“I’m not ready to help you,” I insisted. “I’m still learning how to use the Weird.”
“Aoife, I did not bring you to chastise you.” Tremaine let go of my hand as soon as I’d crossed the hexenring. The floor of the room was earthen and white mushrooms sprouted in every corner, phosphorescent in the dim light. It was a haunted place, all shadow and glow. The walls were composed of rushes, sprouting moss that swayed overhead like the sighing of lost souls. The fire itself was purple-tinged and ghostly. The only solid, dead thing in the room was a stone table, with deep grooves in the sides and a depression at one end.
Tremaine passed his fingers against the hollowed spot and gave me a smile so sharp I felt it against my throat. “This is where the head rests during the full moon, you know. There is a hole in the ceiling and in their final moment, one may view the cold fire of our stars.”
“Dreadful machines,” I murmured, my stomach turning over. “That seems to be your hallmark.”
Tremaine’s smile dropped off. “You weren’t defiant last time we spoke. I prefer that.”
“This is what you get,” I said, sticking out my chin. It had started as Dean’s gesture, but I’d adopted it as my own. “You can like it or not. If you hadn’t lied about how much time I had, I might be more inclined to behave.”
Tremaine moved around the table, his image blinking in and out like a faulty lanternreel. One moment he was feet from me, the next he loomed up in my vision and his knuckles connected with my face, a sharp backhand slap that echoed inside the domed room.
I stumbled, felt my head ring from the blow and couldn’t believe Tremaine had actually hit me. Dean rushed at Tremaine, but the Folk held up a pale beringed hand.
“You step over that line, boy, and you will disintegrate like so much dust in a storm. Think before you do it, greaseblood. Think very hard.”
Dean pulled his boot back from the line of toadstools. “All right,” he gritted. “But don’t think I won’t pay you in full for hitting her.”
Tremaine turned his back on Dean like he was no more than a mumbling hobo on a Lovecraft street and pulled me up from my hunched position. “Now that I’ve knocked you sensible, Aoife, you need to listen.” He gripped me hard, hard enough to grind my wrist bones. “Come along. There’s a good girl.”
“Dean …,” I said as Tremaine jerked me toward the long grass-woven curtains that served as the door of the dome. I couldn’t leave Dean. Not here.
“This is not for his ears,” Tremaine said. We passed through the curtain and I gasped to find myself back in the lily field.
Under the cold steel moon, the coffins of the queens glowed. The light writhed and caressed the sleeping visage of the Folk girls, an unearthly borealis that turned the flowers and the faces of the queens into something spectral and transparent, an illusion that flickered and flamed and danced.
“Don’t think I enjoyed that,” Tremaine said. “I do not take pleasure in pain.”
My face throbbed, and I could taste a little blood where my cheek scraped my teeth. I swallowed it and didn’t say anything, just glared and hoped Tremaine would melt under my gaze.
“You’ve used the Weird,” Tremaine said. “But you don’t understand it. I tell you now, what you need for my task can’t be found in the shortsighted journal of a foolish man.”
“My father isn’t foolish,” I said. Cold, yes. Unloving, maybe. But never foolish. Tremaine folded his arms.
“Aoife, with respect: you don’t know the man.”
“Well, either way, I can’t do what you ask,” I muttered stubbornly, even though he was right. “You may as well end me now,” I said, and then outright lied. “I don’t even know if I have a Weird.”
“You do, and it is prodigious,” Tremaine said. “Your gift for lying, less so. I’ve seen your Weird.”
“How …” I liked to think that I’d know when Tremaine was spying on me. With his powdery skin and skeleton-white hair, he wasn’t exactly blending into the landscape.
But perhaps he didn’t need to see me to watch me. I didn’t know the full power of the Folk. I shivered, and rubbed my hands together, tucking them up in my sleeves.
“My eyes venture far,” Tremaine murmured. “Even if my body cannot. In both Thorn and Iron. They are all colors, all shapes. Silent eyes on silent wing.” He was smirking at me, and all at once the memory of shattering window glass and the shriek of the ghouls rushed back.
“You sent that thing after me!” I cried. “In the library. And again in the cemetery!”
