The Nightmare Garden

8 The Frozen Shores

THE CROSLEY HOUSE was a great white thing, clothed the whole way around in porches, all the way up to the third floor, like lace wrapped around bleached bones. It sat on a spit of land poking into the Atlantic, and on the rocky point beyond sat a lighthouse, its crimson band of paint the only color in the winter landscape.

It wasn’t as grand as Graystone, Archie’s huge granite mansion in Arkham, but was imposing in its own way, clinging to the rocks, crouched above the sea as if the house were waiting for something, or someone, to come in from the horizon.

My father set the Munin down on the vast expanse of dead, snowy lawn behind the house, amid ice-dripping statues and drooping topiary animals. He looked to Conrad. “Well, that shaved about ten years off my life. You know how to tie down an airship, boy?”

Conrad spread his hands and shook his head, but Dean took off his straps and jumped out of his seat next to me. “I do.”

“Good man,” Archie said. “Usually it’s just me and Valentina to keep her steady, and it can get hairy with this much wind.” He went down the ladder to the lower deck, and Dean followed.

“Be careful,” I called, before his gleaming raven head disappeared belowdecks.

He turned back and threw me a wink. “You know me, doll.”

I felt the heat start again in my chest. Dean had an effect on me with just a look. I was glad he’d gone back to smiling after I’d snapped at him. Later, I’d have to try to find a way to really apologize.

“We can disembark,” Valentina said, knocking me out of my Dean-induced daze. “I’ll lock the wheel while you kids go inside.” She pressed a brass key into my hand. “That opens the back door.”

I was surprised at how casually she handed over the keys to her home, especially when I’d made it glaringly obvious I didn’t like her. Dean’s voice echoed in my head, reminding me to give her a chance.

But I remembered the emptiness in my guts when I’d seen the ruined madhouse and realized Nerissa was still gone, and I just couldn’t do it. I snatched the key and went ahead of Conrad, Cal and Bethina down the ladder and across the lawn. Up close, the house was even more foreboding, like it had been emptied out and was only a skeleton, a dead insect left on the lawn after warm weather had gone. Salt-rimed windows glared back blankly at me as I crossed the frozen grass, crunching blades under my boots, and I looked at the vast expanse of empty beach and dune and rock around us. There were no ghoul traps here, nothing to thwart some kind of creature lying in wait for a fresh meal. My shoulder wasn’t throbbing, so I walked on cautiously, but my every nerve sang with alertness, and looking too long at the skeletal house gave me a chill.

“So,” I said to Conrad as we mounted the shallow weather-grayed steps to the wide, faded blue back door. “Valentina is something else.”

“She seems swell,” Bethina piped up. “A real classy lady.” Of course Bethina would think that. She expected the best from people until they showed her otherwise. I wished I could do the same, sometimes, but now I couldn’t help being a little annoyed. Just because Valentina had fancy clothes and good manners didn’t make her good all over.

Conrad sighed and rolled his eyes in consternation at my annoyed expression.

“Aoife, don’t be naive. People in the real world don’t sit around and pine for the rest of their lives when their wives get committed to madhouses. And you know they were never legally married, anyway.”

“Why don’t you strip your own gears, Conrad?” I suggested, glaring at him.

He flung his hands in the air in response to my insult, looking for all the world like someone who had reached the end of his rope.

“I can’t even talk to you these days without getting my head bitten off. I’m done.”

“Fine by me,” I told him. “All you ever do when you open your mouth is try to make me feel stupid.”

“Hey!” Cal shouted, when Conrad opened his mouth again. “Me and Bethina are freezing. You think maybe we could take the family fight inside?”

I turned away from Conrad. I wasn’t embarrassed for losing my temper this time, but I was infuriated that Conrad seemed to be sticking up for Valentina just to be contrary.

I shoved the key in the lock and opened the rickety wooden door to Valentina’s house, following Cal and Bethina inside, away from Conrad and that disapproving line between his eyes.

The remainder of the afternoon was taken up with my father turning the aether feed to the house on and getting hot water flowing while the rest of us checked the pantry and returned to the Munin for provisions. Conrad and Dean carried in wood to stoke the fireplaces; various other household tasks like making up beds and washing plates and cups fell to Valentina, Bethina and me. The work did absolutely nothing to stem the tide of fierce resentment growing in my chest.

Valentina flitted around taking dust catchers from the furniture and asking if everyone had had enough to eat or wanted tea and biscuits, and everything else well-bred young ladies were supposed to check up on when they entertained guests. I didn’t know how she could be so calm in an unprotected house, with no reinforced doors, shutters, or traps—ghouls could burst in at any moment, and then the tea party would be over.

I finally cornered my father when he came back from the basement, cleaning soot from the boiler off his palms. “Are we safe here?”

“Sure,” he said, frowning. “The house is in Valentina’s father’s name. The Proctors have no reason to suspect we’d come here.”

“I meant …” I lowered my voice as Valentina passed, carrying a tray of sandwiches into the dining room. Dean, Conrad and Cal fell on them like, well, starving teenage boys. My stomach grumbled. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a real meal. “Are we safe from, you know …”

Archie raised one eyebrow. “From the Fae? Yes, Aoife.” He put his hand on my shoulder, surprising me, and gave a half smile. “There may not be ghoul traps outside, but the bones of this house were built to protect the people inside. There’s no iron, but that’s not the only way to keep out Fae.” He patted me, in what I’d call a fatherly gesture from anyone else. From him, I wasn’t sure what to call it yet, but it still calmed me. “When we’re settled in, I’ll tell you all about it. It’s stuff you need to know anyway.”

“And Conrad,” I reminded him. Archie’s eyes darkened into an expression I couldn’t identify as he looked past me to where Conrad was shoving roast beef into his mouth.

“Right,” he said. “Conrad. Of course.” He shoved the dirty rag into his back pocket and gave me another of those enigmatic half smiles. “Get some sleep, kid. You look exhausted.”

I was exhausted, so I didn’t argue, just went up to the room Valentina had told me was mine when she was running around playing hostess. I didn’t understand how she could take the time, considering what was going on. Valentina definitely seemed as if she was showing off—her grand house, her skills at hospitality. Wasn’t it enough that she was stunningly beautiful and rich? Did she have to be perfect at everything else too?

I huffed as I flopped backward on the creaky bed, examining the room to which Valentina had exiled me. Maybe exiled wasn’t the right word. Removed. I was rooms away from Dean, my brother and my friends, never mind the master suite. Just like at the Academy—stick the charity case up under the rafters and forget about her.

My room was in a corner so small that the ceiling formed a pyramid where the sides of the roof met. The furniture was mismatched and clearly picked from other parts of the house. A chipped mirror over a dressing table told me I was dirty, tired and really in need of a change of clothes. I got back off the carved wooden bed, which was covered with a crazy quilt and a long-forgotten family of porcelain dolls, and went to the wardrobe to look for some clean underthings, at the very least.

Cal and Bethina were still downstairs—I could hear them laughing. They could enjoy Valentina’s house with none of the resentment the place triggered in me. Dean’s whereabouts were a mystery, and if I knew Conrad he was probably hanging off my father and Valentina, determined to play the part of the good son.

If my mother had been safe, I would have tried to give Valentina a chance to be my stepmother and my father a chance to be happy. I would have forced myself to at least be polite to her, even if we’d never be the best of friends.

But the world was turning to ashes, and Archie didn’t seem nearly as concerned with that fact as he did with his pretty blond doll.

I’d feel better if I were clean. That was the only thing I was sure of. I rooted around in the wardrobe and found a robe made of silk so old it crumbled in places under my hands. It was the only thing remotely resembling nightclothes that fit, though, so I pulled it around me and let the musty, sharp scent envelop my skin.

The bottom of the wardrobe held a stack of old composition books, so old the pages breathed dust when I smoothed one open. Searching the drawers, I found a pencil with a little lead left. My bag and my original journal were gone, but I needed to write. Maybe if I got all these racing, swelling, screaming thoughts out of my head, I’d be able to make a new plan.

I dated the corner of the page and began.

Fourth entry:

I failed. I had a plan, I executed it, and I still failed.

