The Nightmare Garden

7 The Lair of Monsters

CASEY CARRIED A pack from the Lovecraft Academy, the kind issued to boys, with two shoulder straps. She gestured to it proudly. “Those little Uptown brats cut and ran like nobody’s business. Left a treasure trove behind.”

Those “brats” had been my fellow students. I hadn’t called any of them my friends, but the thought of them meeting a fate normally reserved for the worst of criminals turned my stomach a bit.

“So what’s the plan, Casey?” Dean asked her as she tromped ahead of us, red hair swinging almost gaily.

“The Boundary Bridge is the only way in or out, but the Proctors have set up quarantine checkpoints. Regular boat patrols too. We gotta cross under the span, and we gotta do it fast, before they spot us.”

“What do people know?” I blurted. “About the Engine, and the city? What have the Proctors been saying?”

“That you acted alone,” Casey said. “That you’re some kind of radical. Your picture went in all the papers. Reporters came from New Amsterdam to poke around the foundry, with cameras and such. Proctors are claiming the big blow was your fault, and there was a huge ceremony when they made that fink Draven director of the Bureau.” Her brows drew together. “They ain’t said much about what came out of the ground afterward. That’d mess with their big old lie of a story.”

That figured. Any fabricated explanation for the “viral creatures” never before seen would strain the credulity of even the dumbest citizens of Lovecraft. And Draven, only the city Head then, was doubly in control now, had the whole machine of the Proctors to back up whatever story he cared to spin like the venomous spider he was. He was a big man now, bigger than everyone except the president and a few other men who were equally cruel and conniving. He had somebody to blame—me. As long as he had my face to put to the disaster, uncomfortable truths could be swept aside, the way uncomfortable truths often were when the Proctors got involved.

“So, you’re a wanted criminal now,” Dean said, grinning. “I’d be lying if I said that didn’t make me like you even more, princess.”

I tried to smile back but mostly just felt sick at the thought. My picture would be in every paper in every part of the world that didn’t belong to the Crimson Guard. Terrorist. Heretic. Lies. But there was nothing I could do, unless I could turn back time. And that was about as likely as Draven asking me out for tea.

Casey led us off the main road and down an access path. I could hear the ice creaking in the river as we drew closer. Wind cut into me, and I was glad for the jacket Shard had given me in Windhaven. “The trusses on this side aren’t too heavily guarded,” she called. “We just gotta be quick.”

“And then getting to Old Town?” I asked. Casey chewed her lip and cut her eyes to the river below.

“Getting to Old Town means you’re gonna have to be even quicker,” she said. “You’re not bleeding, are you? Any of you? Ghouls’ll sniff blood a week old.”

“We’re square,” Dean said. “Nobody’s cut so’s it’ll bleed freely.”

Casey bit her lip. “For the record, I still think this is a stupid idea.”

“Duly noted,” I told her.

Ahead of us, I saw one of the great trusses of the Boundary Bridge planted in the riverbank like the resting foot of an iron animal.

The supports traveled down into the bedrock, but from here at the base they looked impossibly thin and high, the span above creaking in the harsh wind.

Casey cast a look at my hands, which I’d tucked as far as they’d go into my sleeves. Exposure to the cold air felt like scraping my knuckles across a brick wall. “Here,” she grumbled, shoving a spare pair of fingerless leather gloves at me.

“I’m fine,” I insisted, though the idea of clinging to a piece of iron with my bare skin above a hundred-foot drop was about as far from fine as I could conceive.

“You’ll be fine until you get about halfway across,” Casey said. “Then either your hands will freeze to a piece of iron or they’ll get so cold they can’t grip the iron at all. Best case, you lose the skin off your palms. Worst case, you go swimming.”

I looked out at the river, the surface a rumpled canvas of ice floes and black water. I put the gloves on.

Casey went first, climbing the support as quickly and surely as a pirate from Cal’s adventure stories going up a mast. I followed, using the massive rivets as foot- and handholds, as she had. Conrad came next, and Dean was last.

I knew exactly how high and wide the bridge ran, of course. Every engineering student in the world probably knew its dimensions, marvel that it was. Joseph Strauss’s masterwork, along with the Cross-Brooklyn Bridge in New Amsterdam. The Boundary Bridge was one hundred twenty feet high. Just shy of one-half mile across. Two hundred lengths of wrist-thick cable suspending it above the river.

As we climbed, I could feel the bridge humming. My Weird didn’t crackle like it did when I encountered a machine with moving parts, but I could feel the river’s force running through the iron, the never-ceasing current working to push the bridge aside and be free. Working through me, into the cracks and crannies of my mind, working at the madness, trying to pick the lock and set it free.

The higher we climbed, the worse the wind got, until it was a trial to even breathe when a gust blew straight at my face.

I just kept going. Hand up, foot up. Muscles crying out, every fiber straining. Grab rivet, test for ice, pull myself to the next. I had to get into the city, had to find Nerissa, get her out of there. Then, I knew, and only then, I could rest.

Hand up, foot up. I couldn’t feel my cheeks or the tips of my fingers. Up ahead, Casey reached the span, the metal lattice that supported the roadbed, slick with ice. With one last tug I joined her and slumped, panting, in the crooked embrace of the iron while we waited for the boys to join us.

“See that?” She pointed at a small black launch with a prow shaped like a blunt battering ram that was working its way through the river below. “Proctors patrolling in an icebreaker,” she said. “We’ll have about three minutes before they get down to the point and start to come back.”

I looked to the next support lattice, at least six feet away across open space. “Am I supposed to sprout wings?”

Casey pointed up, grinning. “Those wires will hold us. You just lace your legs above it and then pull hand over hand and you’re over in no time.”

The idea of hanging upside down over certain death didn’t exactly appeal to me, but I wouldn’t be any kind of hero if I balked. I followed Casey’s lead and grabbed the wire. She slung herself up easily, muscular legs encased in men’s dungarees wrapping around the thin line and holding her weight.

The wire jiggled as Conrad followed me, and bowed a bit as Dean joined him. I couldn’t see them, but knowing they were behind me gave me the nerve I needed to edge along after Casey.

Casey tracked the progress of the ice breaker, which had nearly reached the tall stone lighthouse at Half Moon Point.

“Scoot,” she hissed. “And keep it quiet. There’s men up there on the bridge.”

Clinging to that wire was one of the most singularly miserable experiences of my life. The cold cut straight through my trousers and my gloves everywhere I touched the wire. My skin was rubbed raw, and my hands ached so much I hoped they wouldn’t simply break off and fall away.

Casey was nearly all the way across, and I close behind her, when I felt a shudder in the bridge and heard an explosive cracking of ice in the river below.

My shoulder began to throb with a vengeance. When I was in Arkham, a shoggoth, one of the mindless creatures made up of mouths and eyes that roamed outside the city, had latched onto me and left a bit of itself in a black and puckered scar flushed with venom even now. I gasped at the pain, losing my grip on the wire. I dropped rather than try to hold on, my feet landing on the edge of a support beam.

