Piper’s mouth downturns. She peers behind to Todd. “Do you still have it?”
Todd chews his lip and nods.
“Wait, you’re serious? You know where it is?”
“Get in,” he says, opening the door for us. Piper and I climb in. It’s silent all the way back to Hemlock Avenue. Todd leaves Piper and me in the truck for only minutes before dashing back out, book in hand. He climbs back in and passes it over to me.
“Is this it?” he asks.
The book is faded, attractively done, with less intricate designs than some of the others in Nikolay’s shop. The pages are aged and tanned, and it’s filled to the brim with drawings, with outlines, with thoughts and scrawl and symbols.
“I think so,” I say. “It’s smaller than the others. But Nikolay said Garrett’s was the first door, and the way they did things changed for the others.”
“Changed how?” Piper asks.
“Garrett used some kind of potion to prolong his life. Andrei discovered it wasn’t necessary for the others, not if they’re connected to the doors in a different way. But this…”
I close it, examining the spine, remembering what Nikolay told me about adding herbs to the binding for protection and magic.
“Look at that binding. And this.” I flip to another page. In the front of the book lies the circular stamp, sealed in blood. “Yes,” I say in revulsion. “This is it. Look.”
A different handwriting shows the name Ada Agatha Havens. The door’s victim.
“That looks like the designs that were etched in the doors at my house,” says Piper, leaning over, her hair brushing my arm.
“And the one in that theater in Boston. Yeah, I went there,” I add when they give me questioning looks. “That’s why Andrei fired me. I removed the doorknob in the basement of the theater, right after I witnessed the murder of the proxy for the door.”
Todd whistles in disbelief. “These guys really knew how to do things back then, didn’t they?”
“And you still trust him?” Piper asks.
“Andrei, no. But Nikolay—”
“Everly…” Piper’s tone is chastising.
“He said he didn’t know about the murders, Piper. It was as much of a shock to him as it was to me. His dad has been keeping things from him.”
“Are you sure?”
“Why would he lie to me?” They weren’t there—they didn’t see the sincerity in his eyes, the promises lingering there, the disbelief. Or his reaction when he realized my face appeared in Meiser’s book.
“So what do we do with the journal?” Todd asks, turning onto Normal Avenue and passing the small shops. I jerk, gripping the book as he brakes for a couple crossing the street.
“Nikolay says we need to get every doorknob—he already has the one from your house, Piper. I got the one from the theater. Then we take the coordinating books and undo the binding somehow, to free the spirits inside the books.”
“You mean there’s a spirit in this book?” Piper asks, pointing in incredulity at the book in my hands.
“It can’t have. I’ve never noticed anything strange about it,” Todd adds. “And it’s been in my room for months.”
“I think this one is different. Nikolay said Ada’s binding was different. That the process was still being perfected.”
Piper’s gaze is reflexive, her brow pinched. “Ada mentioned something like that too,” she says.
“But he still needs the book?” Todd asks.
“It’s the book Garrett used to solidify the spell on the door,” I explain. “Nikolay has the knob. We just need to meet him. But not until later,” I add as Todd prepares to park in front of Terekhov’s. He shrugs and continues past, heading toward the residential section of town beyond all the shops.
“So you’re getting all the other knobs tonight?” Todd asks.
I finger the book’s leather. “That’s the plan. We have to, if we’re going to undo this.”
We turn another corner, heading back toward Crestwood Apartments. “Okay, then. What time are we meeting him?”
“Eleven thirty,” I say, staring at the clock and wishing time would go faster, wishing I could talk to Nikolay, wishing I could do something instead of sit around.
The three of us congregate in my bedroom—Piper said she didn’t want that book anywhere near where she sleeps. We pull out a few games, attempt watching one of Layla’s horror collection, though it’s the last thing any of us wants to see, so instead we settle on Star Trek. I don’t catch much of anything in the movie at all.
I don’t know how many times I check the clock on my phone. Worry slicks through me, and I wonder what’s going on, if Nikolay tried to get any of the knobs yet, if his father is hurting him or what kind of new deal is being made with Meiser this very minute.
We order some Chinese takeout, and the taking-out part of things breaks up the monotony of the long wait. Piper and Todd spend about an hour watching mindless videos on YouTube, and finally, it’s eleven twenty.
“Let’s get this over with,” Piper says, slapping her knees and rising to throw some empty Chinese food containers in the trash.
I make for the door, slipping into my coat. “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”
“I’m coming,” she says, resolutely. “I want to make sure it’s finished.”
“Can’t argue with the lady,” Todd says, gesturing toward the door and swinging his keys around his finger. We file out, back into the snow and the cold, back into the darkness.
We drive to Terekhov’s and approach the door. A soft covering of fresh snow robes the sidewalk along the street and even past the shopfronts. It’s been at least a few hours since anyone has so much as strolled past. That’s a good sign. There aren’t even tire marks along the alleyway, where Nikolay told me to meet him.
The three of us trudge along. “This it?” Todd clarifies.
I nod, knuckling softly on the side door. We wait, our breath puffing out before our faces. No answer.