My mother is not in Lovecraft and the city is gone. Lovecraft is an abattoir filled with ghouls. My father has a girlfriend who could be my sister and he doesn’t think I should have any problems with that fact. He just says I have to “trust” him, that he has the answers that will let us fix the Gates and find Nerissa. I want to trust him. I want a father, a family. I want people I can trust. But everything that’s happened since I destroyed the Engine makes it close to impossible.

The world is burning, and all I can do is watch and feel the flames on my face. I don’t have a plan to put the fires out. I don’t even know where to look for water.

I didn’t only fail my mother. I failed as a Gateminder.

There has to be a way to stop Draven and put things back like they were. To stop ghouls from roaming free, to stop the Gates from being thrown open to allow whatever can find them to make their way from world to world and cause more destruction. To restore the order the Brotherhood of Iron worked so hard to protect.

I think of the way my life was. I was so afraid of the Proctors, of going crazy, but also of getting bad grades and whether my hairstyle would get me teased. Such small worries now. Of course, that was a life built on lies, but innocent people weren’t in harm’s way.

A life of lies or a life of nothing except this vast feeling of loss inside me.

Is there another way?

I threw down the pencil and slapped the book shut. How was scribbling maudlin little thoughts supposed to save the world? Was the whole Brotherhood of Iron indolent and/or insane? Where were they? Why wasn’t Archie contacting them, trying to find a solution to all this?

What was he waiting for?

In the middle of my worrying, a knock sounded at my door, and I jumped, tearing my robe at the shoulder. I shoved the notebook under the threadbare pillows on my bed and got up to answer it.

Valentina stood on the other side, a dress draped over her arm.

I let my distaste show in my posture, something I’d learned from Dean. “Can I help you, Valentina?”

In her other hand she held a quilted ditty bag, which she held out to me. “Peace offering?”

I looked at the thing askance. Valentina didn’t have to try to befriend me—she already had my father, and Conrad was clearly smitten with her presence. What could she possibly gain from kissing up to me?

“What is it?” I didn’t take the bag.

“Let me in and I’ll show you,” Valentina told me, attempting a smile. It looked about as real as the creamy, note-perfect platinum tones in her smooth, glowing hair, which was to say, not at all. In my old life, friendly faces bearing gifts were usually just looking to trick or mock me, or make me look stupid for the other students’ amusement. I’d learned a long time ago not to trust them, so why should Valentina be any different?

A tiny, doubtful part of me whispered that I was being awfully hard on Valentina, but I told it to be quiet. “I’m very tired,” I said aloud. “I think I’m going to bed.” I started to shut the door, but Valentina stopped it with her foot. She and I exchanged polite stares for a moment, before she sighed and dropped her gaze. I was surprised—she was in charge here, the lady of the house, and she could just as easily have demanded Archie make me behave as tried to reason with me.

“Look, Aoife,” she said, and her voice was no longer the pleasant trilling of a well-trained bird. All at once, she just looked tired. “I know you don’t like me. It could hardly be more obvious, really. But I love your dad, and because of that, I want the two of us to get along. Can you give me five minutes to make my case?”

I felt a tightening in my chest. Five minutes with Valentina would feel like betraying Nerissa the entire time.

“I’m not asking you to take a side,” Valentina said quietly. “I just want you to know I’m not as awful as you seem determined to make me out to be.”

I had some doubts about that, but she looked so defeated I felt the resolve to hate her washing away like the dunes outside under heavy seas. She really wasn’t much older than me—if I’d been in her shoes, I’d have been at my wits’ end trying to deal with somebody so openly hostile.

“Fine,” I said, and pulled the door all the way open. “You can come in, I guess.”

“Well, thank the stars for that,” Valentina said. “You’re even more stubborn than your father, you know that?”

“No,” I told her, sitting on the bed again and pulling my knees to my chest. “I barely know him, never mind whether he’s stubborn or not.” It made me happy to know she saw some similarity between my father and me. I felt a bit less like we’d simply been thrown together as father and daughter by fate. Maybe something other than the Weird tied us together after all.

“He is,” Valentina assured me. “Stubborn as an old goat.” She pulled a hanger from the wardrobe and put the dress she’d brought in on it, placing it on a hook inside the door and smoothing it with her neat, manicured hands. “It didn’t look like you had any clean clothes,” she explained. “You and I should be around the same size, though I’m a bit larger in the bust.” She drew a packet of hairpins from the ditty bag and put them on the edge of the dressing table. “You’ll get there. I can already tell you’re going to be a true beauty.”

I chewed on my lip, not able to think of anything to say, so I just settled for blushing furiously and staring at my feet.

“You don’t hear that much, huh?” Valentina said, raising an eyebrow. “Well, take it from me—when you grow into your face, you’re going to stop traffic.”

“You’re the only one who thinks so, I’m sure,” I mumbled. “Not even my mother ever said I was pretty.”

“Neither did mine, unless I was doing as she commanded,” Valentina said, with a crackly, dry-paper laugh. “My family places a great deal of value on beauty,” she continued, then shook her head. “That’s not exactly right. They put a lot of value on appearances. For instance, my father detests Archie, really. Can’t stand him. But they’re part of the same cause, working for the Brotherhood to protect the Iron Land from the Fae and anything else out there, so he pretends they’re great friends to keep the other members thinking he’s a genial old man, when really, it couldn’t be further from the truth.” She sighed. “What you must think of this place—a kid who grew up like you did. You must find me unbearably bourgeois.”

Valentina was making it harder and harder to completely dislike her, and that just made me feel even crankier and more exhausted than I already did. I wanted things to be simple—she was the evil stepmother, I was the neglected daughter. Her being nice and friendly and normal made things much less cut and dried. “My father’s family isn’t poor,” I said. “But I don’t think my father is like yours.”

“The Graysons have family money,” Valentina said. “But your father and your uncle Ian didn’t do much besides working with the Brotherhood, so Grayson money’s not the fat stack of cash it once was. Another mark against him, from the Crosleys’ perspective. They’ve got that Rationalist work ethic, even if they don’t believe in any of the teachings.”

“It’s really strange,” I blurted, unable to think of a polite way to say it, “hearing about my family from you.”

Valentina drew a hairbrush from the bag as well. “Come over here,” she said, patting the seat of the dressing table.

I drew my brows together, suspicious of her again. “What for?”

“Just come,” Valentina said. “And trust me a little. I may not be an ace engineer like you, but I know what I’m doing here.”

I sat, but slowly.

Valentina sighed. “I’m not going to bite you, Aoife.”

“Maybe I’m just not ready to be best friends yet.” I kept one eye on her in the mirror as she opened the bag and pulled out a Bakelite case.

“Just as paranoid as your dear old dad too,” Valentina said. “For two people who never talked but once before today, you have a lot in common.”

I dropped my eyes at that, unaccountably pleased that someone had confirmed what I’d been thinking—Archie and I were alike, if only in that we were both stubborn and cranky. But it made me feel warm inside, warmer than the cool air of the house could make me.

Valentina opened the case top, revealing twin rows of ceramic rollers, with a connector in the back to allow a small steam hob to heat them. “Your hair is a travesty,” Valentina said. “I’m going to fix it, and we’re going to talk.”

“Do I have a choice?” I asked. I wasn’t entirely opposed to the idea of a makeover, but talking seemed like it might be strained. What could someone like Valentina possibly want to talk about with me? I wasn’t rich and I wasn’t cultured. I didn’t even know the right fork to use at a fancy dinner party.

“No,” Valentina said as she picked up the hairbrush and a small tin tub of pomade and tilted my head down so I was looking at my lap. She yanked the brush through a section of my hair, and I hissed at the sting.

“Where did you meet Archie? You seem a little young for him.” If she was going to push and pull at me, I decided I could at least control the talking part.

“We met when he came to consult with my father on a matter of importance regarding the Brotherhood,” Valentina told me. “I was seventeen then—and yes, that’s very young. Archie was a gentleman, and he waited for three years, until I could return his affections freely.”

“You didn’t like boys your own age?” I asked, looking up at her from under my eyelashes. She didn’t blink, just laughed lightly, as if nothing I said could bother her.

