The Nightmare Garden

5 Through the Mist Gate

BEFORE LONG, WE ran into clots of Erlkin in the corridors, and Dean cursed. “We can’t get down to the bay.”

“Where is it?” I said. Dean pointed his finger at the floor.

“Below the pilothouse,” he said. “They can reach it by evacuation tube.”

I bit my lip. The idea that sprang to mind just then was insane, but it was less of a danger than passively waiting for Draven to catch us again.

“Come with me,” I said, hoping the others wouldn’t ask too many questions, because I didn’t have a lot of answers. That was the problem with on-the-fly plans—sometimes you fell. I turned and started toward the room where Shard had kept me, hoping now wouldn’t be one of those times.

Dean shook his head as I crossed the room and opened the porthole. “Oh, no, Aoife,” he said, realizing what I had in mind.

“We’re not moving,” I said. “We can make it.”

“Yeah, and the next time we take a direct hit we’re going to get shaken off like so many pieces of dust,” Cal said, gesturing at the porthole and the ledge beyond. “This is crazy, Aoife.”

“You of all people have something real to lose when Draven boards us,” I told him, giving him a cutting look. Bethina glanced between us.

“What’s she mean?”

“Nothing,” Cal snarled. “Nothing.”

Above us, I heard the whirr of powerful turbines and a knocking against the hull.

“Boarding ladders,” Dean said. “The Proctors are coming onto Windhaven. We don’t have any more time.”

I levered my leg out the porthole. “I’m going.”

“Me too,” Bethina said, squaring her shoulders. “It couldn’t be any worse than here.”

Clinging to the metal skin of a vessel floating in midair was not my idea of a pleasant experience. I reached out and grabbed the nearest rudder, and for a breathless moment before my foot found the ledge, I swung free.

Dean followed, then Cal. He helped Bethina, and Conrad came last. I allowed myself a small moment of relief that everyone had gone along with me with minimal arguing. We might have a chance after all.

“I changed my mind!” Bethina shrieked above the wind howling around us. “I want to go back!”

“No!” Cal shouted. “No going back now! I’m right behind you.”

I crawled down the side of Windhaven, gripping the rudders and the rungs of a maintenance ladder, feeling the shudders of Draven’s boarding under my hands. But as the bottom hull curved, holding on became harder, gravity pulling my weight away from the hand- and footholds.

“You okay?” Dean grunted as we climbed.

“No,” I gritted out. I couldn’t see him where he hung above me, just heard his ragged breathing. “Okay is not what I am at the moment.”

“Hang on, princess,” he said. “This is nothing. This is a walk in the park.”

“You have a very strange idea of a park,” I panted. Two plump blue balloons were tethered at the bottom of Windhaven’s hull. I reached the first and risked taking one hand off the hull to open the basket door. My hands and arms were on fire, and I could feel tremors starting in my shoulder and working down to my fingers.

“Go on,” Dean said. “Start untethering this thing and I’ll help the others.”

To get into the basket, I had to turn myself around and crawl in upside down and practically headfirst. Spinning with vertigo, I let go and dropped onto the wire mesh. I pulled myself to my feet and went to the balloon’s tether, a flexible metal arm that was attached to the evacuation tube above us.

Dean landed on the mesh next to me, then stood and pulled Cal into the basket after him. He reached out for Bethina, who shook her head, copper curls hanging free in space. “I can’t let go!”

“Foul the gears, Bethina!” Dean shouted. “You can’t stay plastered to the bloody hull for the rest of your life!”

“If I let go, I’ll fall!” Bethina cried. Tears were streaming down her face, streaking like rain in the wind.

“You won’t fall, doll,” Dean promised, his voice changing to a soothing tone. “I’ve got strong arms. I’ll catch you.”

“Go!” Conrad snarled at her from where he clung to the ladder behind her. “I could have climbed up and down this ship twice in the time it’s taking you.”

“Conrad!” I snapped, horrified at how he could be so insensitive at a time like this. “That is really not helping!”

Bethina extended one trembling hand to Dean, and he caught her and hauled her aboard. When she stood up, shaking, she cast Conrad a look that could have stopped traffic. Cal wrapped his arms around her, and she buried her face against his collar. I almost wished she’d just slapped Conrad. Maybe then he would have learned that he couldn’t say whatever he wanted whenever he wanted to whoever was within earshot.

I finished untethering the balloon and the craft floated upward, bumping gently against the underside of Windhaven.

“At last,” Conrad breathed, and moved to close the gap and jump aboard from where he hung.

But before he could, Windhaven groaned, the propeller blades spinning to life high above us, and the floating city listed sharply to one side.

Conrad missed the balloon cage and lost his grip on the hull, pitching off the edge of the cage. He caught the mesh with two of his fingers, slipping down toward the nothing of the mist below.

“Conrad!” I shrieked, diving across space and catching his hand. He flailed and latched onto my sleeve, and with horror I felt myself sliding out of the balloon cage. Bethina screamed, sounding very far away, and Dean shouted something at Cal, but all I could see was the fear in Conrad’s eyes as he hung over the gently roiling cauldron of fog. Everything else was sucked away; there was only the knowledge that I had to save him, and the resolute stone in my stomach saying it wouldn’t end this way. Not after everything we’d been through.