“He did say eleven thirty, didn’t he?” Piper asks.
“Yeah.” I step forward and tap another knock, heavier this time. Maybe he was delayed. Maybe he’s still trying to tiptoe around his father.
“Are you sure he said this door?” Todd asks after several more long minutes.
“I’m sure. But we can check the front.” I turn, making tracks toward the mouth of the street. My feet are the first to imprint in the snow, and I shuffle along to the front step and reach for the click-down handle. Locked.
“I thought you said you could trust this guy,” Todd mutters. I ignore him, cupping my hands to the glass and attempting to peer through.
Cobwebs overtake the shelves. A layer of untouched dust settles on every surface, empty of the contents that were there hours before. Aghast, I step back for a wider view of the storefront.
The glass windows are dingy. Vines crawl along the brick. The sign is rusted over, aged, as though the place hasn’t been open in years.
“It’s not possible,” I breathe.
“It’s closed,” Todd says, peering inside as well.
Frantic, I take another backward step. The windows above the stairs are too black. The other times I’ve come, they’ve been shadowed with soft yellow light. The Closed sign isn’t in its usual place on the front door, no ads on the glass, no magazine rack within.
I rush forward, eager to prove my eyes wrong. But the building is closed. Abandoned. As if they were never here at all.
twenty
one
Nikolay wouldn’t leave me. I think about his kisses, the tender words, the open way he answered all my questions, the feel of his heartbeat beneath my palm. Piper and Todd offer muffled words of confusion. They ask questions I don’t have answers to. They express concerns, but I only stand there in my own personal maze where ever
y turn is a dead end.
He can’t be gone. He can’t be.
I’m in Todd’s truck without realizing how I get there. Then I’m walking up the stairs. Turning a knob. The air is warmer in my apartment. Too quiet. Too distant. My thoughts are detached, disbelieving. Piper asks me a question that I don’t hear, and I go in my room and stare at the wall, confusion raging through me.
Is Nikolay okay? Did his father do something to him? And what about Meiser and the door, is it still there?
One day passes. I go to school, pretend to care, check the store for even a sign of the cat. Nothing. Another day, I go to school, talk to Sierra, talk to Piper and Todd, still nothing. A week, and the not-knowing is bulging in me, driving me crazy and keeping me from being able to concentrate on anything else, until I’m failing every homework assignment.
The crows make an appearance daily. They never move against me, but they’re there, in my window one moment, on my car the next. A silent reminder that they haven’t gotten what they wanted.
Layla asks me what’s wrong, but how can I tell her the truth? Piper and Todd believed me easily enough, but this is my adorable, scatterbrained cousin we’re talking about.
I walked back through time, on a path behind a door, crossing into a paranormal realm to Victorian England, to Piper’s house. I was in a theater in 1917; I witnessed the murder of an innocent woman. I walked through it with Nikolay. I’m not making this up, but I can’t tell her about it all. All I can tell her is that Nikolay is gone.
Every day for two weeks, I go and stare through the storefront, envisioning standing there with Nikolay and Jerry. With Sierra, while Nikolay taught me how to use the cash register. I’m not the only one who was there—have others tried returning?
I go back to my book and write it all down. The crows I drew, the details I added are all inked in, unchanged. I’m glad I have it—it would be too easy to think I really did imagine everything.
But I didn’t add him. And it’s time I did.
This time I pull my pen out and begin to draw. I begin labeling my earlier drawings with every detail I can resurface. I write about what Andrei told me about crows with a message, about Jerry. I add Rosemary in too. I scrawl my own thoughts in connection with remembering everything Nikolay told me about the doors, about his life, about him.
I draw him.
I start with his eyes first, eyes I can’t help but see every time I close mine. The pencil shades an arc, then another, filling in the black of his irises, the feather of his lashes, the line of his nose and bow of his lips.
“Where are you?” I ask the page as I examine my work. The final image is stern, mysterious, and handsome. I brush a finger over it, wishing I could see him, speak with him. What happened?
Every night I can’t sleep, but tonight is the worst. Something pesters at me, leaving me unable to think of anything else. I crack open the book and write, purging every thought festering in me.
Where are you?
I miss you, Nikolay. You’ve inked yourself into my life, like this page I’m writing on. Your kiss, your touch, I can’t get you out of me. And not only my mind. I know how it felt to be held by you. The streets have memories, inserting you everywhere I go, and I can’t live like this. I have to know where you are.
Please come back to me.
A tear trickles from my cheek, unbidden. I can’t believe this. Any of it. I’m back where I started. Jobless. Hopeless. Only this time. fear trips over every inch of me every time I drop my guard. My face is in that book of Harold Meiser’s. Whether Nikolay and his father are gone or not, that hasn’t changed. And I spend every second in skeptical dread, worrying about what it means.
Maybe Piper is right, maybe I should go home. But that won’t change any of this. What does the song say? Seasons change, but hearts don’t.
Someone bangs hard on my door, jerking me to awareness. I take in the stack of cardboard boxes, the spread of clothes I’ve neglected putting away, the mess of my open backpack and deserted homework. My heart flips, foolish hope storming in. Maybe it’s him. Maybe he’s back.