“Your brother told me downstairs you had a smart mouth.” She’d separated my hair into a dozen or so sections, each a sharp tug and sting on my scalp. She tested the rollers with her finger. “Nearly heated. And no, Aoife. Boys my age bored me, although there was no shortage. I was pretty, and my father was rich. That’s how it goes. But they were fools, and I’d never met a man I could love until I met Archie.”

I swallowed, and then decided this might be my one chance to get an honest answer, even if it wasn’t the one I wanted. “Are you and my father going to get married?”

“Marriage is an antiquated construct,” Valentina said. I tucked that away—no straight answers on that score from her. That made me like her a little bit more. Under her manners and clothes, she was just as out of place as Conrad and me.

“What about you and Dean?” she asked, changing the subject.

My face flushed, and the heat of the rollers didn’t have much to do with it. What about me and Dean? He makes my heart beat faster. He makes me feel alive. Neither was a sentiment I was comfortable sharing with my brand-new pseudo-stepmother. I stayed quiet while Valentina carefully rolled and pinned one, then another and then a third section of my hair. It stung, like hot water droplets on my scalp. I bit down hard on my lip to hold in a yelp.

“Do you like him?” she tried again. “You two seem very fond of each other, from what I saw.”

“You know, it’s not very polite to ask me questions and not answer mine,” I told her, almost smiling. It was nice to know that Dean’s feelings for me showed.

Three more rollers and three more hot spots. Valentina’s hands were much stronger than their delicate bones implied. My head in the mirror was rapidly becoming a beehive of black and silver.

“When you’re a little older, Aoife, you’ll understand that answers aren’t always black-and-white or easy,” she said, as if she were confiding in me. “I feel like I live two lives a lot of the time. Good, demure Crosley girl, who’ll marry someone appropriate, who plays piano and knows how to fix hair in the new fashions and wears all the right clothes.”

She had used up the rollers, and she handed me a rubbery pink cap emblazoned with cabbage roses. “Put this on. In the morning you’ll have a good proper set, and we can style it.”

I pulled the cap over my head, hiding the mountain of hair sausages that my usually unruly mane had turned into. My scalp felt a bit itchy and claustrophobic under it, but I kept still and pretended my head wasn’t stinging, for Valentina’s sake. She was trying, that much was obvious. “What’s the other life?” I asked. Valentina was gathering up her things but paused for a moment and turned to answer me.

“A member of the Brotherhood,” she said. “Even if I don’t have an ability like you and your father do, I can do my part. Now more than ever, with what’s happened.”

She must have seen her words hit home, though I tried not to flinch.

“Oh, I don’t blame you,” Valentina said. “You were manipulated. It happens more than you’d think, among those who know the truth about the Gates and the Thorn Land. The Fae are very persuasive.”

“I didn’t do it for them,” I whispered, my face hot with the kind of shame unique to being misunderstood. “I did it for—”

“For your mother, I know. Try not to drown yourself in your guilt, Aoife,” Valentina said. “We’ve all done things we wish we could take back.” She looked at her shoes for a moment, then back at me, as if she’d decided to confess. “I used to have terrible nightmares about the things I saw after I joined the Brotherhood. Some choices I had to make for the greater good.”

“And now?” I whispered. I had to admit Dean was right—I had misjudged Valentina. The pain written across her face mirrored my own in that moment.

“Now I don’t dream at all,” she said, and smiled. It was genuine, but sad. “It does get better, Aoife. Try and get some sleep. Things will seem brighter tomorrow.” She started to shut the door and then leaned back in. “And try not to squash your rollers in your sleep. You’ll look so grown-up tomorrow.”

I didn’t want to burst her bubble on that score, but I knew my unruly hair. I just nodded. “Good night. And … thank you.”

Valentina gave me another one of her sad smiles before she backed out and closed my door, the latch catching with a click. So different from the clanging doors of Graystone and the heavy, creaking hinges of the Academy. A normal house sound, for a house full of normal people. What a joke.

I sat for a long time, listening to the house tick and settle. There was a draft coming through the windows, and I burrowed under the covers of the tiny bed. It was like being back at the Academy, in my drafty dormitory under my threadbare school-issued coverlet. Not exactly comforting, but familiar.

What was I supposed to do now? Sit and wait for my father and Valentina to solve things? If I was going to be the daughter Archie had asked me to be, the trusting one, the answer was probably yes.

If I was being honest with myself, that sounded like trading in one set of rules designed to keep me passive and sweet for another designed to keep me obedient and not asking questions.

But before I could debate any more, my mind decided that I’d been awake for enough days in a row, and I fell asleep hearing the wind worm its way through the cracks and hollows of the house.

In the morning, I realized that I’d slept dreamless and dead to the world for the first time in weeks. My neck was cramped from lying on the rollers. I unpinned them and pulled them off my head, combing the curls with my fingers. I wrapped my head with a rag while I took a bath and then wiped the mirror free of moisture to see what I looked like.

Valentina had been right. I hardly recognized myself. My dark hair set off my skin—which until this moment I’d always lamented as too pale—as it fell in gentle waves to just below my shoulders, swooping low across my brow to partially shadow my gaze.

I’d almost call myself pretty. Almost.

I tried not to let my shock at how I looked distract me while I got dressed. I was still here, in Valentina’s house, and still had no idea what my father wanted from me beyond shutting up and doing as I was told.

The dress Valentina had left for me was plain blue wool, with a straight skirt and mother-of-pearl buttons up the bodice. It was a lady’s dress, not a full-skirted thing with a wide, round collar made for a child. This dress required stockings, a garter belt and pumps, not a petticoat and stiff, flat shoes.

I put it on gratefully. Now that I’d distanced myself from them, the clothes I’d gotten in Windhaven really did stink.

I found underthings in the wardrobe, rolling on stockings that smelled of mothballs, and when I ventured outside my door, a pair of tan leather pumps with low, practical heels sat next to my doorway in the hall. Valentina and I had the same size feet, it turned out, and the pumps gave me height that I loved, even if I did wobble crazily until I learned how to balance on the narrow heel.

All right, I admitted. She’s not my favorite person on the face of the earth, but she’s not an evil stepmother, either. In time, maybe I could accept the fact that my father had replaced Nerissa with her. After all, it wasn’t really Valentina’s fault. That lay wholly with my father, and meant an entirely different unpleasant conversation we would have to undertake at some point.

But not now. Now, my stomach growled and reminded me that real food was nearby, and I hadn’t had nearly enough of it lately. I headed for the stairs.

In daylight, with a chance to look around undisturbed, I saw that the Crosley house wasn’t in much better shape than my old, mud-stained clothes. Everything was clearly expensive, overstuffed and velvet-covered and practically oozing out the money it had cost, but it was all curiously faded and dusty, as if nobody had come to the house for a long time and the house preferred it that way.

I followed the smell of bacon into the kitchen, which was vast and modern, both icebox and range a pale pink I’d only seen over a makeup counter in a department store. All the latest gadgets to mash and peel and open cans under the power of clockwork rather than doing it yourself sat on the countertops, covered in a thick layer of dust.

My father stood at the stove with his back to me, and I watched him for a moment. I tried to see myself in him, as I had the day before, and as I’d done with his portrait at Graystone before that. His posture wasn’t mine—he stood feet apart and shoulders thrown back, even as he chopped onion and turned eggs in a frying pan.

Our hands moved the same way, though, sure and quick. Our hands knew what to do even if we didn’t. You needed steady hands and a delicate touch to be an engineer. It was the one way being smaller than everyone else in the School of Engines had come in handy. In those days, I could always fix what was broken.

“How long are you going to stand there?”

I ducked away reflexively at being caught and then looked at the toes of my shoes, my face heating. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sneak.”

Archie didn’t respond. He scooped up the onions and dropped them into a second frying pan, covering them with egg mixture from a pink porcelain mixing bowl. He tossed in a few lumps of soft white cheese and then wiped his hands on a blue-checked towel and turned to face me, sizing me up with those stony eyes once more. And once more, I felt like a squirming specimen under a microscope.

“How did you know I was here?” I said finally, to break the unbearable silence.

“Basic situational awareness isn’t a magic trick,” Archie said. “At least, not a very good one. And it’s something you’re going to have to learn, if you want to stay alive by more than pure luck.”