I scrabbled for hold and grabbed the bar at the foot of the balloon’s door, hanging on with all my strength. Conrad grappled for purchase on my other arm. The pain was worse than anything I’d ever felt, and it radiated through me. But I couldn’t let go—I wouldn’t. Conrad’s fingers found my skin, digging furrows in my wrist.

“Aoife!” Dean shouted, dropping to his stomach as the balloon swayed wildly, free of its restraints. He grabbed me by the wrist with one hand and the shoulder of my jacket by the other, trying to haul me back into the basket. “Cal, get over here!” he bellowed. Cal left the rudder of the balloon waving wildly and joined Dean, reaching out his lanky arm and catching Conrad’s free hand. With heaving and straining and a lot of swearing, they finally hauled us back in.

Conrad collapsed, shaking, and I lay perfectly still, unable to move. My right arm, the one Conrad had grabbed, felt boneless and disconnected from the rest of my body. I could feel blood from scrapes dribbling across my skin, turning cold against the air. My forehead had begun bleeding again, sending stinging red spots into my vision. All of it was from far away, though, as if I were attached to my body by nothing more than the air we were floating in.

Dean’s face drifted into my tunneled vision. “You all right?” he said. “Let me get a look at you, princess.”

Cal helped Conrad to a place in the corner of the basket while Dean turned my head from side to side. “Don’t check out on me,” he murmured. “You’re fine. We’re all fine.”

“We might not be!” Cal shouted, pointing ahead of us. The balloon was trapped beneath Windhaven’s hull like a butterfly beneath a glass bulb. The brass finial at the top of the harness holding the balloon’s gas bag in place squealed along the underside of the floating city, trying desperately to gain altitude.

I followed the sight line of Cal’s finger along our route and felt panic rise in my chest, unfreezing my body from the shock of finding myself still alive.

The great propeller fan on the rear of Windhaven pulled us closer and closer as it sucked air into its blades, turning the city at a bank so steep that metal screeched and rivets popped and flew like bullets around us. One punctured the silk of the balloon, but we didn’t drop clear of the fan.

“We’re going to get chopped up!” Cal shouted. “We need to lose altitude!”

“And how exactly do you propose we do that?” Dean asked him.

“Steer us out of here, then!” Cal cried as the balloon bounced harder. Conrad twined his fingers in the mesh of the passenger cage. Bethina grabbed me around the shoulders and held me still so that I wouldn’t get thrown around in my fragile state.

Dean snatched the rudder, straining so hard the cords of muscle in his neck stood out like the cables of a suspension bridge.

“It’s too strong,” he panted. “I can’t turn it.” Conrad got up shakily and tried to help him, but even their combined efforts weren’t moving us quickly enough.

I crawled to the front of the passenger cage, curling my fingers in the mesh and using it to pull myself to my knees.

I focused my senses on the fan. It was the largest thing in my mind, a great mechanism of gears and blades, harnessing power from the wind and using it to hold up a device that was never supposed to fly.

My Weird wanted to touch the fan, wanted to connect with it, like reaching into a flame because it burns so brightly you have to feel it against your flesh even though you know it will sear your skin.

I pushed, with all my strength, pushed against the fan, willed it to reverse its direction and allow us to escape Draven.

My head throbbed, heat blossoming across my skin as if my blood were molten in my veins. Then the wind changed direction, blew so hard that it knocked me backward, and I lost my grip on my Weird, falling out of touch with my body and into the dark of unconsciousness.

I came to on a bed of moss that was the delicate blue color of a summer sky. I inhaled its dry, earthy scent and waited for my eyes to focus. There was a bit of dried blood crusted in the corner of my eye, and I swiped at it as I took in my surroundings. We were in a dead forest, gray spindly trees reaching twisted, bare branches into fog. Everything was gray and blue and white, as if we had fallen into a world with all other color leached out.

I rolled onto my other side and caught a more vivid slash of blue: the balloon, deflated. The cage was half sunk in the black muck of a swamp, and nobody was inside.

I sat up, alone for a moment in the drifting grayness, and called out. “Dean? Conrad?” My voice didn’t actually form words, just came out in a croak. What if something had happened? What if I was the only one left? My stomach clenched.

“Miss?” Bethina materialized from the fog, and I collapsed back onto the moss in relief. I wasn’t alone.

“Oh, stones! She’s awake!” Bethina called back into the nothingness. The others came running, and Dean crouched beside me.

“Easy,” he said. “You’ve been out for a while.”

Conrad crouched on my other side and pulled my chin so I was facing him. “Pupils are the same size,” he announced. “The bump on the head is superficial. We can move her.”

“I’ve got it under control,” Dean snapped. “Aoife isn’t going anywhere if she’s not in shape to walk.”

“Excuse me, but you’re not in charge here,” Conrad said. “Nor are you my sister’s keeper. I took care of her for fifteen years, I think I know when she’s fit to walk.”

“You call leaving her all by herself taking care of her?” Dean snorted. “Attacking her, putting a mark on her she can never wash off? Please. Aoife’s better off with me.”

