I was scared. I was more scared than I’d ever been. But I was learning to hide it, to become as smooth and facile as any of the Fae I’d encountered.
And that scared me most of all.
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 wir
e. 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.”
The Nightmare Garden ic-2 Page 12
