Now Rook was getting impatient. The constables were coming, their distant shouts getting louder as they tracked the fox. They had to get this done. She made a shooing motion in the fox’s direction—not enough to startle it, she hoped, but just enough to get it moving through the door. It wasn’t as if she could push it through.
“Go on, boy,” Drift chimed in, clapping her hands gently and pointing to the door. “Don’t you recognize your home? Your family must be missing you.”
Rook gulped, trying to imagine an even larger mama and papa fox running around the dark forest. Why couldn’t the beast just move so she could shut the door and close off the haunted place?
Then, before Rook could react, the fox stretched out his head to sniff at Rook’s pocket, the one that held the shroom bun. Rook went absolutely still. She had to fight the urge to scramble backward and put space between herself and the creature. The fox inched closer, snuffling around her, nudging his head against her flank. His nose left a wet mark on her pants leg.
As she stood there, a familiar burning sensation spread through Rook’s chest. She was exhausted from running and jumping off rooftops, but that wasn’t what caused the feeling. It happened when she left a magical door open too long. She was getting weak, just as Drift had earlier when she’d used too much magic flying them from rooftop to rooftop.
Rook’s legs wobbled and she gripped the door handle for support. “Please,” she said, involuntarily reaching out toward the fox. Her hand froze in midair. What was she doing? This wasn’t a dog to be petted! “You have to go now. I can’t keep the door open. Don’t you see—if we leave, you’ll be stranded here, with no family and no way to get home!”
Desperate, Rook reached into her pocket and took out the shroom bun. Without even looking at it, she hurled it through the doorway into the dark forest, where it landed with a soft thump in the snow. The fox’s head snapped around to follow the movement, but it stayed where it was.
“There!” Rook shouted. So much for blueberry-flavored courage. “Go get it. Eat up!”
But the fox didn’t budge. Rook stared helplessly into the creature’s eyes. They were amber colored, with little flecks of black at the center. White whiskers twitched along its snout as it stared back at her steadily.
Rook’s vision swam, and the world tilted. Her hand slid off the doorknob and her legs gave out. The door swung shut with a sharp click, but Rook didn’t see it. She caught a streak of red in front of her eyes, and then she was falling. Somewhere far away, she heard Drift cry out her name.
AS ROOK SWAM SLOWLY BACK to consciousness, she felt her cheek resting on a strange bed of something soft and prickly. She took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of damp fur and wildness. Her eyes flew open.
The fox, she discovered, was stretched out on the ground beneath her. It must have caught her when she fainted. Drift was kneeling beside them, feeling Rook’s forehead with the back of her hand. “Are you all right?” she asked.
Carefully, Rook pushed herself up off the fox’s back and into a sitting position. “I think so,” she said. She thought she’d only been out for a few seconds, but the burning sensation in her chest from having kept the door open too long had disappeared. She glanced over at the door and saw that it had vanished.
Frustrated, Rook clenched her hands into fists. The constables’ shouts still echoed in the distance as they hunted for the fox. It sounded like there were even more of them now. “I’ll rest a minute and then open the door again,” she said. She’d push aside her fear and drag the fox through the door herself if she had to, but she was getting the beast home.
Drift’s mouth pressed into a line, while another line formed between her brows. “No you don’t,” she said. “You’ve already worn yourself out, and we’ve stayed here too long.” As if to emphasize this, footsteps sounded from the next street over. Too close. The constables were searching for them street by street. At this rate, they’d find them in minutes.
Rook wobbled to her feet and grabbed Drift’s arm. “Then let’s take it with us,” she said, nodding at the fox.
Drift blinked. “Back to the roost? You can’t be serious!”
Rook swayed on her feet. The fox sprang up and pressed its big body against her to steady her. A sane person probably would have jumped back, screamed, or tried to run away, but Rook was discovering she was too exhausted to be afraid. She abandoned all sense and flung an arm over the fox’s back, leaning against it for support.
