I hadn’t known what I was doing, not really, or what I’d set in motion. I’d been trying to save my family, myself. Everything I knew. Trying to put the world back the way it was. What I hadn’t understood was that it couldn’t be that way any longer. I wasn’t the Aoife Grayson who’d left Lovecraft all those months ago, and the world wasn’t the world I’d abandoned for Thorn.
So I let Conrad go, and let the dull ache sit in my chest like a stone while I tried to think of what to do.
Dean was the only thing I could save, at this point. The Old Ones were vast beyond my imagination. There was no way I could send them back, even if I knew how to access the small nucleus of the dreaming world where I’d found them. Crow, king of dreams, who controlled that place, would not welcome me back. We hadn’t parted on good terms, to say the least. He’d spent millennia keeping the Old Ones at bay from Iron and Thorn and all the living worlds, and in one fell swoop, a changeling who didn’t know what she was truly doing had opened the floodgates, released these ancient, implacable things to do whatever it was they planned to do upon their return to the living parts of the universe.
So it had to be Dean. The Deadlands were my destination now. At least I wouldn’t have to go back into the house to get my things. I doubted that, in the place where the dead went, I’d need clothes or food or anything except what was on my back.
I walked around the edge of the reflecting pond, into the ragged hedge maze that made up one whole side of Graystone’s property. The thing hadn’t been cared for in years, and there were large gaps in the hedgerow that you could pass through, rendering the maze useless.
At the center was a statue, one of the heretical bits and pieces that the Graysons had kept out of view of the Proctors when the Rationalists took control. It depicted a woman holding a fallen soldier, a cowl covering her face. I scrubbed at the oxidized copper plaque until I could read CUCHULAINN AND THE MORRIGAN. I had no idea who they were supposed to be—magicians, I guessed, or old gods renounced by the Rationalists.
The crows sat all over the statue, and they didn’t move at my approach. I was close enough to touch the largest one, and it stared at me with glassy black eyes, never blinking, never moving.
I retreated, discomfited by the birds, who’d been everywhere since I’d emerged from Thorn. Dean had always said they were the watchers, the eyes of the old gods and the magic that veined the world. Even my father’s airship was named after a raven, the most famous raven of all, Munin. My father had told me the story of Odin, a god who sacrificed his eye for wisdom, and who possessed two birds, Hunin and Munin—Thought and Memory—that flew into the world each day and brought knowledge back to Odin in Asgard, where he sat on his throne.
It wasn’t so different, I supposed, from Thorn and Iron, two places connected by the dotted lines of the universe, but at the same time wholly apart. One magic, one iron, one replete with the fantastic and one rooted firmly in the earth whereon it sat. There could be crossover, but there could never be harmony.
I turned my back on the crows, focusing on the Deadlands. My Weird let me cross those lines, fold that page so that I could brush one world against the next, travel from one to the next.
My mother had lured me into the Thorn Land by telling me she knew the way to the Deadlands, but now I was sure it was simple as crossing over to a place I’d never been before. I’d managed to build a Gate to Crow’s dreamworld, and it stood to reason that if I could access that place, I could access the Deadlands.
I didn’t need Nerissa, I thought, bitterness welling in my stomach. She’d strung me along for months while my father and my friends wasted away here, in an Iron Land thrown into chaos.
Putting aside my anger at my mother and her manipulation, I focused on building the Gate, as I had with the place of dreams. Then, I’d had a focus, something to channel my Weird. This time I was flying blind.
I wasn’t the first person to be able to do this—my much more famous predecessor, Nikola Tesla, had had the gift as well, had conceived of worlds beyond imagination, and was eventually responsible for breaking the bonds between them, creating the world as we knew it.
I didn’t have anything so spectacular in mind. I just needed to make a path, a bridge I could skip across before it collapsed.
Using my Weird felt a bit like standing on railroad tracks as a train approached—a rumble you could sense in your core, a disturbance that fed through every bit of you. My head started to pound, as it usually did, and a trickle of blood worked its way from my nose.
Forming a Gate, the sort of thing that Tesla constructed out of technology and the Fae constructed with their uncanny powers, took a lot of effort. It usually left me spent and drained, racked by headaches for at least a day, but I couldn’t afford that now.
I had to find Dean, and I let that desire pull me toward the gray spots between the bright beacons of Thorn and Iron and all the places in between that I could travel.