“Listen, Erlkin,” Conrad snarled. “I know exactly what your idea of taking care of my sister entails, and that’s gonna stop right now. She’s a good girl and she doesn’t need your paws all over—”

“Stop it!” I shouted, and every one of my injuries throbbed, but I bit the inside of my cheek to stop myself from flinching. “You are both,” I enunciated carefully, so there would be no mistake, “behaving like complete idiots.”

I stretched out my hand to Cal. “Can you please help me up? We should get moving before Draven sends out men on the ground to track us.”

“Sure thing,” Cal said quickly, easing between Dean and Conrad and taking my hand. I left them crouched on the moss, glaring at each other. I wasn’t a shiny brass trophy, and I wasn’t in the mood to be batted back and forth in Dean and Conrad’s little contest to see who was the biggest, baddest boy in our group. Right now, Bethina would do a better job of leading us to safety, and she’d scream a lot less too.

There was no path through the fog, just spongy ground punctuated by vernal pools that seeped into my boots whenever I mistakenly splashed down in one. The dead forest was endless, as if a blight crept ahead of us through the fog, washing all life out of the world. This was even eerier than the ancient forest we’d come to when we crossed from Lovecraft. The creeping sensation up my spine told me we shouldn’t be here.

“What happened to this place?” I asked Dean, when he caught up with my limping steps.

“Fire,” he said. “Long time ago, before I was born. Maybe before my mother, too.”

“Big fire,” I said. The fog swirled back and forth, thinning to lace. The dead forest went on as far as the eye could see.

“The Fae set it,” Dean said. “They were looking for insurgents, some of my kind who’d set off an explosion in the silver mines in the Thorn Land. They burned the entire forest to the ground. Killed thousands.”

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. I understood then why Shard had looked at me with such coldness. It didn’t excuse her locking me up and refusing to believe a word I said, but it at least explained it.

Dean shrugged. “Not my world. I left as soon as I was able.”

“Shard and Skip,” I said, “they both call you Nails. Why do you have two names?” Cal had two names, but he was a ghoul—wholly other. Dean was more human by a mile than he was Erlkin, from what I could see, and I wanted to know what his name in the Mists meant. I wanted to know everything about him, not that he’d tell me without a lot of effort on my part. But I was willing to try.

“Nails isn’t my name,” Dean said tightly. He fished in his pockets and pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes, crushed beyond recognition. “Dammit,” he muttered, shoving the twisted cardboard back into his jeans.

“Your mother seems to think it is,” I said. Dean shook his head.

“You have to understand, the Erlkin are a slave race. Way back in the primordial ooze they lived underground, and when the Fae dug down looking for silver, they enslaved the creatures they found. They wouldn’t give us real names, names with meaning and magic, so they called us after scraps—glass and silver, drill bits and rock crushers.”

“Nails,” I offered.

“Yup,” Dean said. “When the first generation of free Erlkin named their children, they gave them slave names as a way to tell the Fae they didn’t own us anymore. It’s tradition now.” His mouth twitched. “But I’m not Erlkin, and I don’t need to be reminded that I was ever anyone’s slave.”

“I noticed your mother doesn’t have any problem with your being a half-breed, unlike her problems with me,” I muttered.

“Oh, she has plenty of problems with it,” Dean said with a laugh drier than the dead trees all around us. “But she knows that I’m her fault, too. Stealing away and meeting a human—tsk, tsk and all that. I know it was a lot easier for her in her position at Windhaven after I lit out for Lovecraft and decided to live with my old man. She got that nice shiny captain’s promotion the minute I left.” Bitterness tinged his voice like unsweetened tea on the tongue.

“You really have a brother?” I asked. Dean had only mentioned him in passing, but I was realizing that in spite of spending nearly all my waking moments with him since we’d met, I still knew virtually nothing about his family or his life before me.

“Half-brother,” Dean said. “One hundred percent pure boring human. Older than me by a good few years—my pops had a wife before Shard bewitched his poor dumb self. The woman ditched him and Kurt—that’s my brother. Kurt was never too fond of me, even though his old lady was long gone. Didn’t blame him except when he and I were slugging it out. I wouldn’t be itching to bond with the bastard child of my father’s new girlfriend if I were him either.”

“And where’s Kurt now?” I prompted, racking my brain to remember what else Dean had told me about his past.

“Hell if I know,” Dean said. “He went MIA fighting the Crimson Guard, ’bout a year before you and I crossed paths.” He sighed, and I could tell from his twitchy gait and fingers that he wanted a cigarette. “Truth is, Aoife, I never really felt like I was part of the family. I was a wayward kid and I wasn’t at home much. But it beat the pants off staying in Windhaven and marching in lockstep like my good little Erlkin relatives.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “About Kurt.”

“It’s all right,” Dean said. “Like I told you, we were never close. Not like you and Conrad.”

“Conrad and I haven’t been that close for a while,” I said quietly. “And we’ve been apart since he ran away a year ago.”

“You’ll get it back,” Dean said. “He looks out for you, and even if he’s a cranky bastard, he cares about you. I can tell by the way he’s giving me the hairy eyeball right now.”

I glanced over my shoulder and saw that Conrad was indeed staring a hole into the back of Dean’s head as we walked. I sighed and dropped back to match my stride to my brother’s.

“Will you quit glaring? You’re embarrassing me.”

