The Nightmare Garden

2 In the Mists

BEFORE THE OTHERS woke and after Dean had gone to check that the road was clear, I got my battered composition book out of my bag and opened it on my knees. The book was half full of my engineering homework. It was from my other life, from when I was a schoolgirl who thought that magic was a lie and that a virus was responsible for things like inhuman creatures and uncanny abilities, ghosts and prophetic dreams.

That girl was gone. The Aoife writing was a new girl, one who’d discovered that the necrovirus was a hoax perpetrated by men who sought the magic for themselves. Who were hunting me, even now. The old Aoife wanted to panic, felt the tightening in her chest even now, watched ink dribble from her pen as her hand started to shake. How was I ever going to stop being a fugitive, knowing what I knew?

But the new Aoife didn’t have the luxury of curling up in a ball and pretending the outside world didn’t exist. She had to learn how to be strong and unbending, how to evade the men chasing her and the disease that was eating her mind away from within. Had to, because she had no other choice.

I wrote it all down. I had to write. It was my duty now, because the person who should have been writing this account, my father, was long gone and my brother wasn’t interested. I was the last Grayson still able to record her strange life, as all Graysons before me had. Still, I felt like a fraud the moment I put pen to paper.

First entry:

My name is Aoife Grayson, and I am the last person who should be writing this account, but know I am the only one left who can.

Others like me and my family, the Gateminders, who watch the thin spots known as Gates between the Iron Land, the Mists and the land of Thorn, have the confidence of those who have come before. They know how to navigate the Gates, how each different type works, from the Fae hexenring to the mechanical marvels of the Erlkin. I know nothing.

I have nothing. I am the Gateminder by default, due, I believe, to chaos and chance. It sometimes feels like I’m being punished for uncovering the hoax of the necrovirus, as my father did. For daring to question the Proctors, the order of things. Gateminders before us labored in secret, but at least the rest of the world was not actively encouraged to believe they deserved death.

The Proctors told us that the strange creatures, my family’s madness, everything in the world that could not be explained by science and reason, was a virus. A powerful virus with no origin and no cure. They never hinted that its origin was inhuman and that the cure was to embrace my Faerie blood, the inhuman, immortal side of me, and to stay far away from iron.

At the time, all I saw was that my mother was one of the mad, that my brother was a fugitive and that I was about to follow in their footsteps and go mad. I would be locked up, another victim of the “virus.”

It was all a lie. I was trapped in the stone and iron of Lovecraft, trapped by my own mind and by the lie I believed. And now Lovecraft lies ruined. Ruined because I was stupid.

I scratched out that word, stupid, so many times, writing this. But it’s the right word. I believed the Fae creature Tremaine when he came from Thorn and told me I was the heroine who would free the Fae from bondage, curing my iron madness in the process. He set me up, and I fell, harder than I ever could have imagined.

I should have listened to the words my father left behind, in his own diary: as a Gateminder, you should trust only yourself. Only you stand between the Iron Land of men and what lies beyond. And in that role, you have only your own mind to rely on, your own wit and intellect.

I should have listened to Dean, too. He said it—you can’t trust the Fae. They lie. And Tremaine did lie to me. I destroyed the Lovecraft Engine, in a great cataclysm of magic. I broke down the barriers my father and his Brotherhood of Iron were so careful to construct, over hundreds of years, before the lie of the necrovirus. Barriers the evil things of Thorn had never broken.

I left my mother in Lovecraft.

I can forgive myself, possibly, for being the gullible little girl Tremaine thought I was, but I can never forgive myself for abandoning my mother.

The only way I can sleep at night is by promising myself that I am going to find her and help her escape the city and the iron madness, as I have escaped it, at least temporarily. Conrad, my brother, said that as long as we stay out of the cities, and out of the Iron Land entirely, with its train tracks, iron pipes, steel conveyances, we might stave off madness. In his case, spending months away from the Iron Land meant total remission. In my case, the progress has slowed; I avoided the full psychotic break that usually occurs around age sixteen, and suffer only the occasional headache, visual disturbance out of the corner of my eye and bad dream.

But nothing I’m doing now seems any saner than the dreams I started having weeks ago, before my birthday and the inevitable onset of madness. The dreams are the first sign of acute and chronic iron poisoning, the warning bell. Though I’m still reasonably sane because I fled, the dreams haven’t stopped. I don’t know now if they come from madness or from another source. From something worse.

I do know we’re running, me and Conrad and Dean, Cal and Bethina, too. It seems like there’s no one we aren’t running from. The Proctors and Grey Draven, who has some bizarre notion I’ll lead him to my father, his true target.

