Every Heart a Doorway

by Seanan McGuire

The four students ran through the house, fleet and angry. Jack was surprisingly steady on her feet, given the amount of blood she had lost. Nancy brought up the rear. Stillness and speed were diametrically opposed. But she did the best she could, and they all reached the attic door at roughly the same time. Kade slammed the door open.

  Jill was standing in an ocean of books with a knife in her hand. The table she had swept clear was now occupied by Seraphina—the most beautiful girl in the world—and an assortment of jars, each with its own, terrible burden. Jill raised her head as the door opened, and sighed. “Go away,” she said peevishly. “This is delicate work. I don’t have time for you.”

  Kade was the first to step into the room, his hands held out in front of him. “You don’t want to do this.”

  “I think I do,” Jill countered. “You don’t know me. None of you know me. Not even her.” She jerked her chin at Jack. “I’m going home. I’m going back to my Master. I figured out the way, and no one can stop me. If you try, they’ll have all died in vain, and I’ll just do it again. I’m going to build my skeleton key.”

  Seraphina whimpered behind the gag that covered her mouth, eyes rolling wildly as she looked for a way out. She wasn’t finding one.

  “The door home is locked for a reason,” said Jack. “You can’t get around that.”

  “But I can, dear sister, I can,” said Jill. “Everyone here has something special about them, something that called the doors. I’m building the perfect girl. The girl who has everything. The smartest, prettiest, fastest, strongest girl. Every door will open for her. Every world will want her. And when I get to the Moors, I’ll kill her, and I’ll be allowed to stay forever. I just want to go home. Surely you can appreciate that.”

  “We all do,” said Christopher. “This isn’t the way.”

  “There isn’t any other,” said Jill.

  “The dead aren’t tools,” said Nancy, stepping past Kade with her hands held loosely at her sides. “Please. You’re hurting them. You’re stealing the things that make them important because you want a skeleton key, but they can’t move on to their afterlives until you give those things back.” She didn’t know that her words were true, but they felt so right that she didn’t question them. “Why is your happy-ever-after the only one that matters?”

  “Because I’m the one who’s willing to take it,” snapped Jill. “Back off, or she dies, and I tell everyone it was you. Who are they going to believe? The ingénue, or the girl who talks to ghosts? Even your supporters are weird. I’ll come out smelling like a rose, just you watch.”

  Jill’s eyes were fixed on Nancy. She didn’t see Jack move away from the others, making her slow way around the edge of the attic. Christopher and Kade were silent.

  “You know this is wrong, Jill,” said Nancy. “You know the dead are angry with you.”

  Jack continued to move, slow and easy and quiet as a prayer. She picked up a pair of scissors.

  “I don’t care about the dead,” said Jill. “I care about going home. I care about my Master. I care about myself, and the rest of you can hang, as far as I’m—” She stopped in the middle of her sentence, making a small choking sound. She looked down as blood began to spread through the front of her lacy peignoir. Then, gracelessly, she collapsed, revealing the scissors sticking out of her back.

  Jack looked down at her fallen sister for a moment. Her eyes were dry when she raised her head and looked at the others. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have understood faster. I should have seen it. I didn’t. I apologize.”

  “You killed your sister.” Nancy sounded puzzled. “Did you have to…?”

  “Murder trials are so messy, aren’t they? And death isn’t forever if you know what you’re doing. Jill was the one Dr. Bleak locked the door against, not me. I’ve always been welcome at home, if I was willing to leave her behind … or change her. Her Master won’t want her now. Once you’ve died and been resurrected, you can’t be a vampire.” Jack bent to pull the scissors from Jill’s back. They came up dripping red. She grimaced as the blood oozed onto her fingers. “If you’ll forgive me, we must be going. So much to do, and resurrections always work better when they’re performed quickly. I can bring her back. She’ll still be my sister.”

  She slashed the bloody scissors through the air. They cut lines in the nothingness, until a rectangle hung open next to her, showing a dark, wind-racked field. In the distance, a castle, with a village at its base. Jack’s face softened, becoming suffused with unspeakable longing.

  “Home,” she breathed. She bent, sliding her arms under Jill—grunting slightly as the motion reopened the slash in her left shoulder—and lifting her sister’s body in a bridal carry. She stepped through the door. She didn’t look back.

  The last any of them saw of the sisters was Jack, suddenly distant and so small on that vast, empty plain, walking through the darkness toward the castle lights. Then the rectangle faded, leaving them alone in the attic once again.

  Seraphina whimpered behind her gag. Time resumed.