“There’s something down there!” Conrad shouted from his vantage above, and I looked down to see the ice churning and the water foaming as something fought its way out of the depths.

“Shut up!” Casey hissed at us. “Keep moving!”

My shoulder throbbed so badly it caused black whirlpools to grow in my field of vision. I looked at Dean frantically as he dropped down to stand beside me. “This is wrong …,” I said, my throat raw from cold. I sounded like I was floating far above myself, my voice a hollow and metallic echo. Something was rising out of the river. I could see through the fog that it had yellow, lidless eyes, lanternlike beneath the dark ice, and rubbery green limbs extending from a bullet-shaped body.

Ice shattered when it broke the surface, sending shards and spray in all directions. The creature wrapped its tentacles around the bridge, battering the solid parts of its body against the supports and nearly shaking all four of us free.

“What is that?” The shout came not from any of us but from the roadbed above. A cluster of Proctors peered over the side of the bridge, rifles at the ready.

“Leviathan!” one shouted. “Shoot that bastard before he shakes the bridge down!”

Dean lost his grip as the thing battered itself against the bridge again, and I reached out and grabbed the back of his jacket before he could fall.

“Never seen one that close before,” he panted. “Must’ve picked up the vibrations from the explosion. Gotten turned around.”

Leviathans were abominations of the deep supposedly caused by the necrovirus, but really, who knew where they came from? Its tentacles were spiraling up the supports of the bridge even as the Proctors opened fire, bullets zipping past us too close for comfort. My stomach lurched as the bridge rattled under its assault, and I abandoned all pretense of bravado. This was not good. Not at all.

“We should move!” Casey bellowed. “While they’re distracted.”

Dean nodded at me. “Get back on the wire. I’ll help you.” He put his hands on my hips without any more preamble and lifted me like I didn’t weigh a thing.

The wire swayed and bounced under the assault of the leviathan, and I screwed my eyes shut, focusing on the sting in my palms as the wire bit into them.

I moved forward, concentrating so hard that I started when hands grabbed me and Casey pulled me onto the last support. We were below the elevated section of Derleth Street, the gray half-light shining through the slats of the river walk. There was a gaping hole in the boards, and Casey pulled herself up.

“We owe that old deep water bugger a thank-you,” she panted. “He distracted those blackbirds right and proper.”

“I’ll feel better when everyone’s across,” I said, squinting against the ice glare to make out the others where they clung tightly to the great structure. The leviathan roared as the Proctors shot at it, then battered its entire weight into the bridge. There was a groan and the iron vibrated under my feet, and then everything stilled as the leviathan slid back into the river, causing violent waves of ice and black water to crash into either shore.

The sound was small in comparison, but it was high and close—a light ping as the rusted bolts holding the wires of the suspension assembly in place snapped in half, one by one, like aether bulbs blowing on a circuit. The wires whipped free like the tentacles of a second, metal leviathan hanging in the air above the first.

Dean dropped and caught himself by the elbows on the support where Casey and I were crouching. Casey grabbed Dean’s arm, and I reached out for Conrad, but just like when we’d been in the balloon, I grasped only air.

My heart stopped and I watched helplessly as Conrad plummeted, a scream ripping from his throat, until the wire he was clinging to reached the end of its arc and snapped. Conrad swung a good thirty feet below us, small above the vast expanse of the river.

I locked my arm through the iron lattice to brace myself and grabbed the top of the wire with my free hand. “Help me!” I screamed at Dean and Casey, the icy air tearing my throat raw.

“No!” Conrad yelled up to us. “Just go!”

I shook my head, trying to pull the wire up and bring Conrad with it. I wasn’t leaving him.

Casey, on the other hand, made a move to crawl up to the roadbed.

“What’s that for?” she hissed when she saw Dean’s reproachful look. “He said leave him, and we gotta move before that boat sees us!”

Dean just grunted and grabbed the wire along with me. Between the two of us, we hauled Conrad up, and the three of us climbed after Casey to the roadbed, leaving the Proctors and the bridge behind us.

Once we stood on Derleth Street, behind the arcade of the river walk to hide us from the Proctors, I ran and caught up to Casey, leaving Dean to walk with Conrad, who was swaying like a tree in a hurricane. He was pale, but I knew he’d be all right. Conrad was tough in ways you couldn’t see. He didn’t let fear or panic ever get their hooks into him. I wished I could be more like that.

“That was way closer than I like to cut things,” Casey told me. “From now on, Miss Grayson, you need to listen to me and do as I say.”

I had only intended to talk to her, but her comment sliced through my patience, and all the frustration and horror of the last few days exploded to the front of my mind. I balled up my fist, hard and sure like Conrad had taught me, and smacked Casey in the face.

She reeled, and there was already a fat red bruise growing near her lip when she turned back. “What on the scorched earth is your malfunction?”

“The next time you suggest leaving any of us behind,” I snarled at her, “that’ll be the last suggestion you ever make to anyone.” In that moment, I meant it entirely. I couldn’t recall a time I’d ever felt such pure, hot rage before.

“Aoife, whoa.” Dean appeared at my side. He squeezed my shoulder. “Take it easy.”

Casey touched her lip and winced. “I’m just doing what you asked me to do. Gee whiz.”

“You know who else just does what they’re asked? Proctors,” I snapped back.

Casey yanked her blade from her belt. “Okay, girlie, I respect you, but that crosses the line. I ain’t in bed with the Proctors.”

“Why don’t we all calm down?” Dean suggested. “You two girls want to slug it out later, I’m not going to stop you.”

I uncurled my fist. My palm was red and raw, rubbed bloody from holding frozen metal. “He’s right,” I told Casey. All the rage ran out like so much water, and in its place was just embarrassment. I was supposed to fix problems with my mind, not my fists. I was the smart girl, the civilized one, who didn’t resort to what my female teachers at the Academy would have called “tawdry emotional displays.”

At least, I had been, until all of Tremaine’s lies and everything that had gone on since then. “I’m sorry about that,” I said to Casey, feeling my cheeks heat. “I think we can take it from here.”

“Nah, look,” Casey said. “I’m sorry about saying we leave your brother to go in the drink. I got piss-scared.”

“Fine,” I said shortly, glad she wasn’t going to try to turn things into a real brawl. I wasn’t much of a hand-to-hand fighter unless the element of surprise was on my side. “Let’s just get going, all right?”

“Hell of a right cross,” Dean muttered as we started walking again. “Remind me never to get you testy.”

“Consider yourself warned,” I said, nudging him with my elbow and flashing a grin. Despite where we were and what had almost just happened, I felt a little lighter for the first time since I’d walked out of the Academy and away from the life I’d had there.

We were going to get my mother back, take her far away from the iron that made her mad, and have our family, me and her and Conrad, together.

And then I would find some way to make everything in Lovecraft and the worlds beyond all right again.