“I don’t think it’s dangerous,” Rook said. Quite the opposite, the creature seemed perfectly content to serve as Rook’s crutch. Its lips pulled back from its teeth, not in a threatening way, more like a goofy, foxy grin.
“Maaaaybe,” Drift said reluctantly. “But will it fit in the roost?”
Rook shrugged. “Only one way to find out,” she said. With the fox walking beside her, she stumbled over to the wall and raised a hand to sketch yet another door. “It’s only temporary, Drift, I promise. As soon as I get my strength back, we’ll send it home.”
Assuming they could even get back to their hideout. This time, when she drew the door, Rook’s lines were so haphazard that when they snapped into place, they formed a circle instead of a rectangle, and a black doorknob appeared in the center, surrounded by bright orange wood. A pumpkin door, Rook thought, but she didn’t have time to be critical. The footsteps and voices were almost on top of them.
“Let’s go,” she said, pulling open the door. She didn’t hesitate. She dove through with Drift at her heels, and the fox followed close behind.
As the door swung shut, Rook found herself in a familiar underground tunnel. After the humid, smoke-ridden air of Gray Town, the cool draft blowing through the passage dried the sweat at Rook’s neck and went a long way toward clearing her head.
The door vanished, and for a moment it was pitch black. Still, Rook wasn’t afraid. In fact, she was so relieved she almost felt like fainting again. Her magic hadn’t failed her this time. This was the path to the roost, the way home.
They waited in the dark, and as their eyes adjusted, Rook could make out soft light shining down on them. Starlight. Strewn along the tunnel ceiling was a glittering field, a perfect replica of the night sky.
As it always did when she gazed up at the strange ceiling, the magic inside Rook stirred. She started down the tunnel, Drift and the fox beside her. It ended in a blank wall, unremarkable but for a light coating of yellow chalk dust—the faded remnants of many, many other doors.
Rook stepped up to the wall and added yet another. Her magic doors took many different forms, but the way to the roost was always the same: a small yellow door with a black latch and matching hinges in the shape of stars.
She undid the latch, pushed the door open, and was greeted by the welcoming scent of woodsmoke filling a warm living room. A gray stone fireplace dominated the opposite wall, and a fire burned behind the iron grate. Neither Rook nor Drift had lit one before they left, yet a fire was always waiting for them when they came home, just as the house was always the perfect temperature, no matter the season. It was all part of the magic of the place, an unexplainable wonder they had gradually grown accustomed to over the past two years.
There were two beds, one on either side of the fireplace. A blue patchwork quilt was crumpled up in the center of Rook’s bed, its surface peppered with stars done in bright yellow cloth. Drift’s quilt was red and lay neatly folded at the end of her bed. A large orange sun was sewn on the front and a blue moon on the back. They’d found them inside a pair of wooden trunks that sat at the foot of each of the beds when they’d discovered the roost. The only other rooms were the kitchen and a small washroom at the back of the house.
Once everyone had filed in, Rook closed the door and banished it. Slowly, all the tension and fear of the past few hours fell away. This was the one place where she and Drift could relax.
Drift wandered across the room and plopped down on her bed. On the wall behind her, she’d hung drawings from her sketchbook, the only luxury she owned. Most of them were of birds, dogs, or dolphins she’d seen swimming in the harbor, but some of them were sketches of Rook’s doors.
Rook had hung nothing on the wall above her own bed, but there was a single small window, in itself a mystery. The window didn’t open, and its glass panes refused to break, no matter what you tried to smash them with.
It was dark now, but outside the window, Rook knew, there was an open field, with nothing but tall, wavy grasses in shades of green and yellow as far as the horizon. Rook spent many nights staring out the window at the millions of stars overhead. Her favorite was one bright red star visible only on certain nights. She’d only ever seen it out this window.