I bristled. He could at least give me a tiny bit of credit for staying alive this long. “It’s not just luck. I know things.”

Archie raised an eyebrow and then turned back to the stove, flipping the omelet in the pan with an expert hand. “You can’t fight. You don’t know wilderness survival. You know nothing about the Fae or the Erlkin, or even the Gates. You’ve spent your whole life safe in Lovecraft.” He slid the omelet onto a plate and cut it into sections, placing them on several dishes along with potatoes and bacon and toast. “Tell me, Aoife—exactly what great feat of skill or strength kept you out of the clutches of the Proctors besides pure, blind luck?”

He turned back, set a plate on the table in front of me and folded his arms, awaiting an answer with the tilt of his head.

I stared at him for a moment, stared at the plate, and then, unable to contain myself, shoved the plate back at him, scattering food everywhere. “If you feel that way, Dad, why’d you ever pull me out of Lovecraft on your stupid, prissy airship and let your stupid, prissy girlfriend act like you two actually wanted me here? If I’m such an idiot, you should have just abandoned me to the damn ghouls.”

I turned and left the kitchen, my ridiculous shoes clacking on the wood floors, raising tiny hurricanes of dust in my wake. I snatched an overcoat from a tree by the wide French doors leading to the back deck and ran across the lawn, past the Munin, all the way down to the shore. My breath sawed in my chest, pushing the urge to scream to the surface.

I’d been right the first time. My father didn’t care about me. All he wanted to do was hold me up as an example of how he could do everything so much better.

As if I’d ever had a chance, with him leaving. He was a hypocrite, and he was cruel.

The waves were higher than my head on the beach, breaking with vibrations that raced up through my feet where I stood on the sand. The heels of my shoes sank in, and I yanked them off viciously and threw them, along with my stockings. The freezing sand bit into my bare feet, and my toes went numb. Good. My whole body could have gone numb for all I cared in that moment. I wanted to smash up against something, like the surf, vent my rage on something tangible, but there was nothing there. I settled for staring furiously at the waves, tears blinding me as I faced the wind, breath coming in short, hot, razor-sharp gasps.

The ocean was gray, and far off I could see the wobbly horizon line, the promise of a larger storm to come. I stayed, relishing the sting of cold and salt on my face, waiting for the wind and rain to roll in and blanket me in their fury, so much larger than mine that it was the only thing that might erase how I felt right then.

“Aoife!” My father’s voice cut straight through the wind and the roar of the surf, and when he appeared at the top of the dune, he sounded as if he were right next to me. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

He came down the rickety weathered steps from the dune two at a time and crossed the sand to grab me by the arm. “It’s not safe out here by yourself! Anything could be wandering around!” His brow furrowed. “And where on the scorched earth are your shoes?”

I looked down at his hand, back at his face. Suddenly I couldn’t even muster the energy to be angry. He’d told me how he really felt, and that was that. Now that he’d been honest, I had no reason to be angry, or hopeful, or confused any longer. Just numb, like all the exposed bits of my skin. “Let go of me,” I said, flat as the wet sand around us. Far down the beach, some kind of aquatic mammal had beached itself, white skeleton picked over by a horde of gulls.

“I …” Archie dropped his hand from my arm and stuck it in his hair instead, his face a mask of confusion and upset. The dark strands were laced with white and stood out from his head, toyed with by the wind. “I’m no good at this,” he said. “It’s not gonna do any good to sugarcoat it, Aoife—most Gateminders grow up learning how to do the job. And for various reasons, you didn’t. It’s going to be hard to teach you what you need to know in so short a time. But it doesn’t mean I’m …” He spread his hands, at a loss for words.

“Disappointed,” I finished for him. “And you are. I can see it.” Why wouldn’t he be? He was a Gateminder and I was his daughter who had destroyed everything he and the Brotherhood had tried to build up. Build up and keep safe for hundreds of years. I was a failure as a Grayson. There was no sugarcoating that, either.

“I’m disappointed in a whole hell of a lot,” Archie said. “I’m disappointed I couldn’t tell my daughter not to trust the first Fae who fed her a good story. I’m disappointed her mother went so crazy even I couldn’t fix her. I’m disappointed we live in a world that’s so full of lies it seeps poison like a snakebite. But I’m not disappointed in you, Aoife.” He reached out as if to cup my cheek, but then detoured to my shoulder, patting it awkwardly. I felt like I should pull away after what had happened, but I didn’t. I allowed myself the tiny hope that maybe things would turn out all right after my tantrum. “You’re my child,” Archie said. “We’re kinda stuck with each other.”

“I do have my Weird, you know,” I told him, drawing my brows together in reproach. “You act like I need rescuing, but I can be useful.” I wanted my father to believe that more than anything.

Archie’s mouth curled into a smile. “Yeah, they seemed pretty excited about that in Ravenhouse when they caught you. It works on machines, huh?”

I nodded, adding my own smile. “Anything with moving parts. Some things are easier than others.”

Archie leaned down, and his expression was conspiratorial, like we were the same age. “Wanna see mine?”

His enthusiasm was infectious, and I thought I caught a glimpse of the boyish side that had entranced Valentina, and likely my mother. So different from his perpetual frown and judgmental gaze. I wanted to see more of that, so I said, “All right. I’d like that.” I stood back, excited, but not sure what to expect. Better to be out of the danger zone, as I’d learned when Cal and I had taken a welding class and he’d lit not one but three of his aprons on fire with his torch.

My father winked at me, then trained his eye on a pile of driftwood and dried seaweed that had washed up a few dozen feet farther down the beach. He opened his palm and blew on it, just the smallest touch of air to skin.

A split second later, the driftwood ignited with a whump, a jet of crimson fire rushing toward the sky.

Archie let out a whoop, and I clapped my hand over my mouth. I’d figured out from his journal that my father could conjure fire, but seeing it in reality was a whole new dimension of thrill. I stared, unable to stifle a grin that matched my father’s miles-wide one.

I wasn’t alone. We could both do things that would be considered heresy by any Proctor.

But it wasn’t born of anything evil. It was magic, pure and simple.

“So?” My father was breathing hard from the effort, his face flushed. In the warmth of the nearby fire, my skin was no longer numb.

“Pretty neat,” I admitted. My father looked so animated, I couldn’t resist teasing him a bit. “I’ve seen better.”

“ ‘Pretty neat’?” Archie shook his head. “You kids today. What do I have to do to get your attention, dance a jig?”

I shook my head rapidly, trying not to giggle. “Please don’t. Really. It’s not necessary.”

Archie reached out and messed up the top of my hair. I didn’t care—Valentina’s beautiful curls were lost to the wind anyway. “Who taught you manners?”

It was like walking a tightrope—I took one step at a time and hoped I wouldn’t fall into a chasm. Archie was behaving like a father, me like a daughter, and I decided to just keep going until something did go wrong. “Certainly not you,” I teased.

“True enough,” Archie agreed. “Can’t say I’d have done a much better job if I’d been around. My manners are shit.” He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and then looked at me, pained. “See? You’re not supposed to swear in front of your teenage daughter. I’m hopeless.”

“Trust me,” I said. “I’ve heard worse.” I knew that sooner or later, we’d run into another roadblock, have another fight, and things would go back to being strange and strained. But right now, I wanted to keep taking the tiny steps, keep swaying on the rope and enjoy a few minutes alone with my father.

The way things were going, they might be the only ones I’d get.

I pointed to Archie’s pocket watch, tucked into the front of his vest. My father’s clothes were nice, but they were also out of fashion by about ten years and clearly ripped and repaired dozens of times over. He was always just a bit too unkempt to maintain the appearance of a gentleman of his station. He looked more like a professor or a clock maker than somebody who lived in a grand house and could call flame out of thin air.

Then again, I supposed I looked more like the daughter of the same than what I really was.

“My turn,” I said. “Give me that and I’ll show you what I can do.”

Archie frowned, turning the silver watch in his hands before he gave it over. “Be careful. That watch was your grandfather’s.”

