Chapter 15 Behind the Door
Behind the Door
Things I do not like about the female wolf who has fallen through my fertility portal….
The chair’s job, as it turned out, wasn’t quite done. A few moments after dragging it over to give me a couple more feet of height, I hefted the brass key to the keyhole and said a little prayer as I fit it into the lock.
It fit. But would it turn? Let me in?
TH-THWUNK! The muffled boom of a large door’s locking apparatus releasing answered my query.
Then I pushed the wood open to reveal…
I blinked.
Actually, I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at.
A huge storage closet? A strange kind of library?
The walls on either side of me were basically built-in shelves lined with books of all kinds. Some were leather-bound, others shimmered like my journal.
The back wall was even stranger. Hundreds of squares.
They kind of looked like the cubby holes at the Faoiltiarn village school, but bigger.
And most of them were stuffed with black bags that reminded me of…
I furrowed my brow. It almost looked like… but it couldn’t be.
I climbed off the chair and crossed to the back wall to pull one of the bags out of the cubby hole.
My heart stopped. It was a Cordura duffel. Just like mine.
And I mean exactly like mine. It even had the same tag knotted through its zipper, with ALBAN SCOTSWOLF stamped into its leather.
Had they taken my bag out of my room and put it in here?
My brain grabbed on to that reasoning, and I so badly wanted to hold on to it. But then my eyes lifted to all the other cubbyholes. Hundreds and hundreds of them.
Most of which were filled with black bags.
I pulled out the next one. My chest lurched. It was a black Cordura duffel with an Alban Scotswolf leather name tag attached.
I went to a higher shelf. A black Cordura duffel with an Alban Scotswolf leather name tag attached.
A lower one: black Cordura duffel with an Alban Scotswolf leather name tag attached.
At random, I pulled out ten more bags.
They were all black Cordura duffels with an Alban Scotswolf name tag attached to their zippers.
My knees buckled. I sat down hard on the stone floor, a bag in each hand, surrounded by twelve versions of my own luggage.
Twelve…
I was a holoscribe. And I didn’t have the words.
The stone was hard beneath me, and the room’s utter silence felt like an animal closing in to attack.
“Don’t freak out!” Kiwi reminded me.
Right, right.
I made myself think… tried to come up with a reasonable explanation for…
I started counting the number of cubbies with black bags stuffed inside of them.
And nearly threw up when the number passed one hundred within the first couple of rows.
Several short, quick breaths, like an idiot psyching herself up to touch a burning flame. Then I started unzipping the bags.
The first one had a bunch of clothes and a waterlogged notebook I recognized as the same kind of teacher binder my mom kept.
Another one had colorful clothes that were technically a match for my skin tone but the kind of flimsy summer dresses I would never wear.
There was a t-shirt that said LAYLA RUSTANOV for President. That didn’t track with anything I knew about the former first daughter who, when last I checked for my fating gate story, was living a life of happy anonymity with President Rafes Nightwolf’s fiercely private brother, Knud.
The contents of the other bags were just as baffling. A waterlogged physics textbook.
Tweedy clothes that looked like they belonged to some kind of professor.
A little popsicle frame that said, “Have a great trip, Mummy! luv u!” in a child’s handwriting. Inside the picture frame were two extremely cute little girls with blue eyes and frizzy blonde hair. They were only faintly brown, but freckles covered their faces. And they both had my nose….
My mind filled with an ominous buzz.
And for some reason went to the books I’d passed on the shelves. Hundreds upon hundreds of them.
finnt mei tür…
My heart beat faster. Warning me, even as my feet carried me to the closest wall of built-in shelves like something puppeted.
Not by a dragon this time, but my fate.
I took the first book off the shelf. It was beautifully bound in leather and smelled of mega-deer… but had no title.
I flipped to its first page.
My blood froze over.
Hello, my name is Dorie Hamilton-Scotswolf, and I’ve fallen through time. I’m not sure how to go about explaining this….
I snapped the book closed, tucked it under my arm, and immediately grabbed another.
Hello, my name is Dorie Hamilton-Scotswolf, and I’ve fallen through time. I’m a physicist. Got terrible marks in writing all my life, but I’ll give this my best try….
With my heart beating in my throat, I grabbed another one.
Hello, my name is Dorie Hamilton-Scotswolf, and I’ve fallen through time. I’m a stay-at-home mother and a wife, but now I’ve somehow found myself caught up with these three dragon blokes….
And another…
Hello, my name is Dorie Hamilton-Scotswolf. I’m a sci-fi author, but I never in a million years would have written myself into this kind of storyline….
I couldn’t stop. My hands moved on their own, pulling book after book.
Hello, my name is Dorie Hamilton-Scotswolf, and I’ve fallen through time. I used to run a comic book shop in Edinburgh. Now I’m living in a cave with a dragon who won’t stop staring at me….
Hello, my name is Dorie Hamilton-Scotswolf, and I’ve fallen through time. Three days ago, I was making roux for a dinner service. Now I’m figuring out how to cook reindeer meat over an open fire. Life is strange….
Hello, my name is Dorie Hamilton-Scotswolf, and I’ve fallen through time. Sucks to be me, but maybe not? Here’s why….
Every single introduction was written out in my handwriting.
Every single one bore my name.
But every single one was penned by a Dorie I’d never been.