Walking through Lovecraft was like walking through the dream I’d kept having in the Mists, except I was awake. Awake enough to see the wrecked shops and burnt-out houses. To know, finally, the toll of having destroyed the Engine and broken the Gates to the Thorn Land. I was awake enough to feel the cold bite against every inch of exposed skin, and awake enough to taste the smoke rising in the south on the back of my tongue.

South was where the Engineworks had been.

The people who had worked in the Engine had evacuated. As far as I knew, I hadn’t killed anyone outright. But how many had died afterward, as a result of what I’d done?

And how many of them deserved exactly what they got? whispered a dark retort inside my head. Part of me, the part who’d kept quiet for fifteen years while her mother went crazy and the Proctors lied to her—that Aoife wasn’t sorry for what she’d done to Lovecraft at all.

Old Town was silent, the crumbling brick storefronts and row houses painted all the colors of the rainbow now pale and faded, deserted and, in many cases, destroyed beyond recognition or repair.

Christobel Charitable Asylum had been a convent a long time ago, when there had still been such things as nuns and people who believed in gods and not the reason-based Master Builder or the Great Old Ones, drifting through the outer stars in their endless, frozen sleep. You could still see the spire poking above the sharp Victorian rooflines, and I angled toward it, up Derleth Street.

I’d walked here so many times as a student, on my way to and from the madhouse. I’d hated the walk then, the obligation to go visit my mother almost a physical weight. I’d never noticed how alive the street was, bustling with life in a way the Academy and Uptown weren’t. Now that it lay silent, windows staring at us with our own reflections, old newspapers caught against the fences and lampposts flapping like wounded birds, I missed the activity acutely.

“I don’t like this at all,” Casey murmured. We walked in a loose, staggered line, choosing whichever side of the street kept us clear of shadows and alleyways. “It’s way too calm,” she elaborated. “No sirens, no screaming, no Proctors.” She inhaled deeply. “Something bad in the air.”

“Could you be any more doom-and-gloom?” Conrad complained. “I’m already sour enough on this whole idea without your naysaying, all right?”

I agreed with Casey. I could feel the iron of this place tickling the back of my mind, and its whisper didn’t even cover the snuffling and scraping I could hear in every patch of darkness, tangible reminders that we could be set upon at any moment by nightjars, ghouls, or worse things that had made it through the cracks from the Thorn Land.

Nothing made a move, which only ratcheted my nerves tighter as we reached the gates of the Asylum. In the distance, I could hear the dull tolling of the bells in St. Oppenheimer’s, as I always used to when I’d visited. Only now they were discordant and hadn’t stopped ringing, as if a giant funeral were going on.

In a way, I supposed it was.

The gates in the fence surrounding the asylum were off their hinges, one bent nearly in half, as if a giant had folded it like a piece of paper. That didn’t bode well, but I tried not to panic. Just because the gates were open didn’t mean anything had breached the asylum itself. Everyone in there could still be fine. Likely agitated, as they wouldn’t have had sedatives in close to a week, but fine. I hoped.

I could see from where we stood that the main doors were shut, yet the massive clockwork locks that kept the place from spilling lunatics into the street were open, and the steps were covered with paper files and office supplies. I looked up. A few papers were still caught in the bars of the upper-floor windows, flapping sadly like dying doves.

That doesn’t mean anything, I insisted to myself again. Surely the doctors and nurses had fled. There might have even been a patient rebellion. The doors were shut. I didn’t see any corpses or hear any screaming. In this situation, crazy as it sounded even in my own head, the silence and desolation were good signs.

“Well?” Dean stood beside me. “We going in?”

I didn’t reply, not able to articulate what I was thinking without sounding as crazy as the patients beyond the walls. I took one step through the wrecked gates, then another, and let that be my answer. I half expected them to slam behind me, even in their ruined state. Going into the asylum never felt like anything other than walking into the jaws of a beast.

“I’ll watch your backs,” Casey said. “I ain’t going in there with the loonies.”

I waved her off, not surprised. Casey was a survivor, and survivors knew when to hide rather than rush ahead. That much I’d learned from Cal.

I stopped on the first step, patients’ charts and photographs crumpling under my boots. I’d waited so long to come back here, and now I could feel myself shaking inside my clothes. The truth about what had become of Nerissa was just beyond the doors, and yet I wanted nothing more than to turn and run. Where, I didn’t know. Just away. I didn’t, though, because Conrad was staring at me, daring me to admit this was a bad idea, and because I didn’t want to show Dean just how scared I was of finding out the truth. Good or bad, I was going to have to own up to my mother about what I’d done when I let Tremaine trick me into breaking the Gates, and I couldn’t imagine her reaction. Just that it would be bad and would probably involve a lot of screaming at me.

If she was even in there.

If she was even alive.

Panic like this hadn’t clutched me since I’d first left the city. My shoulder began to throb again—as it had when the leviathan had appeared.

The shoggoth venom was reacting to something beyond the doors.

I froze in place as the doors yawned open seemingly on their own. A dozen pale white paws, puckered and with a greenish cast like the skin of a corpse, gripped the walls. The ghouls’ snouts were long, longer than Cal’s when he wasn’t wearing his human shape, and their claws were pure black. They were part of another nest. One that was a lot more comfortable in daylight than most ghouls I’d run into who weren’t Cal.

I wanted to swear, or scream, but all that made it out of my mouth was a light squeak, like a mouse’s. I didn’t even dare look to see if Conrad and Dean were still with me. Any movement could provoke a ghoul.

“Mmm,” the ghoul in the lead purred. “A delivery. I love it when the meat walks right up to your front door.”

Before I could move, the ghoul tucked its legs and sprang, clearing the steps in one bound. I barely had time to flinch in expectation of its weight on my chest and its teeth in my skin before Dean tackled me, slamming me out of the way.

We landed in the gravel at the foot of the stairs as the rest of the ghouls burst forth from the asylum, howling in anticipation of a meal.

Dean hauled me up. “Run,” he growled in my ear. “For your life.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Conrad and Casey head the other way, toward Uptown. There was no argument from me. I snatched Dean’s hand. In the face of horrors, he’d thrown himself into the line of fire with no regard for his own safety.

I didn’t have time to even hope Conrad would be all right. The ghouls were hot on our heels, their screaming bringing more and more of them out of hiding, spilling out of broken shop windows and shadowed alleys and an open sewer grate in the center of the street.

We ran. We ran until it felt like there was fire and razors in my chest in place of air. Ran so fast that my feet didn’t even catch in the pockmarks left by missing cobblestones.

Dean whipped his head back, then forward again. “Shit” he gasped, and when I looked I saw that the entire street had become a churning, rushing mass of bodies, white and blue and corpse-gray all the way down to rotted, decomposing greenish-black. There were hundreds of the ghouls, fighting and clawing to be at the front of the pack, and their screaming was the only thing I could hear over my own heartbeat.

