The Mirrored Shard

3 Homecoming

THE VIEW OF Graystone would never stop startling me. It was a vast place—carved from rough-hewn granite, massive blocks twice my height stacked atop one another to form the bulk of the main house, wings flying off the sides and back like those of a desiccated bird lying on the ground. Twin turrets sprouted from the ridgeline, the blank blue glass reflecting the empty stare of the clouds and mist.

The gate was ajar. That was bad. I strapped my bag across my chest—wouldn’t do to lose it after I’d managed to bring it all the way from Thorn—and soothed the cat into silence. I crept forward one step after another. I wasn’t the type to rush in, like Dean or Conrad. I took my time. I’d wanted to be an engineer, and being meticulous was part of my makeup.

It was also what had kept me alive thus far.

The one time I’d been impulsive, had flown by my instincts, didn’t bear talking about. The fallout from that choice was all around me, in the absolute silence of the woods around Graystone, the ever-present fog that hadn’t burned away even though it was close to midday, the strange dreams of the populace.

I couldn’t clearly remember what had happened in that place on top of the world, just flashes and fragments, but I knew I’d unleashed something. I’d opened a door so long shut that it had been forgotten by everyone except me and a few beings so ancient they didn’t even have names.

The door of Graystone bore a knocker the size of my head. It was the face of a wolf, grinning at me with bronze teeth and a black iron tongue.

I raised it and let it fall once, twice, three times.

The crows were even more prevalent here. They clustered in the oak trees leading up to the gates, on the rim of the turrets and on windowsills, while hundreds more swooped and dove overhead, cawing so loudly their cries echoed off the stone walls, rolling back on my ears like a wave.

Just as I was about to go around to the back gardens and see if I could get in through the kitchen or a window, the door opened. I heard the creak of clockwork, felt it inside my skull, the low, secret place where the Weird lived. It reacted with iron and machines as well as the Gates between worlds, sensing its likeness forged from metal rather than human flesh.

“Hello?” I called, sticking my head inside. The air was dank and musty, much as it had been the first time I’d come here, looking for my father.

That time, he’d disappeared. I’d been alone, beset by the Fae.

I prayed that this time it’d be different, that I could find what I needed and go get Dean without encountering any more trouble.

I took a few steps into the grand foyer, setting the cat down to scamper off into a dark corner. Graystone was a clockwork house, run by mechanical means, and that kept it safe from the incursion of predatory creatures.

I heard a clank from upstairs and tensed. I doubted any animal could have breached Graystone’s defenses, but that didn’t rule out a person.

“Hello?” I said again, loudly. My voice rattled the long, dagger-shaped crystals in the chandelier above. “Anyone there?” A little quieter. “Say something.” The last came as a whisper. No other sound echoed, and I forced myself to keep looking around. If someone was in the house, I wasn’t going to be a sitting duck.

I started down the back hall toward the kitchen, where I’d always felt most comfortable. Graystone’s luxury was oppressive and smothering, everything incalculably old and valuable, more like the set of a lantern reel or a museum piece than a home.

The kitchen was made for living, was old and worn but homey, and unlike the rest of the drafty mansion, always warm.

As I crossed the threshold, I felt a breath on my neck, but I wasn’t fast enough. I felt a metal barrel jammed against my skin and a rough hand clamped against my mouth.

“What’s your business here?” a voice hissed in my ear.

I struggled, panic rising. The voice and the hand sounded and felt human, at least, but I had no idea whom they belonged to; plus, he or she was armed. Maybe a shock pistol, maybe something worse, but at this range there was no way I could twist the metal with my Weird to render it harmless.

I tried to shout Let go of me! but all that came out was labored breathing as I struggled with the hand across my mouth.

“Are you real?” the voice grated. “Am I seeing you or am I dreaming?”

I twisted violently, and managed to catch a glimpse of black hair, pale skin and a jacket the same gray as my old school uniform, too short at the wrists, exposing knobby bones.

“Conrad?” I managed.

He let go of me as abruptly as he’d sprung at me, but when he backed away the gun didn’t go down. It was old as the hills, metal dull, the energy bulb trapping aether at the barrel cloudy and nearly dead. Still, I wasn’t going to make any sudden moves. My brother had a temper and changeable moods, and we hadn’t parted on the best of terms. I would just as soon not have given him a good reason to shoot me.

