Page 18 of Echo North
It wasn’t a proper answer, and yet his words pulsed strangely in my heart, like their meaning lay just beyond my grasp. If he hadn’t been there that day, my face would be soft and smooth. The village would have accepted me. Donia wouldn’t despise me. I would have a future. But somehow, somehow, I didn’t hate him for it.
I chewed on my lip, slipping back down into the bed and laying my head on the pillow. “Is it over?”
“I do not know. But I will guard the door till the morning. Nothing will harm you.”
And I believed him.
I fell into twisted dreams, trapped in a winter wood, the wolf running one way, my father in Tinker’s sled hurtling the other. Everything was burning, and blood poured fresh from the scars on my face. Donia’s eyes gleamed in the dark, and she laughed as she shoved me into the fire.“It is all a monster like you deserves,”she cackled.“The Devil made you, and the Devil can take you back again.”
I wept in the snow and crumbled to ash, for I was only pages in a book, burned and lost and gone forever.
When I woke it was morning, gray light flooding through the window.
The wolf was gone.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WOLF?”
I stepped from the safety of the bedchamber, but the hallway was empty. It stretched ordinarily, innocuously, to the left and right, the lamp flickering steadfastly from the wall. There was no hint of last night’s fire, of anything magical whatsoever.
“Wolf?”
Fear weighed me down like sodden clothes in a river. He’d said he would guard the door—how long had he been gone? How long had he left me to the mercy of the house?
“Wolf!”
I ran, left toward the dining room, down carved ivory stairs and up narrow, creaky ones, round corners and through passageways I swore I’d never seen before. I passed door after door shimmering in bright shades of blue or green or violet. One door seemed to be made of grass; another, flowers. I ran past fiery doors and snowy doors, through a corridor of rain, down a spiral staircase that chimed a different bell-like note with every step.“Wolf!”
But I couldn’t find him.
I collapsed, gasping for breath, against a gem-studded wall. Emeralds dug into my back and a whispering breeze tangled warm around my ankles. Somewhere in the distance a woman laughed, and a sighing harp filled the spaces between. I was lost in a labyrinth, searching for the monster at the end of the maze.
And then I looked up and saw a black door at the end of a dim, narrow corridor. I’d had no desire to open any of the other doors, but this one beckoned me. It was smooth, and hard as obsidian.
It opened soundlessly at my touch. I stepped into an inky black chamber that seemed to stretch forever into darkness, baubles of multicolored crystal in all shapes and sizes hanging from some unseen ceiling. There were birds and bears, abstract coils, globes that pulsed with light—it was like a field of curious stars suspended in the moment of their falling.
The baubles brushed my shoulders as I passed through, some warm and some icy cold, some so sharp they sliced through my blouse and left hot lines of pain in my skin.
I reached the back of the room where I wasn’t even expecting there to be a back and found a tall, whirring object that had a glass face and a thousand spindly spider arms grinding and clicking. I recognized the object, for all its strange otherworldliness, as a clock. The glass face held something inside of it, and peering closer I saw it was a lock of pale hair, tied with ribbon, and a dark smear of dried liquid that could only be blood.
Horror crawled down my spine, and I turned to find the wolf at my back, his fur standing on end, fresh crimson spots marring the white.
A growl tore from his throat. He lunged at me.
I yelped and scrabbled sideways, grabbing one of the swinging crystals to keep from falling. But it was knife-sharp and I let it go, gasping. Blood seeped from both palms.
“Get out,” snarled the wolf. “GET OUT!”
He lunged again and I leapt past him, ducking under the baubles, stumbling in my haste. The crystals tangled in my hair and I had to claw myself free.
And then I was back out in the corridor with the wolf hard on my heels, the black door slamming behind us.
I cringed away from him but he just stood there, sides heaving, ears pinned back against his head. “You must not go there,” he spat. “Swear you will never go back.Swear it.”
I trembled, but faced him. “Whatisthis place?”
“Swear it!”