The Fae, who did not exact their full price from me after I woke their sleeping queens and ripped the thin, thin barrier between our worlds. Tremaine has more for me to do. He said as much. Opening the Gates between Thorn and Iron was only the beginning.

It was like knocking aside a spiderweb. How could breaking something so huge feel like less than nothing?

These things I do have: My brother. Dean and my friendship with Cal, and I suppose with Bethina, too—she was loyal to my father before I came along, even though she’s only human and the law dictates she should have turned me in. But Bethina is steadfast, and stubborn to a fault; plus, it’s good to have another girl along.

Things I don’t have: A plan to hold off the iron madness and keep ahead of the Proctors and Grey Draven. A way to get to Lovecraft. Anything to go home to if I can get to the city, because the Lovecraft Academy sure isn’t my home any longer. I don’t know what is.

I meant what I said—I’m the last person who should have taken over my father’s burden, recording my life for the next Gateminder. Yet I continue to write in the books that the Brotherhood calls witches’ alphabets, grimoires of power and experience that are supposed to help me along, to keep me safe.

Fat lot of good my father’s records did me. And he’s not here, even though I’ve never needed him more and his absence makes me want to sob or scream.

The one thing he asked of me was to be strong, willful and resolute, and I couldn’t do it.

All I can truthfully say now is that my name is Aoife Grayson, and I have my freedom, and my sanity. I could at least temporarily cure my mother, if I could take her from the Iron Land and the poison that’s clouding her mind.

But I don’t know how much longer she’ll survive in ruined Lovecraft. And if I go back to the iron, I don’t know how much longer I’ll have, either.

After the days of walking, of little food and less sleep, of cold and wet and none of the comforts of the human world—like, say, beds, bathrooms and hot food—the Mists had lost their charm.

The Mists weren’t exactly the world as humans understood it. Humans saw a single world with no others sitting beside it. Really, the Iron Land sat beside all the others like marbles in a sack. But at least the Mists weren’t Thorn, home of the Fae. We’d run here from my father’s house, Graystone, in Arkham, in a desperate bid to escape both the Proctors and my iron madness. The Mists were where the tides of reality ebbed and flowed, and the edges of other places knit and then split apart like wounded skin held by poorly stitched thread.

Austere and alien as the Mists were, though, they were largely devoid of iron, and that was important. Iron made me sick, made me see things. This endless windswept wilderness at least wouldn’t drive me insane, according to Conrad. If Conrad was sane. He certainly hadn’t appeared that way the last time we’d met, when he’d shown up and dragged me here with little preamble. That was the extent of his plan—the part he’d shared with me, anyway. Asking him questions just got silence or grumbling.

Really, I had only his word that he even had a plan other than hiding in the Mists for the rest of our lives, and I hadn’t been able to trust the word of anyone in my family in years.

And despite the lack of iron, I was still dreaming.

I’d fallen to the back of the group, my steps leaden and my thoughts heavier, and Dean slowed down to let me catch up.

“You all right?” He nudged my hand with the back of his and then wound our fingers together.

“No,” I said. “I’m hungry and I feel like my feet are going to fall off.” I’d taken sturdy boots from Graystone, but they were mud-spattered now, and one of the heels was starting to come away. My legs felt like logs, and my mind was fuzzy from lack of sleep. I’d felt this way before, during finals at the Academy, when I’d slept maybe two hours a night and crammed my brain so full I thought it would burst, but I’d never had to trek through a swamp on top of that. More than anything I wanted to shut my eyes and lie down in a patch of soft moss.

“I could use a break myself,” Dean said. “Hey, Connie!”

Dean had taken to calling my brother Connie, and I could see from the twitch of Conrad’s shoulders how much he hated it.

“Yes, Dean?” He turned his head slightly, but he didn’t slow his pace.

“Looks like the group’s voted for a sit-down,” Dean called.

Conrad turned fully to face us but continued walking. He’d always been quicksilver graceful, my brother, in a way I’d never been and never would be. It just wasn’t in me. I tried not to let it bother me as my holey boot filled up with water when I misstepped and put my foot in a soft patch of moss and muddy water. Back in Lovecraft, Conrad was the handsome one, the smart one, and I was, well, the shy, plain younger sister who was never quite as good at anything. Even according to the lore of the Gateminders, he was first in line, being the eldest son of the current Gateminder. I was just the girl. The second choice. The replacement, if neither my father nor Conrad could perform the duties, after all this was said and done—despite my being able to pass between Thorn and Iron, my being able to communicate with the Fae when Conrad had never even seen them. Still just the girl. It stung, and just once, I wanted him to figuratively fall on his face.

