Ghost of Doors (City of Doors) Read online

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  Ghost of Doors

  by

  Jennifer Paetsch

  www.JenniferPaetsch.com

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Copyright ©2012 by Jennifer Paetsch

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of both the publisher and the copyright owner, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Original Kindle Edition: October 24, 2012

  CONTENTS

  Copyright

  Dedication

  ACT 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  ACT 2

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  ACT 3

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  For Torsten.

  ACT 1

  "Everyone you meet is fighting a great battle."

  —John Watson

  Chapter 1

  THE CITY STREETS WERE SO hot, it could have easily been a mirage: The door to the squat, four-story apartment building across the street was burning a scintillating, hellfire red. Red. Wolfgang hated that color. He never wanted to see it on another door again, but there it was, a smoldering fire that wouldn't die. And its glow would spread down the street, claiming every door on every building, claiming the block for MOON.

  But the color was not really fire. It was only an illusion, a "glamour," a way to claim the street, and was usually backed by enough muscle to make that claim. Wolfgang searched for a sign of MOON, but saw no one. The linden trees, their heart-shaped leaves frantic, rattled their branches high above him in a breeze that Wolfgang did not feel on the sweltering, stone-paved sidewalk far below. Out in the open, he felt watched and hunted and he did not like it. He slid a hand into one of the ragged pouches on his belt and a thumb across the silver and iron talisman he kept hidden there; it was a ritual that summoned his courage as much as it called to his mind the symbol worn almost completely away from the charm's face. He felt his mind steel itself against the magic around him, focusing instead on that door and on his family and the ones he loved.

  Like the horse. He swung his leg to dismount and, holding away the sharp end of his halberd, slipped off of the horse's back and didn't get very far before catching the remark, "I hope you know what you're doing, Chief."

  He searched around and behind the horse for a sign of danger, then looked to the lavender eyes made paler by a ring of flaking indigo paint and asked, "What's wrong?"

  "You mean besides the door that turned all by itself to 'Property of MOON'?"

  "We don't know it happened all by itself."

  "So even you feel it."

  A chill shriveled his stomach. Inside his grip, the smooth wood of Vogelfang, his halberd--polished with sweat, notched carelessly from war--became hotter. "Feel..?"

  The horse indicated the door by rocking his head forward. "There's something in there."

  "Someone or something?"

  "Does it matter?"

  Wolfgang didn't know how to respond. The horse got his tongue. On his free hand, the fingerless glove, once a golden ochre but now browning like overripe fruit, provided brief entertainment for his thumb as it stroked the fraying edges. It helped him think. "Whatever it is joined MOON and possessed the door."

  "Crazy talk." The horse blew hard out his nose. "How do you possess a door?"

  "But that's the only thing that makes sense."

  "MOON could just be here hiding. That makes more sense."

  "If there were enough of them here to turn the door, I don't think they'd bother hiding. But okay." The deep breath he took did little to satisfy the sudden hunger in his lungs for air. The next breath failed to satisfy as well, and he took a step back, catching a glimpse of himself as he did so in the shimmering window inside the door. What he saw startled him. His glare was sinister, the face too sunken and wan. Fear kept him frozen, the warping of the reflection by the flickering red glow of the door kept him transfixed far longer than any glamour. Was that really his reflection? He turned around and saw no one, just the horse and the lonely sett stone street bordered on either side by linden trees.

  "What?"

  "Nothing." The silence spoke to him then: The little brown birds who spent long days and nights all summer singing were hushed or perhaps gone. "Either way, we're in over our heads."

  "If you think this is over our heads, wait till we get to the No Man's Land."

  "Well I think it's pretty obvious we can't stay here. Unless you think we should join them." He put a hand up on the great dapple horse, the dark patch of hair warm like a nest under his fingers. Before the strength built up in his arms to pull, the smallest sound behind him caught his ear and stayed his hand.

  "You're not coming back, are you?"

  Startled by a voice as soft as his own thoughts, he didn't need to turn around though he did anyway. He knew whose voice it was; it came to him in his best dreams. "Of course I will, Marie," he said. "My father is here. I won't leave him."

  She appeared then, spawning out of nothingness, splashing into the space in front of him just as he had imagined her: Blond hair shimmering in the filtered summer light, watery-blue cat suit poured on, leaving nothing to the imagination about what lay underneath. Anyone would think she was an angel. Wolfgang knew better. "I don't think you have a choice," she said, and turned her attention to the red door, for once allowing herself the luxury to appear sad.

  "He would never leave me behind," Wolfgang argued. "He's here because of me."

  "You say that like it's a bad thing." Looking back to him, she rolled her eyes as if bored. Marie put on her heavenly poker face, a perfect mask of beauty in flesh and bone. He was almost as familiar with her face as he was with his own, but he still couldn't be sure--not completely, anyway--what those ever-so-subtle changeling expressions meant. "You might want to watch what you say. The doors have ears."

