The Nightmare Garden ic-2

by Caitlin Kittredge

  I couldn’t reverse the mistakes I’d made. Crow had taught me that much. But I could make up for them. From that moment on, I vowed, I would. Dean wouldn’t have died for nothing. I wouldn’t be remembered as Aoife Grayson the destroyer. I’d be Aoife Grayson the girl who tried with every bit of herself to put right what she’d made wrong.

  That Aoife Grayson might have a chance. Not the liar or the deal maker or the dutiful daughter, but the Aoife Grayson who took it upon herself to move ahead, rather than trying to reverse the present into the past—that Aoife Grayson I could live with.

  “Do you want anything?” Conrad asked me as he took away my stone-cold tea.

  I kept looking at the dancing lights and saw how, bit by bit, they were being blotted out by the encroaching storm I’d called forth. I shook my head and made myself look at my brother, my interfering brother, who was only trying to help me. “I want to go home.”

  21

  Return to Lovecraft

  I STOOD ON A street in front of a tumbledown flat near the Rustworks, a streetlamp with a faint aether leak hissing above my head. Cal stood next to me, shifting nervously from foot to foot. He wasn’t my first choice to accompany me on this outing, but I trusted him to keep his mouth shut.

  In the building before us, the only flat lit was on the third floor, where we could see the yellow glow of an oil lamp. The aether feed was long dead.

  Ghouls keened not far away, but I didn’t let them worry me much. The ghouls had been quieter since the advent of the Old Ones, and the howling skies had replaced the howling ghouls. Even the lunatics in the madhouses around Lovecraft—the ones the Proctors had managed to round up, anyway—had grown quiet.

  It was obvious, once I’d thought about it after we’d touched down in Lovecraft. Crow had said the clock couldn’t remake time, but it could make me see things in different ways, make parallel lines cross, help a mother and daughter find one another again amid the chaos of a ruined city.

  “Light’s new,” Cal said, pointing. He cast a look back at me, at the small satchel I carried. Just some clothes and my notebook. “What’s the deal with the luggage?”

  Seeing the lamp made my heart beat faster. “I’ll tell you later,” I said, starting across the street. I’d come every night to the flat Conrad, our mother and I had shared, come alone and occasionally with Cal, and I knew that sooner or later, the lights would be on. The Old Ones had promised it. Just as they grew ever greater in the sky, their advancing mass now nearly the size of the moon, they had promised when I’d been in Crow’s world that sooner or later, I’d find Nerissa.

  I just hoped that trusting them hadn’t been my last, worst mistake. I stepped off the pavement into the cobbled street, careful not to turn my ankle in the holes left by missing stones.

  “Hey.” I turned back to Cal. “You’re my best friend. And no matter what, you’re a good guy.”

  Cal frowned at me, clearly knowing he was missing something. “Thanks? I think?”

  “Don’t be afraid, Cal,” I said. “If Bethina finds out, she won’t love you any less. I know, and I love you. She will too.”

  I was across the street. I was at the stoop where I’d sat and waited for Conrad on so many afternoons.

  “Aoife!” Cal hissed as I mounted the cracked steps. “What’s going on?”

  I waved at him, feigning a happiness I didn’t feel. That had died with Dean. “Take care of Bethina,” I said. “Tell my father and Conrad not to worry. And that I love them. But not about this.”

  The street-level door of the building was half off its hinges, and every other tread of the stairs was a gaping hole. “Goodbye, Cal,” I whispered, and stepped inside, mounting the rickety staircase.

  I climbed the stairs and made my way to the end of the hall. The wallpaper, yellow with blue blossoming violets, had peeled and now hung in long strips like seaweed washed up on a dead shore.

  There was no number on the door anymore, but I knew it by heart. Number Seven. I raised my hand and knocked twice. I waited, holding my breath. I was prepared to hold it forever, to be suspended in this moment for as long as it took, but in reality it took no more than a few seconds.

  The door opened a crack. “Yes?”

  She was even thinner than the last time I’d seen her in the Christobel madhouse. Her hair was stringy and drooped in her face, and her eyes gleamed more brightly than the lamp. But she recognized me, and that was more than I could have said for her in the madhouse on her best day.

  “Aoife,” she said, her face cracking into a grin. She pulled open the door and threw thin arms around me. “Oh, Aoife.” She held me in a firm grip, and whispered against my hair. “They said I should come back. The dreaming voices. They told me to go to the old places and look out the old windows and I’d see you just as I’d see you coming home from school when you were a little one.”

  “They were right,” I whispered back. Nerissa let me go and stepped back to regard me.

  “Baby,” she said. “What’s wrong? You look so sad.”

  “Nerissa, I …” I swallowed, and willed my tears not to spring forth again. I hadn’t cried since I’d held Dean in the snow. “Mother. I paid a lot to see you again.”

  “The Old Ones,” she said instantly. “The great gods, turning the gear of the world to their own ends.”

  I stopped, realizing for the first time how much truth was hidden in her seemingly irrational words. Could Nerissa have a gift as well? Could Fae possess the Weird?

  “We have to go,” I said. “I need to take you away from here. We need to go …” The word hitched in my throat, unfamiliar and terrible. “We need to go home.”

