Layla tugs me inside, rambling about the apartment she found across the street from a home Piper and Joel selected. “But tell me about your trip! You went home? And? Is everything better?”
“Yes,” I say, distracted. “With my parents, anyway. But I need your help.”
“Anything,” she says.
I brace myself, not wanting to tell her what I have in mind. “When Andrei trapped you in that pathway, how did he do it?”
She works her jaw as though trying to extract a popcorn shell. Clearly, this isn’t what she wanted to talk about. “He had this book.”
I should have known. “He didn’t send you through a door?”
She shakes her head.
Hope surges through me. “Do you remember what the book looked like? Could you point it out to me if you had to?”
Layla becomes sterner. “What exactly are you planning? You won’t find him, Everly.”
“I have to try.”
“You don’t even know he’s there,” she argues.
“I’m going,” I say flatly. “Are you going to help me or not?”
Her chest rises and falls. She meets my gaze, waiting for me to cave. Finally, she relents. “Okay.”
I press her hand, grinning. “Be ready to go in just a few minutes, kay?”
For the first time, I’m grateful my mom packaged up my belongings and shipped them to me, because something else dawned on me during my drive home. Nikolay explained it all. Using something that’s spanned the ages without skipping any. It’s how the doorknobs worked. My perfume bottle has to work the same.
I clutch the beautiful piece, not daring to let it out of my hand.
“You sure about this?” Layla asks, lime green purse slung over her shoulder, matching the color of her pants.
“I’m sure.”
We drive back to Terekhov’s. The store’s door is still shattered, and I step through the open pane and up to the second level. The hitch is in my pocket; the book Nikolay gave me is tucked under one arm. I dig through Andrei’s office, looking for his notes, looking for the papers he displayed while helping me. Books and other things have reappeared since Nikolay did whatever he did in the basement to make the rest of the store reappear. Layla hangs near the door, arms crossed.
“It was in here?” I ask, praying it wasn’t smert zhizn. That it wasn’t destroyed like the others.
“It’s blue,” she says. “It’s what he used to warp me to that pathway in the first place.”
Growing feverish, I dig through drawers and files, searching among the shelves.
“There it is.” She enters the room, crossing to the corner bookshelf and removing a deep blue volume. It has no title, only symbols carved into the leather. “I never wanted to see it again. Thanks, Ev.”
“Anytime,” I say, cracking it open.
Andrei’s writing is such a thick scrawl it’s hard to make out. Some of it is in Russian characters and barely legible. I clutch the perfume bottle in one hand, the hitch in my other.
“Layla!” I gasp.
She peers over my shoulder, and together we read his instructions. A cypher, just like the one Nikolay drew me, with symbols and sketches in almost the exact same order. More Latin is scrawled over the diagram, and I pick up two words. Ostium nexu.
“This is it,” I say in a breath, stroking the page like its breakable.
“Oh good,” she mumbles, not sounding like it’s good at all.
“Destroy this as soon as I’m gone,” I tell her, referring to the book. “No one else should have access to this. This will end the pathway access for good.”
“How will you get back?” Layla asks.
“With this.” I show her the perfume bottle, its glass and silver shape catching fading light from the window. “And this.” I show her the hitch.
She lets out a squeak and staggers back. “How did you get that?”
“You’ve seen this before?”
Layla swallows. “It’s what he used when they took me. It’s how he bound me there.”
“I’ll be transporting myself there as well the same way,” I tell her, gripping the tool.
“Are you crazy? You’re crazy!”
“It’s the only way!” I argue. “What if it was Joel? You told me he was the one. If you were sure about that, wouldn’t you do anything to get him back too?”
She pauses for the length of a finger snap. “Do you have to ask?”
“Then you don’t need to ask either. I’ll be okay.” I say, hoping it’s true. “Promise me,” I tell her, handing the book over. “Destroy this.”
Layla thinks it over for several seconds and takes the volume from me. “I promise.”
“I’ll be back,” I tell her. “Nikolay will know what to do.”
Layla draws me in for a final embrace. “Thanks for crashing on my doorstep.”
“Thanks for saving me,” I tell her.
Piper’s scar was on her throat, and from the fresh scab of dried blood above Layla’s collar as well, I know the hitch needs my blood in order to work. I hesitate, the tool shaking in my hand.
“Want me to do it?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“The blood is the key,” she says, holding open my book. “Or so his notes say.”
My blood is the key. Gritting my teeth, I stab the hitch against my finger and shriek at the pain I knew would come.
Blood drips from the sharp edge of the instrument. I hold it over the drawing Nikolay left in my book. The red drops leech into the page, spreading like fingers toward the designs he made, fading in quickly and staining the parchment.
Tiny wings flutter along my skin, opening my pores and releasing their light with each flap. They disperse, breaking free, particles separating and turning me from solid, to liquid, to vapor. I feel scattered and stretched, but the colors, the light, they’re connections. Blades of grass. Words on a page. Images and scenes, lives other than my own, bleeding into me.
