The Iron Thorn

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “Alive. Great,” Cal said flatly. “What are you on about?”

  “Cheer up, Cal!” I demanded, punching him in the shoulder. “Not even a pack of hungry ghouls can stop me! Think of what you’ll have to tell the guys now.”

  “Crazy girl,” Cal said, but without malice. He slumped against the sarcophagus, breathing heavily, shaking. I rubbed his back and patted his neck with my handkerchief until he stopped sweating and quivering. After a moment, color began to return to his face and he lost the morbid walking-corpse pallor, the dark veins no longer standing out under his sagging skin. Once he looked like my friend again, I got us up.

  “Let’s go back to the house. I don’t know about you, but I feel like my head might wobble off.” The overwhelming sensory push of the Weird was wearing off, and I could feel my hands and knees beginning to shake like they hadn’t before. It seemed the harder I pushed, the more of a toll it took. But I could figure it out. I could figure all of it out, because I was alive.

  “You don’t look so hot,” Cal agreed. “Come on. Let me help you before you fall down.”

  “I’m not crazy yet,” I said, and breathed deep of the day. I had found my Weird. I had Cal back. I wasn’t crazy and I might not turn crazy, either. For just a moment, as Cal and I walked arm in arm to Graystone, it was enough.

  The Arcane Payment

  BACK IN GRAYSTONE, in my room, I slept away the pain and creeping fatigue that overtook me on the walk from the graveyard.

  When I woke, I found myself covered and with plumped pillows behind my head. My ceiling was stained with the same alien world map, the blankets were the same itchy wool. My shoes were missing, but otherwise I was just as I’d been before the ghouls.

  “Cal?” I’d had dreams, dark and dripping blood. The ghouls could hurt Cal. If I wasn’t there, wasn’t able to pull him free from their jaws, they’d take him to their nest, consume him, turn his face into the twisted snarling things that snapped at me from the dark.…

  The door to my room swung open of its own volition, with a rifle crack. A simple hinge assembling, connected to rods and wheels in the hollow walls of the mansion, they ran through the place like a cold-blooded nervous system. I hissed and pressed a hand against my forehead. The Weird appeared to come out when I lost control of myself, got upset or panicked, like when I’d stopped the library clock. I needed to rein it in before something other than a ghoul stepped into its path and I hurt someone. My father didn’t run about setting people on fire—I’d have to get better at using my talent.

  Dean’s face appeared in the frame, and he looked at the door askance. “I think your castle needs a tune-up, princess.”

  “That’s not all it needs,” I said. “Have you seen Cal?” My door swung back with another rifle shot, and Dean flinched.

  “He’s downstairs blabbing Bethina to death about his grand adventure in the zombie’s tomb, or whatever did happen when you two went off.” Dean sat next to me and the dubious bedsprings bowed under his weight. “You’ve been sleeping like you pricked your finger on a spindle, kid.”

  I rubbed my shoulder, but the shoggoth’s bite had gone back to being just a sore patch, shallow cuts and bruising.

  “I guess I fainted?”

  “More like passed out cold,” Dean said. “You came back from your jaunt looking pale and walleyed, babbled something about blood underground and staggered up here. By the time I got after you, you’d fallen asleep and all the rockets both sides dropped in the war couldn’t have stirred you.”

  My head felt hollowed out and I was fatigued as if I’d run for miles. The Weird whispered, scratching at my senses, begging to be let free. I shut my eyes. The talent in my blood had wrung me out and I felt in my bones that if I let the Weird go now I’d never get control of it again.

  “There were ghouls down there,” I said. “Down under the ground. Cal wanted to explore the crypt in the cemetery, and he opened the ghoul trap by accident and let them out.”

  “Sounds like our cowboy,” said Dean with a toothy grimace. “You all in one piece? Or did they get a bite?”

  “No … I killed them.” I looked up at Dean. “I got the trap working again, and the house … it killed them. I was the house. My Weird …”

  My hands were still frozen and blue-veined and I shoved them under the blanket. “I can feel it, walking around in my head. The machines and the house. My Weird can speak to them and I hear them now. Whispering.”