“Are you real?” he repeated. His voice was raspy, and in the low light I saw deep circles beneath his eyes and a patchy growth of stubble on his high cheekbones.

“I’m real,” I said. It was the only response I could think of. Conrad tightened his grip on the pistol. Though he was skinnier and more hollow-eyed since the last time I’d seen him, his arm never wavered.

“Prove it.”

I swallowed hard against my throbbing heart. I’d never seen Conrad like this, except once, and it scared me. That time, he’d cut my throat and left me for dead. This time wasn’t looking much better. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Conrad.”

“I’ve seen you,” he whispered. “For weeks, I’ve had dreams because of that hole in the sky. Voices in my head. If you’re really my sister, then prove it.” His eyes narrowed. “You have five seconds.”

I raised my hands slowly, but there was no escape route now. All I could do was run, and then Conrad would shoot me in the back. I had no doubt he’d do it. We might be blood, but something had scared my brother, badly enough that the look in his eye was the same as it was the night iron poisoning had made him try to kill me.

We both had the conviction to follow through on our actions, and Conrad was scared. I was scared. What could I possibly say to calm him?

“Starlight,” I breathed. That night was in my mind anyway, why not use it?

The pistol dipped, just the smallest fraction. Conrad’s thin black eyebrows drew together. “What did you say?”

“ ‘Have you ever seen your blood under starlight, Aoife?’ ” I quoted at him. “ ‘When it’s quite black?’ ”

Conrad let out a shuddering breath, and then his arm dropped. He made a pained expression, as if the pistol suddenly weighed a thousand pounds. “It’s really you,” he muttered. “You don’t know how glad I am to know that.”

“Conrad,” I said, moving toward him again now that his eyes weren’t terrifying me. “What is happening here?”

“You know, you could have picked a happy memory,” he said. “One of those times I read you the horror comics Mom didn’t want you reading, or when we snuck into a showing of The Green Hornet three days in a row. You didn’t have to pick that.”

“I wasn’t exactly thinking about happy memories,” I said. “Not while my own brother is pointing a gun at me.” I tentatively walked toward him and wrapped my arms around his shoulders. Conrad was tall and thin like our father, solid under his too-small jacket, and I felt relief wash over me as I touched him and convinced myself he was real.

“It’s been a crazy couple of weeks,” he said. “Months. Time isn’t doing the same things it used to. I don’t know what the hell’s going on out there, Aoife.”

I had an idea, but I wasn’t about to throw myself on my sword and admit responsibility just yet. Tell Conrad I was responsible for all of the wrong that was happening? All the dreams? I couldn’t be sure, could I? No need to alarm everyone.

I wondered how long I’d be able to rationalize it that way.

“What are you doing here and not on Cape Cod? Where’s Dad?” I asked instead. Conrad’s face fell, and I knew that something was gravely wrong.

“He’s upstairs,” he said. “We had to come back here—the Cape, it’s not safe.… Look, you need to see him to understand. I’m glad you’re back, but you could’ve gotten here a lot sooner.”

I felt a pang of guilt. Of course I hadn’t had to linger in Thorn so long. I could have risked more to escape sooner. The desire I’d felt from the moment I’d left to come to the only place I’d ever considered home, even if living in it would slowly poison me, didn’t make up for my delay.

“How are you doing?” I asked Conrad as we mounted the grand staircase. “I mean with the iron poisoning?”

“It comes and goes,” he said. “I think not having a Weird helps. I’m doing all right, Aoife, you don’t have to worry about me.” He cast a sideways glance at me. “Do I need to worry about you?”

I could feel the pull already, the scream of the iron against my Fae blood like metal on metal, sparking and turning to slag inside me. “Nothing to worry about,” I lied.

Conrad’s raised eyebrow told me he wasn’t buying it. “Uh-huh,” he said. We went all the way to the back of the house, to the master suite, where I’d never been. That was my father’s room. Even when he’d been gone, I’d felt it would be an unforgivable incursion to go inside.

“I really am fine,” I insisted. “I’m more worried about what’s going on down there in Arkham. What’s happened, Conrad? Where’s Dad, and Valentina? Why did you leave Cape Cod?”

Conrad paused at the master suite’s double doors, which were carved high above our heads with phases of the sun and moon in great orbits.

“Speaking of questions, where did you go, Aoife?” he said. “What happened to you? I tried my damndest to get it out of Cal, but his mouth was locked up tighter than a bank vault.”