They had stumbled on the mysterious house by accident while running from the Red Watchers, not long after Rook and Drift first met and escaped their captivity together. Drift had been terrified at the time that they were going to be caught. With the angry, red-banded citizens closing in, Rook had taken Drift’s hand and asked her to think of the place she most wanted to go. Wide-eyed, Drift had shouted, “I don’t care! Far away from here.”
Good enough.
Rook drew the door and found the star tunnel to the blank stone wall. When Rook drew a second door, it led them to the magical house. There were no entrances to Rook’s Roost—that was what Drift had named the place—except through the doors Rook created. So neither of them knew exactly where in Talhaven the house was located.
Rook asked Drift later what she had been thinking when she’d imagined where she wanted to escape. Drift replied that her mind had gone blank, and all she could think was that she wanted to go someplace that was completely safe, someplace no one would ever find them if they didn’t want to be found.
The roost had fulfilled the wish of her heart.
Now there was a fox the size of a giant wolf bounding around in the middle of it.
It skidded to a stop next to the fireplace, stuck its paws out, and performed an impressive full-body stretch. Then it shook from head to tail before collapsing on the braided rug with a contented sigh.
“Hey, don’t get too comfortable,” Rook warned. “Remember, you’re going home as soon as I’ve rested.”
The fox rolled over onto its back, four paws sticking up in the air, and closed its eyes.
Rook shook her head in exasperation and sat down on the edge of her bed. She no longer felt any fear of the beast. The only problem was, the fox took up all the space in front of the fire and then some, making the house feel even smaller than it usually did.
Drift stood and headed to the kitchen, emerging a few minutes later with two glasses of water, one of which she handed to Rook. She glanced down at the fox, raised an eyebrow, and then went back to the kitchen, returning with a bowl of milk, which she carefully placed on the floor in front of the fireplace.
“Do foxes drink milk?” she asked Rook.
Rook shrugged.
They got their answer when the fox rolled to its feet, sniffed the bowl curiously, then lapped at it with a long pink tongue. After a few seconds, the lapping became gulping, and suddenly the milk was gone and the fox was licking the bowl so hard it looked like it might scrape the paint off.
“Hungry beast,” Rook remarked.
Drift laughed. “I’ll see what else I can find.”
She returned to the kitchen and this time came back with a wedge of slightly stale cheese Rook had bought on a previous visit to the Night Market. Drift broke it up into bite-sized chunks and knelt by the fire, intending to drop them into the empty bowl, but the fox darted forward and snatched a piece from her hand so fast that Drift barely had time to yelp. The fox parked itself in front of her and whimpered, waiting for more.
Rook giggled at the expression on Drift’s face—a look somewhere between shock and laughter. “Well, you really are tame, aren’t you?” Drift said. Hesitantly, she held out her hand, palm up, offering the rest of the cheese. The fox wolfed the chunks down in one great bite, then ran its enormous tongue over Drift’s empty palm, checking for crumbs.
“Eew,” Drift said, yanking her hand back and wiping it on her pants. “We’re going to have to teach you some manners.”
“Yeah,” Rook laughed. “Don’t you know it’s not polite to drool all over the hand that’s feeding you?”
The fox sat back on its hindquarters and stared dolefully at both of them.
“No,” Drift said, holding up a finger. “One meal at a time.”
“Besides,” Rook said, standing and stretching. “I’ve rested enough. It’s time for me to send you home.”
In response, the fox collapsed on the rug and turned its head away from her.
“That’s not going to work,” Rook said, hands on her hips. “You can’t stay here, no matter how nice the fire feels. You’re too big for this house. You belong in the open forest where you can run and hunt and play with the other giant foxes.”
She reached into her pocket and fished out her chalk. When she approached the wall opposite the fireplace, the fox let out a high-pitched, mournful whine that filled the whole house. Rook whirled to find the creature staring intently at her.
