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.