I felt as if hours passed while we stared at each other; he was waiting for an answer. “I was in the Thorn Land,” I said at last, bracing for Conrad’s inevitable explosion. “With our mother.”

“What?” Conrad’s already haggard face took on a new crop of shadows, making him appear hard and unyielding as granite. I felt the nervous fear rise again. I knew from his expression this couldn’t go anywhere good.

“I had to,” I said.

“I don’t understand why you’d ever give that woman the time of day, never mind run away with her,” Conrad said.

“It was that or lose Dean forever,” I said softly. “I’m sorry, Conrad. Do you at least believe that?”

He heaved a sigh, pushing his hands through his dark hair until it stood straight up. “Yeah,” he said. “I believe you’re sorry. But that doesn’t mean this is all okay with me, Aoife. You know how I feel about the full-blooded Fae.”

“Will you please stop acting like I’m a traitor and tell me what the hell is going on in Arkham?” I demanded. Conrad usually just needed somebody to bite back, to knock some sense into him, and then he’d return to being my slightly pompous but generally tolerable older brother.

Conrad heaved a sigh, and before he could say anything else, the door swung open. The tall, blond figure waved his arms in irritation. “What’s all this noise? I told you that Mr. Grayson needs it quiet.…” Cal trailed off as he took me in, his pale, watery eyes going wide. “Aoife!” he exclaimed, and enfolded me into a hug that was all bony edges and Cal’s distinct, musty scent.

“Hey there, Cal,” I mumbled into his sweater. He squeezed me tighter, and his strength reminded me that I wasn’t dealing with a human boy. Cal was a shape-shifter, and had the prodigious physical abilities to go with it. I’d learned to live with the fact that his kind usually ate human flesh and lived below ground in nests. Cal was Cal, and whatever he was, he was my best friend in the world.

“I was so worried,” he said, holding me at arm’s length. He’d cut his hair, and his clothes fit for the first time in my memory. I was half sure the gray wool sweater and flannel slacks he was sporting had been my father’s at one point in my dad’s misspent youth.

“I’m all right,” I assured him, and cast a look at Conrad. He could hear it twice, and maybe believed me this time.

“Come in, come in,” Cal told me, and before Conrad could protest, dragged me into the master suite. “It’s good you’re here,” he said softly. “I hope it’ll make a difference.”

The first thing I noticed was that all the curtains were drawn. Heavy things, velvet and oppressive, full of dust that tickled my nostrils and trickled down the back of my throat. Blackout curtains, left over from the last war, or maybe the one before that.

The second was that my father was lying in bed, in his pajamas, sheets pulled up to his chest. At his side sat my friend Bethina, her copper curls in disarray, wearing a plain green dress rather than the maid’s uniform she’d worn when we first met. She held my father’s hand lightly, stroking the back of it with her fingertips. I felt a slow-encroaching sense of dread, like a rising tide.

“What’s going on here?”

Bethina looked up at me and blinked rapidly. “Oh, Miss Aoife. Thank goodness you’re back.”

“He’s been like this for a few days now,” Cal said quietly. “He’s fine as far as we can tell. He’s just … asleep.”

“Don’t know why, or how,” Conrad said, shutting the door and standing in front of it like an ill-tempered guard. “We’ve tried everything to wake him up, but he won’t react to anything. Until the nightmares come.”

Bethina nodded, her eyes wide. “Then he gets to screaming something awful. Noises like I never heard a man make.”

I turned on Conrad. “How could this happen?” My brother was the one acting like the leader of men. He could at least tell me how such a thing could be possible. My father wasn’t the sort to be caught by surprise, either by magic or by malady. He was strong—the strongest person I knew.

“I don’t know any more than you do,” Conrad snapped. “One minute he was fine, the next Arkham was going crazy, and the next he was like this.”

Bethina moved aside to make room for me, and I took my father’s hand. It was dry and cool, the hand of a patient rather than that of the strong man I knew my father to be. I felt the urge to cry, or scream, bubbling in my throat. I couldn’t be sure which it was.

“I think you better start from the beginning,” I said to Conrad. “Tell me exactly what’s happened since I’ve been gone.”

He sat next to me on the edge of the bed, but my father didn’t stir even as the mattress shifted under my brother’s weight. Conrad smoothed the blankets, adjusted the pillows and spoke without looking at anyone.

