The Iron Thorn

25 The Arcane Payment

BACK IN GRAYSTONE, in my room, I slept away the pain and creeping fatigue that overtook me on the walk from the graveyard.

When I woke, I found myself covered and with plumped pillows behind my head. My ceiling was stained with the same alien world map, the blankets were the same itchy wool. My shoes were missing, but otherwise I was just as I’d been before the ghouls.

“Cal?” I’d had dreams, dark and dripping blood. The ghouls could hurt Cal. If I wasn’t there, wasn’t able to pull him free from their jaws, they’d take him to their nest, consume him, turn his face into the twisted snarling things that snapped at me from the dark.…

The door to my room swung open of its own volition, with a rifle crack. A simple hinge assembling, connected to rods and wheels in the hollow walls of the mansion, they ran through the place like a cold-blooded nervous system. I hissed and pressed a hand against my forehead. The Weird appeared to come out when I lost control of myself, got upset or panicked, like when I’d stopped the library clock. I needed to rein it in before something other than a ghoul stepped into its path and I hurt someone. My father didn’t run about setting people on fire—I’d have to get better at using my talent.

Dean’s face appeared in the frame, and he looked at the door askance. “I think your castle needs a tune-up, princess.”

“That’s not all it needs,” I said. “Have you seen Cal?” My door swung back with another rifle shot, and Dean flinched.

“He’s downstairs blabbing Bethina to death about his grand adventure in the zombie’s tomb, or whatever did happen when you two went off.” Dean sat next to me and the dubious bedsprings bowed under his weight. “You’ve been sleeping like you pricked your finger on a spindle, kid.”

I rubbed my shoulder, but the shoggoth’s bite had gone back to being just a sore patch, shallow cuts and bruising.

“I guess I fainted?”

“More like passed out cold,” Dean said. “You came back from your jaunt looking pale and walleyed, babbled something about blood underground and staggered up here. By the time I got after you, you’d fallen asleep and all the rockets both sides dropped in the war couldn’t have stirred you.”

My head felt hollowed out and I was fatigued as if I’d run for miles. The Weird whispered, scratching at my senses, begging to be let free. I shut my eyes. The talent in my blood had wrung me out and I felt in my bones that if I let the Weird go now I’d never get control of it again.

“There were ghouls down there,” I said. “Down under the ground. Cal wanted to explore the crypt in the cemetery, and he opened the ghoul trap by accident and let them out.”

“Sounds like our cowboy,” said Dean with a toothy grimace. “You all in one piece? Or did they get a bite?”

“No … I killed them.” I looked up at Dean. “I got the trap working again, and the house … it killed them. I was the house. My Weird …”

My hands were still frozen and blue-veined and I shoved them under the blanket. “I can feel it, walking around in my head. The machines and the house. My Weird can speak to them and I hear them now. Whispering.”

The sensation when I’d been lying there, a handbreadth away from bloody scraps for ghoul pups to fight over, of a vast and sleeping consciousness sharing my head, came back with a rush and I grabbed Dean’s arm. It was bare, exposed by the short sleeves of his white T-shirt, and I blushed at the feel of his skin.

“Cripes, Aoife.” He rubbed my hand between his palms. “You’re freezing.”

“I think it’s a side effect,” I said. “I got so cold when I used my Weird in the tunnel, I thought I could never move again.”

“You know what they say.” Dean tucked the blanket around me and edged closer. “Cold hands, warm heart.”

“My mother used to say that,” I murmured without thinking.

“You don’t mention the old lady much,” Dean said. “What’s her story?”

Dean Harrison knew more about me than anyone but Nerissa herself. He knew, and he hadn’t spilled a word to anyone.

“My mother is in a madhouse back in Lovecraft.”