“I don’t like your friend, Aoife,” Conrad told me. “Not one bit. He’s too familiar with you.”

“He’s familiar because I want him to be familiar,” I snapped. “Stop acting like you’re our father, Conrad, because you’re not.”

He flinched, and I felt as if I might as well have smacked him across the face. “I know that,” he muttered. “But he’s not here, is he? Nobody knows where he is or if he’s even alive.”

I stayed quiet for few steps, our feet squashing into the bog the only sound besides the faint murmur of Cal and Bethina’s conversation. Conrad was right—we didn’t know. None of the Erlkin would admit to knowing where Archie had gone. And he’d made no attempt to contact us. Not that he could, even if he was in a position to. After the Engine exploded Conrad and I had effectively vanished from the Iron Land without a trace.

No matter how much I wished Archie would appear again and make it right, as he had when I’d been in Draven’s prison, he wasn’t going to, and it was time I accepted that. I bit down hard on my lip to hold back my tears. “We know where Nerissa is,” I said after a time, when I could speak without a break in my voice.

“No,” Conrad said instantly. “Don’t even think of that, Aoife. We can’t go back there.”

“Draven already found us,” I said. “He’ll find us no matter where we go, and I have to get Nerissa out of Lovecraft.” Or what was left of Lovecraft. I imagined a wasteland overrun with ghouls and pockets of vicious survivors barricaded in their homes while black-clad Proctor squads roamed the streets and their clockwork ravens swooped overhead, watching every living thing left in the desolation.

“Why?” Conrad demanded. “She was locked up in a madhouse when everything went sideways. Those places are fortresses. She’s probably safer there than on the run with us anyway. And honestly, Aoife—that woman never did one bit of good for us our entire lives. She’s crazy.”

“She’s not crazy,” I snarled, feeling my teeth draw back over my lips. My anger flared bright and I felt the insane urge to strike out at Conrad. I’d never wanted to actually hit him before, beyond a light smack when we were arguing over something minor. “She’s poisoned by iron, like we were. She’ll be fine if we can get her out of the city.”

“You don’t know that,” Conrad said. “She’s been exposed to iron for years longer than us, Aoife. And she’s full-blood Fae besides. Her mind could be punched full of holes, just like the doctors always said it was.” He stopped and folded his arms, brows drawing together. “Why do you care so much, Aoife? You were always more angry at her than I was for leaving us, making us wards of the city.”

“Because,” I said softly. “I left her there, Conrad. I did this, and when everything went wrong and the city got destroyed I had to leave her.” A sob bubbled out of my chest and I didn’t try to stop it. Crying was better than screaming or collapsing and refusing to go on. “I have to go back and try to fix her,” I whispered. “Fix her and try to fix what I did to Lovecraft. Mend it somehow, the Gates and the Engine and all of it.”

“People aren’t machines, Aoife,” Conrad said softly, and reached for my hand, squeezing all my fingers by wrapping his thumb and forefinger around them like he had when we were very small. “Some, nobody can fix.”

“I have to try,” I whispered. My dreams would never cease, and the weight of my guilt would never be lifted, until I was able to look at what I’d done to Lovecraft with my own eyes, until I had at least tried to get my mother out of the iron city that had turned her into someone my brother and I didn’t recognize.

Conrad sighed and then dropped my hand, shoving his through his unruly black hair, so much like mine.

“All right,” he said at last. “Say I was insane enough to go back to the Iron World—where I can’t even remember my own name once the poison takes hold—risk using the Gates now that they’ve been breached by the Proctors and stone knows what else, travel overland with ghouls on the loose, and go back into the very same city I barely escaped from a year ago—what then? How are we even going to find Nerissa if she’s not still in Christobel Asylum, never mind get her in shape to walk out of there on the kind of rough journey we’ve had? How would we evade the Proctors and Draven?”

I chewed on my lip for a moment. The sting wasn’t worse than the pain through the rest of my body, but Conrad’s questions were. “I don’t know,” I told him. “But I will by the time we get to Lovecraft.”

I filled Dean in on the plan—if you could call it that—while we walked, and to his credit, he reacted better than Conrad had. “I can’t say what I’d do if Shard and I were in the same situation,” he said.

“You are,” I said. “Draven was boarding Windhaven. He’s not inclined to be kind.”

Dean sniffed. “My mother can take care of herself. And a city full of Erlkin is a far cry from some scared, sniveling humans hiding in a basement.”

“I hope so,” I said. “You know I feel terrible. I thought he’d never find me in the Mists.”

“Not your fault,” Dean said shortly. “Draven’s a pit bull. He’ll hold on till he’s dead or somebody else is.”

“He doesn’t want me dead,” I muttered. “He doesn’t want me at all. He just wants bait for my father.”

Dean stopped us at the crest of a hill, behind a half-collapsed stone wall. We had come out of the dead forest and were standing on the outskirts of a ruined village, small white stone cottages topped with rotting thatch, the only thing stirring in the breeze.

“Wait here,” Dean said. I looked down the slope toward where the cottages disappeared into the ever-flowing mist.

“Why? Where are we?”

“The Mist Gate,” Conrad said, nearly making me jump out of my skin. Cal joined us, and his nostrils flared.

“Humans are down there,” he muttered, out of Bethina’s hearing.