“It happened right after you left,” he said. “People started falling asleep and not waking up. Or they’d dream so vividly they’d think it was actually happening and they’d do things like walk into traffic or attack their loved ones.”

“The Proctors tried to control it and set up more quarantines,” Cal added, “but they’ve lost a lot of power. There’s all sorts of investigations by the government into their conduct, and without Draven, individual offices have pretty much gone off and done what they liked.”

“Riots in some places,” said Bethina, “and others are on total lockdown. Arkham pretty much got cleaned out, folks taken off to quarantine, after a bad rash of dreamers swept through and tried to light the place on fire.”

“Same thing happened on Cape Cod,” Conrad said. “Proctors were everywhere. Valentina decided to split up from us and try to find help, sympathetic folks in the Brotherhood of Iron, and she made me responsible for getting Dad back here, where he’d be safe.”

I squeezed my father’s hand. This was worse than I ever could have imagined. I’d been warned there were consequences to what I’d done to try to reverse the Fae’s deception and save my mother, but I’d never imagined that they would be so direct, so tangible. That they would hurt my father.

“How long has he been like this? And having the dreams?” I said.

“Nightmares, more like,” Conrad confirmed. “He thrashes and screams—it got so bad last night we had to hold him down. It started right after you left. Valentina found him on the floor of his study, asleep. Nothing on this earth could rouse him, and she tried everything, believe me.”

“It’s an epidemic,” Bethina said quietly. “All over the country. People goin’ to sleep and not wakin’ up for love or money.”

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered to my father. I didn’t know if my being there could have prevented this, but the plain truth was I hadn’t been. Hadn’t been thinking of anyone except myself and the thin hope that I could get Dean back and put things right via some vague notion fed to me by my mother. She was insane, and by believing her, I was probably just as crazy and desperate in my own way.

My father would be ashamed of me. In that moment, I was ashamed of me.

“Can we talk outside?” I said to Conrad, and he looked as if he’d rather do anything but. “Please?” I insisted. Conrad nodded, and I’d never been so relieved to leave a room as when we stepped from the oppressive shadows back into the weak sunlight of the mist-laden day.

We walked in silence the entire length of the lawn and sat on a stone bench by the reflecting pond, the bench covered with moss and pockmarks from decades, if not centuries, of weather. It mirrored the pond, choked with algae and lily pads, speckled with the crimson shards of fallen leaves floating on the surface.

“What was it like?” Conrad said abruptly. He didn’t look at me, just at the water, which rippled as something—a turtle or one of the ancient koi that lurked below the pads—surfaced to snatch at a late-season insect.

“Thorn?” I said. “Boring, mostly. Fae are very stuffy, and very odd. I spent a lot of time with Mother.”

“No,” Conrad said quietly. “Being with her—our mother.”

I thought about that. I’d seen flashes of the old Nerissa, the one who told us stories, took us on walks to search for flowers between cracks in Lovecraft’s sidewalks, let us watch clouds in the park for hours on end rather than going home and tending to things like chores and homework, but mostly I’d seen the new Nerissa, no longer mad, but wholly Fae.

“It was disappointing,” I said, and left it at that. I didn’t tell Conrad about the parts that had been all right, the evenings when we’d sit quietly, just spending time together. Conrad felt abandoned and lost, and I didn’t blame him.

“Then why did you go with her?”

I dug my fingers into the bench, nails carving crescents into the moss and lichen. “I had to, Conrad. She promised me a way to find Dean.”

Conrad turned and stared at me. It was a stare of pure pity, as if he hadn’t realized I was ill and I’d just told him I was terminal.

“Aoife,” he said carefully. “Dean is dead.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I snapped. “I just want to be home and not talk about Thorn anymore.” I prayed that Conrad would drop the Dean business, and thankfully he did. Trying to explain I was still looking for a way to the Deadlands would just get him thinking my iron poisoning was back, that I was mad.

“It’s been weird since you left,” he said. “All around. Things are happening—it’s almost like an epidemic. Dreams. Madness. The president might have to sit for an impeachment hearing, and the Rationalists are having a fit. It’s like when things were wild all over again.”

Something clicked into place, what the old woman had shouted at me earlier. “Somebody called me a demon this morning,” I said. “A demon from hell. Nobody talks like that. I mean, if they want to stay out of Rationalist jail.”