We hit the top of Dunwich Lane, the center of despicable goings-on back when Lovecraft had been the Lovecraft I knew. Now Dunwich Lane’s red-light district was a smoking, ash-gray ruin. Fire could have started in any one of the dive bars or brothels by the river, and it had chewed on the shabby neighborhood’s bones as surely as the ghouls were going to chew on ours if they caught us.

Still we ran, until I couldn’t feel myself, except for my straining breath, and could barely see except for a tiny tunnel straight ahead.

We weren’t going to make it. I could smell the foul, orchid-sweet stench of the ghouls, and before me I could see the flash of the river. We would have a choice in a moment: jump in and freeze, or stand on the bank and be torn limb from limb, turned into dinner for the horrific and hungry citizens of this new Lovecraft.

The last houses on the street were on pilings out over the river, listing dangerously and plastered with warnings that they were condemned. The street ended at a crumbling wall, and beyond there was nothing but the river. My heart sank.

As Dean and I ran toward the wall, I heard a great whirring from overhead, the sound of a zeppelin’s fans. I looked up, thinking Draven had finally caught up with us. That would be the grand finale to this wretched day.

It wasn’t Draven’s black craft, though—it was a smaller ship, the balloon a dark green and the cabin underneath made of polished wood trimmed with brass that gleamed even in the smoky sunlight. The craft banked sharply over the river and a ladder extended from the cabin hatch.

“You!” bellowed a voice made sharp and metallic by the horn of an aethervox. “You two on Dunwich Lane! Grab the ladder and get on board!”

The ladder drifted into range. I looked to Dean, and he nodded vigorously. Whoever was in the dirigible, he was better than what was closing in on us, no question. I grabbed the ladder’s wooden rungs and leather straps and climbed as best I could while it swayed in the wind. Dean jumped on behind me, and the dirigible rose into the air, away from the ravening horde of ghouls.

“Any others alive in the city?” the voice bellowed at us.

“North!” I shouted, gesturing in the direction Conrad and Casey had run.

Another ladder dropped from the other side of the dirigible, and we swooped over the grounds of Christobel Asylum in a hard turn, toward what had been Uptown and the Academy grounds. From above I could see that the back wing of the asylum had been gutted by fire, and ghouls were scampering across what had once been a garden where the patients could walk in warm weather. Half-chewed bodies in the asylum-issued gray pajamas lay like discarded toys on the flagstones, but from what I could see, my mother wasn’t one of them.

That was it, then. The truth I’d known in the back part of my mind, the black part that only understood logic and odds, fell home with a hammer blow.

My mother wasn’t there. Nobody human was. If she’d managed to survive, she was alone in the city, adrift.

We swooped low across the mazelike streets leading to Banishment Square and Ravenhouse, the Proctors’ headquarters in Lovecraft.

Conrad’s movements were easy to pick out among the stately granite buildings. He was alone, cornered near Ravenhouse’s back wall.

My stomach flipped from the abrupt change in altitude as the dirigible lowered, and I waved frantically at him. “Grab the ladder!”

Conrad jumped, then did as I’d said and clung tightly as the dirigible rose. The ladders clanked against the metal parts of the hull as they retracted into the hatches of the craft, and I scrambled into the cabin along with Dean.

“You all right?” I asked Conrad, who’d climbed in from the other side. He nodded, patting himself down.

“Mostly. That was a hell of a close call.”

“Where’s Casey?” I asked.

“Dunno,” Conrad panted. “Lost her in the back alleys. She was rabbiting back toward Nephilheim last I saw. Not ghoul food yet.”

He rubbed his arms, shivering. “I tried to stay with her, Aoife.…”

“It couldn’t be helped,” I reassured him. “Nobody expects you to be ghoul lunch.” I patted him awkwardly on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, Conrad.”

“And why not? This is a Proctor ship isn’t it?” he grumbled. “We’re under arrest.”

“I have no idea who picked us up,” I said. “But I doubt they’re Proctors.”

He managed a weak smile, which I returned. Never mind that I had less than no clue who this airship belonged to and why the pilot had rescued us.

I examined our surroundings, hoping to make a guess on that score. We were in a narrow cargo bay at the aft of the dirigible, and there were no hints, just a few boxes tied down in a corner, devoid of any markings.

“Aoife’s right. I don’t think it’s Proctors,” Dean said. “Proctors probably would’ve just left us to get eaten. Less work for them that way.”

“Good point,” Conrad said. He got up and brushed himself off. “Come on. Let’s see what kind of degenerates we’ve hooked up with.”

I went to the hatch that led to the rest of the dirigible to see what I could find out. Best case, we’d been picked up by pirates or smugglers who also hated the Proctors. Worst, we’d been picked up by pirates or smugglers who didn’t hate the Proctors enough to turn down a quick buck they could earn by handing us over.

I tried the hatch, which swung open easily enough. At least we weren’t locked in. I stepped through it before Dean or Conrad could protest. A ladder led up one level to a deck, swaying aether lamps lighting my way as the airship climbed at a steep angle, passing through turbulence in the clouds.

The passenger deck was richly appointed, like the interiors of the private craft wealthy families in Lovecraft once used to fly from their mansions to New Amsterdam or their vacation homes in Maine. Lush velvet covered the corridor walls, and all the fittings were brass. When I peeked above deck I saw rich wood and bookshelves lining the room. Furniture bolted to the floor creaked gently as the craft banked, and I saw a plethora of charts spread out on the wide dining table. I’d never seen anything like it in real life—the only airship I’d been on previously was a repurposed war buggy, stripped to the bare bones. This was the sort of craft I’d always dreamed of flying on when I was just another girl at the Academy. I was sad I couldn’t explore it now, but I did take in all the details to remember later, when I had the time.

“Hello?” I said cautiously, braced for a confrontation.

“Hello!” A blond woman stuck her head in from another compartment and hurried over to me. “We’re so glad you’re all right!”

“We?” I said, backing up in surprise when she reached out her hand. She went with the cabin—immaculately curled hair, a traveling skirt and boots that probably cost more money than I’d been given to live on in an entire year as a ward of the City. Her ivory blouse was pressed, and a blue stone brooch sparkled at the collar.

“You don’t have to be afraid of me, Aoife,” she said, attempting a friendly smile that looked slightly out of place on her perfect porcelain features. She wasn’t much taller than I was, but there was a sureness to her posture and a set to her delicate face that told me she was used to being listened to and obeyed.

“How do you know who I am?” I started casting around for a weapon. Something not good was definitely happening here.

“Aoife …,” she started, but I snatched an animal leg bone from its display hook and waved it at her.

“You stay away from me!” I didn’t know how the woman knew my name, but her perfect facade didn’t inspire trust. Beautiful things were usually ugly under the surface, in my experience, and I wasn’t about to trust this one.

“Aoife!” Another voice called from above, and I looked up to see a tall, rangy figure with a shock of white at his temples standing on a balcony.

I felt my body go slack, and the bone tumbled from my hand as I stared at the figure, shocked. “Dad?”

