Moon’s Knight

PART 1

THE DOOR

ONE

A GRAVE

Funerals were shitty, and God how Amelie would have hated hers. We should get up and show our tits, she would’ve muttered in Gin’s ear, and keeping a straight face while a black-robed priest droned on about the kingdom and the glory would have broken them both to giggling pieces.

Assuming Ami was in a good mood.

As it was, Gin just barely kept from screaming during the whole ordeal, the familiar panicky slipstream in her ears rising to drown out the organ, the shuffling, and the dead dry rustling cry caught in her throat. The undertakers had worked some kind of miracle, or maybe drowning left a pretty corpse. Amelie’s coppery hair was arranged in loose ringlets, and she looked pale and perfect before the casket was sealed up and everyone had to endure homily after homily about how this was all part of God’s plan and their beloved friend was in heaven now.

Well, fuck God, and fuck Heaven, and fuck everything else, too. Even standing at the graveside, raw geologic stripes of earth down the sides of the hole like cake layers, the noise inside Gin’s skull just wouldn’t stop. There was Danny, his jaw set and his cheek ticking madly like someone was poking it with a sharp object, but his gaze was roving over anything female in range. Bena and Carolyn and Sharpe were in attendance, all fractionally different shades of blonde but with their hemlines hitting exactly the same mark just above the knee like a trio of Barbies with slightly different molds meant to trick you into thinking they were separate, individual people instead of a mycelium collective. There were Bobby and Tucker from Danny’s frat house, both probably mourning they never got in Ami’s pants rather than saddened by the loss of a human being. There was Amelie’s father Carl, the broken veins on his nose glaring and the stench of Clorets whenever he exhaled, his tongue green and nobody fooled, slugging from a flask each time the world came back into focus. The kids from Amelie’s shop, too—Giovanni scratching at his arms, Thea frowning a little and probably wishing to be elsewhere, all Ami’s other employees solemn-faced and probably wishing they were staring at their phones instead...

Oh, yeah, her bestie would have elbowed Gin and whispered, cracking both of them up and garnering looks of bovine disapproval from the herd.

Worst of all was Carl grabbing at Gin’s arm when it started to snow at the graveside, swaying like he was going to pass out. Let him drop, Amelie would have said, pushing her reading glasses—worn when she wanted to look serious—up the bridge of her patrician nose, but the egg-eyed priest rambling on about shepherds and valleys of fear pinned Gin with a stare that said hold him up, will you?

Of course Gin did, because that was her lot in life. What else did a best friend do when you went and got yourself drowned swimming drunk out at Old Matchead Quarry with some asshole from a bar who left you in black water? Oh, sure, the cops were looking for anyone who’d seen anything, but it was like finding a needle in a haystack. Water in the lungs, a blood alcohol level over .13, no sign of any funny business in the rape kit—well, they wouldn’t work very hard, since there was no proof that the guy in the tan leather jacket Amelie was seen leaving with had driven her out to the quarry after all.

Except Ami didn’t drive, the quarry wasn’t off a bus line, and who the fuck would go swimming on a January night anyway? It was the type of thing you thought about doing while drunk but never actually got to because your responsible best friend would drag you home and put you to bed with a hilarious antique rubber pillow full of sloshing hot water instead.

Just like my Gramma Lettie used for her rheumatiz, Gin would have said soothingly, and probably later held Ami’s hair back while her bestie heaved.

She should have been silently reciting something more appropriate, like Linda at her salesman’s grave free and clear, or a passage from the Tibetan Book of the Dead—what good was a lit major if you didn’t use it?

Instead, Gin watched the casket sinking into the hole, white flakes speckling its polished hood and Carl’s hand a python-squeeze around her upper arm as he made a low groaning noise. The priest talked louder, the machine with the straps lowering the coffin down buzzed, and Danny’s gaze—I’m gonna break up with him this weekend, Amelie had said, shaking her head so her earrings shivered, come on, I just want to get drunk and not think tonight—finally rested on Gin’s face.

