CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE #2
The same poison, redesigned.
Voss meant to bring back the finished version.
Ceci stopped fighting him.
Voss’s face sharpened with triumph.
Duncan saw and shouted, “Ceci!”
She looked at him.
The whole world slowed.
Archie was half inside the light now, one hand gripping a wet stone of the arch, teeth bared against pain. Duncan had one arm around his waist, trying to drag him back while keeping the pistol raised with his other hand. He could not do both. He was losing ground.
Duncan’s eyes found hers.
There was no command in them now. Only fear. Only love. Only the terrible question.
Ceci pulled against Voss just enough to turn her body toward the gate. Then she smiled at him.
With every ounce of contempt she possessed.
“You still don’t understand.”
Voss’s grip faltered. “What?”
“Fear shakes the latch,” she said. “It doesn’t make the road.”
“It responds to fear.”
“No. You scared us until we reached for one another. That is what it answered.”
His eyes narrowed.
Ceci ripped the estate key from the chain at Duncan’s belt. He had taken it from Grace. He had carried it because Hawarden still belonged to him, even if he had not yet decided whether to leave it. The key was heavy in Ceci’s hand, old iron, cold from the rain.
Duncan saw it and went still.
Grace had said, If you come back, you’ll need it.
And if I don’t?
Then it comes home by another road.
Ceci held the key up.
The gate flared.
Voss lunged for it.
She threw it across the shimmer to Duncan.
He caught it against his chest. The moment his fingers closed around it, the ruins changed.
The shimmer deepened from pale brightness into a corridor of color and shadow.
The red gate groaned on its hinges. The iron latch struck the wood once, hard, as if an unseen hand had slammed it open again.
The old stones beneath Duncan’s feet lit at the seams.
Duncan stared at the key in his hand.
The gate had answered him.
Voss’s face twisted. “No!”
Ceci tore her sleeve free of him.
“You thought he had no attachment because he has control,” she said. “You idiot. He has spent his whole life binding himself to everything.”
Duncan looked at her as if the words had entered him by force.
Archie gave a breathless, pain-filled laugh. “Oh, that was magnificent.”
Voss struck him.
It happened too fast.
A hard blow with the back of his hand, driven across Archie’s face. Archie’s head snapped sideways. His grip slipped from the stone. The gate took him another step. Duncan dropped the pistol and caught him with both arms.
Ceci ran.
Voss grabbed her from behind. His arm locked around her waist. His other hand clamped over her mouth. The touch was cold, brutal, empty of care. The gate recoiled from it.
She felt that too.
The threshold did not like him. It had never liked him. He had survived by exploiting openings, by forcing edges, by stealing passage from moments meant for others. He dragged her toward the arch.
“If choice is required,” he hissed against her ear, “choose, then. Choose to save them.”
Ceci kicked backward and struck his shin.
His grip failed.
She bit his hand.
He cursed and shoved her. She fell hard against the wet grass, breath knocked from her body.
Duncan still had Archie. Archie was conscious, barely, his hand fisted in Duncan’s coat. The light behind them surged again. It caught Duncan now too.
Waiting.
Duncan looked down at Archie.
Then at Ceci.
The key lay in his hand. Ceci tried to rise and failed, palms slipping in mud.
Voss moved toward the gate.
He had decided.
If he could not use them cleanly, he would force the opening with whatever remained. He stepped into the shimmer.
The gate darkened.
For one second, Ceci saw exactly what he wanted. Rooms full of men with cleaner slogans and better tools. Cameras. Ledgers. Donor lists. Borders drawn with administrative calm. Old hatred given modern machinery.
Voss reached forward with both hands as if the century already belonged to him.
The gate refused.
The light around him buckled.
Voss froze.
His face changed.
“No.”
The word came out almost small.
Ceci understood with sudden clarity. Ceci understood with sudden clarity. Voss had mistaken force for passage. He had appetite enough to tear at the threshold, control enough to bruise it open, but nothing in him that could guide him safely through. No one waited for him. No one called him home.