I popped open the top. The face was mother-of-pearl, and the hands were black, the numerals painted on in a fine hand and intertwined with vines hiding tiny forest creatures. It was a work of art. Inside the lid was an engraving, almost worn away with age: There is no rule but iron, and no balm but time. The date was 1898.

Pushing a little of my Weird to the forefront of my mind, I let the smallest tendril touch the watch. Here, away from the city and in Valentina’s iron-free house, the whispers and the pain weren’t nearly so bad. I could probably stay here for years before I started to go truly insane.

My Weird responded eagerly, unmuted by iron, and in the space of a heartbeat, the hands began to turn backward, still ticking off time. The dates in the face also turned back, and once I’d ensured they would stay that way as long as I held a bit of the watch in my mind, I handed it back to Archie proudly. “I can do that with anything. Came in handy when we were on the run.”

“Pretty neat,” he told me with a grin, and this time I didn’t hesitate to return it.

“What’s the inscription mean?” I asked.

“It’s the motto of the Brotherhood,” he answered. “Or was, at least. Back when the Brotherhood actually did some good.”

I started to ask what he meant but thought better of it when his smile dropped and the stone-faced expression I recognized returned. He shut the watch and shoved it into his pocket. When he looked up, he was smiling again. “But enough about that. Want to take another crack at breakfast?”

“Sure,” I agreed, and followed him inside. The hundred questions I had about Nerissa, the strange comments about the Brotherhood and my Weird could wait. I did trust my father, and I just hoped that sooner rather than later, he’d be in a mood to give me answers.

The next two days at the Crosley house passed uneventfully. Things with my father were all right when it was just the two of us, but when Valentina was around he got gruff and awkward and had a hard time looking me in the eye. I wasn’t sure how to act either—yes, I was his daughter, but in reality he barely knew me, and the last thing I wanted was a spat with my de facto stepmother over territory she had clearly already claimed.

Valentina wasn’t completely bad, as long as we avoided serious subjects. She showed me how to apply rouge and paint my nails without getting the enamel everywhere. We sipped tea in the sunroom and everyone gathered around the piano to hear her play thunderous classical music that sounded like the ocean had broken down the dunes and come rushing through the music room.

It was a break from running, that was for sure, and there was decent food and a warm bed. Still, every time I looked toward Lovecraft and saw the orange glow against the night sky from still-burning fires, my guts churned with guilt and worry.

On the third morning, I couldn’t take it anymore. My patience caved, and with it went my placid veneer. “Are we going to stay here forever?” I said to Archie. He and I were washing up from breakfast, a task I’d taken away from Bethina by force. She thought as long as she was in Archie’s presence, she had to revert to her old job of maid, but I’d bribed her with some leftover scones and cream and sent her away with a suggestion of taking Cal for a walk along the dunes. She wasn’t a maid any longer, and I wanted her and Cal to be able to relax.

“It’s safe here,” Archie said. He was scrubbing while I dried. “Relatively so, anyway. We’re not behind walls like in New Amsterdam and San Francisco, and there are things roaming out there, but no Fae is going to risk coming within spitting distance of this house and not one but two members of the Brotherhood of Iron.”

“Is the Thorn Land trying to invade us?” I asked bluntly, setting the plates in a pile. They clacked like ghouls’ teeth. I hadn’t asked yet because I didn’t really want the truth, but I couldn’t avoid it any longer. If I’d done more than wake the queens of the Thorn Land, if I’d opened not just a crack but an actual channel for invasion, I needed to know.

“You sure are good at picking the one question I don’t have an answer to,” my father said. He shut off the hot water and dried his hands, wincing. I noticed that his knuckles were cut, like he’d driven his hand into something hard and unforgiving.

“Tremaine said—” I began.

“Tremaine lied to you,” Archie snapped. “That’s what he does. He’s a snake, even among his own kind. He told you exactly what you needed to hear so you’d wake the queens, and then he told you exactly what you needed to hear so you’d stay good and scared and not try to put anything right once you saw what you’d done.”

He had a point—I’d seen the extent of Tremaine’s lies firsthand. But his lies always held a grain of truth, and that terrified me.

“You’re with the Brotherhood of Iron!” I cried in frustration. “You all saved the world when Tesla made the Gates. You’re supposed to know what to do.”

“The Brotherhood is not some magical cavalry that rides out of the smoke and hellfire and saves the poor, innocent humans from the menace of the otherworlds,” Archie said. “No matter how much Grey Draven and his cronies might want to change us into that very thing.”

He gestured me outside to the kitchen steps, and despite my irritation I followed him. He stood quietly for a moment and then furtively drew out one of his cigarettes. “Truth is, Aoife, the best we ever were was a police force that was too small and spread too thin to do all the good we could against encroachment from Thorn, the Mists and wherever the hell else nasty monsters crawled up from. And that was in my grandfather’s day. Now the Brotherhood has … Well. They’ve lost sight of the endgame, to say the very least, and there’s a lot of things the leadership and I don’t agree on.”

I sat next to him, pulling my skirt down over my legs to keep out the cold. I’d wanted the Brotherhood to be the knights, to have the knowledge in their collection of Gateminder’s diaries to fix what I’d done. But the image of squabbling men, and only a handful of men at that, didn’t inspire much hope. “So they can’t help us?” I was only half surprised. Most hope these days died a quick death the moment I got close to it.

“Oh, they’re trying to shut the broken Gates, and keep the Fae and the Mists at bay while they do it,” Archie said. “Avoid Draven and his plans to turn them into his own personal shock troops while they’re at it. But when Tremaine came after me and started this whole mad plan that ended with you, I couldn’t ask the Brotherhood for help.”

“Why not?” I said, confused. I wasn’t naive enough to think the Brotherhood would come and set everything right, but I’d at least thought they could be an ally and that, as members, my father and Valentina counted among their number and were to be aided no matter what.

“Because they’d have negotiated,” Archie said softly. “They’d wheedle and cajole, try to get something for themselves out of the deal and use me like a damn trading chip. The Grayson family has done a lot for the Brotherhood, Aoife, but we are not in charge. Gateminders are guard dogs. Dogs have masters. If you have the idea that you can go and ask them to help you now …” He reached out and squeezed my hand, hard and all at once, with bruising strength. I hissed in pain, flinching under his touch, but he held fast and stared into my eyes.

“Promise me, Aoife. Promise me you will not throw yourself on the mercy of the Brotherhood. They know it was a Grayson who broke the Gates, because it couldn’t be anyone else. I don’t think they’ve figured out which one yet, since they haven’t tried to haul me in for questioning, but listen—they won’t take you in with open arms and they won’t fix anything, because despite acting as if they’re all-knowing, they can’t. Tesla was the only one who really understood how the Gates on our side work, and he’s long gone, along with his research.”

“Dad …,” I began, trying to ease his grip on me and reassure him I wasn’t going to go running off, but he squeezed harder, wringing a droplet of sound from me at the pain. “I can’t promise,” I whispered. “You don’t understand. My mom …”

“I told you, Nerissa is going to be all right for a little while longer,” Archie said. “Stay with me, let me show you the ropes, make it so you don’t end up like you did in Lovecraft. Let me help you, Aoife. Stay here for a month or so and promise me you won’t go to the Brotherhood, and then I’ll do what I can about Nerissa, all right?”

“I can’t …,” I started. My mother didn’t have that kind of time, no matter what he said. I couldn’t waste a month learning whatever it was Archie wanted to teach me. If the Brotherhood had actual answers, I had to seek them out, no matter what they thought of my father or he of them.

“Promise me,” my father ground out. Pain flared in my fingers.

“I promise!” I cried, because I could tell by his expression I wasn’t going to change his mind.

I didn’t change my own mind, either, though.

My mother didn’t have a month.

Crunching footsteps over the icy grass made my father finally let go of me, putting his hand back in his lap, and when Dean rounded the corner, Archie looked like himself again. I breathed a sigh of relief, glad it was Dean and not Conrad or Valentina.

“Hey there, Aoife,” Dean said. “Mr. Grayson.” He was smoking the very end of a Lucky Strike, which he stamped out under his steel-toed boot. “Am I interrupting something?”