If he couldn’t have what he wanted, he’d settle for second best. It was how the whole thing started, after all, dating Gin for three weeks before confessing it was Ami he was in love with anyway. Bena and Carolyn and Sharpe—plastic souls closed in mass-produced blonde bodies—were a closed circuit, no way for him to worm in since they only dated high-cash guys, and the kids from Ami’s coffee shop were just this side of jailbait.

No, Gin was his best bet for once, and he knew it.

The sky was a flat, depthless iron pan. The graveyard, wet green starred with chunks of rock carved to shout here’s a dead body, no really, you just can’t see it, had a line of leafless trees at the bottom of the hill, and the freeway was a solid grey bar without any car-glitter in the distance, grey buildings choking the view. The church walls were rough wet grey stone and evergreens crouched over buried coffins, their roots probably squirming with maggots and other wriggling things.

It was enough to make you throw up into an open grave, and if she didn’t, if she closed her eyes and counted to ten, would God notice he’d pulled an enormous boner—you’re twelve inside, Ami giggled inside her head—and rewind everything, like he hadn’t when her parents died?

Carl actually dropped to his knees when the casket thumped on the bottom of the hole, and the urge to kick him filled Gin like a shot of tequila. She didn’t move, staring at the snow-clots forming on the coffin-lid, and Ginevra’s own trembling was a final treachery. She was breathing and alive and her best friend wasn’t.

It was a monstrous fucking mistake, because only one of them had nightmares about drowning, and it wasn’t Amelie.

TWO

PITY FUCK

There had to be a word for the friend who could be talked into pity-fucking your putative fiancé—not that Danny had ever had a shot in hell of actual marriage—after your funeral. Amelie would even know that word; she’d whisper it and they would both break down in giggles. As it was, Gin staggered for the end of the alley, ignoring his moaning behind her, because of course Bena had said let’s go do this right and they ended up at the Inferno Bar buying rounds Gin couldn’t afford. Carolyn had probably seen her leave with Danny, too, and the three Barbies would be trashing her at this very moment like the backstabbing stuck-in-high-school bitches they were.

It was enough to make Gin wish she’d just let him get it in, pump a few times, and cough.

You bitch. Danny wasn’t having a good time, for once, because she’d nailed him right where he lived with a good sharp knee-up. "Come back here, you bitch."

Nope, sorry, not gonna. Her leg hurt. So did her ribs, but Gin knew the word for a man who tried to hold a girl up next to a filthy dumpster on a snowy night and had the gall, the sheer fucking cheek, to say he didn’t have a rubber handy.

She’d meant to go through with it this time, honestly. If you couldn’t get fucked under these conditions, when could you? But she wasn’t nearly drunk enough in the end, his breath was rancid, and no condom meant no joy. So she moved unsteadily down Gillespie Street fumbling for her phone because it was time to get a rideshare and go back to the apartment she wasn’t going to be able to afford without Amelie.

Gin also knew the word for a best friend who would pity her stupid, silly self right after your funeral because she was going to have to give up a place with good heat and decent water pressure. It was the same as the word for Danny, it started with ass and ended with hole, and if Amelie was still alive she’d be chanting it under her breath, staggering next to Gin and waving to strangers who would inevitably smile and wave back.

You had to. Amelie was just so…there, bright and bubbly all the time.

Gin blinked at her phone, shook it, and pressed the power button before realizing it was out of juice because she hadn’t plugged it in since Carl called about finding Ami. The urge to throw the tiny, expensive metal-and-plastic rectangle across the road itched in her fingers, her toes, her arms. Someone honked, and she dashed across Eleventh with her head down and her shoes clatter-slipping. It was the only pair of black heels she owned, and her calves were on fire.

