Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children #1)

“You had milk, I had science,” said Jack. “It’s amazing how much of culinary achievement can be summarized by that sentence. Cheese making, for example. The perfect intersection of milk, science, and foolish disregard for the laws of nature.”

“How did the laws of nature come into this?” asked Nancy, walking over to claim one of the mugs. The smell was alluring. She took a sip, and her eyes widened. “This tastes like…”

“Pomegranate, I know,” said Jack. “Yours was made with pomegranate molasses. Christopher’s has a pinch of cinnamon, and Kade’s contains clotted cream fudge, which I stole from Miss Eleanor’s private supply. She’ll never notice. She has the stuff shipped over from England by the pound, and her next delivery is due in three days.”

“What’s in yours?” asked Nancy.

Jack smiled, holding her mug up in a silent toast. “Three drops of warm saline solution and a pinch of wolfsbane. Not enough to be dangerous to me—I’m human, despite what Angela might say to the contrary—but enough to make it taste like tears, and like the way the wind smells when it sweeps along the moor at midnight. If I knew the taste of the sound of screaming, I’d add that as well, and never drink anything again, as long as I chanced to live.”

Christopher swallowed a mouthful of cocoa, shook his head, and said, “You know, sometimes I almost forget how creepy you are, and then you go and say something like that.”

“It’s best if you remember my nature at all times,” said Jack, and offered Kade his mug.

“Thank you,” he said, taking it from her and wrapping his long fingers around it.

“Say nothing of it,” said Jack. Somehow, coming from her, it wasn’t politeness: it was a plea. Let this momentary kindness be forgotten, it said. Don’t let it linger, lest it be seen as weakness. Outwardly, all she did was twitch one corner of her mouth in a transitory smile. Then she turned, hands cupping her own mug, and moved to find a seat on the piles of books.

“Isn’t this cozy?” Kade returned to what seemed to be his customary perch, leaving Nancy standing awkward and alone next to the hot plate. She looked around before heading for one of the few actual pieces of furniture, an old-fashioned, velvet-covered chair that was being encroached upon by the books, but hadn’t been swallowed yet. She sank down into its embrace, tucking her feet underneath her, hands still cupped around her mug.

“I like it,” said Christopher, after it became apparent that no one else was going to say anything. He shrugged before he added, “The guys—uh, the other guys, I mean, not you, Kade—put up with me because there’re so few of us here, but they all went to sparkly worlds. They all sort of think where I went was weird, so I can’t talk to them about it much. They start insulting the Skeleton Girl and then I have to punch them in their stupid mouths until they stop. Not the best way to make friends.”

“No, I suppose not,” said Jack. She looked down at her cocoa. “I had similar issues when I attempted to make friends with my fellow students. I gave up trying before Jill did. All they ever wanted to do was talk about how strange the Moors must have been, and how inferior to their own cotton-candy wonderlands. Honestly, I don’t blame them for thinking I could be a killer. I blame them for thinking I would have waited this long.”

“And bonding just got creepy again,” said Christopher cheerfully, before taking a gulp of his hot chocolate. “Luckily for you, I’ll forgive anything for cocoa this good.”

“Like I said, cooking is a form of science, and I am a scientist,” said Jack.

“We do need to figure out what’s going on,” said Kade. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not so well-equipped to go back to my old life. My parents still think they’re somehow magically going to get back the little girl they lost. They haven’t let me come home for five years. No, maybe that’s unfair—or too fair. They won’t let me come home. If I want to put on a skirt and tell them to call me ‘Katie,’ they’ll welcome me with open arms. Pretty sure that if the school closes down, I’m homeless.”

“My folks would let me come back,” said Christopher. “They think this is all some complicated breakdown triggered by the things that happened after I ‘ran away.’ Mom genuinely believes the Skeleton Girl is some girl I fell for who died of anorexia. Like, she asks me on the regular whether I can remember her ‘real name’ yet, so they can track down her parents and tell them what happened to her. It’s really sad, because they care so damn much, and they’re so completely wrong about everything, you know? The Skeleton Girl is real, and she isn’t dead, and she was never alive the way that people are here.”

“Skeleton people generally aren’t,” said Jack, setting her cocoa aside. “If they were, I would expect them to die instantly, due to their lack of functional respiration or circulatory systems. The lack of tendons alone—”

“You must be a lot of fun at parties,” said Christopher.

Jack smirked. “It depends on the kind of party. If there are shovels involved, I’m the life, death, and resurrection of the place.”

“I can’t go home,” said Nancy. She looked down at her cocoa. “My parents … they’re like Christopher’s, I guess. They love me. But they didn’t understand me before I went away, and now, I might as well be from another planet. They keep trying to get me to wear colors and eat every day, and go on dates with boys like nothing ever happened. Like everything is just the way it used to be. But I didn’t want to go on dates with boys before I went to the Underworld, and I don’t want to do it now. I won’t. I can’t.”

Kade looked a little hurt. “No one is going to make you do anything you don’t want to do,” he said, and his tone was stiff and wounded.

Nancy shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. I don’t want to go on dates with girls, either. I don’t want to go on dates with anyone. People are pretty, sure, and I like to look at pretty things, but I don’t want to go on a date with a painting.”

“Oh,” said Kade, understanding replacing stiffness. He smiled a little. Nancy, glancing up from her cocoa, smiled back. “Well, looks like we’ve all got good reason to keep this school open. We’ve had two deaths. Sumi and Loriel. What did they have in common?”

“Nothing,” said Christopher. “Sumi went to a Mirror, Loriel went to a Fairyland. High Nonsense and high Logic. They didn’t hang out together, they didn’t have friends in common, they didn’t do any of the same things for fun. Sumi liked origami and making friendship bracelets, Loriel did puzzles and paint-by-numbers. They only overlapped in class and during meals, and I’m pretty sure they would have stopped doing that if they’d been able to. They weren’t enemies. They were just … disinterested.”

“Nancy said something before about Sumi’s hands being the most important things about her,” said Kade.

Jack sat up straighter. “Why, Nancy, how callous and odd of you.”