“I don’t care what the group wants,” Conrad said to Dean. “We stop when I say we stop, and we need to get through these woods before nightfall. You don’t know the Mists, Dean, despite what you are. You’ve spent your entire life in the Iron Land. I’ve spent almost a year here. The Mists aren’t Thorn or Iron—they’re treacherous, and I don’t want to get caught in an ambush because my baby sister’s feet hurt, so why don’t you two toughen up and accept that I know what I’m talking about?”

Dean snarled under his breath. To look at him, you’d never know he was only half human, but he was, and his other, Erlkin half had a bad temper when it was crossed. Conrad was like me, human blood poisoned with a drop of Fae. More than poisoned—saturated. But at least we weren’t like our mother, struck mad simply by virtue of living in the Iron Land, as all full-blood Fae like her would eventually be. Conrad and I, with our human father, were hopefully all right as long as we steered clear of iron. More than that, though, Conrad thrived and never seemed bothered by much. With his charm and force of will, Conrad could say anything and make it so. It merely annoyed me, but it made Dean furious, and to head off the fight that had been brewing for days, as the fog got thicker, the ground wetter and the food scarcer, I dropped Dean’s hand and jogged to catch up with my brother.

“We’re all tired,” I told him. “If you keep up this pace we’re just going to stop following you. We can’t run from the Proctors and the Fae if we’re dead of exhaustion.” My brother listened to me very rarely; I hoped this would be one of those times.

Conrad’s jaw twitched, and my hopes fell. “It’s not your call, Aoife,” he snapped.

“You’re right,” I agreed, through gritted teeth to avoid outright angry shouting. “It wasn’t my call to leave Lovecraft looking for you, it wasn’t my call to run here when the Proctors came for us. But I followed you, Conrad. I’ve done what you said without complaining for almost a week, and now I’m telling you I’m tired. You can walk.” I stopped and plopped down on a mossy stump. “I’m not going another step.”

The old Aoife would never have dreamed of disagreeing with anyone, but this new Aoife had no such compunctions. Her feet hurt, and I was glad she’d spoken up. She didn’t even care that Conrad was puffing up his chest, getting ready to chastise her like the father we’d never had. We stared at each other while the throaty call of a crow echoed from a nearby thicket. I wasn’t going to be the one to look away. I’d been glad of Conrad’s protection in our care-homes and at the Academy, but since he’d left, I’d realized I didn’t need him. He needed to see it now too. He was my brother, and I loved him, but the closeness of our old relationship had blown away with the ash from the ruined Lovecraft Engine.

“Well?” I said at last. Dean, Cal and Bethina, who’d been a chambermaid in my father’s house before a few days ago, stopped and clustered around me. Conrad had elected himself group leader, but so far they’d stuck with me. Not that I knew where we were going, or where we were going to stay when it got dark again. These were ancient forests, night forests, and who knew what was lurking in the shadows? In Lovecraft, things like nightjars, shape-shifting blood drinkers and springheel jacks, terrifying long-toothed predators, ruled the night along with the ghouls. And those were just the creatures who’d managed to slip through from Thorn and other places. Here in the Mists, this native land of theirs so far from Iron, if they caught us we’d be so much lunch meat. I felt a small, traitorous prick of pride at that and tried not to show it on my face. I’d managed to get us as far as the Mists. I tried to believe I could see us through to wherever we ended up, but I wasn’t very convincing, even inside my own head. Conrad did know the Mists, and I had no idea how to even find my way out of this wood.

Conrad folded his arms. “Aoife, you’re being a child.”

“I left her there, Conrad,” I said quietly, voicing what had been bothering me since the morning dream. “I left her to whatever might happen.”

Conrad sighed, shifting his feet. “Listen, when we get somewhere safe we can talk about this. Right now, we’re exposed and we need to keep moving.” He started walking again, until my words distracted him and he tripped.

“She’s our mother.”

My brother turned back to me, and his face was colder than I’d ever seen it. “Nerissa hasn’t been a mother to me for ten years, Aoife. To you either. She left us to the mercy of people who’d just as soon burn us alive, or cut us open and study us. She didn’t even try to keep us from that when she knew she couldn’t take care of us. Some kind of mother to do that.”

“I said I wouldn’t leave her there,” I told him. I’d promised her. No matter what she’d done, I’d promised that I’d keep her safe because she couldn’t do it for herself. That was what you did, when you had a mother, and I hadn’t managed to do anything except put her in more danger. Guilt made my stomach roil. “This is my fault,” I said, “all of it, but most of all Nerissa, and I have to—”

“Dammit, Aoife!” Conrad bellowed. The crows took flight in a ripple of glossy black against the silver sky. “Going back to the Iron Land and risking your neck won’t change what happened! You’re going to have to accept that so we can all stay alive.”