  He looked at the ground, then checked the red door again, disgusted. Thankfully, the ghost in it was gone. "I don't want to become a monster, Marie," he said, mostly to himself, though she heard every word, he knew.

  "Everyone here becomes a monster," she said gently, insistently, while drawing close to him. If he had offended her, it didn't show--her aqua eyes were wide, full of longing, as if seeing a dream move upon his face, a dream meant especially for her. "That's kind of the point."

  "She's got ya there, Chief."

  "Not everyone," Wolfgang reminded them. Proof lay everywhere. Almost everything had a face if one knew where (or when) t
o look. The very stones were human once. Magic, the sister of Luck--just as life-changing, and just as fickle--was never kind to humans here, not when they needed her to be, anyway. The glamour on the door danced in his eyes, in his mind, taunting him, mocking him. It reflected the burning in his heart, the rage that never seemed to go away and could barely be contained; a wild animal, hungry and prowling, searching for that one weakness that would let it come out. He wondered how bad would it be, to plunge into the wrong door. Would it consume him like MOON and SUN used up everything in their struggle for the city, or would it reject him as all the monsters had because he refused to become one of them, leaving him to a cold and lonely fate? Would the world end in fire, or ice?

  "If you would just accept your fate, you could come and go as you pleased."

  "Not true." All the muscles in his neck tensed. He hated being fed lies about this place, especially when those lies came from Marie. The Fair Folk had so many reasons to want Doors, why couldn't they just admit that they wanted--no, needed--it? Would that make them too human? Was it that repulsive to feel? "Why are you here, then? If you can go anywhere, do anything. Why this city?"

  The glamour of the door undulated behind her as if it were her own frustration coming and going in waves. "To help you. Even if you won't help yourself."

  Marie's twisted idea of helping him--destroying who he was, destroying his soul, to become a monster, to take a bigger part in this war--only enraged him. He wanted her to understand him, but she couldn't--no monster could understand a human's heart. But perhaps this twisted place, this city, made her right: if he couldn't escape with his soul in tact, maybe destroying himself was his only choice, his only way of being saved. Maybe his sacrifice could save the neighborhood, as well. "I am helping myself. Today." He lunged past Marie for the angry red door. Opening easily at his touch, the door welcomed him by swinging wide, revealing a milky-pink wall. A dark circle swung across it, the center shrinking against the light. A giant eye. His heart struggling crazily in his chest, Wolfgang shut the door.

  A hand clamped on his shoulder and he shrugged away from it but was not strong enough to shirk it off. "Are you crazy?" Marie cried as she pulled him back. He gripped her strong yet slender arms and steadied himself. "You'll die."

  "The doors have...eyes?!"

  The sidewalk underneath their feet began to quake. The door burst from three large and eerily human-like fingers forcing it open--they scraped against the paved sidewalk stones and scattered several from their mosaic to send them flying. Thunder crashed as Wolfgang and Marie grabbed each other and, followed swiftly by the horse, fled across the street.

  "Did you hear that?" Marie asked. Wolfgang saw her go pale.

  "What?" he asked. "The thunder?"

  "That wasn't thunder," the horse said. "That was a scream. 'Help.'"

  A moment later, like a giant drain, the door swallowed everything back up: The creature that had filled it was drawn deep inside and the rage that had been building in Wolfgang went with it. Then the door went black. After long moments, the three decided it was safe to come out from the shadows of the linden trees. All they found where the red door had been was a charred hole in the apartment building as if from a real fire, as if the glamour had burned the door away. Dead black like a window at night, Wolfgang thought he could feel a breeze blowing through it. It smelled of burnt hair and bacon. Disgust kept the desire for further exploration away.

  "Why would the door destroy itself?" Wolfgang wondered out loud. He had never known MOON to get a foothold and give up so easily.

  "Maybe MOON couldn't keep it," Marie said, "with no one else here."

  "Then it would have gone back to blue," he argued. "It didn't. It's...dead."

  The big horse made a strange sound, a sort of nicker. "What do you think, Pilgrim?" Marie asked. She was the only other person to use Wolfgang's nickname for the horse, a much older and wiser fae than he let on.

  Pilgrim snorted. "I've never seen a door destroyed. Ever." The three stood silent until the paths their thoughts took became too frightening to bear.

  "We should try to find out more about this," Marie said. "Your mother might know. Or your father. I'd feel better having some answers to tell HQ before I report this."

  "All right. But promise that then you'll come with us to the No Man's Land. Please. At least that far. You've been there," he said, taking off his wire framed glasses and wiping the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. "You've seen it."