It takes all of my concentration to fold my fists over the hitch and the perfume bottle, to clutch the book to my quaking chest.
The world blurs around me like a storm, waning in and out of sight before it slowly settles once more. It pieces back together, one molecule at a time. Glitter and ash simultaneously coat the surroundings.
I stand on a slab of cement beside a corner mailbox and a streetlight. Traffic lights no longer string along the sky. The street itself is crowded with cars—all black, all the same Tin Lizzy model with long snouts and thin-spoked wheels. Men in suits tip their hats courteously in my direction as they pass, not seeming to notice or care that I’m wearing clothing so different from the dresses of a pair of women across the street.
A sound leaks from my lips. I hurry to retrieve the discarded newspaper flapping in the gutter near the mailbox.
“November 1, 1921,” I breathe, inhaling the cool air and exhaust from the old cars. The glittery, golden haze shakes from my eyes, leaving the quiet scene as real as anywhere.
1921. Four years after Rosemary died. I glance around expectantly. Nikolay will step onto the street any minute now. It makes me wonder what brought him here to this time when the doors were destroyed.
The striped awnings over the buildings increase in familiarity. The buildings’ size and shape, the placement of their windows, the small barbershop next to a larger dress shop, the sight of each in turn dawns with clarity.
I’ve seen that window before. Sprayed with paint and a handmade sign labeling it CrossYo!
“This is the same street,” I say in utter and complete wonderment. I’m standing in Cedarvale, seeing its roots, its origins, its people who didn’t know or care that one day cars would speed faster than their trains, that computers with the capability to cross continents in seconds would fit in the palms of their hands. The lighting store is now
a pharmacist’s shop. The Brunswick on the corner has no title, but several women loiter outside, making me wonder if Layla was right. If it really was a brothel.
And if that’s CrossYo!, then that means…
I turn. A car putters by. A gaggle of children use sticks to push a tire down the sidewalk, playing in the streets in a way kids no longer do. And there it is. Terekhov and Son Books.
The handle is so much cleaner, newer, than the one I know. The glass is thicker too, the paint around the door fresh and clean.
A bell with a clearer sound peals at my entrance. My heart pounds. For a fleeting moment, I wonder if Andrei will be here, but something tells me his life, in any time period, is over. He was connected to the doors. Like Meiser, like Garrett, his life is over.
Sweat collects in my palms, but I push through and stare at the newer version of a store I know so well.
“You came.”
Oxford shoes, brown pant suit, vest and bowtie, his hair shaved on the sides and slicked back down the center, my gaze gradually makes its way over him, saving his face for last. Nikolay’s eyes burn the way ice sometimes can, blue and magnetic. His strong jaw, his cheekbones, I take him all in, standing in the utter delirium of not touching, of looking. Just looking.
“Nikolay. Is this… You’re here?”
A step. Then another. His pull is too much, but I resist, wading through questions. How he got the book to Rosemary. How he wound up here of all places and times, after what we did, what we destroyed. I have so much to tell him.
“It worked,” I say, staring down in awe at the objects that survived the trip. The antique perfume bottle, the spindled hitch, my book. I begin quaking at the awareness of it all.
I’ve gone back in time. I found him.
Nikolay touches my hand, and I press my lids closed at the pulse it ignites. He pries gently at my fingers.
“You can let these go,” he says.
“I don’t want to. I don’t want to lose you again.”
“You’re here,” he says. “You aren’t going anywhere.”
I let him pry the objects from my hands and watch him set them on his counter beside the beautiful, gilded register. The sight releases something in me. I stumble, melting into his arms.
His chest, his arms circling me, the scent of leather and vanilla at his neck, his heartbeat drumming in my ear. I absorb every second of it.
“You did it,” he says.
I hold him tighter, needing the stability, and we don’t move. A customer or two gives some odd looks, and still we cling to each other.
“I never thought I’d see you again,” I say, pulling back just enough.
“Nor I,” he says, stroking my cheek. “So tell me, Everly. Would you like to kiss a boy from 1921?”
I chuckle and tiptoe up. The thrill, the ownership of this moment roots me to the spot.
“As often as I can,” I tell him, pressing my lips to his.
A miasma of colors and phrases, of shape and sound and particles and pieces, and everything that makes me feel alive, erupts in his kiss. His lips are soft and warm, his kiss the confirmation I didn’t need but bask in just the same. I’d do it again and again, cross space and time, just for this. Just to be with him.
Nikolay pulls away. His eyes glisten with delight, with pride. He brushes hair away from my face.
“What happens now?” I ask.
The delight in his expression dims.
I tighten my grip. “What? What’s wrong?”
“Give me one moment,” he says, placing one more kiss on my lips.
He inclines his head at a few customers, apologizes that the store is closing early, and escorts them to the door. I fidget with my perfume bottle on the counter, rubbing its smooth surface, needing something to occupy my worried mind. That look can’t mean anything good.
Nikolay flips the sign in the door to Closed. I don’t fail to notice his father’s plaques are absent from the wall next to it. And he returns to me, taking my hand in his.