I wished he’d just slapped me. The hole that opened in me at his words was a hundred times more painful than any blow would have been. Because I knew he was right. My guilt was like a chain around my ankle, attached to a weight the size of my mother. If I couldn’t put the thoughts out of my mind until we’d reached safety, I’d drag them with me. But I didn’t know how. I swiped at my eyes, telling myself my face was damp only with cool fog, not hot tears.

“All right, now,” Dean said. “I think we’ve established neither of you is giving up this ghost, so why don’t we agree to disagree?” He helped me off the stump and put his arm around me. “And Conrad—how about shutting your big trap and not making your sister cry before I knock your teeth in?”

Conrad blinked once. “What did you just say to me?”

“Hey!” I clapped my hands. Boys could be like unruly dogs. Where was a bucket of water when I needed one? “I’ll keep going,” I told Conrad quietly. “But I’m not going to forget about this. I am going to get her back.”

“I’m not saying forget it,” he said. “Just focus on staying safe until our father comes back and can help us settle things.”

He started walking again, his stiff-shouldered posture evidence that he was dismissing Dean and me—and the straggling Cal and Bethina—so I spoke my last thought to his back: “You know, Archie coming back and saving the day is about as likely as a snowball surviving the heart of the Engine.” It was harsh, but it was true. Conrad was the only one who refused to see that.

Second entry:

What can I say about my father? I knew him as only a story for the first fourteen years of my life, a figure both larger and smaller than any real father could hope to be.

I know that he stayed just long enough to watch Conrad take his first steps and see me born before he returned to the city of Arkham, to Graystone, his family home, and then had nothing more to do with us. Nerissa never mentioned it, but I knew they weren’t married, and that a family like the Graysons didn’t need bastards running around. It made me angry, made me feel small and worthless, like a trinket rather than somebody’s child. Usually I pretended I didn’t have a father at all.

I only saw him once: when the Proctors scooped me up and Grey Draven told me the truth about the necrovirus, that it was a lie and that he planned to use me to lure in the insurgents my father was running with. My father showed up and helped me get out of Ravenhouse, the bastion of the Proctors in Lovecraft, and run to Arkham, back to my brother and into the Mists.

We spoke maybe ten words to each other.

So you can see why I don’t have a lot of faith in Archibald Grayson showing up and saving the day, even though Conrad thinks he’ll solve everything. People relied on the Proctors to solve everything too—to keep them safe from the necrovirus—and look what happened. The world is going to burn. Maybe not all at once, but what happened in Lovecraft is surely worldwide news by now, and who knows what’s already crossed over from the Thorn Land to make a picnic of the human race? I can’t even think about it without feeling like I want to cry, scream, or simply lie down, let the guilt eat me alive and give up.

I don’t know if our father is coming back. I don’t know if he’ll help us if he does.

I don’t know anything except that Conrad’s wrong about me, and about our mother when he says that she’s a lost cause, and that if I want to survive, I have to cast my lot with a father I barely know. If I can go back, if I can at least make sure she’s alive and see what condition the city is in from what I did—if it still exists at all—then I’ll know.

I’ll know exactly what I did and what the damage was, the number of deaths and exactly how many tons of guilt should press on me. I’ll know if there’s anything I can do to make it right, because the plain fact is, innocent people shouldn’t pay for my stupidity. That, nobody had to teach me. That’s just the truth.

And maybe if I know what happened, I can stop dreaming about it.

I’d stopped keeping track of how many miles we’d walked days ago, but not of the day. My birthday had come and gone, and so far, I still had my mind. But I wasn’t cured. Periodically I felt the scratches and whispers of the madness, and I waited for the iron poison to awaken it fully in my blood and plunge me down an endless hole of insanity.

The road disappeared for a time, and we relied on the dim sun to navigate until it came into view again. Well, Conrad did. The rest of us were so tired we mostly just trudged. Cal had barely spoken since we’d come through from Arkham to the Mists, and finally, when I looked back and saw him stumble, I dropped back to walk with him.

“How are you holding up?”

Cal grunted. He was a head taller than me, and I watched his knobby Adam’s apple bob up and down.

Of all of us, Cal was the least what he appeared to be. I should have been afraid of him—after all, the Proctors had filled my mind for years with warnings about the ghouls that lived in the old sewer tunnels below the streets and surged up to hunt when the moon was full.