She knew what she had to do, of course. Continue down Gillespie to Thirteenth, hook over, cut through Falough Park—hellooooo, Faloooooough, Amelie would always chant—and go home. Sleep it off and get up in the morning to make plans.

The snow had retreated as evening rose but it was really coming down now, clinging to Gin’s hair. Most of the sidewalks were salted since everyone expected a winter storm, but good luck getting home without a car if she left any later. Danny would stumble back into the Inferno and probably make a bid for Sharpe, which was fine because Gin decided she didn’t want to see any of them ever again.

It couldn’t be that hard. There was a pond right in the middle of Falough, with two storybook-arch bridges and a central white gazebo full of graffiti and used hypodermics. If she didn’t chicken out, if she actually walked right over the bridges, would God realize he’d fucked up, reach down a celestial finger, tip Gin in, and yank Amelie back out?

She was just drunk enough to think maybe it was worth a try as she lengthened her stride, almost running. Thirteenth arrived in a blur, the CopyEx on the corner still open with glowing-yellow windows leering at the street, and there were the big stone lions guarding the park entrance. Someone had once again climbed up and stuffed cigarettes in their wide-open, yawning mouths. Gin’s hair—mousy brown, never worried about dye or a good cut because she was the ugly one—came loose and bounced, shaking snow, and she hit the slight incline on the jogging loop at warp speed, her heart pounding and the last shot of vodka crawling up her throat.

THREE

NOT A CHASE

The sky was a flat orangeish lid, city light reflecting against infinite cloud cover. A slightly brighter spot showed where a full moon hung between the tips of two skyscrapers, but anyone wanting to see the stars tonight was shit out of luck.

Falough had antique streetlights over the jogging loop, but no few of them were burnt out. Gin flickered through empty toothsocket shadows, an ivy-cloaked retaining wall from when they cut the park in half rearing to her right, and had almost convinced herself to take the hard left at the bottom of the hill when her shoe slipped and she went down in a jumble, erasing skin on both her palms and tearing her long black knit skirt, not to mention her tights underneath. Hadn’t she been feeling pretty smart because she’d foregone both pantyhose and shivering by wearing tights and something ankle-length, knowing the plastic Barbie fucks wouldn’t?

Gin screamed when she went down, too, a girly little cry cut in half when she bit her tongue, and the vodka fought for release.

Panting on hands and knees, she spilled onto one hip and sat on snow-scarred pavement, lifting her scraped hands and examining them. Whoopsie, she muttered, and a forlorn giggle hitched its way out on a sour burp.

Oh, girl, Ami would have crooned, with bright vicious glee. You are a hot, hot mess.

Snow plopped onto her head. Her navy wool coat was all twisted around; she fished for her phone again before remembering it was out of charge, wincing and swearing under her breath. She’d been smart to bring the tiniest of clutches stuffed in her other pocket instead of a purse. It would be dramatic to lose her goddamn driver’s license right now, wouldn’t it?

That was when she heard the deep, throbbing animal growl. Her head jerked up.

Falough was deserted, the park’s three slopes like a lopsided pair of breasts over a pendulous belly. It was snowing hard now, and even homeless junkies had enough sense to be inside tonight. Ivy scratched her back, a fingerlike branch worming through to touch her coat collar. It took two tries to get upright, and she was helped by a random, handy protrusion her scraped, questing fingers found. Her knees were about the consistency of mochi and even her ass hurt, she was covered in snow, and to top it all off, she was wheezing.

I don’t have asthma. Bena does.

Ami had claimed to need Bena’s inhaler sometimes, though, when it was convenient or when the limelight threatened to stay on one of the Barbies. And Gin was going to hell for thinking that.

Too late, wouldn’t you say? The protuberance turned out to be a doorknob of dark metal, rising through a curtain of snow-edged ivy. Weird, but probably for maintenance or something. Thank you for your service, Gin intoned, and coughed, wiping at her nose with her free hand.