  The sensation when I’d been lying there, a handbreadth away from bloody scraps for ghoul pups to fight over, of a vast and sleeping consciousness sharing my head, came back with a rush and I grabbed Dean’s arm. It was bare, exposed by the short sleeves of his white T-shirt, and I blushed at the feel of his skin.

  “Cripes, Aoife.” He rubbed my hand between his palms. “You’re freezing.”

  “I think it’s a side effect,” I said. “I got so cold when I used my Weird in the tunnel, I thought I could never move again.”

  “You know what they say.” Dean tucked the blanket around me and edged closer. “Cold hands, warm heart.”

  “My mother used to say that,” I murmured without thinking.

  “You don’t mention the old lady much,” Dean said. “What’s her story?”

  Dean Harrison knew more about me than anyone but Nerissa herself. He knew, and he hadn’t spilled a word to anyone.

  “My mother is in a madhouse back in Lovecraft.”

  It came in a rush, once I’d decided to break the dam on my worst secret. “She contracted the necrovirus before Conrad and I were born and she started to lose her grip when she was pregnant with me, I mean really lose it. She could still fake sane when Conrad was a baby, I guess. They say everyone in our family goes mad, usually at sixteen—it’s our strain, our particular virus—so, you see, it doesn’t matter that I’ve found out all this about the Folk and the Weird. In no time at all, I won’t remember you or myself or any of this.” I gestured at the faded grandeur of my bedroom. Tremaine could threaten me, but he’d never frighten me as much as the thought of losing who I was to the virus, leaving Cal and now Dean behind and becoming just another deluded madwoman locked in a cell.

  I could do as Tremaine asked, but I was still afraid, if I were honest, that I wouldn’t be around to see the result. I’d just have to help him and his queens and pray my effort kept my friends safe.

  “I had no idea,” Dean whispered.

  I scrubbed the heel of my hand across my eyes. I’d cried over the situation enough. “Yes, well, it’s not a tidbit I go spreading around.”

  Dean shifted, leaning down on his elbow so we were roughly perpendicular. “Cal know?”

  I nodded, a small gesture because the memory still strangled me when it broke to the forefront. “He was there when my brother tried to kill me. On Conrad’s birthday.”

  Cal held up his hands. Big and ungainly, like puppy paws. “Conrad, don’t hurt your sister. She’s all you have.”

  Dean whistled. “So Conrad gave you that scar.”

  I didn’t have to confirm his suspicions. Dean knew. “The virus incubated and it came out as madness,” I said. “He didn’t know what he was doing, Dean. He’s still my brother.”

  Dean shook his head slowly. “That’s a hell of a thing, Aoife.”

  “It’s your payment, Dean.” I smiled even though I felt more like screaming. The door hinges tensed, but I bit down hard on the inside of my cheeks, balled the Weird up inside my chest and kept it small. The door stayed where it was.

  Rubbing his face with both hands, Dean shut his eyes. “I don’t want it. This is the kind of secret that never stops bleeding.”

  “I can’t keep hiding from everyone in the world,” I said softly. “It’s becoming everything I am. Like a shadow that falls only on you even though the sun is out.” The stone of madness dogged my ankles even as I felt the Weird spurring me to fly, as it had in the cemetery tunnel.

  “I don’t want it,” Dean said again. “You didn’t have to
tell me this, even for payment. I …” But he trailed off, shoving a hand through his hair, so it fell every which way.

  “I expect you’ll be leaving, then,” I said. “And I thank you for all of your help. Truly. I won’t inconvenience you any longer.” I felt the thickness of tears behind my eyes, and despised it. Some Gateminder I was, crying over a boy.

  Dean stood up and went to the door, wiggling it experimentally as if it might decide to slam shut on his knuckles. “I get that you’ve had a lot of running out in your life, princess. A lot of empty rooms and doors slammed in your face. But you paid me fair and square, even if it’s not what I wanted, so dig this when I say it: I’m not leaving you alone. I don’t run out.”