My father looked much different from when I’d glimpsed him in the jail cell. There he’d been masked, with deep half-moons under his eyes and his hair wild. Now he wore a natty safari outfit similar in color and style to the blond woman’s clothes, canvas pants held up by leather suspenders, a linen shirt open at the collar and boots shined within an inch of their lives. He looked every bit the wealthy gentleman my mother had always told me he was.

“Yes, it’s me,” he said. He descended the curving brass staircase that led from the bridge. He held up a hand, as if to still a temperamental child. “Calm down.”

“I …” I took a second look around the airship. It really was a marvelous craft, the cabin more like a stately apartment than the interior of an airship. “What’s going on?” I said. It was a lame response, but it was the only one that came to mind.

“I’ll explain it all as soon as we’re clear of the city and those damn Proctor sweeps,” my father answered. “Now I’ve got to get back to the helm.” He gestured to the blond woman. “Val, make sure Aoife is comfortable, and tell her friends they can come up from the hold, will you?”

The woman stooped and picked up the bone I’d liberated, setting it gently back in its display rack. “Of course, Archie.”

I stood awkwardly in the center of the dark night sky–blue carpet, feeling both underdressed and acutely aware of how filthy I was after the two days of hard travel from Windhaven. I didn’t know who the woman was or why she was being instructed to take care of me. I had no idea what was going on, and I didn’t like that. Confusion was my least favorite state.

The woman—Val—gestured me into a leather wing chair, which was bolted to the floor, like everything else. “Would you like some tea?”

“All right,” I said, a bit in shock. The two of them were acting as if rescuing Dean, Conrad and me from a horde of ravening ghouls was the most usual thing in the world. Or at least, not strange enough to interrupt afternoon tea.

I watched quietly as Val went to an aethervox panel in the far wall and pressed one of the intricately worked silver-and-brass buttons. “You two can come up now,” she said sweetly. “Aoife is fine and we’re not going to hurt you.”

She went over to a steam hob built into the bookcases and set a silver teakettle on it. “You’ve had quite a journey,” she said to me. “You must be worn out.”

“I’m sorry,” I answered, shutting my eyes briefly in an attempt to reconcile what had almost happened in Lovecraft with my new opulent surroundings and the gentle hum of the airship’s fans. “Who are you, exactly?”

“Oh, how rude of me!” She fluttered her hands around that brooch. “I’m Valentina Crosley. I’m an associate of your father’s.”

“And this?” I gestured at the airship cabin as Dean and Conrad poked their heads through the hatch. Dean relaxed visibly when he saw that I was in one piece. His hand came out of the pocket where he kept his knife, but he trained a wary eye on Valentina.

“This is your father’s craft, the Munin,” said Valentina. “It belonged to my father, but now it’s Archie’s.”

“It’s very … nice,” I said cautiously. It was too nice—I clearly didn’t belong here, and neither did Dean. Conrad was the only one who appeared at ease. I wondered if his composure would last when he saw our father. Conrad had always taken it harder that Archie had left us with our mother.

“I’m pleased to meet you,” he told Valentina, seeming calm enough. “There were some letters in my father’s house from you. Archie and I never spoke about you, but I’d hoped we’d meet someday.”

Valentina blinked at him, staring for a moment, and I stared as well. Where was Conrad’s sullen rage at being abandoned? The outrage that Archie had clearly taken up with another woman? I was feeling both in spades, but my brother seemed pleased as punch to be here.

Valentina recovered inside of a second and held out her hand. “And it’s really a pleasure to meet you at last, Conrad. Your father has told me so much about you and your sister both.”

I shot a glance toward the bridge while pleasantries were being exchanged. My father stood alone, silhouetted against the glass. I rose and climbed up the brass steps and stood at the lip of the bridge, feeling awkward but needing to see him, to speak to him again and convince myself this was really happening. How to start a conversation like that? Why did you save me from the Proctors? Where have you been? Why did you leave our family behind?

“Two of my friends are still in Nephilheim,” I said at last. “Cal and Bethina.” I figured he’d at least appreciate my being to the point.

“Bethina, really? My maid? She’s come a long way.” He looked over his shoulder at me. The Munin was flown standing up, with a half-moon brass wheel for the rudder and two controls for the fans. It was really a beautiful craft in every way. If I hadn’t been put so off guard by how I’d come aboard, I would have been excited to see something that was this much art along with its function. And would have been doubly excited that my father was at the helm and I was face to face with him for only the second time in my life.

“We need to get them,” I said. “Or you need to let me off there so we can go somewhere safe together.”

Archibald locked the rudder in place and turned to me, folding his arms. He was taller than I remembered from meeting him in the interrogation room in Ravenhouse, and his eyes held none of the warmth they’d had then. “And what if I said no?”

I kept his gaze and adopted the same icy tone. “Then I suppose it’s been nice to see you again.”

Archibald shook his head, dropping his arms. “I swear, you’re even more stubborn than your mother.” I flinched. It was strange to think of his spending time with my mother before Conrad and I were born, learning her expressions and her moods and seeing them in me.

My father banked the craft, dropping us over the dour gray roofs of Nephilheim. “Don’t think I don’t know,” he told me, “that your little buddy Cal Daulton is a ghoul. And don’t think I’m going to welcome him aboard.”

“He saved my life, Dad,” I said, folding my arms to mimic his earlier posture. “He’s not like the other ghouls.”

“I know,” he said. “That’s why I’m picking him up.” He spun the wheel and we crossed the river, drifting up the far bank, over the foundry and into the village, which from this vantage looked like a ruined toy, stepped on by an angry child.

“There,” I said, pointing to the broad avenue where we’d left Cal and Bethina. My father throttled back the fans, hovering, and the Munin shivered as the thin, delicate ladders unfurled from its hatches. I saw figures emerge from the nearest ruined cottage, and mere moments later, Cal and Bethina were in the main cabin with the rest of us.

“Mr. Grayson!” Bethina shrieked, running to my father and wrapping her arms around him. She’d been his chambermaid; he probably knew her better than he’d known me, before all this happened. I was just relieved they were both all right, and didn’t begrudge her the reunion.

My father smiled at her and patted her on the back. “Glad to see you in one piece, Bethina. Didn’t I dismiss you, though?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Someone had to keep your house in order.”

Cal sidled up to me. “That’s your father?”

“In the flesh,” I said, still barely able to believe it myself. Every time I looked at Archie, he seemed like he should shimmer and vanish like an illusion, rather than be standing not ten feet from me, pouring Bethina a cup of tea.

“Something to sweeten it?” he asked, reaching for a cut-glass brandy decanter in the sideboard.

“Oh, no,” said Bethina primly. “You know I don’t do that sort of thing, Mr. Grayson.”

“Seems nice enough,” Cal muttered to me. “Certainly not the raving lunatic Draven was always yelling about.”

“Jury’s out on the first part,” I said, just as Cal’s eyes lit on Valentina.