Drift’s brow furrowed as she glanced between Rook and the fox. “It really doesn’t want to go,” she said. “Maybe we let it sleep here, just for—”
But Drift didn’t finish the sentence. Her face had gone very still. She had reached into her pocket, and there was the sound of dozens of coins jingling. Rook’s stomach turned over as Drift pulled out the money pouch Mr. Kelmin had given them in the alley. It held the coins they’d been paid for a job they’d failed to do.
A job Rook had failed to do.
It was a long moment before either of them said anything. In the end, Drift was the one who broke the silence. “I…In all the confusion, the running, I forgot I had these,” she stammered. “I guess we should go to Mr. Baroman, see if he can help us find the Kelmins so we can try again to get them out of the city.” Her eyes were downcast as she spoke.
Rook knew what she was thinking. After witnessing a giant beast jump through one of Rook’s doors and create menacing shadow doubles of itself, the Kelmins, already skittish of magic, might not want to have anything to do with her or Drift ever again. And if that was the case, they obviously couldn’t keep the Kelmins’ money, not without having completed the job.
But when Rook met Drift’s eyes, she saw the pain there, the conflict. It mirrored her own feelings.
They needed that money. In the early days, after their escape but before they started working with Mr. Baroman, they’d come close to starvation more than once. Sometimes, Rook had to open doors to people’s pantries to pilfer food, but they’d almost been caught more than once, and they’d both hated resorting to stealing. It wasn’t a state Rook ever wanted to be in again.
And it would be so easy to keep the money, Rook thought, tell Mr. Baroman they’d lost it in the chaos after the fox’s appearance. Or they could never go back to the clockmaker’s shop at all, just take the coins and stay away.
No. Rook considered herself many things, but she wasn’t a thief. Not anymore, and not from someone like Mr. Kelmin, who needed the money as much as they did.
“We’ll take care of that tomorrow,” Rook said to Drift, “but we need to send the fox home tonight. It doesn’t belong here, and it doesn’t need to get tangled up in our problems.”
Yet, when she stared across the room, she couldn’t help but think that the fox looked at home sitting there by the fire. It sprawled on the rug as if it were his spot, and he was just coming back to it after a long time away. He’d already shed a generous amount of red and white fur on the rug too, and it didn’t seem to matter. It felt right, but it couldn’t feel right, and that was why Rook had to get him o
ut of there, before she or Drift accidentally got attached to him.
The floorboards creaked as Drift rose to her feet and came over to where Rook stood. “You’re right, of course,” she said, putting on a smile the way she always did to make Rook feel better. “But you have to admit, he’d have made an incredible guard dog.”
Rook glanced over at the fox, who was once again sitting up and watching them intently. “No argument there,” she said, relieved that Drift wasn’t angry with her over this mess. She turned back to the wall to finish her other lines.
A loud yip startled her into juggling her chalk, but somehow Rook managed to keep from dropping it. She spun to glare at the fox.
“Stop that,” she scolded. “You’re going home, and that’s the end of it.”
The fox lifted his head and yipped again.
And suddenly…
He changed. Rook didn’t know how to describe it. For a split second, the fox’s body shimmered. Rook thought he was about to throw out the shadow forms she’d seen in the alley, but this time there was a flash of light, bright enough to make Rook shield her eyes.
When she dropped her hand, the fox had vanished. In his place, a boy sat on the braided rug, his bright red hair sticking up all over his head, a profusion of freckles scattered across his cheeks. He grinned, and there was a small gap between his crooked front teeth.
Rook stared. Drift stared.
The boy held out his hand. “Cheese?” he asked.
ROOK GASPED, THE PIECE OF chalk sliding from her fingers. It clattered and rolled across the sloping wood floor, lost in the dark space beneath her bed, but neither she nor Drift paid any attention.
They were too busy staring at the fox who’d suddenly become a boy.
Rook guessed he was younger than they were, maybe nine or ten years old. He was skinny, fragile as a baby bird, barefoot and dressed in faded trousers and a baggy green shirt. Loops of string wound around his elbows to contain the loose sleeves.
The Door to the Lost Page 5