But they’d also told me my mother was crazy and had to be locked away, and that a bloodborne virus was responsible for my abilities and my madness dreams, so there you were. Cal might have been a monster before he’d come to the Academy, a ghoul who’d hunted people like me, but he’d stuck by me when everything went wrong. Draven had sent him to spy on me, threatened to burn Cal’s family alive if he rebelled, and Cal had still helped me get out of Lovecraft. Cal was loyal. I trusted him a lot more than Conrad at that moment.

Which made me feel lousy, like I was betraying my own blood in favor of someone who wasn’t even human, but the fact remained that Cal had been there for me when Conrad hadn’t. And he didn’t have potential madness lurking in the dark corners of his mind, ready to spring forward and sink its teeth in the moment he got too close to the Iron Land. I loved Conrad, but I’d never forget that in his worst moment, he’d hurt me, and hadn’t hesitated to do it. I had a scar to ensure I’d never forget.

“Cal?” I said when he didn’t answer me.

“How do you think I’m holding up, Aoife?” he snapped, thin face growing a deep frown. “Being in this place isn’t going to get us into any less trouble, and it just might get us into more.”

Regardless of the shape he took, Cal had a nearly endless capacity for worrywarting. I was just glad he’d decided to keep his human shape for the time being, though that was a credit more to Bethina than to me. Cal was sweet on her, and she thought he was a regular boy. I just hoped she wouldn’t try to light him on fire when she figured out the truth. Bethina was bubbly and sometimes flighty, but she wasn’t stupid, and eventually all the strange bits of Cal’s personality would fall into place for her.

I’d decided at the outset that I’d cross that bridge when we came to it. Besides, how was I supposed to pull her aside and tell her the nice boy with the city manners was actually a flesh-eating beast? That was a conversation I couldn’t even fathom how to start. It would come up one way or another—Cal wasn’t always good at hiding his true nature. None of us were, I guessed. Dean snarled when he was angry, and I got blinding headaches when I was too close to iron. Conrad was the only one among us who could appear effortlessly human, and I was really starting to resent him for it. He’d been out of the Iron Land long enough that his madness had largely receded. I hoped it would be the same for me, but sooner or later, I’d have to go back, and if he went with me we’d both be in trouble.

“Fine,” I grumbled.

“If you say so,” Cal said, and I could tell I’d played on his last nerve. He could tell I was wishing I could just leave the lot of them, aside from Dean, in the woods and go home.

Not even that. I wished I could wind time backward until none of this had ever occurred. And if I could live that time over again, I would ignore what was happening to me, go on being a good student, a good girl, good little Aoife Grayson, who adored her brother because he was the strong one, the charming one who could do no wrong. He was a brother she could trust, implicitly. A brother who’d never hurt her.

But then I’d also be insane from the iron of Lovecraft, locked up with my mother, and who knew what would have happened to Conrad. I could never have that little girl’s imaginary version of my brother back, and I was just going to have to live with it. If I’d done it sooner, I might not have been so easily swayed by Tremaine, or so quick to dismiss my mother’s ramblings. If I’d been more willing to accept reality, my mother would be safe and alive, instead of alone in a city overrun with creatures of Thorn.

If she’d survived. I didn’t let myself think that my mother might be dead too often, because the very idea was a physical pang in my chest. Nerissa had managed to survive for seven years in the worst madhouses in Lovecraft. She couldn’t be dead. I kept repeating that, with all the dedication of a fanatic. My mother couldn’t be dead. She had to be waiting for me when I went back.

I became aware that Cal’s skinny shadow no longer loped next to me, and I turned back. Cal was frozen, quivering, his nostrils flared and his chest vibrating like a plucked string.

“Cal?” I said with soft alarm, motioning to the others to stop.

His lips drew back from teeth that razored out of human gums, leaving thin red trails of blood and spittle on his lips. They disappeared just as quickly, when Bethina turned toward him, but the wire-tight tension didn’t leave his skinny frame. “Someone else is here.”

Dean cut his eyes toward the brush and back to me. “Get off the road.”

“What’s going on?” Bethina called tremulously from behind Cal.

“Get off the road now!” Dean bellowed, and grabbed me by the arm, dragging me into the brush. I gasped in pain as thorns snagged my sweater, rending skin and finding blood beneath.

I saw Cal, Conrad and Bethina go into the ditch on the other side of the path as Dean pulled me down. Mud soaked into my stockings and through the holes in my boots, and freezing water numbed me.

“What—” I started, but Dean pressed his finger against my lips.

A second later, I felt something unfurl in my mind, like a flower opening under the light of the moon. It prickled across my forehead, over my scalp and down my spine, fingers of feeling scraping across my every nerve.