“Ever since people started falling asleep and the Proctors got stripped of their authority, a lot of that’s been happening,” Conrad said. “I’ve heard rumors that all sorts of creatures are cropping up. People who don’t know the truth blame the necrovirus, but it sounds to me like the barriers between Thorn and Iron and … other places are easier to get past.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. It could all just be mass hysteria. People thinking the world is ending.”

“It’s not ending,” I said quietly. “But this isn’t nothing.” I looked Conrad in the eye. He had our mother’s eyes, pale blue and cloudless, like a new sky after rain. I looked more like my father, both in coloring and features.

Conrad frowned. “Aoife, what are you not telling me?”

I looked up at the sky, at the mist that roiled above our heads like a sea, ancient and birthing primordial creatures onto a phantom shore.

What I’d seen in the Arctic, in the space where dreams were born, had been real. That much was clear to me now.

I told Conrad the truth then, there in the garden. About how I’d tried to reverse what I’d done because of Tremaine, step back through the loopholes of time and undo the damage I’d done to the Lovecraft Engine and the city. How it hadn’t worked, and how I’d snapped something fundamental in the gears of the worlds, Thorn and Iron and everything in between.

“I thought they weren’t so bad,” I said. “The Old Ones. I thought letting them go was just returning the universe to its natural state. They’re not evil, Conrad. They’re just … alive. A different sort of alive than us, but not malicious.”

“But, if I believe you, they’ve done this.” Conrad’s face was pale and drawn, and he made a sweeping gesture. “It’s them, all of this. All the dreamers and the strangeness. They’re returning to the Iron Land, right? And their influence is driving the entire world insane. How is that not so bad, exactly?” His brow had that crease in it, the one that meant he blamed me, and I couldn’t argue with him.

“I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known,” I mumbled, but even to my ears, it wasn’t convincing.

“I can’t …” Conrad rubbed his hands across his face, and I waited. I’d hoped he’d forgive me, or at least understand. I’d had to do something. What had happened when Tremaine tricked me had to be undone. “I can’t,” Conrad repeated. “I’m sorry, Aoife. I’m done.”

“What do you mean?” I rose as he did, panicked, watching him back away from me. “Conrad, don’t.…”

“You did this,” he said. “It’s because of you that our father is like this. You tried to make it better, and I get that, but you’ve made it worse.”

“Conrad—” I started, but he raised his hand.

“Don’t talk to me, Aoife,” he said. “Don’t try to make this right. I can’t count you as part of my family. We can’t ever repair this.” He started back toward the house. “What’s done is done. I expect you to be out of Graystone by the morning.”

I could have screamed at him, or run after him and demanded that he hear my side of things, but I just stood there and watched him go. Conrad was even more stubborn than I was.

And he was right. I’d thought that the Old Ones weren’t the evil that the Rationalists preached or the saviors that the Star Sisters, their worshipper sect, insisted they’d be when they returned. When I’d been in the dreaming place, the center of all the worlds, I’d seen them and felt their touch in my mind. It still burned there, as if the mere contact had scarred the channels of my conscience with acid. But I hadn’t felt malice, simply ancient intelligence. Yet to human beings, with their fragile makeup, who was to say the two weren’t one and the same? The Old Ones’ return could simply be too much for the fragile barriers between worlds, and it could signal a fracture that would make them all collapse, one after the other, like dominoes.

I hadn’t known what I was doing, not really, or what I’d set in motion. I’d been trying to save my family, myself. Everything I knew. Trying to put the world back the way it was. What I hadn’t understood was that it couldn’t be that way any longer. I wasn’t the Aoife Grayson who’d left Lovecraft all those months ago, and the world wasn’t the world I’d abandoned for Thorn.

So I let Conrad go, and let the dull ache sit in my chest like a stone while I tried to think of what to do.

Dean was the only thing I could save, at this point. The Old Ones were vast beyond my imagination. There was no way I could send them back, even if I knew how to access the small nucleus of the dreaming world where I’d found them. Crow, king of dreams, who controlled that place, would not welcome me back. We hadn’t parted on good terms, to say the least. He’d spent millennia keeping the Old Ones at bay from Iron and Thorn and all the living worlds, and in one fell swoop, a changeling who didn’t know what she was truly doing had opened the floodgates, released these ancient, implacable things to do whatever it was they planned to do upon their return to the living parts of the universe.