  For the first time that day, I managed a real, if wan, smile. I believed Dean when he made his promises, and I wanted to kiss him for it. Stone it, I wanted to kiss Dean Harrison for any old reason at all, but I settled for saying, “You’re one of the good ones, Dean.”

  “I’m about as far from good as you can get without running into it again,” he said. “But I keep my bargains and my word is my bond.” He flashed me a smile that was far from his usual killer grin—no, he looked like any boy trying to find a way to ask a girl on a date without stumbling over his feet, his words, or both. I wondered if Dean had ever been that Dean, before he went to the heretics and started guiding in the Rustworks.

  He came back and tousled the hair on top of my head, fingers spreading a little static electricity between us. “Rest, princess. It’s been a very long day.”

  “Yes, it has indeed,” I said, but instead of obeying Dean I swung my legs over the bed and found my boots. “Could you get Bethina to make me some coffee?” The Weird had exhausted me, and I contemplated that if this was what I had to look forward to every time I tapped the enchantment in my blood, I was going to go through a lot of hot beverages.

  “That’s pretty much the opposite of resting your bones,” Dean said. “But I don’t think we need to bother Bethina over a cuppa. I learned to brew a pretty good pot when my old man had the third shift at the foundry.”

  “Good,” I said. “Because if I’m going to break Tremaine’s curse, I’m going to need all the help I can scrounge.”

  The Bottomless Room

  AFTER DEAN HAD made a pot of strong coffee, he poured me a mug and followed me into the library. “Feel like an assist, princess?”

  “I’d like that,” I said as he helped me onto the ladder. Apparently, we weren’t speaking about what I’d shared with him upstairs, and that suited me just fine.

  Dean sneezed when he came through the hatch into the library above. “Dusty as old bones up here.”

  “Look for anything about the Folk,” I told him. “Tremaine knows everything about me and I know nothing about them, except that they like to play tricks.”

  “And I could have told you that.” Dean flashed me a grin and reached for a book. He stopped, hand fluttering in front of the shelves on the far side of the attic.

  I joined him, staring at the gap between the journals and papers, which revealed nothing to my eye except water-stained plaster. “What’s wrong?”

  Dean’s eyebrows drew together. “You know there’s another room back here, right?”

  I snapped my gaze to his. “What?”

  “Another room,” Dean said. “I feel it. Open space, hidden space.” He shook his head, like someone had slapped him. “A place that got lost. I found it.”

  Hidden rooms in hidden rooms. Perhaps this room held what I needed to fulfill my bargain with Tremaine.

  “There’s got to be a locking lever and a switch here somewhere,” I said. I put my hand on the wood near Dean’s trembling palm. I let my own Weird unfurl, ever so delicately, like letting just a few grains from a handful of sand slip through your fingertips. The switch twitched against my mind, the lock and the wheels all clicking into place with that pressing fullness.

  It wasn’t nearly as torturous as when the ghouls had found Cal and me, but it hurt more than enough. After a moment the entire section of wall swung away, ponderous under the weight of its volumes.

  “Our own little hideaway,” Dean said. “I think I might like this.”

  “Behave yourself,” I said. Abruptly my feet were as unsteady as if we were at sea. I couldn’t be distracted by Dean and what he did to me, even if I wanted to be for the first time ever, with anyone.

  Dean’s lighter snapped and the dancing flame sent slivers of bright into the corners of the dingy space beyond. He sucked in a breath, focusing the blue flame on my face. “You’re leaking, doll.”

  I felt under my nose with the back of my hand, saw the skin streaked crimson black. “Dammit,” I said, swiping at the blood.

  Dean held out his bandanna with his free hand. “Put your head forward until it stops.”

  I did as he bade, and he watched me with a calculating eye. “This happen every time?” he said quietly.

  I shrugged as best I could with a blood-soaked rag on my face. “I’ll let you know once I’ve used it more than twice,” I told him, muffled. The trickle of red from my nose eventually ceased, and I laid the rag aside. Taking a moment to compose myself, I nodded at Dean.