It came in a rush, once I’d decided to break the dam on my worst secret. “She contracted the necrovirus before Conrad and I were born and she started to lose her grip when she was pregnant with me, I mean really lose it. She could still fake sane when Conrad was a baby, I guess. They say everyone in our family goes mad, usually at sixteen—it’s our strain, our particular virus—so, you see, it doesn’t matter that I’ve found out all this about the Folk and the Weird. In no time at all, I won’t remember you or myself or any of this.” I gestured at the faded grandeur of my bedroom. Tremaine could threaten me, but he’d never frighten me as much as the thought of losing who I was to the virus, leaving Cal and now Dean behind and becoming just another deluded madwoman locked in a cell.

I could do as Tremaine asked, but I was still afraid, if I were honest, that I wouldn’t be around to see the result. I’d just have to help him and his queens and pray my effort kept my friends safe.

“I had no idea,” Dean whispered.

I scrubbed the heel of my hand across my eyes. I’d cried over the situation enough. “Yes, well, it’s not a tidbit I go spreading around.”

Dean shifted, leaning down on his elbow so we were roughly perpendicular. “Cal know?”

I nodded, a small gesture because the memory still strangled me when it broke to the forefront. “He was there when my brother tried to kill me. On Conrad’s birthday.”

Cal held up his hands. Big and ungainly, like puppy paws. “Conrad, don’t hurt your sister. She’s all you have.”

Dean whistled. “So Conrad gave you that scar.”

I didn’t have to confirm his suspicions. Dean knew. “The virus incubated and it came out as madness,” I said. “He didn’t know what he was doing, Dean. He’s still my brother.”

Dean shook his head slowly. “That’s a hell of a thing, Aoife.”

“It’s your payment, Dean.” I smiled even though I felt more like screaming. The door hinges tensed, but I bit down hard on the inside of my cheeks, balled the Weird up inside my chest and kept it small. The door stayed where it was.

Rubbing his face with both hands, Dean shut his eyes. “I don’t want it. This is the kind of secret that never stops bleeding.”

“I can’t keep hiding from everyone in the world,” I said softly. “It’s becoming everything I am. Like a shadow that falls only on you even though the sun is out.” The stone of madness dogged my ankles even as I felt the Weird spurring me to fly, as it had in the cemetery tunnel.

“I don’t want it,” Dean said again. “You didn’t have to tell me this, even for payment. I …” But he trailed off, shoving a hand through his hair, so it fell every which way.

“I expect you’ll be leaving, then,” I said. “And I thank you for all of your help. Truly. I won’t inconvenience you any longer.” I felt the thickness of tears behind my eyes, and despised it. Some Gateminder I was, crying over a boy.

Dean stood up and went to the door, wiggling it experimentally as if it might decide to slam shut on his knuckles. “I get that you’ve had a lot of running out in your life, princess. A lot of empty rooms and doors slammed in your face. But you paid me fair and square, even if it’s not what I wanted, so dig this when I say it: I’m not leaving you alone. I don’t run out.”

For the first time that day, I managed a real, if wan, smile. I believed Dean when he made his promises, and I wanted to kiss him for it. Stone it, I wanted to kiss Dean Harrison for any old reason at all, but I settled for saying, “You’re one of the good ones, Dean.”

“I’m about as far from good as you can get without running into it again,” he said. “But I keep my bargains and my word is my bond.” He flashed me a smile that was far from his usual killer grin—no, he looked like any boy trying to find a way to ask a girl on a date without stumbling over his feet, his words, or both. I wondered if Dean had ever been that Dean, before he went to the heretics and started guiding in the Rustworks.

He came back and tousled the hair on top of my head, fingers spreading a little static electricity between us. “Rest, princess. It’s been a very long day.”

“Yes, it has indeed,” I said, but instead of obeying Dean I swung my legs over the bed and found my boots. “Could you get Bethina to make me some coffee?” The Weird had exhausted me, and I contemplated that if this was what I had to look forward to every time I tapped the enchantment in my blood, I was going to go through a lot of hot beverages.

“That’s pretty much the opposite of resting your bones,” Dean said. “But I don’t think we need to bother Bethina over a cuppa. I learned to brew a pretty good pot when my old man had the third shift at the foundry.”

“Good,” I said. “Because if I’m going to break Tremaine’s curse, I’m going to need all the help I can scrounge.”