“Draven’s, likely,” Dean said. “He’ll have guards to make sure his bread crumbs don’t dry up and blow away.”

“How did he even come through?” Conrad said. “Humans can’t pass into the Mists, not even members of the Brotherhood. Not without help.” He shifted, obviously remembering the “help” the Erlkin slipstreamers had given him, crossing him over like so much contraband.

“He might have it,” I said

He jerked his thumb down the hill. “So what do we do about them?”

Cal’s tongue flicked out. “Leave that to me.”

“Cal, no,” I hissed, glancing behind me at Bethina. “What about her?”

“Keep her busy,” Cal said, shrugging. “We need to get out of here, and this is the quickest way.”

“Cal,” I snapped. “Don’t be ridiculous.” I turned and pointed at Conrad. “You and I.” We were the only ones besides Cal who had the ability to defend ourselves, even if my Weird was unreliable and my fighting skills nonexistent. At least I didn’t have to turn into a long-clawed, fanged monster to tap into my particular talent. I didn’t relish confronting the Proctors again, but I had to think of the group, not just myself.

“Me?” Conrad squawked, but I grabbed his arm and tugged him along, keeping to the shadows of the ruined cottages.

We crept down the hill, and before long I could hear low conversation in human voices.

“You better at least have a plan,” Conrad hissed. “These guys will have guns.”

I stopped in the archway of what had once been a barn. Peering around the corner, I could just make out two shapes standing in the fog.

I’d seen the hexenrings the Fae used to travel between the Iron World and their own, circles of simple stones or mushrooms wreathed with enchantments that could bend space and time, but the Erlkin’s Gates were a mystery to me. I’d watched Conrad use them only once, when he’d helped us escape from the ruins of the Iron World. Not even him, really—the slipstreamers had opened the way.

After I’d broken the Gates … and presumably allowed Draven to manipulate them somehow, without Erlkin aid.

That bothered me. If the Mists were open, what was to stop a free-for-all, beings crossing every Gate between every land? The fact that we’d seen only Draven so far in the Mists made me think there was something larger going on, possibly worse, but I hoped with everything I had that what I’d done to the Gates to Thorn hadn’t rippled to the rest of the lands.

That would be worse than one destroyed city. That would be worse than anything.

Now is not the time, Aoife. I steadied my breathing, and with it, my racing thoughts.

Two Proctors stood beyond the last of the ruins, in front of a tumbledown iron structure that was hard to make out distinctly through the mist.

I crouched down and hefted one of the stones that had fallen from the cottage wall.

“Whistle,” I told Conrad. He raised an eyebrow.

“Whistle? Are you cracked?”

“Will you just trust me for once?” I hissed. I might not have had a grand and daring plan for sneaking into Lovecraft, but I could at least handle a couple of Proctors. All students in Lovecraft learned how to get around guidelines and curfew, and uniformed Proctors weren’t usually the best and brightest of the crop anyway.

Conrad’s face was marked deeply with skepticism, but he put his fingers in his mouth and let out a piercing whistle.

Instantly the Proctors snapped alert, and the closer one started toward us. “Hey!” his partner shouted. “Draven said we were supposed to stand on this spot!”

“That could be him now,” the other insisted.

“No,” the first said. “He told us to stay put.”

“You really want to be the one who kept him waiting?” said the first Proctor. “You’ve seen how he gets. Especially since he got to be a bigwig in the Bureau.”

The other sighed, but then jerked his head in assent. “Make it fast, will ya? This place is the worst. Creepy as all hell.”

“Hello?” the first Proctor shouted. “Any virals lurking, show yourselves!”

I blinked, momentarily surprised that the Proctors still believed in the necrovirus. But how could they not? I wondered what excuse Draven had come up with to bring them all here, to a place that wasn’t supposed to exist and could get you burned for heresy for suggesting that it did.

The Proctor passed the stone wall, so close I could have reached out and plucked at the sleeve of his black uniform. Once he’d passed out of sight of his friend, I stepped out from cover behind him and swung the rock swiftly and surely, connecting with the back of his skull.

Conrad gaped at me, then at the sprawled Proctor on the ground, who lay unmoving. “Well?” I said to Conrad, hefting the rock. “Whistle again.”

“Stone and sun, Aoife,” Conrad muttered. “You’re not the sister I left behind, that’s for sure.”

“You’re not the brother who left, Conrad,” I retorted. That brother wouldn’t have looked at me like I was crazy for doing what was necessary, and it made me sad. But that was for another time, when we weren’t surrounded by Proctors and who knew what other dangers. “It’s a natural progression, as far as I’m concerned.”

Conrad rolled his eyes at me as if I were unbearably childish, but he stuck his fingers back in his mouth. The second Proctor fell in much the same way as the first.

Once Cal and Dean had helped Conrad tie the Proctors up, using their own belts and some rope in Cal’s backpack, we approached the Gate.

“All right,” Dean rubbed his hands together. “Conrad, get this bad boy up and running, and get us far away from Draven and his jackbooted blackbirds.”

“Me?” Conrad pointed at Dean. “You’re the Erlkin, you get us out of here.”

“Brother, I know less than nothing about those contraptions,” Dean said. “I’ve lived most of my life in the Iron Land, just like you. ’Sides, you need a technician or a slipstreamer to work the Gates, if you don’t want just anything getting in.”