Please, I thought as panic pressed on my chest, slowing my breath to almost nothing, not here. Not now. I knew the sensation bubbling up from the recesses of my brain, knew it the same way I knew my own heartbeat. My blood was reacting to iron, iron that whoever Cal had scented carried, iron worked into an unseen machine. And with the machinery came something else: the power that my father, in his journal, had called a Weird. And on the heels of the Weird, because machines and iron were inexorably intertwined, the madness would bloom.

My Weird had been quiet since we’d been walking through the Mists, but not now. Now it was pushing against the inside of my skull, threatening to crack it. I pressed a palm against my forehead and dug the heel in, willing myself to stay quiet as my thoughts went wild, clamoring for me to scream and let my Weird free. Behind them was something blacker, something that crawled and giggled as it picked at the scars on my psyche. Let me in, Aoife. Let me show you.…

I saw a sharp stone protruding from the embankment, and I ran my hand against it, dragging it down my palm. Blood dribbled down my wrist and the sharp, clear prick of pain pushed the whispers back. When all else failed, physical hurt would quiet the voices in my head. For now, anyway.

The Weird still pressed on my skull, and I pushed harder against the stone, focusing only on the pain.

On the road, the trees parted ahead of us and disgorged two tall, thin figures. They weren’t Fae—I could tell that much from their lack of silver eyes and pointed teeth—but they weren’t human, either. They moved too smoothly for that, like the fog all around us glided between the trees, and their forms were too slim and angular.

The Erlkin had found us. The people of the Mists, the other half of Dean’s bloodline, had found the intruders in their domain and were coming to exterminate us. At best. At worst, they were Erlkin working for Grey Draven, and we were about to be shackled and taken back to Lovecraft. I pressed my forehead down into the dirt. That couldn’t happen. It would be the end of even a faint hope that I could remain free and sane.

Dean squeezed my arm, each finger carving a groove that would leave purple marks behind. He was telling me to stay quiet. Stay still. Not to give us away.

I wasn’t the one, as it turned out, who screwed up—a splash came from the ditch on the other side of the path and I knew it could only be Cal.

“Oh, iron damn this day!” I hissed, breaking free of Dean’s grasp, trying to reach Cal before the Erlkin did … something. I’d use my Weird, keep them from taking us, keep us free of imprisonment for one more day. Honestly, I didn’t know what I was going to do. The new Aoife moved without thinking, summoning the scream of the Weird into the front of her mind.

Conrad erupted from his side of the ditch before I could fully leap from my hiding spot, entrapped my arms and took me to ground, my knees crashing into the gravel with sharp, hot blossoms of pain as he smothered me.

The Erlkin shouted at us in a guttural language I didn’t understand, but I knew when someone was yelling at me not to move. And Conrad was muttering to me as the ground shook with their approaching footsteps, a single word over and over.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid. So stupid, Aoife.”

“We know there are more of you skulking in there!” the Erlkin shouted in English. “Show your faces!”

“I’m going to let you up and we’re going to run, all right?” Conrad whispered into my hair. “Fast as you can. Just run. The others will be all right—the Erlkin don’t want them, just us.”

I struggled, trying to get out from under his weight. “Get off me, Conrad!” I hissed. “You’re not making this any better.”

“Show yourselves,” the Erlkin ordered. “Or we open fire into the bushes and drag your bodies back to the dirigible!”

“Wait!” Conrad shouted, raising his head. “We aren’t Fae spies. We’re just traveling through. There’s no need for all this, I promise you.”

I heard the lock and snap of a weapon, and my Weird pounded against my skull at the proximity of a complex machine, a machine it wanted to bend and twist to its will. My will. But that couldn’t happen. The Erlkin couldn’t know about my ability, so I held it back, until I thought I’d burst. I threw Conrad’s arms off me, feeling as if I’d suffocate if he touched me for another second.

“I’m Conrad Grayson,” Conrad announced. He stood above me now, hands out to the side, the long, clever fingers we shared splayed in deference to show his empty palms. “I’ve been here before, and I’ve always been a friend to the Erlkin, just like my father, Archibald Grayson. Maybe you’ve heard of him?”

To my right, Bethina and Cal climbed slowly from the ditch they’d thrown themselves into, Bethina clutching Cal’s arm. He was doing an all-right job of not losing his form, but it wasn’t good enough. I could see long teeth, and yellow eyes, and claws. I jerked my chin at him and he swallowed his ghoul face, features rippling until he was human again.