She heard it again. A low, chilling, basso growl.

What the fuck? If it was a dog, it shouldn’t be out on a night like this.

Gin blinked. The knob moved under her throbbing fingers, and she was ultra-drunk, because it felt…warm. Had her fingers frozen to the metal? Her grandfather had always remarked it took a little less cold to make snowflakes than ice. She couldn’t even tell if she was bleeding, numb from the neck down.

Just not numb enough to fuck Danny, right? A laugh jolted out of her, high and screamy, interrupted when she bent over and retched, her hand still clinging to the random doorknob. Now she’d horked up a steaming mess of vodka on the pavement; it was a good thing nobody was around to see this bullshit.

Skuf-scrape. Click-tap. It took her a few seconds to realize she was hearing footsteps with skin-pads and rough blunt nails instead of shoes.

Gin raised her head, peering through the wet strings her hair had become. Of course Amelie would be pretty-perfect in her rosewood box like the Little Match Girl in a snowdrift, and Gin would end up the victim of a wild dog attack in a shitty little park full of used needles.

They’d have to keep her casket closed. Did they bother with a funeral when the only other person who might’ve attempted to act sad was dead too?

Hello? she whispered, stupidly; falling snow swallowed the sound.

The scrabbling footsteps came again, from her other side. A pair of venomous yellow gleams burned amid whirling snow at about chest level. Gin straightened, blinking and wishing her vision wasn’t so blurry. The doorknob moved against her palm once more, like a small frightened animal, and it was official, she’d had enough booze to start hallucinating.

Go figure. At least if she lost her mind she’d be put in an asylum, right? Though that would be just typical, as Ami would say.

You like to daydream too much, Gin. Your GPA can’t take it.

Her GPA was just fine when she could do her damn work. Snow fell in thick white curtains, a real blizzard. Shadows flitted between the vertical white streams, faint yellow eye-gleams winking out and reappearing, glints off dirty ivory teeth contrasting with pure white frozen flakes. She caught a suggestion of shaggy shoulders, horns spreading from a narrow, viciously snaking head, and the doorknob rattled.

What the fuck? It wasn’t enough to think it, she had to say it out loud, too, just for good luck. "What the fu—" she began, but the big monstrous yellow-eyed thing lunged and she cowered, her shoes slipping in fast-accumulating snow.

This time, her scream was a breathless yelp and the growling was everywhere, surrounding her, scraping the ivy, breathing a foul meat-scented breeze against her face. Her stinging hand wouldn’t come away from the stupid doorknob.

The door under the ivy was old dark wood and its hinges creaked alarmingly, squirting bloody rust. It shouldn’t have opened inward because the hinges were on Gin’s side, and the thing in the snow—the animal that shouldn’t exist, the big iron-furred shape with a dog’s snout and wide, stabbing horns—lunged again, a heavy chuk sound falling dead between snowflakes as its jaws snapped.

Ginevra went over backward, hit something relatively soft, and scrambled blindly on torn hands and wet ass. The back of her head clipped a hard vertical column and she cried out again, a thin piping noise snapped in half as the jolt robbed her, finally, of consciousness.

FOUR

HELLUVA BONUS

Could you get a hangover so bad you’d hallucinate?

Gin lay on her back, one throbbing, bleeding hand flung out and the other clutched to her chest. One of her feet was bare, the other swelling inside a black heel not meant to take the kind of abuse she’d put it through. Her skirt was pushed above her knees, her tights were shredded, and her wool coat was torn. Her hair was still damp, but it didn’t seem to matter.

Her bed was green grass with finger-thick blades, and it smelled like spearmint. If she’d been drinking mojitos she could have understood that, but the huge banana-tree leaves arching over her weren’t familiar either, and they refused to go away no matter how many times she squinted or blinked, closed her eyes, counted to ten like the therapists said you should, or even held her breath.