So it had to be Dean. The Deadlands were my destination now. At least I wouldn’t have to go back into the house to get my things. I doubted that, in the place where the dead went, I’d need clothes or food or anything except what was on my back.

I walked around the edge of the reflecting pond, into the ragged hedge maze that made up one whole side of Graystone’s property. The thing hadn’t been cared for in years, and there were large gaps in the hedgerow that you could pass through, rendering the maze useless.

At the center was a statue, one of the heretical bits and pieces that the Graysons had kept out of view of the Proctors when the Rationalists took control. It depicted a woman holding a fallen soldier, a cowl covering her face. I scrubbed at the oxidized copper plaque until I could read CUCHULAINN AND THE MORRIGAN. I had no idea who they were supposed to be—magicians, I guessed, or old gods renounced by the Rationalists.

The crows sat all over the statue, and they didn’t move at my approach. I was close enough to touch the largest one, and it stared at me with glassy black eyes, never blinking, never moving.

I retreated, discomfited by the birds, who’d been everywhere since I’d emerged from Thorn. Dean had always said they were the watchers, the eyes of the old gods and the magic that veined the world. Even my father’s airship was named after a raven, the most famous raven of all, Munin. My father had told me the story of Odin, a god who sacrificed his eye for wisdom, and who possessed two birds, Hunin and Munin—Thought and Memory—that flew into the world each day and brought knowledge back to Odin in Asgard, where he sat on his throne.

It wasn’t so different, I supposed, from Thorn and Iron, two places connected by the dotted lines of the universe, but at the same time wholly apart. One magic, one iron, one replete with the fantastic and one rooted firmly in the earth whereon it sat. There could be crossover, but there could never be harmony.

I turned my back on the crows, focusing on the Deadlands. My Weird let me cross those lines, fold that page so that I could brush one world against the next, travel from one to the next.

My mother had lured me into the Thorn Land by telling me she knew the way to the Deadlands, but now I was sure it was simple as crossing over to a place I’d never been before. I’d managed to build a Gate to Crow’s dreamworld, and it stood to reason that if I could access that place, I could access the Deadlands.

I didn’t need Nerissa, I thought, bitterness welling in my stomach. She’d strung me along for months while my father and my friends wasted away here, in an Iron Land thrown into chaos.

Putting aside my anger at my mother and her manipulation, I focused on building the Gate, as I had with the place of dreams. Then, I’d had a focus, something to channel my Weird. This time I was flying blind.

I wasn’t the first person to be able to do this—my much more famous predecessor, Nikola Tesla, had had the gift as well, had conceived of worlds beyond imagination, and was eventually responsible for breaking the bonds between them, creating the world as we knew it.

I didn’t have anything so spectacular in mind. I just needed to make a path, a bridge I could skip across before it collapsed.

Using my Weird felt a bit like standing on railroad tracks as a train approached—a rumble you could sense in your core, a disturbance that fed through every bit of you. My head started to pound, as it usually did, and a trickle of blood worked its way from my nose.

Forming a Gate, the sort of thing that Tesla constructed out of technology and the Fae constructed with their uncanny powers, took a lot of effort. It usually left me spent and drained, racked by headaches for at least a day, but I couldn’t afford that now.

I had to find Dean, and I let that desire pull me toward the gray spots between the bright beacons of Thorn and Iron and all the places in between that I could travel.

I could practically feel him, his warm chest against my cheek, smell his smell, hear his laugh. I was so close that the tears leaking from my eyes had nothing to do with the pain I experienced as the Gate opened in front of me.

Then, as quickly as I’d felt my Weird begin to respond to my desires, everything went wrong.

A scream ripped through the empty spaces that I saw when I opened myself to my Weird, and I felt a tug against the center of myself as if a jitney had slammed into me. Light exploded in front of my eyes and panic rose in my throat, along with a scream of my own. This had never happened before, and I didn’t know what I could do except be buffeted by a wave of resistance as I glimpsed a sliver of a gray sky and a black, twisted tree in a field of brown grass. Then I saw nothing, simply black velvet cut through by pinpricks of light.

Stars. I saw stars. I realized that I was in the vastness between worlds, and they weren’t stars but spots in the fabric of space and time, worlds and destinations that I could visit if my Weird could only reach them.

The cool grasp of the Deadlands, like opening a room long locked, breathed its last and slipped away. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t connect again.