“Yeah, you’re the one who’s been going back and forth like he knows a magic trick, according to Bethina and Aoife,” Cal piped up. “How’d you do it, Conrad?”

“I didn’t, all right!” Conrad answered, clearly irritated. “I paid Erlkin to take me back and forth. Just like that square deal Skip said.” He kicked a clump of muddy earth with his shoe. “I don’t know how to work the Gates. Is that what you want me to say? It’s the one thing I’m supposed to do as a Gateminder, besides have a Weird, and I can’t. I tried, I can’t, and I never could. And now that the Gates are so screwed up even people like us can’t always use them, I’ll never get the chance to try again. You happy now?”

“Damn, man,” Dean said after a moment. “You don’t have to put your dukes up. We were just asking a question.”

“Yeah,” Cal said. “I didn’t know. And it doesn’t matter,” he added quickly. “You just haven’t gotten the hang of it yet.”

I hadn’t known either, and I looked at Conrad with a new light shining on him, surprised that he’d admitted to all of us he wasn’t perfect. I’d assumed Conrad had found his Weird, and more importantly, learned how to manipulate the Gates, long before he’d sent me the letter that started me looking for him. I had no way of knowing he’d found someone to smuggle him. That he’d never touched his Weird.

That it was all up to me.

While Conrad sighed and paced away from the group, I turned in the opposite direction and went to examine the Gate. Conrad needed his space when he got in moods like this. He always had. Bethina looked for a moment like she was going to try to speak to him, but Cal laid a hand on her arm and shook his head.

Gates were, from what little I’d gleaned from the Fae, tears in the fabric between the Lands. Call it physics, or magic, or heresy, barriers kept humans, Fae, Erlkin and the older, darker things apart. Erected after the great Storm, when magic ran unbidden through the Iron Land and nearly caused a catastrophe on a global scale, the Gates had been a human idea first, but the Fae had taken them, twisted them. The Erlkin’s physical markers for their Gates were a far cry from the stone circles of the Fae and the simple thin spaces in the fabric of the Iron Land that a Gateminder felt as a tingle down the spine. This Gate was an iron structure, a plinth that tapered to a point at the top. A network of iron lattice filled the center, and in it a small tube of aether glittered, held at either end by spindly iron arms. That much aether could flatten the land for half a mile if it made contact with the air. I drew back my hand from the iron. I had better not screw this up.

“What do you think?” Dean asked at my shoulder. I jumped and let out a small noise.

“Sorry,” he said. “But can you get us out of here?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, tentatively placing my hand against the iron marker of the Gate. My Weird responded immediately, opening a vast void in my head, through which I could feel the mechanism of the Erlkin’s Gate—a machine, here, rather than a spell like the Fae’s stone circle—churning and wide open. “Holy …” I jerked my hand away. The skin was hot and pink, and I felt the telltale dribble of blood down my upper lip. “Darn it,” I said, swiping at it.

Dean handed me his bandanna. “So,” he said carefully, “not good?”

“It’s a machine,” I said. “So that’s … better, I guess, than Fae magic. But it’s open.”

One of Dean’s dark eyebrows arched above his silver eye. “Right now?”

“Wide open.” I sniffed and tasted metal in the back of my throat. My Weird was far more of a pain than a gift most of the time. And how could the Gate be open, with no one controlling it?

Because you didn’t just open the Gates to Thorn, my thoughts whispered. You broke something, some fundamental backbone, and now it’s just a matter of time until another Storm.

No. I couldn’t let my thoughts spin off track. It was just the Weird, or residual echoes from being on Windhaven and close to so much iron. That was all. I hadn’t kick-started a disaster of apocalyptic proportions.

Now if I could just believe that.

“Well, hell,” Dean said. “I’m taking the leap, then. We need to move—those two are going to wake up and Draven’s going to come back sooner or later.” He braced himself to run at the Gate. “I’ll go first, make sure it’s safe.”

“No!” I cried. Dean’s impetuous lack of forethought was one of the things that had appealed to me when we’d met, but now he was just acting insane, and it wasn’t helping anything.

I grabbed for his arm, but his leather jacket slipped between my fingers as he took a run at the Gate. “We don’t know what’s on the other side!” I shouted, frantic. Dean couldn’t get hurt. Couldn’t leave me alone. I couldn’t let him put himself at risk.

A split second later, Dean smacked into the metal lattice with a loud clang.

“Shit!” he bellowed, sitting down hard on the spongy ground, clutching his nose, which leaked a velvety trickle of blood down his square chin.

“Dean!” I cried. I ran to him and crouched at his side, using the tail of my shirt to stanch the bleeding.

“You said it was open,” he groaned.

“It was.” I fluttered my hands helplessly, wishing more than anything that I could stop his pain, but there was nothing I could really do.

“Man, that smarts,” Dean said, muffled against my shirt. He closed his hands over mine. “It’s okay, princess. Not your fault. I’ll be okay.”

I reached out from where I crouched and passed the tips of my fingers over the cold, mist-kissed iron of the Gate. It was dead now—nothing pricked my Weird as working. As quickly as it had opened, it had shut again. Which lent even more credence to my theory that something was deeply wrong.