  Time had a way of doing that.

  AND THEY ALL LIVED

  WITHOUT JACK TO HELP, disposing of Lundy’s body was more difficult: no one really wanted to go into the basement save for Christopher and Nancy, and they didn’t know enough about chemicals to dissolve her safely. In the end, she was laid to rest in the grove where she’d been killed, buried deep among the tree roots. Sumi’s hands and Loriel’s eyes were buried with her. The police pursued a few false leads looking for Sumi’s killer, but eventually they admitted that the trail had gone cold, and the case was closed.

  Eleanor was slow to recover her vitality; she still walked with a cane, although she was sturdy enough to run the school without her right-hand woman and best friend. Kade began stepping up to fill the void Lundy had left. More and more, it was obvious that one day, the school would be his—and that he would do a good job. Eleanor’s legacy would be protected, as it always should have been.

  Nancy moved into the basement, once it had been thoroughly cleaned out. Seraphina had repeated the story of her rescue often enough that the other students no longer blamed Nancy or her friends for the deaths; while they might not be friends, at least they weren’t enemies.

  The rest of the semester passed like a dream. Nancy was packing to go home when she heard footsteps on the stairs and turned to see Kade standing there, a familiar flowered suitcase in his hand.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” she replied.

  “Heard you were going home for the holidays.”

  Nancy nodded. “My parents insisted.” They had begged, they had pleaded with her over the phone, and every word had solidified her determination not to do anything that would give them an excuse to pull her out of school. She didn’t want to stay here, where it was bright and colorful and fast, but she would take a thousand school days over a single day in the presence of her parents, who would never understand.

  She couldn’t even be excited at the thought of seeing them again. During her days among the dead, she had wondered what her family was doing, whether they missed her; now she just wondered if they’d ever let her go.

  “I thought you might want to take this”—he held out the suitcase—“so they wouldn’t think we’d been encouraging your weirdness.”

  “That’s very kind of you.” Nancy smiled as she walked over to take the case from him. “Will you be all right without me?”

  “Oh, always,” he said. “Christopher and I are working on a new map for worlds connected to the dead. I’m starting to think that maybe Vitus and Mortis are minor directions. That might explain a few things.”

  “I’ll look forward to seeing your work,” said Nancy gravely.

  “Cool.” Kade took a step back up the stairs. “Have a good vacation, okay?”

  “I will,” said Nancy. She watched him walk away. When the door shut behind him, she closed her eyes and allowed herself a few seconds of stillness, centering her thoughts.

>   So this was the world. This was the place she’d come from—and more, this was the place where she came closest to belonging in this world. She could stay at the school until she graduated, and after. She could be Kade’s Lundy, once Eleanor was gone, to Nonsense or to the grave; she could be the woman who stood beside him and helped to keep things going. She’d do a better job, she thought, of telling the students about their futures without making those futures seem like life sentences. She could learn to be happy here, if she had to. But never completely. That would be too much to ask.

  She opened her eyes and looked at the suitcase in her hands before she walked over and set it on Jack’s old autopsy table, now blunted with a plain white sheet. The latches resisted a little as she pressed them open and revealed the welter of brightly colored clothes that her parents had packed for her all those months ago.

  There was an envelope on top of the tangled blouses and skirts and undergarments. Carefully, Nancy picked it up and opened it, pulling out the note inside.

  You’re nobody’s rainbow.

  You’re nobody’s princess.

  You’re nobody’s doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.

  Sumi’s name wasn’t signed: it was scrawled, in big, jagged letters that took up half the page. Nancy laughed, the sound turning into something like a sob. Sumi must have written it that first day, just in case Nancy couldn’t handle it; in case she became less sure, and started trying to forget.

  Nobody gets to tell me how my story ends but me, she thought, and the words were true enough that she repeated them aloud: “Nobody gets to tell me how my story ends but me.”

  The air in the room seemed to shift.

  The letter still in her hand, Nancy turned. The stairs were gone. There was a doorway in their place, solid oak and so familiar. Slowly, as in a dream, she walked toward it, Sumi’s letter falling from her hand and drifting to the floor.

  At first, the knob refused to turn. She closed her eyes again, hoping as hard as she could, and felt it give beneath her hand. This time, when she opened her eyes and twisted, the door swung open, and she found herself looking at a grove of pomegranate trees.

  The air smelled so sweet, and the sky was black velvet, spangled with diamond stars. Nancy was shaking as she stepped through. The grass was wet with dew, tickling her ankles. She bent to untie her shoes, stepping out of them and leaving them where they lay. The dew coated her toes as she reached up to pluck a pomegranate from the nearest branch. It was so ripe that it had split down the middle, revealing a row of ruby seeds.