I fling open the door.
“Todd?”
Todd runs a hand through his brown curls, disheveling them until they rest over his ears once more. “We’ve got a problem,” he says. “You should probably see this.”
Instantly, purpose fuels my heart in a way it hasn’t since Nikolay left. “What kind of problem?” I ask. “Is everything okay? Is it Piper?”
Todd yanks me down the stairs. “She’s at work right now. And I need your help figuring out how to break it to her.”
“Break what to her?”
He slams the door without answering. We don’t talk much on the short drive to Freak Street. And when we get there, a gasp rips from my lungs.
A house stands beside Todd’s. Majestic and Victorian, with decorative eaves, a rounded tower peaked with a pointed roof on one end. It’s beautiful, gray with lavender shutters, looking fresh and sharp and not at all burned.
“Is that—?”
“Piper’s house,” Todd says, rubbing a hand over his forehead. “In all its glory. And I’ll be if I can’t figure out where it came from.”
I stare in awe, stunned at its appearance. “When?”
“It was here when I got back from study group. It wasn’t here this morning before school, and now…” He offers both hands in an annoyed gesture toward the windshield.
Befuddlement rolls in. Questions too. I only know as much as what Piper and Nikolay told me about what happened there, but I know enough to know it was not anywhere near good. The fact that it’s reappeared now is even worse.
“We have to tell her.”
He chews his lip, shaking his head. “How?”
“We just tell her. The truth,” I say. “She needs to know.”
And we’ve got to figure out how it happened.
“When does she get off work?” I ask.
“In twenty minutes,” Todd says, shifting the stick shift between us and pulling back, heading toward town. Todd makes a detour past Terekhov’s, but it still looks as it has for the last two weeks. Empty.
“Still nothing from your boyfriend?” Todd asks, steering along toward the spa where Piper works.
“Nothing,” I say, hating the word. Even more urgency builds, a crippling wedge in my chest. Where is he?
I pull out my phone and swipe, not caring that I’ll use data. I Google Terekhov and Son Books, but there’s nothing. No address. No website.
Of course they wouldn’t have a website. They haven’t even updated their cash register in the last eighty years. But we have to know.
Piper smiles at the sight of us, slinging her purse across her shoulder and treading carefully over a patch of ice on the sidewalk. She opens the door.
“Everly! What are you doing here?”
I hop out, allowing Piper to squeeze in beside Todd before I climb back in. Todd’s fingers thrum on the steering wheel. Her smile trickles away.
“Okay, what happened?”
I open my mouth, and a noise escapes, blocking out something similar from Todd’s direction.
“Tell me,” she says. “Whatever it is. Don’t hold it back.”
“Your house is back,” I blurt.
Todd gives me a look. Yeah. Yeah, I did just say it.
Her hands fall to her lap. “Show me,” she demands. No questioning disbelief. No hesitation. Just an adamant resolution, stronger than I would have expected from her.
“It’s your call,” Todd says, chauffeuring us once more back to Freak Street.
Piper mutters under her breath at the sight of it. She practically rams me out the door before making her way to the sidewalk, and the three of us stand together in front of her old house. A crow flutters over, perching on the skeletal tree out front.
“No way,�
� she says. “You better tell me this is a hallucination.”
“That all three of us are having?” Todd says.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Piper says before pushing through the snow toward her front steps. She leaves a trail of snow all the way to the elegant screen and stands in the white-fenced porch. A porch that looks faintly familiar. “All I can say is he’d better not be back.”
Todd pounds softly against the siding, then turns to her, gauging. Piper rubs her arms as if waiting for some kind of reaction. She shakes her head. “Nothing,” she says to his unspoken question.
“Ada?” Todd calls out, turning in a small circle. “Are you here too?” He lifts his head, staring up at the awning above.
I blink a few times, remembering how quickly they accepted the fact that I saw crows attacking Layla. I must have seemed this ridiculous to them at the time, but they thought nothing of it. I need to be that accepting now.
I don’t know everything that happened here. But they’re certainly handling it well, all things considered.
“Ada?” Piper echoes, more adamantly than Todd.
We stand in silence. A cold breeze filters across the snow, swirling my hair off my shoulders and snaking its way down my back.
“I’m no longer bound to this house,” a soft, sweet voice behind us says.
Shivers crawl up my sides. I turn to find a transparent, lovely young woman standing behind us on the porch. In spite of her dark dress, covered by a white pinafore, I can see the other side of the street through her. My mouth drops. Unwittingly, I back into Todd’s side. He puts a hand on my shoulder, Piper at his other side, though I’m also surprised to find that she isn’t cowering or looking afraid.
If anything it’s like she’s ready to start a boxing match and come out on top. Her chin is high, and she steps forward.
“Then why is it back?” Piper demands.
Ada glances around. “Something sinister is underway.”
“It’s the doors,” I say, stepping away from Todd, toward the ghost. “You know about them, right?”
The Forbidden Doors Box Set Page 45