Later, I could puzzle it out, worry and fret over what I’d done, but for now, Conrad’s statement remained true—we had to go before Draven found us here.

I focused my attention fully back on the Gate. I opened my mind, just as I had on Windhaven, not able to control a slight wince at the anticipation of skull-shattering pain.

I felt the machinery of the Erlkin Gate respond to my Weird, the aether blazing across my mind. I cracked one eye and saw the lattice begin to move. The arms were mechanical, and they moved like spider legs, crimping and rearranging themselves into new formations as gears within the Gate begin to grind. For a moment I felt the Gate slipping open again, responding to the blood of a Gateminder as it should, and then all at once it was too hot, too bright, and I couldn’t feel anything except furnace-warm air. I was burning alive, turning to ash, and I think I screamed before the world fell away.

The room had turned from sunset to night, the skies replete with a million stars. On one horizon, a faint blue line of dawn flared, while above my head triple moons, in phases from swollen full to the hunter’s horns, turned and waxed and waned in time.

“It’s not just gears and aether,” said the figure standing before me in a black cloak. “It’s those things, but it’s more. It’s the same thing that puts uncanny power in your blood, and it’s what allowed the Gates to come to exist in the first place.” He turned to watch the moons, cloak swirling. “And it can’t be harnessed and controlled. It’s a wild force, Aoife. It must be bargained with.”

I looked at the spinning clockwork palace and voiced the thought echoing in my head. “Am I dead?”

“Dead?” the figure snorted. “Knocked out, perhaps. Far from the Deadlands as you are from anywhere else, in this place.”

“Then why are we talking?” I said. “I haven’t been exposed to enough iron to trigger a madness dream.”

The figure smiled at me, the darkness of its face shifting. “You don’t know, Aoife?”

“No,” I said frankly. “I have no idea who you are or where we are.” This time, it felt even more real, more present, than when I’d first dreamed of the place, and it made me want to scream. I couldn’t be mad. I’d been doing so well, trying to hold on until Conrad and I found a more certain cure than simply hiding in the woods.

The sunrise beyond the dome was growing in intensity, but it wasn’t the sun of the Iron Land—it was green and flared around the edges with sunspots. It was a dying sun, looking down on a dying universe.

Above, the black tentacles lashed and writhed in the green light, and the figure turned back toward the great gears that churned before us.

“You’re dreaming, Aoife,” he said. “Not seeing the product of iron poisoning, but really dreaming. And it’s time for you to wake up.”

“Fantastic,” I mumbled. “Not only do I visit this place every time I close my eyes, I have to leave it and go back to the real world.”

“You don’t give your world enough credit,” said the figure. “I’ve seen them all. Yours is beautiful.”

“It’s awful,” I said. “And I made it that way.”

“No, Aoife,” said the dream figure. “What you did to the Engine was not as terrible a thing as you think. The worlds were never meant to be gated. At least, not your worlds. The Fae and the Iron … they need one another.”

The figure turned away from me again. “Now it really is time for you to go.” He turned the great gear, and I saw the green sun begin to spin out of its orbit, and the tentacles to recede with it.

“By the way,” said the dream figure. “Don’t try to use your handy little magic trick on a Gate in the Mists. The Erlkin are much better at keeping your kind out than the Fae.”

He moved the gears again, and I watched as the green sun began to go nova, burning out in a flash so bright that it seared my vision.

I came back to the world with a gasp, and the worst spike of pain in my head that I’d ever endured, save the one when I touched the Lovecraft Engine with my Weird. “Did I faint?” I demanded of Cal, the first face I saw leaning over me with an anxious expression. It was embarrassing, but better than blacking out from a madness-induced hallucination by miles.

“You just kind of keeled over,” he said, and upon seeing my mortified expression hastened to add, “You were only out for a few minutes.”

“You fell like somebody cut your strings,” Dean said, frowning. The bloody mark across the bridge of his nose made him look savage, but his eyes were filled with pure worry. He put his hands under my shoulders and helped me sit up. Touching Dean calmed the throbbing in my skull a bit, until Conrad cleared his throat.

“You were mumbling,” he said, reaching out his hand for me and then pulling it back like touching me might pass the fainting spell. “Your eyes were twitching in their sockets too.” He swallowed. “I’ve never seen you do that. Are you okay, Aoife?”

“Not really,” I said. I managed to stand up by myself, so that was something. When your friends and brother could disappear at any moment, every small thing a girl like me could do for herself was monumentally important.

“I really don’t like this place,” Bethina piped up. “I feel like something is watching us.”

I had to agree with her. This ghost-colored bit of the Mists was eerie, even by the standards of the things I’d seen recently, and my skin crawled as the drifting moisture kissed it.

“Don’t worry, Bethina,” Dean told her. “Nothing’s going to jump out and bite you.” He patted me on the shoulder. “Aoife will get us out of here.”

I didn’t say that with my spinning head, I wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry, but I grasped Dean’s hand in return. He was something solid to cling to, and I was so glad he was there.

Conrad’s lips compressed in a straight line. “If this is what’s going to happen, I’m not letting her touch the Gate again.” He fished in his jacket pocket, pulled out a dirty kerchief and handed it to me. “Clean yourself up,” he muttered to me, pressing the cloth into my hands. “Don’t like to see you bleeding.”