“Who’s the dame?” he said, brows going up. “She looks like a lanternreel star.”

I spread my hands. “I’ve been here about ten minutes longer than you have, Cal. Her name is Valentina. Aside from that, your guess is as good as mine.”

Valentina bubbled up to us, carrying a tray holding two delicate china cups painted with briar roses. “Tea?”

I took it and pointed to the brandy. “I think I’ll have something in mine.” My old teacher, Mrs. Fortune, would give us tea with brandy when we had the flu at the Academy. I could use the calming effect just then.

“No, you won’t be having any brandy,” my father returned crisply. “The rest of you, make yourselves comfortable. Conrad and Aoife, we need to speak privately.”

He gestured to a small hatch that led to the room Valentina had appeared from and waited until we’d followed him in before shutting and latching the door. I felt as if we’d been called on the carpet for passing notes during class, not as if we were having the first real meeting with our father, ever. His expression was stern and his eyes betrayed no emotion beyond annoyance.

This was not how I’d imagined my first conversation with Archie going, and I could tell from Conrad’s fidgeting and his frown that he felt the same way.

“First of all,” Archie said, “what the hell were you two thinking, going back into Lovecraft?”

“I—” I started, but Archie pointed his finger at me and focused his eyes on my brother.

“I’ll get to you. Conrad?”

Conrad spread his hands as if to ask what was the big deal. “It wasn’t my idea. I was actually against it.”

“Oh, come on, Conrad!” I shouted, furious that now we were actually caught, he was trying to wriggle out of getting in trouble. “You were the one who ran off in the first place! It’s because of you that I’m even here! You and that stupid letter!”

“I wrote that letter to get you out of Lovecraft, not rip apart space and time and destroy the entire damn city!” Conrad shouted back.

Rage overwhelmed me and I cocked my arm back and whipped my teacup at Conrad’s head. He ducked and the cup hit the wall, sending tea and china shards spattering across the cream-colored damask wallpaper.

“Enough, both of you!” Archie bellowed. He stepped between us, pointing at the door. “Conrad, give us a minute.”

“You always overreact,” Conrad muttered at me. “That’s why we’re in this mess.”

“You’re an idiot,” I returned, too angry to watch what I was saying. Conrad could treat me like I was still his excitable little sister, but I’d managed on my own for over a year after he’d run off. I’d managed after he’d nearly killed me. He didn’t get to talk to me like that any longer.

Archie thumped him on the side of the head with his knuckles. “I said enough. This is not your sister’s fault. Not entirely. Go.”

Conrad turned and stormed out, slamming the hatch behind him hard enough to rattle the framed paintings on the walls. In the silence that followed I looked anywhere but at my father’s face: A bunk in the corner immaculately made up with cream linens and rows of clothes neatly hanging in the wardrobe. A brass globe swaying from the ceiling, lit from the inside by aether. Outlines of continents and seas glowing softly against a ceiling painted like the night sky, constellations spelled out with silver thread. Finally, I ran out of things to stare at and had to look at my father again and see his shoulders slumped with fatigue, the dark circles under his eyes and the new lines along the sides of his mouth. I felt horrible for screaming at Conrad, for breaking my father’s things. What must he think of me after that?

Archie sighed, sitting down in one of the two small, overstuffed chairs by the cabin’s porthole. “Have a seat, Aoife.”

I stayed where I was and fidgeted. Being around him was still too new for me to sit and act comfortable—as if we were actually father and daughter. Besides, if I sat, I couldn’t study him while we talked, look for the similarities in our faces that I wanted to be there. I wanted to be a little bit like Archie—otherwise, my only fate was to end up like Nerissa.

Archie’s eyes were an eerie reflection of my own when we locked gazes, dark green and glittering, like something that had waited for light a long time in a dark place.

But his held none of the uncertainty mine did, just a calculating hardness that seemed to measure me up and dismiss me as wanting. I’d always hoped that Archie would be warm, like the fathers in books and lanternreels who came home every evening, hung up their hats and kissed their wives and children hello. But I’d known I was probably just fantasizing. His hard eyes weren’t really a surprise, just a disappointment.

“It’s good to see you,” he said at last, more quietly than I had expected. “It’s been a really long time.”

This I hadn’t expected. A lecture, maybe, or a punishment for making him rescue us from the city, but not the sadness that hung on his frame like an ill-fitting coat. “Yes,” I said at last, matching his soft tone. “It has.”

“Aside from when I got you out of Ravenhouse, I mean,” he said. “And that’s not exactly a family memory I’m looking to cherish.” He sighed and raked a hand through his hair, disturbing his carefully groomed coif into something that was closer to my own unruly cloud. “I’m glad you’re all right, Aoife, but you have to promise me never to do something that stupid again—and I mean both times, when you let Draven pick you up and this time, when you were doing whatever the hell it was you were doing down there in that wasteland.”

I had a feeling he wouldn’t be so forgiving when he found out why I’d come back, especially after he’d helped me escape the Proctors’ cells when I’d turned myself in to Draven as a means to get to the Engine. But I was done lying to everyone. Done pretending everything was fine, when even now the iron told me that the clock had started ticking on my madness again.

At least up here on the Munin, made of wood and brass, it had quieted to an insidious whisper rather than a scream. I looked out the porthole while I formulated my answer carefully. The country passing beneath us was blank now that we’d left the outskirts of Nephilheim, gray and white with patches of bare trees and snow. The coastline cast gentle lace on the frozen beaches, and I could see the red buoys of the shipping channel we followed bobbing like tiny beacons in the vast Atlantic.

“I was looking for Ner—for my mother,” I told Archie. “What happened … I left her there.”

“Nerissa isn’t in the madhouse,” Archie said. “She’d know the ghouls would come up when everything went to pot. That ghouls or something worse would be after her. Nerissa is a survivor, Aoife. She knows to go to ground and wait for things to blow over.”

“How can I possibly know that for sure?” I snapped, shocked and angered that he was brushing off my mother’s fate. Archie hadn’t seen Nerissa for nearly sixteen years. She wasn’t a survivor. She was fragile. Exposed to the world, the open air and the creatures in it, she’d wither like a hothouse bloom. “Is that supposed to make me feel any better about what I saw down there? Should I get back to tea and scones with your friend Valentina and leave all my troubles behind me?”

“Don’t you speak to me that way,” Archie snapped back. “You have no idea what went on between your mother and me. Like it or not, Aoife, I know her better than you do.”

I felt tears press up against my eyes, hot and traitorous. I couldn’t cry in front of my father. Couldn’t show him how I was panicking over not being able to find Nerissa, and over everything else that had come out of my one misguided moment of trusting the wrong person. I covered the panic with anger instead. “Oh, really?” I whispered, because that was all I could say. “Where were you, up until a few weeks ago? Oh, that’s right, you left your bastard children to rot in Lovecraft and went on your merry way. You didn’t even care that Conrad and I existed until Draven decided to use me to get at you.” I breathed hard, feeling the anger heat my cheeks and quicken my heart, burning away the tears. “You left us, Dad. You left us to whatever might happen. So no, I don’t believe you, and I don’t think of you as my father. Not in any way except by blood.” I had to get out of the close little room, which was hot and smelled cloyingly of rosewater, no doubt Valentina’s doing. I scrabbled at the hatch.