And it was warm. Not tropical, and not as stuffy-humid as a jam-packed bar on a cold winter’s night. It was simply temperate, which would have been fine if she hadn’t just stumbled through a snowstorm. The light was wrong too, low and reddish instead of the pitiless glare of streetlamp on frozen white, or even the depthless illumination of an ice-choked afternoon.

So Gin lay very still, and thought about this.

Deep philosophical consideration wasn’t easy with the vodka boiling underneath her breastbone, but at least the urge to retch seemed to have passed. The crushed grass exhaled minty sweetness, and the reddish light didn’t sting her eyes. A faint, pleasant breeze whispered through the leaves overhead, and their dancing soothed her.

Oh, I’ve got it. Soft, alcohol-blurred relief filled her. I’m dreaming. Okay.

She was probably freezing to death in a snowdrift, too. You went to sleep and never woke up, the stories said. Hypothermia was one of the gentler ways to go.

Not like drowning. Oh, in literature drowning was supposed to be just fine, but medical research said otherwise. Books aren’t everything, Ami used to say, but then again, she’d never needed the safety of crawling into one.

Gin scrambled to sit up. She’d hit her head on the tree with the big broad leaves, and the back of her skull was tender. Maybe her brain was swelling, a nice big intracranial hematoma. Her palms were crusted with dried blood, but the scrapes didn’t look that bad. Her right knee was still oozing, though, black threads from the tights caught in shredded skin, and her other shoe was nowhere in sight.

Great. Even in her dreams, she was a mess.

The grass was chest-high; good luck seeing anything over it. She was tempted to lie back down and let whatever this was go on without her, but she hurt all over. Her ass felt bruised and she was going to be black and blue everywhere, like after some of their nights clubbing in college. Or that one time Gin tried not to think about.

Ami was never the one who fell down the stairs.

Besides, the strange ruddy light bothered her. Gin rocked up to her only lightly wounded left knee, hissing at the pain. The grass slithered, giving like a fragrant mattress. She patted herself down, found out she still had her clutch and her dead, useless phone, and—a helluva bonus—also spotted her missing shoe lying on its side, half covered with grass and rich, loamy dirt.

She grubbed it up in short order, knocking the high heel clean and jamming it back on her right foot. With that done, she could figure out how to stand up.

If it was a dream, why the fuck did she hurt so much? Her knee wasn’t too bad now, but her tights were goners and her coat was full of dirty snowmelt.

Slight comfort that this was the way she would have expected tonight to go, tattered clothing and too much vodka included. Gin blinked furiously, gaining her balance and unfolding. If she was careful, she could just about get vertical.

When she did, though, nothing made any sense. She rubbed at her eyes with grungy fingertips, stared again.

Okay. Definitely a dream.

Only a dream would have a spot of juicy, overwhelming green in the middle of a blasted, ash-choked wilderness spread under a huge, dim, red sun that hung a few handspans above a horizon scarred with dead, twisted trees. Only a dream would show a high grey wall at the fringe of the green smear, cyclopean blocks fitted together without mortar and rearing to crenellated heights, and behind it something that couldn’t possibly be real—a strange building, fantastical towers rising to needlelike points or oddly graceful bulbs, some of them leaning at angles that ol’ building in Pisa couldn’t match.

Gin could have pinched herself, but she already hurt everywhere she could reach. If that didn’t wake her up, what would?

There was something in the vodka. Danny slipped me something. Or maybe she was having a good, old-fashioned psychotic break. The prospect was largely comforting, though there was a significant problem.

Just like drowning, she had dreamed this before. Not the grass or the big spreading tree, but the sterile grey soil, the trees without a single dry leaf clinging to their skeletal arms, and the giant pile of stone impersonating a castle from some Salvador Dali LSD binge. And each time, she’d awakened in a gush of cold sweat, only now….

Now she wasn’t waking up.

"Oh, shi—" she began, but stopped halfway through, clapping her blood-crusted palm to her mouth.

