodded and squeezed in beside me. Once we’d settled, I closed the door from the inside and sat in the darkness, waiting for the same strange light to envelop us — but nothing happened.
“Maybe the metamorph is the only one who can trigger the magic?” I asked, frustrated.
“Or maybe we just have to tell it where we want to go? Room 510, please!” Kiki shouted, and I bit back a laugh at the silly idea, but a second later, the blinding light filled the closet again and the electricity I’d felt before swept over me before the light faded.
Thrilled, I turned the knob on the door and breathed a sigh of relief when I found myself inside Delia’s room where the soup cart still sat, untouched, though I saw no signs of Jadis, Blair, or Delia. Still, I threw my arms around Kiki. “You’re brilliant! If I’d known it was that easy all along…”
“What if we tried room 666 next? If nothing happens, at least then we’ll know there’s no such place, or that it’s not part of the closet network,” Kiki said.
“Good idea. Come on, hurry,” I said and climbed back into the closet — but froze when I heard a familiar squealing in the hallway. “Lox! Keez! Is that you?” I shouted, hoping against hope it was. If Kiki’s idea worked and took us to room 666, somehow, I doubted it’d be wide open for us to walk right in, and the imps could be exactly what we needed to help us save Feal and Emile.
“Human girl?” Keez screeched as she came flapping into the room with Lox behind her, their tails still tightly knotted. When she saw us in the closet, she let out an ear-piercing shout and the two of them darted toward us and landed on the floor beside us. “Human girl! Imps thought human girl dead!”
“Not yet. Listen, we need your help. We’re going to room 666.”
Keez nodded vigorously. “Imps help human girl.”
“Good, then let’s go,” I said and reached over her and Lox to close the door. “Work your polite magic, Kiki.”
“Okay. Room 666, please!” Kiki requested and, though I didn’t really think it would work again, I yelped in excitement when the closet began glowing. The imps bounced nervously from foot to foot on the floor, but the glowing subsided quickly, and I couldn’t get my hand on the doorknob fast enough.
I flung the door out and gasped. We’d arrived in a sparse room without beds, furniture, or windows, and on the far wall, a door that looked just like the dozens of other room doors in Kindred Spirits waited — with three tarnished, golden sixes hammered into its surface.
“Kiki! We did it, we found it!” I shouted as I scrambled to my feet and ran toward the door opposite us.
“Selena, wait! I wouldn’t touch it if I were you. They might have cursed it,” Kiki cautioned, and I froze with my hand inches away from the doorknob. She was right, but still. We were so close to rescuing Feal and Emile that I could barely help myself.
“Feal! Emile! It’s me, Selena! Are you in there?” I shouted, though I doubted they could hear me or reply even if they could. Unsurprisingly, I got no response.
The closet door clicked closed behind me. “Here, let me run a few spells to see if I can catch anything fishy,” Kiki said and stepped toward the door with her wand ready. She tapped its tip against the doorknob, closed her eyes, and started muttering things I couldn’t understand. A golden, sparkling wave of magic washed over the surface of the door, similar to the spell that Blair had cast over the door to the room I shared with Jadis.
“I can’t detect anything, but that doesn’t mean it’s safe,” Kiki said with a shrug several moments later.
“Imps try,” Keez said and fluttered up to the handle with Lox dangling by the tail beneath her. She gripped the handle with both her hands, planted her feet against the door’s surface, and pulled as hard as her little body and furiously flapping wings could manage. Nothing happened. “Door loc
ked,” Keez grumbled.
“What do we do now?” I asked no one in particular. We were so close that we couldn’t give up, but if Kiki and the imps didn’t have the magic to break the seal on the door, there wasn’t much we could do.
“Break and enter! Sneak and steal!” Lox shouted, and Keez squealed her approval. I had no idea what they meant, but I didn’t have to wonder long. The two imps leveled with each other, turned their backs to the door, and wedged the tips of their knotted, pointed tails into the door’s keyhole. It took everything I had not to laugh at the looks of deep concentration on their little faces while they wiggled their tails back and forth, but when I heard a click and the door popped open, the laugh I’d been holding turned into a shout of amazement.
“Sneak and steal! Sneak and steal! Sneak and steal!” the imps shouted in unison and devolved into hysterical laughter as they embraced each other and flew in excited circles around Kiki and me.
“Now you know where they get their names,” Kiki said, beaming. “You couldn’t find a better locksmith than these two if you tried.”
“Amazing! Come on,” I said and pushed the door open. We entered a plain room with wooden slats for a floor and a single, round window up high that I immediately recognized as the one at the very top of Kindred Spirits — which meant we had to be in the attic somewhere.
Beneath the window, next to a bone-dry milk bowl, sat a heap of dingy straw illuminated by a sharp beam of the moon’s light from above. I gasped when I approached and found a tiny figure lying on it with their back to us. Though I couldn’t see their face, I would’ve recognized the pointed red hat they wore anywhere.
“Feal! Feal, is that you?” I whispered, not wanting to startle her out of her sleep. The little brownie stirred and rolled over, rubbing her bulging, sleep-crusted eyes with a knotty, gnarled fist.