“No,” I said, jumping up. “We were just finishing our talk.” Honestly, I didn’t think that talk would ever be finished. The revelation that the Brotherhood might blame me for what had happened, might actually refuse to help, was almost more worrying than thinking about my mother’s fate.

Archie stayed where he was, smoking and running his other hand absently up and down his temple, his index finger leaving a small red mark. He didn’t look strong and self-assured just then, more small and lost, like I felt a great deal of the time. I wanted to do something to make him feel better, but I knew from my own bleak moods there was nothing for it except time.

Before I could say anything else, Dean laced his fingers with mine and was leading me away. The motion aggravated my already sore hand, and I jerked loose without thinking.

“Whoa,” Dean said as we rounded the corner of the porch. “You hurt? Did he hurt you?” Quick as a cloud scudding across the moon, darkness dropped into his eyes. “I’ll beat his hide so hard your granddad feels it.”

“Dean,” I said as he started back toward Archie, realizing what he’d read into the situation. “He didn’t do anything.”

Dean looked down at me, his nostrils flaring and his lips parted so I could see his teeth. In that moment he looked more Erlkin than human, and I took a step back. “You’ve been quiet and glum since we got here, and now I see you looking tore up. Is he—”

“No!” I shouted. “Stones, no. He’s my father, Dean. He’s not hurting me.” The very idea that Archie would be physically abusing me was sort of laughable. To me. But Dean’s life had been very different, and I knew he was just trying to look out for me.

Dean settled back inside his leather jacket, like a predator retreating back into its cave. “Well, okay. Why are you so gloomy, then?” He brushed his thumb down my cheek. “I miss you, princess. I miss your spark.”

I didn’t speak, just leaned in and wrapped my arms around his torso under his jacket. I loved the feel of his ribs under my fingers, the warmth of his skin through his shirt. I put my cheek against his cotton-wrapped chest and let out a breath for what felt like the first time since the Munin had touched down.

“I miss you too” was all I said. All my anger at the Brotherhood and all the worry about my father deflated, and I felt exhausted.

Dean pressed his lips to the top of my head. “Is it that bad?”

“Yeah,” I whispered. “We’re stuck here. And everyone in the world wants my head on a spike.”

“They can’t all,” Dean said. “Though it is a very pretty head.”

I laughed, even though it felt like swallowing a mouthful of ash. “You’re the only person who thinks so, I guarantee.”

Dean moved his lips to touch mine. “Only one that matters, aren’t I?”

I nodded, and stood on my toes to kiss him in return. After a minute I tilted my head toward the metal hulk of the Munin. “We could be alone in there.”

Dean’s smile came slowly, but it warmed me from the inside out. “I like the way you think, princess.”

“I am the brains of this operation,” I said, and then shoved him lightly and took off across the grass at a run.

“Oh, you are gonna get it when I catch you,” Dean called as I darted away from his grasp, feeling lighthearted for the first time that day. He followed me until we’d climbed the ladder into the Munin, both of us out of breath and shivering from the cold.

Dean snapped his lighter and illuminated our way into the cabin, where he shut the hatch and then turned to me, stripping off his jacket. I sat on the edge of the bunk, feeling the satiny brush of the fine linen on the backs of my legs. Valentina had given me fresh stockings and a garter belt to replace the ones I’d destroyed on the beach, and suddenly I could feel every inch of them against my skin.

I couldn’t leave the Crosley house, I couldn’t fix what was happening outside it, but I could be myself with Dean. Never mind that my hands shook when I gripped Dean’s biceps, his wiry muscles moving under my hands as he lowered me to the mattress, the length of his body pressing against mine. I could feel his weight and smell his smell—cigarettes and leather and woodsmoke. It covered me and pushed away all the helplessness and the choking feeling of being caught in a spiral of events that I had as much control over as an oak leaf over a hurricane.

“I like being this close to you, Dean,” I whispered.

“And I you, princess,” he whispered back. “What do you want to do?”

“Honestly?” I propped myself up, looking into his eyes, and bit my lip.

“Honesty is good,” Dean said.

“I want to take a nap,” I confessed. “I’m exhausted, and that house is so echoing. I can never really drift off.” I was self-conscious all of a sudden. Would he get mad that I didn’t want to just make out until we either got caught or had to go in to supper? Would he go find someone who would, when we left here, if I kept putting him off? “Or we could just go inside,” I rushed. Dean stopped me moving.

“Don’t do that,” he said. “Don’t leave.”

“I-I’m sorry,” I stuttered. “I just …”

“Hey, calm down,” Dean said, and I managed to stop my frantic babbling long enough to look into his eyes. As always, the calm gray seas within soothed me. He stroked my hair, pulling me back to his chest so that I could hear his heartbeat. In that moment, I never wanted to move. “So lay yourself down and sleep.” He grinned at me. “How many guys get to sleep next to somebody who looks like you?”

“Just you,” I murmured, eyelids already fluttering now that I knew he wasn’t upset with me.

“Damn right,” Dean said, pulling a blanket over us. “And in my book, that makes me the luckiest guy on this messed-up planet.”

“Good night, Dean,” I whispered. I planted a light kiss on his chest before nestling my head against him. His arms went around me, and I was so warm and calm that I never wanted to get up.

“Good night, princess,” he said softly. “Sweet dreams.”

The figure didn’t seem surprised to see me, and I wasn’t as shocked as I had been in the past to see him.

All the skies were red, bleeding sunsets and throbbing, bruise-colored sunrises. The black things that drifted above were close now, close enough to cast shadows.

I no longer even bothered asking what he wanted from me. I just stood, watching the great gear tick off the heartbeats of this place.

“You are unhappy,” the figure said.

I shrugged, watching absently as, one by one, the suns winked out, replaced by stars, and listening to the glass bell that made up the figure’s domain vibrate as the great shapes passed back and forth overhead.

“You have regrets,” the figure said. He reached out a hand to me. His robe fell back, and it was a disappointingly common hand, pale but not too pale, as if it had once been a darker shade and had spent a long time in the dark, leaching pigment into the nothing around it. “Please don’t look that way,” he said. “I do like your visits, you know.”

“Unless you can bring back my mother, mend my father’s life and turn the world back to how it was before it got ripped apart,” I told him, “then you’d better get used to this expression on my face.”

The figure withdrew like I’d burned him, hand disappearing into the black miasma of his body. Eyes glittered at me from under his hood. “I shouldn’t,” he said. He looked at the shapes overhead. “But it’s a new day, not an old day. This is a day never before seen by the universe, by any spoke of the wheel.”

“What are you talking about?” I sighed. “I hate your damn riddles.”

“This is the day and the night and the place in between,” the figure told me. “You can see it when you sleep. You cannot cross into it via magic or machine, but you can dream your way into it. Dreams are in every world, Aoife. In everything. Time. Dust. Your blood. The things you can’t remember when you wake.”

“Meaning?” I spread my hands.

“The nightmare clock can find your dreams,” said the figure. “It can weave them and unravel them. It can make your dreams real and allow you to cross not just worlds but time. If you can dream it, the nightmare clock can give you the ability to make it a reality, no matter where or when or how impossible your dream may seem.” He stretched his hand out once more and grabbed mine, and I realized that he was as cold as I knew the airless space outside the glass was. “Aoife,” he whispered. “The nightmare clock can undo what you have done, what plagues your dreams. The nightmare clock can set you free.”

Footsteps woke me, all at once, like breaking the surface of icy water. I sat upright and knocked Dean’s arm off me in the process. He grunted and scrubbed a hand across his face. “Not awake yet,” he muttered.

“I heard something,” I insisted. Before Dean could respond, the hatch swung open and Valentina appeared, aether lantern in hand. The sky had gone dark while we’d been asleep, and the blackness inside the Munin’s cabin was near absolute.

“There’s that mystery solved, then,” Valentina said, lowering the lantern. “We thought you’d been devoured by something.”

“No such luck,” I said sarcastically, trying to cover for my embarrassment at being found here. Valentina looked me up and down, and I could see her eyes pause on my mussed hair. Never mind the fact that Dean was lying next to me.

“Get up,” she said shortly. “Your father is in a mood, and I have a feeling none of us wants to have this conversation.”