The silence that followed was full of slithering and sliding, tiny crackles, and a low, grinding growl unmuffled by falling snow.

It followed me. Great. Her eyes widened, her hand fell to her side, and she scrambled through the high grass with her heels punching deep divots in soft soil, not only because of the growl but because she’d seen the most wonderful, marvelous of things.

Another door.

It crouched in the wall, heavy wooden planks dark with age and varnished with only God knew what. The knob was smooth, and round, of dark metal as well, and its hinges were, again, thick with blood-colored rust.

It was also half-open.

Behind her, another low coughing growl exploded, and all the breath left her in a rush. She lunged for the door, for snow and miserable sanity, and it gave inward with a screech though the hinges were once more on the outside.

Gin plunged into darkness, expecting to trip and land face-first in snow.

Which was…not exactly what happened.

FIVE

NO CRICKETS

Stairs. Going up, their middles worn down from a long weary time of footsteps grinding them in stone-choked dimness.

Gin put her back against the door and heaved, her shoes slipping on slick stone; it closed with a jolt that clicked her teeth painfully together. A giant, splintering impact hit the other side, and Gin’s scream was lost in a rising barrage of echoes. A scraping—claws against wood, her imagination told her, and she had no reason to doubt it—made the wooden rectangle behind her shudder in its socket.

OhGod, she whispered. "OhGod no, no no no, please, please…"

Silence returned, broken only by her ragged breathing. Gin slumped against the door, trembling.

Maybe she’d fallen down the stairs and through this door? Maybe she was still dreaming?

Maybe she was insane? It was looking like that was a major option, as Ami would say. What would she do in this situation?

Nothing, that’s what. Because she’s dead, drowned in the fucking quarry, and you know why. You were too tired to go with her. You wanted your Lit 315 reading and some goddamn time alone.

Well, she couldn’t go back through the damn door. No way, no day. There were stairs, they obviously led somewhere. Gin waited until she was reasonably sure whatever was outside had lost interest and took a single step away from the door, her heels clicking slightly and her right leg threatening to give out.

Now she had to climb.

There wasn’t a banister so she trailed her dirty fingertips along the wall for balance, and every five steps or so she had to stop to take a breather. The vodka was no longer burning behind her breastbone; next would come the exhausted part when you downed a few more shots to keep warm on the way home, with your best friend leaning her head on your shoulder because she had two for every one of yours.

Everyone wanted to buy Ami a drink.

She lost track of how many steps she climbed. When the end came Gin almost fell flat on her face. Instead, she folded down to sit sideways on the top step, her ribs heaving with deep, whining breaths. She was making a small, terrified sound and couldn’t help it.

If that thing—whatever it was—managed to break through the door, a few stairs wouldn’t stop it. It was most likely a real champion at climbing. Probably did it all week just to keep in shape, and twice on Sundays.

A high stone arch gave onto a cobbled courtyard, a single stubby finger of brickwork and a wooden roof thrusting upright in its center under a drench of ruby light. It took a few moments of staring before she figured out it was a well, a real kitschy garden-fixture number surrounded by empty blasted places where cracked cobbles sat and draggle-dead, spindly thornbushes were in the process of turning to dust.

It was distinctly unpromising, but she was suddenly thirsty. Not just a little bit; she was flat-out parched. The idea that the water might not be quite wholesome did occur to her, but Gin decided the vodka still running around in her system would kill anything bad.

Or, if it didn’t, dysentery would be the least of her problems.

It looked like this had once been a garden. Brittle stems puffed into dust as she edged past; nobody had come here for a long time. What was that old poem, or was it the Bible?

The dead tree gives no shelter. And no crickets sing, she murmured, hunching her dirty wool-clad shoulders in case the echoes started again. Ami always laughed when Gin quoted something or another.

An English degree. Girl, you should get an MBA like me.