Tremaine nodded mildly, polishing one of his bracers with his opposite sleeve. “I did send the strix owl, as incentive to defend yourself with your Weird. I don’t know of any cemetery.”
“You almost killed me,” I snarled. “I could have—”
“The poisoned queens sleep eternal.” Tremaine cut through my words with the sharpness of his tone. “In the old times, the shining times, we would gather at the Winnowing Stone and harness its great bounty to awaken the sleepers from their curse. But now no magic borne of the Thorn Land can wake them. This is the truth. This is the curse.” He turned his gaze from the lilies and the coffins. “It falls to you, Aoife, you and your Weird, to find a way.”
I swallowed hard, trying to keep up the toughness I had started with. “I don’t know what you expect me to—”
He reached out and put a hand on my face, cupping the cheek that he had struck. “There was once a great spark in the races of your world, Aoife. But it has extinguished, gone to ash, all but the barest ember. From the ashes of magic has risen the phoenix of the machine. That is what I seek.”
His fingers tightened on my cheek, diamond chips of nails digging against my skin. “My world is dying, Aoife, and by symbiosis yours is as well. Ours is a sudden and violent cataclysm, and yours is a death spiral into the entropy of reason.” Tremaine’s nails drew blood from my cheek. “You are something never seen before, in the history of your bloodline,” he whispered. “You will rekindle the flame. You will cleanse this insidious plague of science by fire.”
I struggled, but he held fast with the desperate grip of a drowning man. “You will awaken the queens, Aoife. And to free my lands from the shackles of so-called enlightenment, I will do what I must.” He leaned in so that our faces nearly touched. “Forcing a stubborn child to do her chores is the least of my reach, Aoife. Continue to defy me and see what else I can send to find you.”
“You’re hurting me,” I whispered. What Tremaine was asking me to do was impossible—my father had said so—but I had a feeling that objections would just get me slapped again. And Tremaine seemed sincere, even his anger born more from the desperation in his eyes than any deceit that I could see.
Releasing his grip, Tremaine wiped the blood away from my skin with the tips of his fingers. “Don’t force me to hurt you worse to convince you of your importance to me, Aoife. Break the curse. Bring light back to both of our worlds.”
“I can’t …” Tears started, stinging the cuts and mingling with my blood. Have you ever seen blood under starlight, Aoife? When it’s black? “I can barely control it,” I said, thinking of the great pressure on my head when I’d slain the ghouls, the pain and cold that had nearly stopped my heart. How was I supposed to break a curse? I didn’t even know how to make my Weird respond unless I was about to be eaten or clawed to death.
“Aoife,” Tremaine sighed. “You have spirit and a certain fey quality that reminds me of my own daughters, may they travel through the Mists unharmed. But these are the darkest hours of my people. If you confound me, you will not appreciate the consequences.”
I was trembling all over, from cold and from plain-faced, ugly fear, but I managed to keep my voice steady, because I was keeping my vow to not show weakness to Tremaine. “And if I do, and still refuse?”
“Why, then,” Tremaine said softly, “the terms still stand: I will come to Graystone and forfeit the lives of Dean and dear Cal. And you will never know Conrad’s fate, and both
of us will live to see the end of our species’ existence.”
I looked back at the hut, imagining Dean aging by the year inside the hexenring. Imagining him or Cal lying dead on the library floor by Tremaine’s hand. Of never seeing Conrad again and only having an inkling of his fate through my madness dreams. I shook my head to clear the images.
“Well?” the pale man purred.
I nodded, unable to look into his stone-sculpted face for one more moment. “I’ll do it.”
Tremaine smiled again. I didn’t want to see it, but I could sense it—his thin lips pulled taut, his razor teeth exposed in victory, like a wolf’s.
“I knew you would,” he said. He reached into his coat and drew out a brass bell, muting the clapper with his thumb. “Use this when you’ve done as I asked. Until then … I hope we do not have to meet again. I grow weary of scolding you.”
Tremaine took my shoulder and led me back to the hut and the hexenring where Dean waited. He pushed me over the ring of toadstools and I shoved the brass bell into my pocket. The last thing I saw before the ring closed was Tremaine watching me, the wolf’s smile still on his face.