Archie jumped up and slammed the door shut before I could fully yank it open. “You are a child, Aoife,” he said, color rising in his face. “You’re a smart child, and a resourceful one, but there are things you don’t yet understand about your mother, or me.”

“Then tell me,” I said. My heart thumped in time with Archie’s ragged, angry breaths. “Tell me, or I have no reason to trust you and never will.” The simple truth coming out lightened me to a surprising degree. I’d been waiting, consciously or not, a long while to say that to Archie’s face.

My father slumped, like someone had opened a valve and let the air out of him. “That’s fair,” he said. “That’s honest. Look, sweetheart. I know I wasn’t any kind of father to you. Not in any way that mattered.” He pointed at the second chair again, and this time I joined him. Hearing him admit it so easily had extinguished my rage like a bucket of ice water. I’d imagined telling Archie off in so many different ways, and now I just felt like a petulant, spoiled brat, whining because her father hadn’t bought her a pony.

I’d never expected him to admit it. And I’d never expected the deep ache in my chest when he did. I’d wanted a father. I could pretend I only hated him for leaving, but I’d always wanted him back, as well. And every day and month and year he didn’t come had made the knife cut a little deeper into the wound.

I didn’t hate Archie anymore, I realized. He’d screwed up. So had I. But maybe I didn’t have to be a child. Maybe I could be a girl who tried to forgive him.

“Look, I was really mad …,” I started, but Archie held up his hand.

“Don’t you start apologizing for speaking your mind,” Archie told me. “That’s a dangerous habit to get into.” He glanced at the door for a second, then went to the wardrobe and pulled an old, dusty evening jacket from its hanger, fishing in the pocket for a pack of cigarettes. “Open the porthole, will you?” he said. “If Valentina smells this I’ll catch hell.”

I did as he said, too drained to do much else, and sat back. He was being remarkably calm. I could have misjudged the hardness in his face—maybe Archie wasn’t unyielding. Maybe he wore the face as a shield. I did the same thing, when I was hurt and angry.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” I said. It was all I could think of.

Archie pulled a silver lighter from his pocket and lit the cigarette, exhaling with a sigh. “I have a lot of bad habits. Is that all right for a father to admit?” He shrugged. “Too late now.” He tapped ash into my empty saucer and sat forward. “I know you don’t believe me that Nerissa is safe, but you have to trust me—if anyone can outrun the ghouls and the Proctors, it’s your mother.” He squeezed my shoulder—not a long gesture, or a gentle one, but solid. “I know you’re worried about her, and that you came back for her, but you need to trust me when I say this: We need to be a family, to get through what’s happened. And what’s coming. If you can just take me at my word, I promise we will get Nerissa back.” He inhaled once, sharply, then stubbed out the cigarette and slid the unburned portion back into his pack. “Can you give me that? Just until we get where we’re going?”

I thought, really, it was a pretty simple thing to ask. Archie had rescued me, after all. Let himself tell me how he really felt. I could wait to interrogate him with the million questions I had, about the Brotherhood and my Weird and the Fae, just a little longer.

“Aoife?” he said, his expression begging me to just go along with him.

“Okay,” I said. “But you and I really need to talk when we get—Where are we going?” I asked, peering out the porthole. I saw that we’d been following the coast as the land got narrower and narrower. I figured we were tracking over Cape Cod, and could see two small islands in the distance.

“Valentina’s summerhouse,” Archie answered. “Can’t go back to Graystone—the Kindly Folk—the Fae, whatever you call them—and the Proctors both’ll be crawling all over it.”

“Are her parents expecting us?” I said, and immediately felt inane. Who cared about manners at a time like this?

Archie snorted. “Hardly. The elder Crosleys live down in New Amsterdam. Where it’s safe.” His lip twitched, just the barest flicker of scorn, but I caught it, and it dawned on me that Archie didn’t feel any more comfortable with the money dripping off the Munin and Valentina herself than I did.

“I suppose Valentina’s home is all right,” I offered. It had to be safer than Lovecraft, even though small towns and villages didn’t offer the protection of big cities. Then again, the lack of iron would keep me from getting sick a little longer, so I supposed the mortal danger balanced that.

Though with things like Tremaine around, what good had protection done?

“Thank you,” Archie sighed. “And I meant it—I’m glad you’re all right.”

I felt my first real smile in what seemed like years flicker. Just a spark, but it felt good to know that somebody other than Dean and Cal cared if I turned into ghoul food. “I know you’re angry that I went back to Lovecraft,” I said. “And I know it wasn’t that bright, but I’d do it again. It’s my fault Nerissa is … is … out there.”

“Hey,” Archie said, squeezing my shoulder again, longer and harder this time. “None of that. Your mother isn’t a fool. She will have found a place to hole up. It’s how she survived as long as she did, when the Fae were after her.” He shoved a clean handkerchief into my hands, and I was embarrassed he’d even noticed my tears. “We’ll find her eventually, or she’ll find you. I know you blame yourself, but you’re going to have to stop trying to find her and set things right all by yourself. You’re going to get yourself killed.”

I looked at him, knotting the handkerchief between my fists. The fine linen turned to a wrinkled lump in my grasp. “You don’t seem all that worried about her. About any of this.”

“Of course I am,” Archie said. “But tearing out my hair and running straight into a herd of ghouls isn’t going to help anyone. Not Nerissa, not you.” He opened the hatch. “Nerissa is smart, Aoife. She always was. Smart and a survivor. She’ll be fine. I’m more worried about you.”

I squirmed under his scrutiny. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine,” Archie said. “Aoife, you can’t beat yourself up about what happened with Tremaine. The Fae trick you. It’s what they do. How they survive. You did a terrible thing with the Engine, but your mother—It’s not your fault. You did it, but the blame doesn’t lie with you.”

“He tricked me,” I whispered. I swiped viciously at my face with Archie’s handkerchief, hating that I was showing weakness at all, never mind to my father. “Tremaine tricked me, but I shouldn’t have left her.”

Archie looked as if he was going to reach for me, then drew back when another guttural sob came out. I was glad. We weren’t at the point where we could touch each other like a normal father and daughter. “Listen,” he said. “I guarantee, the minute no one was around to pump her full of sedatives, Nerissa was over that fence,” Archie said. “She’s a firecracker.” He smiled, as quickly as he’d glared before, and I wished that I could add another question to my list, about what Nerissa was like before Conrad and I were born. Before all the badness that came down on us after Archie left. “You’re a lot like her.”