  After grinding out an ember with one heel of a pair of elegant, dark boots, Marie looked into the wind coming from the west as if it was a manifestation of the future and she could sense everything that lay ahead just by breathing in the air. Wolfgang had no reason to think she couldn't. "I don't think you're going to find what you're looking for," she said finally, "but okay."

  Down the street from the ruined door was another apartment building just like all the others on the street--all of them 4 or 5 stories, all of them square, their mansard roofs in clay tile, all of them shades of brown. This one had the name "Schäfer" on the roster of the apartment building's tiny, cracked, and cobweb-filled name plate that was always back lit, day or night. Wolfgang pressed the door buzzer. A woman wearing a light blue, laced peasant blouse fastened with a delicate peach cord came out onto a second floor balcony and waved to him, her braided hair of golden brown falling off one shoulder. Then she left to buzz him in and open the apartment's front door. "I'm so glad to see you," she said to him when he appeared in the stairwell. "I was hoping you would change your mind."

  "Change my mind?"

  "Well, even if you didn't, I'm glad you're back, even for a little while." His expression suggested he didn't follow, but she didn't notice that, distracted as she was by his appearance. The maternal urge to meet him and hug him hushed and cowered before his intimidating form. A metallic, cold water smell hung around him mixed with the leather of his clothes and gear. She stood back to let him in, his long, black, rider coat swinging, brushing the tops of his laced army boots. When did he get those? "Maybe we could talk some more."

  Shifting her feet anxiously in the foyer where the stucco walls, once painted a cheery yellow, now stood muted with age, Lorelei Schäfer studied her son. No matter how she tried, she could not keep her face from mirroring the worries she felt churning inside. Was he really giving up this foolish idea? Was it her fault that he didn't want to turn, that he didn't want to join SUN? Had she been such a poor role model for him? "There are always choices. It's not as bad as you think. Your father and I believe you could make something of yourself, here."

  He grinned too wide, his teeth too sharp. "I was thinking the same thing," he said, and shut the door.

  That simple act chilled her. But her rational side ignored her foolish gut and could not, in recent memory, recall her son being so sensible. He was back, he was alive, he was listening! Nothing could be better. It inspired her to continue, even though she could not shake the feeling that something about him was fundamentally wrong. "You could follow in his footsteps," she said. "I know that you feel frustrated. Trapped. But you can do far more than you realize. Being an inventor is nothing to be ashamed of. Wolfgang..." Meeting his eyes, she noticed something missing. "Your glasses." Those same eyes as her son's--steel blue and haunting--but no longer sad. Scheming.

  "And your hair..." ...long and loose, not short and neat like her son's. She didn't think the scruffy beard was an accident, either. Her heart sunk as the reality of a trap closed in around her. Her gut took over, reveled in being right, and her rational side self-destructed. As she struggled to make sense of this, one last rational thought, horribly crippled, limped up to her: Maybe these changes only meant that he was joining MOON. But then another thought intruded, the original thought that had startled her so badly that she had tried to make it go away. It had been writhing, smothered in the back of her mind and finally broke free, a thought borne from a flaw she could not see for no better reason than because she had
not wanted to see: He didn't have a soul. She blurted out the inevitable conclusion, "You're not Wolfgang."

  "Oh, yes," the doppelganger replied, circling around her in the tiny foyer, his boots making somber music against the wood. "Yes, I am Wolfgang, but the question is, Mother, why are you talking as if there is another one of me?" He closed in on her, loomed over her, snarling, hair falling into his face like a veil of shame, "Why is there another one of me?"

  "Oh my God," she gasped, seeking safety by backing up into the living room, half-falling, half-sitting on the amber tile-topped coffee table, almost tipping it over. Fear made her forget the entire layout, even after twenty years of living in the apartment and having arranged all the furnishings herself. "You--It's you. You're my son. My real son."

  This Wolfgang gave Lorelei a look that she had never seen on her stepson's face before. It was cruel, hard, and most unnerving of all, inhuman. "Yes, I am your REAL son, the one you left to raise in the human world, like all good changeling mothers do." He followed her into the living room, his steel blue eyes burning a cold fire. "But something tells me you have failed in your other duty. The duty to ensure that there is only one of me, to ensure that only one infant lived--yours." Cold rage deepened his voice. "You didn't do that, did you?"

  She had wanted to see her real son again but she was entirely unready for this. All of the worst traits of the fae had come out in him. Greed, bigotry, and pride were his virtues, and the human world probably breathed a collective sigh of relief to be rid of him even if only for a short while. He was a stranger to her, not just because he had been raised by someone else but because he could not have turned out more different than her if he had been borne from someone else. His was a repulsive strangeness that linked the fae to demons in the minds of the mortal races, an evil that no thinking race liked to admit their stock could produce. And she had been the bearer; she had borne the Devil's son.