And in a sudden upsurge of fear, I realized that I couldn’t go anywhere else, either. That I was trapped in between, my Weird refusing to return me where I’d been or to move me forward, to any of the points of light.

I did scream, then. I knew that my body was still on the ground at Graystone, but my consciousness was scattered across a thousand light-years, the image I carried with me only a memory of my physical body.

Had anyone with my gift ever been trapped here? Was my fate to float forever, always in between? I started to panic. It was the worst fate I could conceive of.

Then I saw them as I thrashed in the void: great shadows that blotted out the world-lights, one by one, long and lean, square and massive, or with tentacles that reached for each point of light, closing it amidst their incalculable bulk. I stared as the Old Ones passed by me close enough to touch, if I’d had fingers. Their inexorable journey from the dreaming place toward the point of light that represented the Iron Land was fast and relentless, and I watched, breathless, as their shimmering bodies slid by me, buffeting my Weird with their vast power.

I felt their desire to return to the Iron Land, their focus on it, their hunger to touch the shores that they had not touched for a hundred thousand years—a long time even for such creatures as they. They were coming, and it was clear there was no stopping them. I knew—I’d released them from their prison, let them loose into the in-between and sent them toward the Iron Land.

Long time, one of them agreed, and I didn’t hear the voice so much as feel the brush of mind on mind.

We remember, another agreed. How you freed us.

How you need us.

How we knew you even before your creation.

Your blood, our blood.

Your flesh, our flesh.

“STOP!” I screamed. Their voices were shredding me, tearing this non-body of mine apart, and I saw the lights begin to dim.

I was lost. I was never going to make it out of here. It went beyond panic now, into deep, true terror. I would hear the Old Ones’ voices echoing in my head for as long as I lived. No living thing was meant to encounter them this closely. Perhaps in the ancient times when they’d last come, a primitive brain too dense to decipher their voices might have withstood it, but now? Now I felt their voices on me like physical scars, the indelible touch of the Old Ones’ minds.

We will not forget, the first one whispered. We will show our favor.

“Aoife!”

The voice cut through the cacophony of the cosmos, the background radiation, the rumble of the Old Ones’ passage.

“Aoife!”

My Weird snapped against my mind like a rubber band, and all at once I knew how to reel myself back in again, how to return to the point where my flesh resided, as well as my soul.

Opening my eyes was like taking a hammer blow to the forehead, and I lurched into the fetal position, riding out the wave of agony as I writhed and screamed on the gravel.

Small, strong hands wrapped around my wrists, and arms pulled me against a silk dress that smelled both familiar and terrifying—the overwhelming aroma of the orchid perfume favored by Fae.

I blinked the pain tears from my eyes and waited for the face above me to come into focus.

Nerissa stroked her thin fingers over my hair, my cheeks, brushed the tears from my face as if I were five years old again. I couldn’t fathom how she could even be here, and simply stared at her.

“You?”

“I’m here,” she confirmed. “When I heard you’d run away I had to follow you.”

“But the iron …” I made myself sit up and scoot away from her. She still looked like her new, improved self. Well-dressed, hair up, cheeks flushed with life. The tinge of madness in her eyes I’d come to know as normal wasn’t there. Yet.

“I’ll be all right for a few minutes, out here where there’s no metal,” my mother said. “I had to use the hexenring to find you and see what on the scorched earth you thought you were doing, running off like that.”

“What I had to do,” I told her. “I have to find Dean.”

“Well, you’re not going to find him with your little parlor trick,” Nerissa said crisply. “The Deadlands are closed to the living, Fae, human or anything else. Your Weird won’t get you there, and you’re lucky you’re not dead from trying.”

I tried standing, and found it a treacherous endeavor. I staggered over to the statue and sat by the fallen hero’s feet. My skull was echoing, and the gravity of what Conrad had said was starting to sink in, now that I’d failed. “So, what, you came to scold me? I thought you didn’t want me going to the Deadlands, so why come?”

“Because you ran off with that piece of scum Grey Draven, Octavia is beside herself with rage and I told her I’d go make sure you weren’t colluding against the Fae.”

“I’m doing what I have to,” I repeated. “You wouldn’t help me.”

She shook her head, reaching to stroke my cheek, but I pulled away. “I told you it wouldn’t be this simple, Aoife,” she said. “Playing roulette with Death never is.”