The threshold began to tear.
Archie whispered, “Duncan.”
Duncan looked at him.
Archie’s hand rose, shaking, to Duncan’s face. “Choose.”
Duncan closed his eyes.
When he opened them, the decision had cleared his face.
He looked at Ceci. “If we go, we go together.”
Ceci pushed herself up, mud on her hands and dress. “Yes.”
“If one cannot cross, we stay with him.”
“Yes.”
“If the future hates us, we make it learn.”
A laugh broke out of her, wild and wet with tears. “Yes.”
Archie managed to smile through the blood at his lip. “That sounds like an excellent administrative policy.”
Duncan bent and kissed him. A fast kiss. Hard. More vow than comfort. Then he reached for Ceci.
She got to them as the gate began to scream.
Stone, wind, iron, time, all of it strained at once. Voss stood trapped in the arch, half in shadow, half in light, one hand reaching toward the future while the other clawed at the old stone.
“Help me,” he said.
The plea fell dead between them.
His eyes found Ceci. “You know what is coming. You know what survives. Men like me always return.”
Ceci stepped closer, Duncan’s hand locked around hers, and Archie held tight at his other side.
“Men like you return when frightened people open the door.”
The gate shook.
She looked at Archie. At Duncan.
“This house is done opening it.”
Voss’s face twisted into hatred.
He lunged.
Duncan pulled Archie and Ceci toward the threshold at the exact same moment. Voss’s hand closed around Ceci’s coat. Archie, with a sound of pure pain, struck Voss across the hand with the butt of his pistol.
Voss lost his grip.
The gate took him.
There was no scream.
The absence of sound was worse.
One moment, he was there, his face lit by fury and disbelief. The next, the opening folded around him, and the light tightened.
Ceci understood then.
The gate had refused him.
It had become a trap.
His outline stretched, thinned, and broke across the shimmer. For one impossible second, there were too many versions of him, each pulled in a different direction, none of them whole.
Then nothing.
One cufflink struck the stone and spun once before falling still. A bit of scorched cloth clung to it.
Archie stared at it.
No one reached down.
The red gate trembled on its hinges, and the shimmer beyond it burned brighter, cleaner, waiting.
Ceci could hear her own heartbeat. Duncan’s hand held hers so tightly it hurt. Archie leaned against him, breathing hard, face gray, eyes still bright.
Beyond the arch, the future burned with all its danger and possibility.
Ceci looked back once.
Past the ruins. Past the dark trees. Toward the house she could no longer see. Sabrina. Grace. Margaret. Ginger. The rooms still lit against dawn. The packet hidden behind the cedar panel. The women who would keep faith with a possibility.
Her chest broke open around the loss.
Duncan saw.
He had loss all over his own face.
Archie too.
No one asked whether they were certain. Certainty was a luxury dawn had not brought.
Duncan lifted the estate key and pressed it into Ceci’s palm.
“You found the door first,” he said.
She closed her fingers around it.
Archie’s hand covered hers.
Duncan’s covered both.
The gate brightened.
Ceci felt the pull again, changed now. The old violence had gone out of it. What remained felt stranger: an opening that waited for consent, a road forming beneath the choice all three of them had already made.
Archie looked into the light and gave a shaky breath.
“If there truly are aggressive groceries,” he said, “I shall require guidance.”
Ceci laughed through tears. “I’ll help.”
Duncan looked at her. “And if we arrive nowhere useful?”
“Then we make a plan.”
Archie smiled faintly. “That’s my girl.”
Ceci kissed him.
Carefully because of the blood. Fiercely because of everything else. Then she kissed Duncan, and his hand came to the back of her neck with the same reverence as before, the same hunger held in check by love and ruin and the edge of a century.
When she drew back, dawn had reached the stones.
The gate stood open.
Ceci took one last breath in 1938.
Then she stepped through.