Dean got up, grabbing his jacket and pulling it on. “We weren’t doing anything you need to be worried about,” he told Valentina. I nodded vigorous agreement, glad it was mostly dark in the Munin and she couldn’t see that my face was on fire.

“Fine, but I doubt Aoife’s father will believe that,” she told him. She didn’t look angry, but she sure wasn’t happy, mouth compressed into a thin line. She jerked her free hand at me. “Come along, Aoife. Your father is waiting.”

I made sure the buttons on my dress hadn’t come unfastened and the seams on my stockings matched. I slipped my shoes back on and went as far as the hatch, drawing even with Valentina. I knew she was doing me a favor, letting me know she wasn’t going to tell my father how she’d found us, even if we hadn’t been up to anything. I couldn’t help wondering, though, what I was going to have to do in exchange for her silence. “Thanks,” I mumbled. “I swear I wasn’t doing anything.” Not entirely true, but not entirely a lie. Half-truths seemed to be the order of the day.

Valentina sighed. “Aoife, I was sixteen once. Just go find your father. And quickly. He’s terribly worried.”

Worried that I was dead or worried that I wasn’t doing exactly as I was told, even if he hadn’t told me yet? I decided it didn’t matter right now—I’d gotten away with sneaking off, and if Archie wanted to yell and rant at me a bit, I’d take it.

I crossed the lawn back to the main house and found Cal sitting at the table in the sunporch, playing a game of solitaire, his greasy hair falling in his eyes.

“You might want to check a mirror,” I told him. “Before Bethina figures out you aren’t just afraid of bathing and that patchy skin is hiding something.”

Cal looked up and gave me a glare. “Nice mouth. What’s gotten into you?”

“I’ve been summoned by Mr. Grayson,” I told him. “I’m pretty sure he’s going to read me the riot act.”

Cal grimaced. “Yeah, he was stomping around the library a minute ago, before he went out with Valentina to find you. He’s pretty steamed.”

“Of course he is,” I said, feeling the heavy dread of a punishment, a holdover from my days at the Academy. Meals, things like hot water and clean clothes, even our shoes, were taken away sometimes, for the smallest things. I didn’t think Archie was going to switch me, but the residual twinge of fear was still there.

I walked as slowly as I could, following the irregular lamplight to the library. It wasn’t anything like Graystone’s magnificent collection of books, not even close. This was small and cozy, stuffed with the sort of reading material wealthy people like the Crosleys put on display to prove they were educated. The potboilers and cheap romances were probably tucked behind the Proctor-approved classics and the fashionable novels.

“You think you can just run off whenever it suits you?” My father was sitting in one of the twin leather armchairs, the oxblood deep and slick by the glow of the fire in the grate. He was drinking, a bottle half empty and a glass more than that.

“I’m sorry,” I said, figuring contriteness was the first and easiest route to take. My father looked much angrier than Valentina, all the lines in his face deep and stark.

“I told you how dangerous the world is now,” my father said. “And I know you’re not stupid enough to not listen to me about that. So what is it, Aoife? Typical teenage willfulness? Or something else?” He picked up the glass, drained it and slammed it down. “I’ve got enough problems without my daughter sneaking off to canoodle with some useless greaser and letting me think she might be nothing but rags and bones in a ghoul’s nest for hours on end.” He poured and drank, and the glass landed again. Clank. “Maybe if we were a regular family we’d have the luxury of learning boundaries and setting rules. But we don’t, Aoife.” Pour, drink, clank. “Let me make this perfectly clear—disobey me again, go outside these four walls without letting me or Valentina know it, or sneak off with Dean again, and I’ll tan your hide.” He examined the bottle, now within a millimeter of empty, and gave a regretful sigh. “Do we understand each other, child?”

I stayed where I was until he glared at me. “Something you want to add?”

I chewed my lip for a moment and then decided he couldn’t get any angrier if I just asked. “Do you know anything about the … something called the nightmare clock?” I said softly.

Archie stopped moving, glass halfway to his mouth. “Where did you hear that?” he asked, in the same soft tone I’d used.

“It’s not important,” I said quickly, seeing his alarm. At the same time, though, his alarm told me this was real, or that I wasn’t the only person who’d had the dream. Not the only one the dream figure had talked to, not the only one to visit the strange room. With my father’s reaction, I couldn’t write the bleak figure off as a product of iron poisoning, the human world making the Fae blood in me boil with insanity. The dreams were more than my own fancies. The figure’s words echoed in my head. Set you free. A device I could use to cross not just space but time—one that would set me free. I could return to the moment when I’d destroyed the Engine. I could stop that Aoife from listening to Tremaine’s lies.

I could go further and make a reality my oldest dream, awake or asleep—that my father had never left us. That he, Nerissa, Conrad and I were a family, together.

“Well, I never heard of such a curious phrase,” Archie said, and tossed back the last of his drink. “No idea what you’re talking about. Sounds like some story in a cheap magazine.”

That was one way Archie and I weren’t alike, I realized. He was a terrible liar. He couldn’t even look at me, and fidgeted uncomfortably in his seat, as if a colony of ants had taken up residence under his shirt.

“All right,” I said. “I suppose I’ll say goodnight, then.” I started to walk out, then stopped and looked back. “And I am sorry. For going off like that and worrying you.”

I sped out of the room before Archie could reply. His lie had told me a lot.

He had heard of the nightmare clock. And what my father knew about it scared him enough to make him lie to me about it. If he knew, someone else knew. Someone who might be willing to tell me the whole story, explain the cryptic riddles of my dream figure.

His knowing about the clock also meant that I’d been right: the dreams, the black figure and the endless skies, the great gear, all of it—they were at least partly real.

I felt a swell of happiness in my chest like a soap bubble, fragile but there. As I climbed the stairs to my room, my thoughts were racing. The nightmare clock could set me free—if the dream figure was telling the truth. Could I use it to undo what I’d done in Lovecraft? I had to think so. Otherwise it was just another dead end, another dashed hope. It was like a Gate, but with the power to move time and events already set. That, I could use. That would set me free, free of everything I’d let Tremaine make me do.

While I got ready for bed and crawled under my blankets, I decided I needed to find out, and fast—because if I had a chance to set everything right, I was taking it, no matter what.

My father was quiet at breakfast, holding his head in his hands. Valentina was by contrast unusually sharp and impatient for someone who prided herself on decorum. She slammed a coffee cup down at Archie’s elbow, and he winced.

“Do you have to?”

“Your own fault,” she returned, and went and sat at the other end of the table. Conrad raised his eyebrow at that, then went back to sulking over his notebook. Dean and my father were engaged in some kind of glaring contest, and Bethina was focused on her food. Only Cal seemed to be in a good mood.

“Say, Valentina,” I said in a voice that was gratingly perky to my ears. “I’m a bit bored. I was wondering if I could use the library on the Munin to do some reading.” I widened my eyes in innocence. “I wanted to ask permission, after yesterday, of course.”

“Sorry, no,” Valentina said. “I have more important things to do today. You’re just going to have to entertain yourself in the house with the others, where we can keep an eye on you.”

“Good grief, Val,” Archie snapped without looking up. “This isn’t a reform school. Just let her go get some books that don’t insult her intelligence. If she stays on the Munin and doesn’t wander around, she’ll be fine.”

“Oh, of course,” Valentina said, and the acid in her tone could have etched the teacup she was holding. “Because you have the final say in all things, Archie, don’t you?”

“As far as the people at this table are concerned, I do,” Archie said.

“Right,” Conrad said, pushing back from the table. “I’m going … somewhere else.”

“Yeah,” Cal said hurriedly, also jumping up. “Thanks for breakfast, Miss Crosley. I mean, Mrs. Grayson. Uh … I mean … just thanks.”

Bethina took that as her cue to start clearing plates, and Dean pulled out his pack of Lucky Strikes, practically waving them under Archie’s nose before he went out to the back steps to smoke one. I rolled my eyes.

“Looks like it’s just you and me, then,” Valentina said in the same tone she’d used on my father. “Let’s get you fixed up with something a girl like yourself finds stimulating.” She snatched my hand and practically dragged me outside and to the Munin.