I handed back the handkerchief, now a stained and soaked mess. “I’m going to be as crazy as she is if I stay in the Iron Land, I know that much.” I sighed.

Archie shrugged. “Probably. I don’t know you that well, strange as that is to say about your own flesh and blood, but I hope that changes.” He took a step from the cabin. “I’ve got to get back to the bridge. If you need something before we land, Valentina can get it for you.”

I looked back at the wardrobe. One side was my father’s jackets. The other side held dresses and skirts, rows of shoes lined up neatly on the bottom and hatboxes stacked along the top shelf. Archie knew Nerissa, but there were no signs of her here. Here, it was Valentina’s domain, and I wasn’t sure I could accept that. “How long?” I asked Archie. He blinked at me in surprise.

“Valentina? I … Well. A few years, I guess.”

I looked past his broad shoulder out into the main cabin, where Valentina sat with Bethina and Conrad, sipping tea. Dean paced from one porthole to the next, never sitting still.

“My mother asked for you,” I told Archie. “Over and over, all the time I visited her. She kept talking about you and asking for you.” I stared him down, waiting for something. I wasn’t sure what. Guilt? An admission that I wasn’t the only one who’d left Nerissa behind?

I got nothing except the inscrutable mask once again, the frown lines and the cold glance of my father’s glittering emerald eyes. “Aoife,” he said. His tone was as heavy as an iron door. “I’m sorry, truly, that you feel that way. But what went on between Nerissa and me is complicated, and my being with Valentina is my business. Not to put too fine a point on it.”

He might as well have slapped me. Although he and Nerissa hadn’t even talked since just after I was born, the idea that he’d managed to find himself someone new didn’t sit well with me. Maybe it was a selfish way to think, but whenever I thought about my father and Valentina, my stomach twisted involuntarily. “Are you going to marry her?” I asked bitterly, loudly enough to make Dean look up from where he was examining the antiques and curiosities on the wall.

“I’d like to,” Archie said, pulling back from me a bit and looking surprised at how forward I was. “But Valentina doesn’t believe marriage is necessary.” The Munin shuddered in the wind and he turned and left, making his way back to the bridge. From where I sat I could see him take the wheel again. Valentina stared at me for a moment before leaning over to refill Bethina’s teacup, and I flushed hot, looking away.

I couldn’t say that if Dean and I were separated, after years and years I wouldn’t move on. Find somebody new, especially if they cared about me as much as my father clearly cared about Valentina. The way his features softened when he talked about her made me almost jealous. They weren’t soft at all when he talked to me, so far.

But I doubted I’d be able to forget Dean. I doubted I’d be able to say our being apart was for the best. And for that, I found my father’s attitude callous. I decided that I wouldn’t ask him any of those questions that were burning me up about him and Nerissa after all. I couldn’t hear him talk about my mother while Valentina was here, safe and alive.

I went into the main cabin and over to a porthole away from the others and stared out at the passing landscape, trying to let the hum of the Munin’s machines calm my mind and take me away from my racing, angry thoughts about my father, Valentina and everything else.

The ship, under Archie’s guidance, flew on, over the spindly arm of Cape Cod, past stately white-painted mansions hugging the coastline. The destruction was less here, but I could still see creatures moving among the low scrub, darting and jumping from place to place. An overturned jitney on the side of the road lay smoking, steam wafting from under the crushed hood like spirits escaping into the cold air. No people.

Dean came and stood next to me at the porthole. “So, your old man. He going to chase me with a shotgun?”

I had to smile. All family unpleasantness aside, I did have Dean. He wasn’t gone, and I wasn’t going to have to make the choice my father had. At least, not yet. “Don’t worry, I didn’t tell him about us,” I said. “Anyway, he doesn’t really have a lot of room to talk, what with his little friend over there.”

Valentina smiled at me as she got up and began clearing the tea things. It was a forced smile, and it didn’t reach her eyes. Good. I didn’t like her any more than that smile and those fake pleasantries pretended to like me.

“Maybe you should give your old man a break,” Dean said, brushing his thumb over my cheek. “Sixteen years is a long time to be lonely.”

“I know that,” I said grudgingly. But the fact that Archie must have been lonely didn’t make Valentina’s presence—and my mother’s absence—sting any less. “And it’s not like he ever made it legal between them. I guess I just thought he cared more than that.” I felt my mouth twist down, and an answering twist in my guts. “He doesn’t even seem that worried that Nerissa’s missing.”

Dean sighed and pressed his lips against my forehead. “You know, my dad was a decent guy,” he said. “But like I said, he and my mother never would’ve worked out. It was better they went back to their own people. Maybe it’s the same for your folks.”

I had to admit, he had a point. Who was to say they’d still be together? My mother was impossible to get along with on her best days, and on her worst she’d scream and throw things at your head. Still, the fact that Archie had never given us a chance to be a family grated on me. “Maybe my father should stop giving the eye to girls who are closer to my age than his,” I grumbled. Dean snorted.

“Oh, come on. She looks all right to me. Hardly an evil stepmother.”

“Oh, I bet she looks good to you,” I told him before I could bite the words back, acid etching them onto my tongue. Jealousy tasted ugly and bitter, like bile and spoiled fruit, but I couldn’t stop the surge.

Dean shook his head. His dark hair brushed across his pale forehead like an ink stain. He looked inhumanly beautiful in moments like this, when the light hit him just so and brought his Erlkin features to the forefront. “Aoife, don’t be that way. You’re not one of those girls, and that’s why I like you.”

“Do me a favor, Dean,” I said. “Don’t tell me what I am and what I’m not. You don’t know me that well yet.”

He drew back from me, hurt replacing the tender look in his eyes. “I want to, dammit,” he murmured. “But you won’t let me. There’s a wall around you, princess, but I’m not going to stop trying.” He squeezed my hand and then stepped away from me. “I know this is hard,” he said. “And I’m here for you, but you’ve got to stop shoving me back every time I try to get in.”

I searched for the words to tell Dean that I was sorry, and that if anyone was close to me, it was him. He knew things about me that nobody else did, and he wasn’t put off by them. But Archie’s voice drowned out my reply of I’m sorry. Which was fine with me, really. Banality like that could never show Dean how I really felt.

“We’re landing, and it’s rough wind!” my father bellowed. “Strap yourself in if you don’t want to be dumped on your ass.” Dean and I both scrambled for seats and safety harnesses. I’d survived one airship crash, on the way to Arkham, and I had no desire to even come close to the experience again.

Valentina sighed as she hurried to an armchair, drawing a pair of leather straps with brass buckles from beneath the cushion. “Archie, your language. Honestly.”

Dean looked over at me and mouthed You all right? I nodded as the wind buffeted us. Conrad looked distinctly green around the edges, which I couldn’t help feeling a little smug over. Flying had never been his favorite thing. I saw Cal reach over and squeeze Bethina’s hand as the Munin drifted back to earth, and in that moment I envied her. Her life was easy, with someone who loved her unconditionally. Mine was becoming anything but.