Well, maybe that was the world’s greatest and most useful advice, but by the time Gin was involved it was too late. As usual. The sky was full of that reddish glow, the castle’s outer wall rearing high like a cresting wave, and she was surprised to find the well wasn’t ramshackle like the rest of the place.

Instead, the winch worked, and though her scraped hands gave a livid flare each time she pulled she was rewarded with a dripping bucket of the same dark wood as the door and the well’s roof. The throat of the well-hole was all those same blocks, curved and fitted together so tightly no mortar was necessary. There was even a metal dipper attached to the bucket by a silver chain, and she drank without caring.

The water wasn’t cool or warm, but it did coat her throat. The raging thirst retreated. Switched off, in fact, between one swallow and the next, and she stood stoop-shouldered for a few moments, gasping afresh. You couldn’t drink and breathe at the same time, after all.

You could drown yourself in a well, you know. It’d be easy. She leaned over the side, looking down into darkness. The bucket dripped, each drop silent until it hit a faintly glimmering mass far below and sang, tiny crystalline noises. Her coat dripped too, melted snow finishing its long journey.

I’m insane. Darkness with water at the bottom swallowed the words; she had to stand almost on tiptoe to peer into the depths. There was a Kurosawa movie with women shouting into a well’s guts; the name escaped her at the moment. This is a psychotic break. Right?

Right. Nothing mattered. Except getting away from that thing outside, whatever it was. Maybe she’d starve to death in here. You could last without food, but not water, right? She vaguely remembered that from biology class. Should’ve gone for premed or something. More money in that—but also more debt.

Gin dropped the bucket and winched up another load of weird, tepid fluid. It took only a few moments of wrestling to unhook the bucket-and-dipper pair, and she carried it to the closest patch of sere blasted dirt. It wouldn’t do any good—if any seeds lingered they probably wouldn’t sprout, and even if they did, was she going to stay here and water them?

It didn’t matter. If it was a dream, dream-logic was as good as any, and who could pass up something like this without feeling a little sad for the crumbling corpses of bushes that might have been pretty once, though the wicked-sharp thorns argued against it?

Not her. It was the same instinct that made her dig apologetically for spare change while Ami huffed and tried to drag her away from a busker or worse, a homeless person just asking for the bare minimum of respect. A tiny sliver of humanity.

You’re gonna get raped in an alley one of these days, Ami would say, well within a homeless man’s hearing, and Gin’s shoulders would hunch. You have victim written all over you, Ginny.

She sprinkled what she could, and retraced her steps while the thick powdery dust sucked greedily at unfamiliar moisture. The bucket made a lonely sound when she clipped it back on, and Gin glanced nervously at the archway she’d come through. It stood, a dark mouth open in a soundless scream.

You’ve got too much imagination, girl. Ami, laughing again.

She always wanted to point out that maybe Amelie didn’t have enough, but that wasn’t what you said to a best friend, was it? And most of the time, Ami called her the practical one, which canceled the other stuff out. Everything even, everything balanced, especially when Gin could be relied on to do something boring or difficult.

The bulk of the castle reared up opposite the entryway, pierced by three doors of that same stupid dark oiled wood. None of them had hinges on her side, though, and two didn’t move when she tried their knobs. The one on the far right was last, and if it didn’t work, what was she going to do?

But that knob turned easily, and the door made a soft sound when she pushed it open. More stairs; she climbed slowly, passed down a short hall with carved, fish-shaped holes along one side letting in a banked reddish skyglow, and found yet another door.

She expected another long black tunnel, maybe more stairs, but instead a wide space drenched with that weird red sunlight opened on the other side. More cobbles, more patches of dark powder that used to be dirt. Some of the paths were flat glossy black stones instead of the round grey ones, laid in a looping pattern she couldn’t quite figure out, and in the middle was a big bony metallic contraption that might have been a fountain once. Tangled dry sticks that had once been plants crowded in some of the beds, just as