Now that we’d been caught, all I could think about was how we could convince the Erlkin we weren’t a threat. I wasn’t leaving Dean and Cal and Bethina, that much was certain. Conrad could run if he wanted to. I’d already left enough people behind.

“You,” the Erlkin said to Conrad. “Oh, we know all about you, Conrad Grayson.”

I took the chance to examine the Erlkin while he was focused on my brother and his big mouth. He was tall, thin, with hollow cheeks and stringy black hair pulled back with a leather thong at his neck. He looked like a human who’d been dead a few days, whose skin, tinged blue, had begun to tighten. In another life, when I’d been a student, some of us freshmen had been dared to go into the anatomy room in the School of Hospice. The cadaver on the table, dead of a ghoul attack, had looked much the same.

The thing he held in his hands was about the size of a crossbow but had a bulbous end, a glass ball that enclosed a coil of copper piping running back to a bulky gearbox near a trigger. Putting together what I’d learned at the Academy, I guessed it was a stun gun, with a windup static charge.

“You think you can hire slipstreamers to smuggle you back and forth across our borders any time you please?” the lead Erlkin snarled. “You think we don’t know every time your sack of meat walks through the Mists? We’re not stupid, human, nor are we savages. We see you. We know that someone breached the Gates, and we know that our borders aren’t safe. You’re not welcome here, by any true citizen of the Mists who’s not just out to take your money and leave you to die in a swamp.”

I looked up at Conrad in alarm. I’d thought the Erlkin who’d helped us escape Graystone, our father’s house, had been, at the very least, not criminals. Honestly, I’d hoped they’d been in some kind of authority, that Conrad had used his charm to sway the Erlkin to his cause, but I saw now that I was wrong. Slipstreamers, Dean had said, were Erlkin who used the Gates on the sly, for illicit purposes, caring nothing for what might happen if they misused the Gates or allowed something unwanted to come through along with them. It was horribly dangerous—slipstreamers didn’t really know what they were doing, and often as not, their charges disappeared into a void.

In short, I thought we’d been invited to the Mists. But knowing Conrad as I did, I should have guessed he’d done something underhanded. I could have strangled him in that moment, and I doubted Dean or Cal or Bethina would have stopped me, judging from the looks on their faces.

“Listen,” Conrad said, making a smoothing motion in the air between the Erlkin and himself. “I’m sure we can work this out.”

“You’re a wanted man,” the Erlkin snarled. “And the rest of you are trespassers. Every time you cross from the Iron Land or anywhere else to the Mists, you raise the chance of the Fae finding a way in and crossing over with you. This may be an in-between place, but it’s our place. And we don’t want you. Breaching borders without permission of the Erlkin is a grave offense.” He moved his leather-clad finger to the trigger of his weapon. “For the danger you’ve caused our lands, I could put you down right here, by law.”

Conrad took another step forward. I wanted to yell at him not to be an idiot, but I couldn’t make myself talk. I wanted to grab him like he’d grabbed me, foolish and frantic, and run, but the trees rustled behind us and two more Erlkin with similar weapons stepped onto the road. Who knew how many more might be in the trees? I stayed still, my heart pounding, hating myself for hesitating.

“We can work this out,” Conrad said again. “I have money.”

“We’re soldiers—we work for the people of Windhaven. We don’t want your money.” The Erlkin nodded to the weapon in his hands. “This is a shock rifle. Might not kill you, but it’ll knock you out. Now stay put before I prove it to you.”

“I say we shoot him here,” said the other. “Lowlife consorting with slipstreamers, and probably a human criminal himself. We don’t need that kind in our land.”

Both Erlkin raised their rifles. I opened my mouth to shout. Conrad might have been a complete idiot for using criminals to get him into the Mists and escape the Proctors, but he was my brother, and if I had to throw myself into the line of fire, I would.

Before I could do more than stumble to my feet, Dean’s shape appeared between us and the Erlkin. “Don’t shoot.”

The Erlkin looked at Dean, then each other. The pair behind us shifted uncomfortably, but at a gesture from the leader, they lowered their rifles.

“Is it …?” said the one who’d wanted to vaporize Conrad.

“I think it is,” said the leader. He cocked an eyebrow at Dean. “You’ve grown a foot or two, Nails, but I’d know that smug face anywhere.”

I cut a glance at Dean. I knew that he was half Erlkin, but I’d had no idea he was known to the Erlkin at large. I stayed quiet, waiting for him to say something and praying that it wouldn’t be one of the smartass comments that usually came out of his mouth.

Dean bristled, his shoulders going up the way they did when he got insulted. “That’s not my name. It hasn’t been for years, and you of all people, Skip, should know that.”