I had prepared this lie carefully, so that it would practically drip sincerity. “I am sorry about yesterday,” I told her as we climbed the ladder into the main cabin. “I really didn’t mean any disrespect.”

“Aoife, I’m just going to say this once,” she told me when we were inside. “Because I’m not your mother, and not trying to be, but I am older and I’ve been around. From what I’ve seen these past few days you’re a sweet, bright girl. You don’t want to waste yourself on somebody like Dean Harrison.” She flipped the switches in the main cabin to turn on the aether lamps and then folded her arms, looking for all the world like a miniature, younger version of one of my professors at the Academy. “You want to wait for someone who’s marriage material. Lifelong material. Don’t sell yourself short just because a boy gives you a wink and a smile. I’ve seen too many smart girls take that route and end up stuck in the mud.”

“You’re not married,” I said, feeling reflexive anger when Valentina insulted Dean. She didn’t know him, and she’d admitted she didn’t know me. Four days didn’t qualify her to give me parental advice. “And don’t worry about filling in for my mother. You’re barely old enough to be my big sister.” I knew it was mean, but she’d fired the first volley.

Valentina smiled, a tired and sad smile. “I know that your back will get up no matter what I say about that boy. But maybe in a few months or years you’ll realize I’m not just trying to be a snob. I want to help you.” She went back to the ladder to the outside. “I have mixed feelings on marriage, but I do believe that were things different, did we not lead these lives, I would marry Archie. In a heartbeat.”

She sounded sincere, her face softening and her voice dropping, and looked so happy at the prospect that for a moment I felt almost guilty about what I was going to do. Almost. It seemed Valentina could be your best friend one minute and then in the next instant be as cold and hard as the brass that kept the Munin’s hull intact. I knew I couldn’t predict which Val I’d be getting, and after a lifetime as a charity ward, with new families and new mothers every few months, I couldn’t trust someone like that.

“So, when you worked with the Brotherhood,” I said, deliberately pulling down a stack of blue cloth–covered boys’ adventure novels and trying to act casual, “did you use this ship for traveling and battles with eldritch creatures and things?”

Valentina laughed softly. “It’s not as exciting as you’d think. A lot of chasing, a lot of frustration and dead ends. A lot of time cooped up with musty books, learning the lore. The only exciting part was combat training. I liked that.”

“But some excitement in the field, surely? It sounds a lot better than the Academy,” I said. If Valentina wanted to talk about the Brotherhood, I was happy to encourage her.

Valentina went over to a map of the world painted on the wall, in the spaces between the bookshelves and curio cabinets, and traced her fingers over it. “Oh, yes,” she said. “It’s a wondrous life. If you have the strength for it.”

While she wasn’t looking, I grabbed a few books from the section of the library filled with handwritten volumes and shoved them under my coat. They were what I had come for—the diaries of the Brotherhood members, whose knowledge was compiled into the vast Iron Codex, the go-to guide for fighting things like the Fae. Hundreds of diaries, like Archie’s and like mine, collected into a single volume. That volume was watched over by the Brotherhood. These were the next likeliest place to look for the knowledge I needed—about both the Brotherhood and the nightmare clock, if it existed at all outside of the sort of fear-tinged whisper it had caused in my father.

“Thank you,” I said loudly to Valentina, holding up the adventure novels. “This should keep me.”

“Good,” Valentina said. “Let’s run along, then. I’ve got a busy day.” We got as far as the ladder to the lower deck before she turned, blocking my way like a little blond fireplug. “Are you going to give them back?” she asked.

“What do you mean?” I said, heartbeat picking up to a frenetic pace. Just because Archie was a bad liar and not as perceptive as he liked to think when it came to me didn’t mean I should have assumed the same of Valentina. She was sharp. “The dress and shoes? You said they were for me to keep.”

“Don’t insult both of us,” Valentina said. She reached out and undid the buttons on my jacket. The books slid to the floor, making soft plops on the carpet.

“Now what?” I said, refusing to drop my eyes.

“You want to tell me why you’re poking in my father’s journals, for a start?” Valentina said, folding her arms.

I bent down and picked up a book, brushing off the cover. “Nobody will tell me what I need to know,” I said bluntly, passing it back to her. “And when nobody will help me, I’m used to helping myself.” I raised my chin, refusing to be cowed.

“Helping yourself to other people’s things, more like it,” Valentina said. She put the books back where they belonged and then gestured to one of the chairs in the reading nook. “Sit.”

I did, knowing that anything else would just rile her more and make her more likely to report what I’d done to Archie. “My father lied to me,” I said. “I asked him a simple question and he wouldn’t tell me the truth, so what am I supposed to do besides find the answers on my own?”

“Maybe I wouldn’t have lied if you’d asked me,” Valentina said. “Ever think of that?” She sat and folded her hands. “What did he lie to you about?”

“The nightmare clock,” I said plainly. “I asked him what it was and he said he didn’t know. That was a lie.”

I got the same reaction from Valentina that I had from Archie. She twitched, but the freezing of her expression and the stiffening of her posture were identical to Archie’s. “Where did you …,” she started.

“I had a bad dream,” I said, and left it at that.

Valentina sighed. “Yes, he lied. But I don’t blame him for not wanting to give you crazy ideas,” she said. “Not at all.”

“You both know what it is,” I insisted. “What is so horrible that you have to keep it from me?” I sat up straighter. “I’m not a little kid. I can handle the hard truth.”

Valentina sighed, then ran her hands over her face. “Only the Brotherhood is supposed to know—at least, as far as the Iron Land goes.”

She traced lines on the fine inlaid wood of the table between us. “Imagine that Thorn and the Iron Land and the Mists—all of them—are spokes in a wheel, and in the center of the wheel …” She sighed. “This is just a theory, mind, and it has a lot of holes. But some people believe that at the center of the wheel is a place that isn’t entirely whole—an in-between place. A place made of dreams, which no Gate or magic can access—only the people who have the abilities to make dreams real, the ability to travel between the other worlds that have Gates and such.”

“People with the Weird?” I guessed.

Valentina was far from maintaining her usual composure. She looked strained, as if every word were being drawn from her under duress. Her pretty round face crumpled with frown lines, making her look a lot less angelic. “Yes, people with the Weird,” she continued quietly. “In this dream place, these same people believe that there exists a machine, a machine that can grind the fabric of space and time and remake it—can permit time travel, cross-world travel, the ability to transport things, or people, from one place to another, in time as well as space. Can spin the spokes on that wheel so that they rest in any order the clock chooses. It’s a clock that measures off dreams, and nightmares, and everything else. Anything you imagine, it can be. It’s different for everyone who sees it. So the Brotherhood scholars believe.” She leaned back and sighed. “Of course, a lot of the same people who believe the nightmare clock is real believe the Great Old Ones will return to the Iron Land from the stars and that you can summon the dead to do your bidding with Erlkin rituals, so, you know, for them, time travel and transporting yourself across the vast dimensions of space must not seem so far-fetched.” She waved a hand in a circle. “Crazy as bedbugs in a burning mattress, most likely.”

“But it does exist,” I said, excited. My dreams weren’t just madness and poison. Somewhere out there, the dream figure was seeing me—dreaming of me? I wasn’t sure—while I dreamed of him. He was reaching out to me, trying to save his small slice of world from what had happened when the Gates ruptured as I was trying to save mine. Those figures outside his dome would scare me, as they’d clearly scared him. I didn’t know why he couldn’t fight them off, but I thought of how helpless I’d be in the jaws of a Fae like Tremaine. Perhaps it was the same for the dream figure. And he had in his possession a device I was going to use to send myself to the moment when this had all gone wrong, and stop it from happening.

“Of course not,” Valentina said, much too quickly. “At least, not in my opinion, it doesn’t. I mean, the Gates are real. Tesla made them, and the Erlkin built theirs, and the Fae enchanted their hexenrings. That’s science as much as it is sorcery. It’s tangible. But a place that exists between sleeping and being awake? That you can only dream yourself into? A device that can turn whoever uses it into a virtually unstoppable time traveler? That’s a fairy tale.”

She was a better liar than my father, but the way she practically ran back to the house and slammed the door behind her told me that if Valentina didn’t believe that the nightmare clock actually existed, she at least worried that it might.