The Enchantment’s End
MY FATHER’S ATTIC room appeared around me again by degrees, as the enchantment of the hexenring slipped away. Dean grabbed me by the shoulders. “Aoife. Aoife, what did he do to you?”
I blinked at him. “Nothing. He did …” I breathed deep to compose myself. “It’s nothing I can’t handle.”
“Did he hurt you?” Dean gave me a shake. I winced as he grazed the shoggoth bite.
“Not any worse than you are right this moment.” I shrugged Dean’s hands off. They were too heavy, too hot. The spot where Tremaine had touched my face was cold—felt brittle, as if it could break.
“Doll, you look like something chewed you up and spat you out the other end.” Dean moved my hair out of my face, his fingers rougher than Tremaine’s, warmer and livelier.
“I think I want to go downstairs,” I muttered. I wasn’t up to reassuring Dean I was all right. I wasn’t sure I was all right.
Dean opened the hatch and gave me his hand to help me down the ladder. “Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”
“Honestly?” I paused on the bottom rung. “I’m more concerned with you. You were trapped in that ring.… I thought you might have lost years when he took me out.…”
Dean put his hands on my waist and lifted me the last foot to the floor. “I told you they lie, Aoife. Besides, it takes more than the Folk flashing magic to stir me up.”
“Still.” I smoothed a speck of dirt from the Thorn Land off Dean’s shirt, his skin beneath warming my fingers. “I’m sorry you had to see that.” I didn’t want Dean to see the ugly consequences of my Weird. If he did he’d give me a wide berth, and I didn’t want Dean to be gone. I needed him there.
Dean nudged me. “Forget about that. Come with me.”
He took me to the back parlor and stood me in the center of the room while he flipped the switch on the hi-fi to start the aether warming up. I regarded him suspiciously. After what Tremaine had threatened me with, I wasn’t in the mood to switch back to cheerful.
“I tinkered with it while you were gone,” Dean told me. “The hi-fi. You can get a little more than static and the Miskatonic U station now.”
“Cal will be thrilled,” I said. “But what’s it to do with me?”
“Listen,” Dean said, “I know that what happened is twisting you up. Twisted me up, and I’m fairly sure I’ve seen a lot more oddness in my life than you have.”
He turned the hi-fi’s dial until a wax record scratched and dropped over the aether, burbling pop music. “You’re not gonna think straight until you calm down. So will you trust me for a few minutes? I want to help.”
The song continued, and Dean held out his hand. “Now or never, princess.”
“Never,” I said, darting out of Dean’s reach. His mouth turned down, but I held firm. “I don’t dance.”
“And I aim to rectify that situation,” Dean said. “Please, Aoife. Trust me.”
I hesitated. Tremaine had shaken me terribly. I was getting better at not showing it, but my stomach was churning and I couldn’t stop thinking about his last words.
Dean was right. I wasn’t going to figure anything out in my state.
I jumped as Dean slipped his arm around my waist. “Here we go,” he said. “Put your other hand on my shoulder.”
“Dean,” I said as we swung in a wide, parabolic circle. “This is ridiculous.”
“Listen,” Dean said. “Close your eyes and listen. Let yourself move.”
My steps smoothed out as I obeyed him, though I still kept a death grip on his hand and shoulder. And just like a switch flipping over, we were dancing in time, moving by turns around the parlor. It was easier to focus on my feet than the storm inside me. I felt a tiny bit less terrible.
“It’s, well … not so bad,” I conceded.
“And?” Dean gave me a small smile.
“I might like it,” I admitted. “A little.”
Dean spun me out and back. “Course you do. I’m hoping you’ll grow to like me, too.” He winked. “A little.”
I didn’t answer, I just danced until the song ended and static hissed along the empty aether. “Too forward?” Dean said, lowering our hands so they were pressed together between us. The shine faded from his eyes.
“It’s not that.” I didn’t let go of Dean and he didn’t let go of me. “But this won’t last. Me, and the Weird, and the Folk—”
“Aoife,” Dean interrupted, bending his head toward mine. “I don’t care about lasting. I just want right now.”