  “Home, yes. To Thorn. I expected as much. That’s not why you’re sad, though,” Nerissa said matter-of-factly. “There’s a shadow of a soul on your eyes. Through glass, you’re looking at another place but you can’t touch it.”

  “A boy,” I whispered. “His name was Dean.”

  Nerissa took my face in her hands, turned it this way and that. “I know what brought me back here,” she said. “I know what you could be, child, given time to hone your gift in a place without iron. You don’t have to be like me, you know. You don’t have to go mad.”

  “How?” I muttered. “I know I have to try and send the Old Ones back, but I don’t know how.”

  “There’s a way,” Nerissa said. “You think the gear only works between our two worlds? That there are only two sides to everything? The universe is shapes and spaces, Aoife. It flows and moves like bubbles through water. Your Dean has gone, it’s true, but where?” She brought us so close our noses were nearly touching. “You know the wheres. You know how to move between. You can have him again, and in that place, you can find what you need to send the Old Ones away, not just to the stars, but forever.”

  I stared at my mother, willing the light in her eyes to be inspiration and not insanity. I thought of what Crow had said to me, when I’d asked him if the dome of dreaming was the afterlife. “The Deadlands,” I said aloud. “You can’t visit them if you’re alive. Crow said …”

  “The king of dreams has his rules and we have ours, and we rewrite them with the ink of our blood,” Nerissa said, fast and in a monotone, as if she were reciting a prayer. “You can go anywhere, Aoife. Anywhere that dreams can see, you can go. You can make the dream king point the way.”

  I stayed very still for a heartbeat or two. I was determined that I was going to be a Gateminder in the way the Brotherhood had meant for me to be, before Crosley and Draven had split it apart and allowed the world to fracture. I was determined that I would stop the Old Ones before they spread their madness and destruction across all the worlds I could visit. But in that moment, the only determination I cared about was the small, slender, flickering flame of a chance that I could have Dean back. That I could journey not to the Thorn Land or to the empire of the Old Ones, but to a land that no living thing, be they human or immortal, could visit.

  “I can get Dean back,” I repeated
to Nerissa, slowly and carefully, as if we were just learning to speak the same language. In a way, I supposed we were. I was learning to decipher her madness, and she was learning to extrapolate from my Weird. “I can go to the Deadlands and get him, and I can push back the Old Ones at the same time.” I swallowed, throat tight and dry. I wanted to hope, but I didn’t dare. “I can get Dean back.”

  “Oh, yes,” my mother said, her eyes glistening like beads in the lamplight. “You can go. To the Deadlands and beyond, and what you meet in the Deadlands can be the end of anything you choose. Including the Old Ones. There is a way.”

  “How?” I said. “How can you be alive and bring someone back from the dead?”

  My mother stepped outside and shut the door firmly. “Walk with me, until we get to the hexenring,” she said, “and I’ll tell you.”

  Final entry:

  So here I sit, in a spot where no Gateminder ever expected to find herself. The court of the Winter Queen is nothing like the life I knew, but it’s not unbearable. At least, I tell myself that, because I only have to endure the stares of the full-blooded Fae and the glares of Tremaine for a little while longer.

  My mother is well, and getting stronger, although I don’t know if she’ll ever be the same after the years of iron poisoning, locked up in Lovecraft.

  Octavia spends hours talking to her. I know too well the agony of having a sibling you can’t reach, the almost primal desire to make them well.

  Tremaine is just as he has always been, conniving and cruel, although of late, his cruelty is mostly directed at his new human pet, Grey Draven, and I personally feel that’s the way it should be.

  So no, I didn’t beat back the Storm. I didn’t fix what I broke. I am the destroyer, and it’s a name that’ll follow me for the rest of my life. But I do have a plan, a new plan. I am living for the plan, because if it fails, I’ll truly have nothing. I’ll just be a mostly human girl trapped in the Thorn Land while everyone she knows and loves back home grows old and dies.

  This will be my last entry in this journal. I am not a member of the Brotherhood. I’m never going to be. And my Weird doesn’t work like my father’s, like my family’s. My gift is so much stronger, so much worse than theirs. I’m not going to keep writing about it for some future Brotherhood member to pore over and dissect and use to their advantage.

  I don’t know what will happen now, but I have a plan, and my plan is simple: I am going to the Deadlands. I am going to use my gift to get there. I am going to find Dean, and I’m going to bring him back. And when I do that, I am going to kill the Old Ones and make the world safe again.

  Or I am going to die trying.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Caitlin Kittredge is a history and horror movie enthusiast who writes novels wherein bad things usually happen to perfectly nice characters. But that’s all right—the ones who aren’t so nice have always been her favorites. Caitlin lives in western Massachusetts in a crumbling Victorian mansion with her two cats, her cameras, and several miles of books. When not writing, she spends her time taking photos, concocting alternate histories, and trying new and alarming colors of hair dye. Caitlin is the author of two bestselling series for adults, Nocturne City and the Black London adventures. The Nightmare Garden is her second book for teens. Look for her first, The Iron Thorn, available from Delacorte Press. You can visit her at caitlinkittredge.com.

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