  “Let’s take a look at this hideaway of yours, shall we?” I was relieved that I kept the quiver out of my voice. If this was the result of using the Weird to open a door, what would happen if I tried to stop a jitney or manipulate Graystone’s clockwork in earnest? I didn’t particularly care to think of it at the moment.

  “This is something else,” Dean said, as the lighter’s flickering flame caressed the hidden room with fingers of shadow and light.

  I spied a worktable, covered with bundles of plants and bell jars of long-dead animal specimens, a ruin of gears and machine parts alongside all the trappings of witchcraft that we’d been warned of by the Proctors—chalk, candles, red string and black, petrified frogs and eyeballs of unknown origin. Enough evidence to earn the owner a stint in the Catacombs that only ended when he was carried out dead. Claiming to believe in this stuff was bad enough. Actually practicing it, even though the Proctors repeated over and over and over that magic was fake and witches were only charlatans, was a death sentence back home.

  And it might be here too, though for very different reasons.

  “This is some workshop,” Dean said. “I don’t know what your old man was up to, but this isn’t something I’d let get around.”

  “I think my life’s complicated enough,” I agreed. I investigated the curio cases and devices scattered about the perimeter of the room. A few I’d seen before, in lanternreels or in my textbooks. A bell-shaped diving helmet with a pair of air filters attached to the front; a hand telescope with a plethora of extra lenses, attached to a pair of goggles and a headband; and a gun-shaped device with a glass bulb soldered to the end. Aether swished back and forth gently inside the barrel, blossoming and folding within the glass.

  I started for the cabinet, but Dean curled his fingers around my shoulder. “Could be dangerous.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” I said. I picked up the goggles and slipped them over my eyes. The lens in place at the moment was blue, and the room jumped into sharp black-and-white relief. I rotated the brass dial on the rim of the hand telescope, and a wavering green-blue lens that picked up Dean as an outline of crimson body heat moved into place, followed by a lens that outlined all of the witchcraft paraphernalia in the workshop in bilious green, wavering like seaweed in a current. My vision bulged as if I were looking through a fish’s eye, throwing me off balance and roiling my stomach until I removed the set from my eyes. The effect wasn’t as bad as the one caused by the goggles Tremaine had given me, but these goggles were definitely something of my father’s design. I’d never seen anything like them.

  I smoothed my hair. “These things are incredible,” I said, pulse quickening. Devices, machines—this sort of thing was familiar, and yet exciting, because I had never seen machines like these in Lovecraft. “Want to t
ry?” I asked Dean.

  He shook his head with a smile. “Not much scares you, does it, Aoife?”

  “Plenty,” I said. “Plenty scares me. But not the dark and what might be in there. I’ve plenty of facts that frighten me more than shadows and spooks.”

  “Spooks are spooks for a reason,” Dean said. “I’ve seen a few things that’d straighten your hair.”

  I started to tell Dean that the specter of encroaching madness, the ever-present Proctors and knowing that your life had a chronometer attached to it was worse than any ghost tale, but before I could, the world fell away.

  The twisting, churning, falling sensation was worse this time, my being stretched thin across too many universes. Dean’s hand slipped from mine, and I heard the flutter of a thousand wings before I landed, upright, in a room lit only by firelight.

  “There, now,” Tremaine said. “I did tell you we’d speak again.”

  “ ’S not been a week yet,” I panted. “I have more time.”

  Dean, mercifully, was with me when I glanced over. He went down on a knee and clutched at his forehead. “What in the frozen starry hell is all this?”

  “Dean,” I sighed, “this is Tremaine.”

  Tremaine stepped forward and held out his hand to me. “My dear. You may leave the hexenring.” His cold pale eyes locked on Dean. “Your companion, however, stays where he is. He has the sheen of clever wickedness about him.”

  “Get bent, paleface,” Dean gritted. His face was bereft of color except for two spots of flame in his cheeks, and sweat marked all the hollows of his face.

  “Breathe,” I told him, trying to let him know with my eyes we’d be all right. “It gets better.”

  “Hurry along, child,” Tremaine said. “Decades are running through the boy’s fingers while you dawdle. You don’t want to have an old, gray steed in place of a fine yearling when we’re through, do you?”