We swayed together on the spot, bonded by hand and hip, my breath and heartbeat trapped in Dean’s starlight gaze.
“Dean?” I whispered.
“Yeah, princess?”
I stood on tiptoe to close the distance between us. “I want right now too.”
When I kissed Dean I shut my eyes as if I were dancing again, and shut out everything except his scent, and his skin, and the music whispering in my ears.
Dean let out a soft sound when I pressed my lips to his and then pulled me tight and flush against his chest. His hand on my waist was warm, and I could feel every finger pressing into my ribs. His other slid across my neck, the tips of his fingers catching my hair.
“Aoife,” Dean said huskily, when we finally pulled apart.
I opened my eyes, slowly, afraid that he’d become nothing more than smoke if I looked at him.
“Yes, Dean?”
His eyes were stormy, darker than I’d ever seen them. Dean’s hand moved from my neck to cup my cheek, the spot where Tremaine had slapped me. When he touched me, my skin was finally warm. “I don’t want to let go of you.”
“Me either,” I whispered. My stomach was light and my head was full of vertigo, like the floor was falling away beneath me, and yet I knew Dean would anchor me, keep me close.
Dean pressed his forehead against mine. “So let’s just stay like this a while.”
“Aoife!” The new voice slammed me back down to earth.
Dean and I turned as one, his hands still on me. “Cal?” I gasped. How much had he seen? His expression told me that he’d seen far too much for me to have any hope of explaining.
Cal stood in the doorway, a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk slack in his hands. “I heard music. I brought you some …,” he started, eyes darting between Dean and me. “Bethina got some groceries in this afternoon and made them.…” He shook his head, lips peeling back to show all of his teeth in a grotesque echo of Tremaine. “Really, Aoife? Him? Him?”
“Cal, it’s not …,” I started. His face went stone, and his expression was ugly. He wasn’t my Cal in that moment, and I didn’t want to know the new person who was staring at me with unabridged contempt. Cal looked like every student who’d stared down at me—Marcos, Cecelia, every one.
“It is, Aoife. He’s not our kind. Yo
u’ll have to choose, and you’ll leave me behind.” He slammed down the plate and glass, so that milk sloshed all over the parlor table. “I hope you’re happy.”
“Cal …” I extricated myself from Dean’s grip, anything but happy. I’d never seen Cal so angry. “Cal, wait!” But my friend had stormed out, and the frightful foreign expression hadn’t left his face.
“You should go talk to him,” Dean said.
I pressed my hands over my face, feeling a hot tangle of anger and sadness, but not shame. I wasn’t embarrassed about what Dean and I had done. I’d wanted to kiss him since our first day in Arkham, and after what had happened since that day, I was through being ashamed of wanting things. “It won’t do any good,” I said. “Cal’s … fragile. He’ll think that I lied to him.”
“I don’t mean salve his dashed notions of romance. I mean calm him down.” Dean shoved his hair off his forehead. “If he throws a rod and goes back to the city spouting stories, he could hurt you, Aoife. And then I’d have to beat the crap out of him, and that’d be a real shame.”
“Cal wouldn’t …” My stomach flipped over, dizzy and unsettled. I realized I didn’t know Cal as well as I had the night we left Lovecraft. “Would he?” I realized I didn’t know the Cal who’d run out of the parlor at all. He might.
“I once spent six hours in freezing rain outside the flat of a girl I was crushing hard for,” Dean said. “And when her boyfriend came around I got myself a night in lockup over the scene I caused.” He took my chin between his fingers and kissed my forehead, softly. “A guy does a lot of things he doesn’t think too hard about when he’s got it bad for a girl.”
“Was she pretty?” I said, a tinge of sharpness I hadn’t intended in the question. “The girl you went to jail over.”
“Pretty enough,” he said. “Gold hair, blue eyes. The usual.” He let go of me and winked. “She was sure no you.” He tried a cookie, crumbs lingering on his chin. “That Bethina’s got a real trick for the hearth.” He licked his fingers. “With my kind of people, you might almost call her a witch.”
I cocked my head. “And what would you call me?”
The Iron Thorn Page 29