“It’s so much worse than that,” I whispered, and felt hot tears of helplessness and panic start to flow. I couldn’t hold them back. I sobbed, and I let Nerissa rub my back and whisper soothing words, because nobody else would, and in that moment I needed it.

I didn’t tell her about the Old Ones. I let her think all my tears were for Dean. I couldn’t handle having yet another person look at me as if I’d set fire to everything they held near and dear.

“Poor girl,” Nerissa whispered. “Everything seems so big and impossible at your age. This boy—surely he can’t be worth killing yourself or melting your brains over?”

“He’s the only person I know worth it,” I snapped, and watched the pain blossom in Nerissa’s eyes. Belatedly, I realized what I’d said.

“I see,” she murmured, before I could backpedal or try to apologize. “If you’re really insistent, then I might know of another way. Even though I think it’s a foolish thing. The dead should stay dead, if you ask me.”

That sounded like the Nerissa I knew—never a mother to coddle or console, even before the madness really sank tooth and claw into her mind. It helped, in an odd way. A mother who wanted to comfort me and have a heart-to-heart? I’d have no idea what to do with that or how to react.

“I didn’t ask you, but I have a feeling you’ll tell me anyway,” I said. I didn’t care that I was being a mouthy brat—not the way I’d care if it were my father across from me. I didn’t feel the connection to Nerissa I did to him. I guessed Conrad was right. Our mother had left us long before she’d been committed.

“You really are a difficult child,” my mother sighed.

“I’m not a child,” I told her. “By this point, I think I’ve earned the right to be treated like an adult.”

“You’re not,” my mother said. “But I can see you aren’t going to give up this ridiculous idea, so I’ll tell you what I know: when I was in the madhouse another patient told me about a man in San Francisco.”

Oh, this was perfect. “Mother,” I said, slow and direct, “your one idea comes from another inmate in a mental institution.”

“I didn’t belong there,” my mother snapped. “Neither did he. He was a Spiritualist, and the Proctors locked him up for heresy. He worked with a doctor who had made a machine that could reach the Deadlands. Horatio Crawford, that was his name. Dr. Horatio Crawford.”

“And?” I prompted. One madman’s tale of a magical device that could peel back the layers of space and time when even my Weird failed was suspect, to say the least.

“You’ll probably scoff, since it’s a Fae tale and not made of math and metal,” my mother said. “But I thought there was a thread that bound souls to life, a measure of time that was only theirs, and when the thread got cut, well … Octavia always used to tell me that was what led to spirits and phenomena and such.”

I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to anger her now that she was talking by suggesting that Fae ghost stories held about as much water as the kind my classmates and I used to tell. The notion of the thread, though—if there was a connection between worlds via the Gates, why not a connection of the soul to the Land it had inhabited in life?

“If Crawford found a way to use his machine to tether the soul to life but allow it to be free of a body … well, that makes sense to me,” Nerissa said. “Your father always said magic was just science nobody could quantify yet.”

“That sounds like him,” I said. I desperately wanted to hear more about her and Archie’s life together, but now wasn’t the time. Now, time was precious.

“Thank you for trusting me,” I said, when she only stared up at the high windows of Graystone, which reflected the mountains beyond, gray and implacable as stone eyes.

“I just know you’re too stubborn to give up,” she said. “And I don’t want you to get hurt, or have your spirit broken worse than it already is. I do care about you, Daughter.” She pressed her hand over mine, and I tried not to start at her cold skin. The gesture was so foreign, all I could do was squeeze her fingers, because I didn’t want her to think it was in vain.

“Go to San Francisco and find Horatio Crawford,” my mother said, giving my hand a squeeze back. “If he’s still alive, then perhaps the two of you will be clever enough to cheat Death.”

She rose and smoothed her skirts. “I’ve been here too long. Goodbye, Aoife.” After a moment of hesitation, she reached out and cupped my face with her thin, cool palm. “Be careful,” she whispered, an unidentifiable expression flitting across her face. Then she stepped back and walked away, and the mist swallowed her up.

I stayed where I was. My mother had never been reliable, but when it came to Dean, could I really be picky about where I got help?

There was nothing I could do for Dean or my father by sitting on a garden bench moping. I finally had a sliver of hope, and not to follow it just because of the source would be the worst kind of foolish.

I stood up and turned back toward the house. There was only one direction to go, and that was west, to San Francisco.