“That’s his name?” Cal said, surprised. “Skip? Kinda lighthearted.”

“Cal,” I said, trying not to move my lips or my body in any way that could be interpreted as threatening. “Shut up.”

“I forget what you’re running under these days,” Skip said. “Dave or Dale or something, right? While you pretend you’re flesh-and-blood human?”

“It’s Dean,” Dean gritted out. “And I’m a hell of a lot more human than you.”

For a breathless second, I thought Skip was going to shoot Dean, and then move on to Conrad and the rest of us. His cadaverous brow furrowed, and his body language tightened so much I was surprised he didn’t break. Then he dropped his rifle and laughed.

Dean laughed too, but he didn’t drop his shoulders. Neither did Skip, although he pasted a great big smile on his face, one that looked about as out of place as I’d have looked at a formal tea party.

“Hell, man,” Skip said. “How long has it been?”

“Ten years, at least,” Dean said. “We were both still playing with toys, for sure.”

“Yeah, except it looks like you never stopped playing around,” Skip said, gesturing at us. “What on the scorched earth is going on here? You still running humans around in circles and calling yourself an underground guide?”

Dean’s shoulders tightened another notch. “Why are you asking, Skip? You keeping tabs on me?”

“Not me.” Skip shrugged. “But someone up there is keeping an eye on you, boyo, a close and watchful eye, at that.”

Dean didn’t stop smiling, but he dropped back to stand next to me. The implicit meaning wasn’t lost on me: he was with us, even though he shared Erlkin blood, just like Conrad and I shared the Fae’s. None of us was one thing or the other. We were caught in the middle, just like we were caught between the four Erlkin with their rifles.

“We’re not here to make trouble,” Dean told Skip. “We’re just passing through.”

Skip shook his head. “Don’t even try to sell that one to me, Nails. Dean. Whatever. You know we’ve got to take you up. That one’s a wanted criminal, and the others, well.” He sighed. “We know what’s happening in the Iron Land.”

“I really doubt that,” Dean muttered, but he nodded to Conrad and the rest of us. “Fine. Take us up to the city on Windhaven. Can’t say I missed that flying junkyard at all, so let’s get this over with.”

Skip gestured at Conrad. “We’re going to arrest him and put the cuffs on.”

Conrad bristled. “The hell you are.”

“Conrad,” I snapped at him, jabbing him on the arm. “You’ve done enough to aggravate these gentlemen, don’t you think?”

He looked at me like I’d slapped him with my hand rather than my tongue. I felt a pang in return. I used to be a good girl, a nice girl, who never so much as raised her voice. Who would never have scolded her brother for only doing what he thought he had to.

Well, she was gone, along with the life she’d lived. Conrad had led us back into the Mists as a wanted criminal, and he’d gotten us into this mess. I loved my brother, but he could be a prize idiot.

Skip gestured to his fellow soldier, who pulled out a pair of old-fashioned skeleton-key shackles. I flinched when I saw the gleam of polished, oiled iron. I just hoped Conrad would be out of them before the madness started to creep in. The last time he’d had a fit, back in Lovecraft, he’d attacked me and tried to slash my throat. I tried not to think about it, the feel of the knife against my skin, the curious warmth of blood loss, but the memories crept in and I flinched as the Erlkin snapped the cuffs shut around my brother’s wrists.

Skip gestured to the group, and we fell into a loose line, bracketed by the four Erlkin.

Dean grabbed my arm and leaned close enough that his lips were against my ear. “When he asks—and he will—you and I met somewhere that didn’t involve guiding, you’re here because your brother got you mixed up in a scheme, and for the love of all that’s iron, don’t mention the Fae stuff unless you want your head hung out as a warning to anyone else who’d wander into the Mists. Got it?”

“Got it,” I murmured, keeping my eye on the back of Skip’s head. Dean had made it evident there was no love lost between Fae and Erlkin, but I had the sinking impression that I’d gotten into a swamp much deeper and more dangerous than I could have conceived. I wasn’t as good a liar as Dean or Conrad, and I couldn’t lie inside my own mind at all—I was scared of what we’d find when we reached this Windhaven, whatever it was.

“Knew you’d catch on, princess,” Dean muttered, and brushed a kiss against the top of my ear before he let go of me.

I put aside the way his touch made my thoughts jiggle out of alignment. It wasn’t the time for crushes and weak knees, even if I wanted nothing more than to have everything be right again, and my biggest concern to be what to wear on a date with Dean, a real one with no Proctors and no specter of their lie. I raised my voice instead and spoke to Skip.

“Where are we going?”

“Windhaven,” he said. “And to get to Windhaven, we’re going to fly.”