  The juice was bitter on her lips. It tasted like heaven.

  Nancy began walking down the path between the trees, never looking back. The door was gone long before she broke into a run. It wasn’t needed anymore. Like a key that finds its keyhole, Nancy was finally home.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Seanan McGuire was born in Martinez, California, and raised in a wide variety of locations, most of which boasted some sort of dangerous native wildlife. Despite her almost magnetic attraction to anything venomous, she somehow managed to survive long enough to acquire a typewriter, a reasonable grasp of the English language, and the desire to combine the two. The fact that she wasn’t killed for using her typewriter at three o’clock in the morning is probably more impressive than her lack of death by spider bite.

  Often described as a vortex of the surreal, many of Seanan’s anecdotes end with things like “and then we got the antivenin” or “but it’s okay, because it turned out the water wasn’t that deep.” She has yet to be defeated in a game of “Who here was bitten by the strangest thing?” and can be amused for hours by almost anything. “Almost anything” includes swamps, long walks, long walks in swamps, things that live in swamps, horror movies, strange noises, musical theater, reality TV, comic books, finding pennies on the street, and venomous reptiles. Seanan may be the only person on the planet who admits to using John Kenneth Muir’s Horror Films of the 1980s as a checklist.

  Seanan is the author of the October Daye urban fantasies, the InCryptid urban fantasies, and several other works both stand-alone and in trilogies or duologies. In case that isn’t enough, she also writes under the pseudonym Mira Grant.

  In her spare time, Seanan records CDs of her original filk music. She is also a cartoonist and draws an irregularly posted autobiographical Web comic, “With Friends Like These…,” as well as generating a truly ridiculous number of art cards. Surprisingly enough, she finds time to take multihour walks, blog regularly, watch a sickening amount of television, maintain her Web site, and go to pretty much any movie with the word “blood,” “night,” “terror,” or “attack” in the title. Most people believe she doesn’t sleep.

  Seanan lives in a creaky old farmhouse in Northern California, which she shares with her cats, Alice and Thomas, a vast collection of creepy dolls and horror movies, and sufficient books to qualify her as a fire hazard. She has strongly held and oft-expressed beliefs about the origins of the Black Death, the X-Men, and the need for chain saws in daily life.

  Years of writing blurbs for convention program books have fixed Seanan in the habit of writing all her bios in the third person, so as to sound marginally less dorky. Stress is on the “marginally.” It probably doesn’t help that she has so many hobbies.

  Seanan was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her novel Feed (as Mira Grant) was named as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2010. In 2013 she became the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo ballot.

  www.seananmcguire.com. Or sign up for email updates here.

  ALSO BY SEANAN MCGUIRE

  THE OCTOBER DAYE SERIES

  Rosemary and Rue

  A Local Habitation

  An Artificial Night

  Late Eclipses

  One Salt Sea

  Ashes of Honor

  Chimes at Midnight

  The Winter Long

  A Red-Rose Chain

  THE INCRYPTID SERIES

  Discount Armageddon

  Midnight Blue-Light Special

  Half-Off Ragnarok

  Pocket Apocalypse

  Chaos Choreography

  Sparrow Hill Road

  AS MIRA GRANT

  THE NEWSFLESH SERIES

  Feed

  Deadline

  Blackout

  THE PARASITOLOGY SERIES

  Parasite

  Symbiont

  Chimera

  Rolling in the Deep

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Part I: The Golden Afternoons

  There Was a Little Girl

  1. Coming Home, Leaving Home

  2. Beautiful Boys and Glamorous Girls

  3. Birds of a Feather

  Part II: With Your Looking-Glass Eyes

  4. Lightning to Kiss the Sky

  5. Survivors, for a Time

  6. The Bodies We Have Buried

  7. Cocoa

  8. Her Skeleton, in Rainbows Clad

  9. The Broken Birds of Avalon

  10. Be Still as Stone, and You May Live

  11. You Can Never Go Home

  And They All Lived

  About the Author

  Also by Seanan McGuire

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  EVERY HEART A DOORWAY

  Copyright © 2016 by Sean
an McGuire

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Fort

  Photograph of forest © Colin Anderson/Getty Images; photograph of doorway © Martin Barraud/Getty Images

  A Tor.com Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

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  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

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  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-8550-5 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-7653-8387-7 (e-book)

  e-ISBN 9780765383877

  First Edition: April 2016