Page 41 of The Queen's Box

“Some call it the Gift of Orrin, an attempt to help those who’ve suffered as he did.”

“Who’s Orrin? How did he suffer?”

“Hard to say,” Brooxie said.

“Who really knows?” Ruby chimed in.

“You slip into a crack between worlds,” Brooxie explained. “I’ve never seen it happen, nor Ruby, either. Was nearly convinced it was just a story—until now.”

“That’s right—because you did it. You got away from those deacons.” Ruby leaned in, eyes bright. “What did it feel like? Could you see them not see you? Could you feel yourself... slip away?”

“I don’t know. It all happened so fast,” Willow said, deciding there was no reason to hold back. The sisters already knew, and their excitement was contagious. “I was there, and they were coming for me. Those men. I felt trapped.”

Ruby nodded. “Trapped. Yes.”

“And then?” Brooxie asked.

“And then...” Willow shrugged. “I don’t know. It was strange. I heard a creak—”

“Acreak?” Brooxie interrupted. “Did you hear that, sister?”

“Shh, let the girl talk,” said Ruby. “You heard a creak... and then what?”

Willow bit her lip, trying to remember. Trying to find the words to describe what she remembered. “It was as if something opened, but only I could see it. But ‘see’ isn’t right. Ididn’tsee it. I didn’t seeanything. And yet...”

She propped her elbows on the table and rested her forehead on her fingertips. She stared at the grain of the wood, knowing that what she was about to say was too fragile to survive scrutiny. If she saw doubt in the sisters’ expressions—and she would if she looked; she knew she would—then her attempt at explaining would die in her throat.

“Have you ever stared at yourself in the mirror for a very long time?” she asked, but it wasn’t a question, and she didn’t wait for an answer. “Reallystared, right into your own eyes. Stared until you got lost. Stared until the air shimmered, and everything around you fell away, and somehow you became two people at once—the you gazing into the mirror and the you gazing back?”

She overlapped her hands and positioned them above her eyes like a visor, making it doubly hard to succumb to temptation and check the sisters’ reactions. “It was like that. In Hemridge, with the deacons, it was like a reflection of the world appeared in front of me. Like someone had taken a great big pair of scissors and cut a rectangle out of reality, but only one layer of reality, and only for me. It was just my size.”

She frowned. “I didn’t choose to step inside it. Or I don’t think I did. But I suppose I must have—and then it sealed shut around me, and I was safe. Unseeable and untouchable. There andnotthere, like the girl in the mirror.”

She stopped because those were all the words she had. She let her hands fall to her lap. Queasy with nerves, she lifted her head.

Brooxie nodded gravely. Her expression was oddly sad. Ruby, on the other hand, radiated an uneasy awe.

“That’s it,” Brooxie said. “The Gift of Orrin. You have it, all right.”

“Unless it was a onetime thing,” Ruby said.

“It wasn’t,” Willow said. But what did she know? She hadn’t summoned the crack. She wasn’t even sure she’d slipped into it. It was more like it had sucked her in.

Brooxie groaned and pushed herself to standing. She was wearing great wide khaki pants, and the fabric swished between her thighs as she made her slow way toward the hall on the opposite side of the room.

Ruby stood, too. She gestured for Willow to follow.

“Let’s see if you’re truly meant for this path, or if what happened in Hemridge was a fluke.”

~

They passed down the narrow hall, the flooring changing underfoot from linoleum to a bare wood staircase that took them down below the house, the air growing cooler with each step. At the base of the steps, the space opened into a low-ceilinged room dug straight into the earth. A root cellar.

The air smelled earthy and wet, the scent of soil that had never seen the sun. Brooxie tugged on a string, and a lightbulb came to life, illuminating crude shelves lined with Mason jars. Willow saw pickled beans, wax-sealed tomatoes, floating ghost-pale peaches. Propped against the wall on the other side of the room were tools: rusted shears, empty bushel baskets, and a hoe with a warped handle.

At the far end of the cellar was a door made of stone.

Willow didn’t understand. Stone doors belonged in crypts or castles, not in the root cellar of a crumbling mountain house.But there it was, set clean into the packed dirt wall as if it had always been there. Stranger still, there was no knob. No handle. No hinges Willow could see.

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