I swiped at my face and then shoved the kerchief into my own pocket.

“Thanks,” I whispered to Conrad. He shrugged—a gesture of kindness I thought we’d forgotten how to exchange. I felt a little less strained in that moment.

Planting my feet carefully until my balance came back, I returned to the Gate, but this time I examined the plinth itself. The Erlkin were engineers, I was an engineer. Surely I could make their machine work without my Weird. I still had a brain, at least until I fetched up against that much iron again. The plinth, not iron itself but some kind of smooth black stone, revealed a hinged door in the side, which opened into a small space studded with dials and gauges.

The symbols stamped next to each were similar to what I’d seen in Windhaven, and I called Dean over to translate. “There’ve got to be instructions for this thing.”

Dean whistled. “There’s just markings for places like the black forests, the dry wastes—not that I know why anyone would want to head there—and there’s one marked Iron.” He fingered the burnt edges of the panel. “But this thing is dead, princess. No way we’re turning it on manually.”

“The Gates are made of magic,” Conrad said. “This is just their physical manifestation. The rift between here and the Iron Land is still there.”

I gave Conrad a look with a raised eyebrow, a private look that said Can you feel the Gate?

Conrad coughed and looked away. “I mean, according to what I read at our father’s house.”

“Right, of course,” I said quickly, turning the dial Dean had pointed out to us.

The next dial asked for directionality in pictograms, incoming or outgoing, and I turned it. All that remained was to complete the circuit, but they were all fried.

Reflexively, I put my hand against the panel and felt a flutter of life from my Weird. The figure’s words came to me, but from far away. This could be our only chance to get out of here. I put both hands against the panel and fervently hoped this wouldn’t be the last thing I ever did.

“Here goes nothing,” I murmured so that only Dean could hear. Best case, the Gate worked for me and we got to go home. Worst case, I got electrocuted.

I wasn’t nearly as strong and capable as Dean and Bethina and Cal seemed to think I was, but I could do this. I could be brave, like they needed me to be.

I grabbed the lever with my hand, and my Weird with my mind, and flipped the metal circuit to the On position.

For a moment, there was nothing, just the sweet ache of the Weird coursing through me and into the circuit board. I didn’t try to push forward into the mechanism of the Gate, but I felt the void drop away again as the rift within the mechanism opened.

I felt a rumble under my hands and feet and heard the subtle swoop of aether rearranging itself inside the vacuum tube, and then I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle and stand up. I jerked my hand away from the lever and stepped away from the Gate. The row of gauges below the dials vibrated to life, needles climbing toward maximum.

Above us, I saw a bright flash of lightning and heard a crack of thunder nearly directly above my head. The ionized air all around made my skin crawl, and my Weird ran frantic circles in my mind as it sensed the wondrous, terrible machine that controlled the incalculable power of the world rift.

The lightning flashbulbed again, brighter than anything, leaving whorls on my vision, black clouds gathering over us like ghost crows, swooping down and making my head ring with a thunderclap so loud my teeth shook.

I gasped, drawing back from the Gate, which had become a lightning rod, making sure the others were clear as well. Nature and magic were beyond anyone’s control, even someone with a Weird. I didn’t feel ashamed of being wary of them.

The third flash snaked a bolt of electricity from the boiling clouds and hit the Gate, punctuated by a thunderclap so loud it deafened me instantly. Dean grabbed his ears and Bethina let out a scream, though I couldn’t hear it, could only see the panicked pink O of her lips.

Before me, in the center of the Gate’s iron arch, stood the same shimmering mirror that I’d seen when Conrad had transported us into the Mists, a wavering image of the Iron Land on the other side. It flickered, spiderweb cracks running across the glassine surface and then retreating. I could tell that the Gate still wasn’t stable, but it was open, and that was all that mattered.

I’d kept us safe from Draven. I’d gotten us home.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Dean shouted at the others. “Go!”

One by one, they hurried through the flickering hole in reality, Conrad bringing up the rear, until only Dean and I remained.

“Now or never, princess,” he told me. I looked back at the Mists, the ruined village, and the swirling white fog that hid Draven and his men, growing closer by the second.

“I hope this is the right thing to do.” I hadn’t meant to say anything, just step through the Gate, but it came out. I felt if it hadn’t, I might have exploded.

Dean looked into my eyes. “I don’t know that. But I trust you, princess. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders and you haven’t steered me wrong yet.”

I reached out and put my hand on one of his slightly rough, stubble-covered cheeks. I pressed my lips to the other, and tasted the warmth and salt of his skin. “Thanks, Dean.”

He flashed me half a grin and skimmed his thumb across my lips. “Thank me when we’ve got your mother with us and we’re out of Lovecraft for good.” Motioning to the Gate, which had grown increasingly fractured and jumpy, he dropped his hand. “Go on, now. I’m right behind you.”

I touched the opening of the Gate with my fingers first. It was an absence of feeling in the shimmering space the aether had created. Holding my breath, and still thinking I could possibly be making the worst mistake I ever made, I stepped through, back along the line of travel to the last location, the one the Proctors had used. Back to Lovecraft, and whatever awaited me.