“Come,” he says. “Now that you’re here, we have a small problem.”
thirty
three
He leads me up the stairs. The same leather chairs rest on the balcony, but the book selection along the wall is vastly different. Something tells me a line of romance novels with half-dressed people on their covers would be the height of scandal in this era.
I expect to see a space where the door was. But the door remains, no longer a brick vacancy. It looks the same, with its swirled designs and intertwining angles.
I stop in my tracks. “Nikolay, how is this possible? Why is it still here?”
With his hand still in mine, he urges me forward. “Do you feel it?” he asks, not answering my questions.
The ground rumbles beneath my feet. I touch the brick, gasping at the vibration.
“Does that mean the rest of them are still there too?”
“In their own times, yes,” Nikolay says. “But not from 2017 on.”
“Then let’s destroy them from here, right now! We can prevent the damage, the deaths, all of it!”
“We can’t.” He rubs his thumb across the back of my hand. “Too many people have been affected by those doors. It would alter too much. My bringing you here was risky enough. It is fortunate the book I made for you wasn’t linked to the others.”
The book. My book. That’s why it wasn’t destroyed like the others were—he made it differently.
“If it was risky, then why did you do it?” I ask, not sure I want the answer.
“For selfish reasons.” His eyes glint, and he leans in to show me exactly what he means.
I jerk my thumb in the door’s direction once our kiss ends. “So what’s the problem then?”
“I thought we fixed the unrest,” Nikolay explains, leaning against one of the shelves and resting his head back. “But Meiser’s door is still here in its time. He is still here.”
Everything in me clenches. Meiser’s past still exists, even though we destroyed the doors?
“What about your father?”
“He was too involved in the doors. He’s not in any time now.”
“Are you—okay with that?”
He stares off. “I never thought he would betray me like that. It’s hard, but I’m glad he’s gone.”
I place a hand on his shoulder, waiting for him to go on.
“The problem is that I took the other knobs from 2017,” Nikolay says. “But you—”
“I took his knob from his time,” I say. “Which means it’s missing now. Which means…”
Time travel hurts my brain. I have a difficult time keeping everything straight.
“The spell on your cousin was never completed,” Nikolay says. “Her knob hasn’t been retrieved. It’s waiting. And if Meiser gets it to use in his door…”
“Layla will die,” I say, fear seizing me.
His face is grim. “We have to finish it. From here.”
“Do you know where your father hid it?”
“I have an idea.” He places a soothing hand on my lower back. “You brought the hitch with you. And that is a very good thing. We’ll need to use it.”
“Then let’s go. Right now. I can’t let her die, Nikolay.”
A deafening crash ruptures below, a dozen tinkles following as glass sprays across the marble floor. Nikolay makes for the balcony railing.
A man in a wide-brimmed hat enters the store through its broken doorway, crushing glass beneath his polished shoes. He swings several sprinkles of glass aside with his cane and approaches the checkout counter. Or more specifically, the items we left on the counter.
“The hitch,” I mumble in horror.
“Stop right there!” Nikolay calls.
Meiser lifts his head enough to reveal the sneer beneath his hat’s wide br
im. He hails us from his position below.
“Thought I’d pay a small visit to my favorite businessmen,” Meiser says. “And look. How good of you to provide exactly what I’m after.”
Nikolay and I hurry down the spiral stairs. “Stop!” he calls once more, but by the time we reach the checkout counter, it’s too late. Meiser holds the hitch in his fist.
thirty
four
“What are you doing here?” Nikolay snarls.
Meiser whips his cane and stares at its jeweled head. “It’s interesting, Nikolay, that you managed to bring your…friend…here yet again. Your father made it quite clear to me that she was done meddling with our affairs.”
Meddling. He’s about to see how meddlesome I can be if he doesn’t give that hitch back.
Nikolay lifts his chin. “You spoke with my father?”
“He paid me a visit not long after Miss James robbed me.”
“I didn’t rob you!” I spurt, my blood boiling.
“You stole my doorknob,” Meiser says, mouth downturned beneath his mustache.
Nikolay tugs me closer to him, securing himself between Meiser and me. I place a hand at his waist, invigorated from the anger roaring through him. I should have known Meiser would barge in here to exact his revenge.
“I’ve only come to return the favor.”
“No,” I mutter. “We can’t let this happen.”
“Everly, don’t,” Nikolay warns. But Meiser is backing toward the gape in the glass. We can’t let him leave, not when I crossed decades to bring it here.
“That hitch isn’t yours,” I say, pushing past Nikolay’s protective stance and charging at Meiser. “It’s Nikolay’s!”
In a swift motion, Meiser whips a knife from the end of his cane and jerks me to his chest, holding me to him as he backs away to the door he shattered.
“Everly!” Nikolay cries.
“I was startled to see your store had returned. You forget this is my time as well,” Meiser says. “Your father made me a deal, Nikolay. And I want my door.”
The Forbidden Doors Box Set Page 52