I could practically feel him, his warm chest against my cheek, smell his smell, hear his laugh. I was so close that the tears leaking from my eyes had nothing to do with the pain I experienced as the Gate opened in front of me.
Then, as quickly as I’d felt my Weird begin to respond to my desires, everything went wrong.
A scream ripped through the empty spaces that I saw when I opened myself to my Weird, and I felt a tug against the center of myself as if a jitney had slammed into me. Light exploded in front of my eyes and panic rose in my throat, along with a scream of my own. This had never happened before, and I didn’t know what I could do except be buffeted by a wave of resistance as I glimpsed a sliver of a gray sky and a black, twisted tree in a field of brown grass. Then I saw nothing, simply black velvet cut through by pinpricks of light.
Stars. I saw stars. I realized that I was in the vastness between worlds, and they weren’t stars but spots in the fabric of space and time, worlds and destinations that I could visit if my Weird could only reach them.
The cool grasp of the Deadlands, like opening a room long locked, breathed its last and slipped away. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t connect again.
And in a sudden upsurge of fear, I realized that I couldn’t go anywhere else, either. That I was trapped in between, my Weird refusing to return me where I’d been or to move me forward, to any of the points of light.
I did scream, then. I knew that my body was still on the ground at Graystone, but my consciousness was scattered across a thousand light-years, the image I carried with me only a memory of my physical body.
Had anyone with my gift ever been trapped here? Was my fate to float forever, always in between? I started to panic. It was the worst fate I could conceive of.
Then I saw them as I thrashed in the void: great shadows that blotted out the world-lights, one by one, long and lean, square and massive, or with tentacles that reached for each point of light, closing it amidst their incalculable bulk. I stared as the Old Ones passed by me close enough to touch, if I’d had fingers. Their inexorable journey from the dreaming place toward the point of light that represented the Iron Land was fast and relentless, and I watched, breathless, as their shimmering bodies slid by me, buffeting my Weird with their vast power.
I felt their desire to return to the Iron Land, their focus on it, their hunger to touch the shores that they had not touched for a hundred thousand years—a long time even for such creatures as they. They were coming, and it was clear there was no stopping them. I knew—I’d released them from their prison, let them loose into the in-between and sent them toward the Iron Land.
Long time, one of them agreed, and I didn’t hear the voice so much as feel the brush of mind on mind.
We remember, another agreed. How you freed us.
How you need us.
How we knew you even before your creation.
Your blood, our blood.
Your flesh, our flesh.
“STOP!” I screamed. Their voices were shredding me, tearing this non-body of mine apar
t, and I saw the lights begin to dim.
I was lost. I was never going to make it out of here. It went beyond panic now, into deep, true terror. I would hear the Old Ones’ voices echoing in my head for as long as I lived. No living thing was meant to encounter them this closely. Perhaps in the ancient times when they’d last come, a primitive brain too dense to decipher their voices might have withstood it, but now? Now I felt their voices on me like physical scars, the indelible touch of the Old Ones’ minds.
We will not forget, the first one whispered. We will show our favor.
“Aoife!”
The voice cut through the cacophony of the cosmos, the background radiation, the rumble of the Old Ones’ passage.
“Aoife!”
My Weird snapped against my mind like a rubber band, and all at once I knew how to reel myself back in again, how to return to the point where my flesh resided, as well as my soul.
Opening my eyes was like taking a hammer blow to the forehead, and I lurched into the fetal position, riding out the wave of agony as I writhed and screamed on the gravel.
Small, strong hands wrapped around my wrists, and arms pulled me against a silk dress that smelled both familiar and terrifying—the overwhelming aroma of the orchid perfume favored by Fae.
I blinked the pain tears from my eyes and waited for the face above me to come into focus.
Nerissa stroked her thin fingers over my hair, my cheeks, brushed the tears from my face as if I were five years old again. I couldn’t fathom how she could even be here, and simply stared at her.
“You?”
“I’m here,” she confirmed. “When I heard you’d run away I had to follow you.”
“But the iron …” I made myself sit up and scoot away from her. She still looked like her new, improved self. Well-dressed, hair up, cheeks flushed with life. The tinge of madness in her eyes I’d come to know as normal wasn’t there. Yet.
“I’ll be all right for a few minutes, out here where there’s no metal,” my mother said. “I had to use the hexenring to find you and see what on the scorched earth you thought you were doing, running off like that.”
“What I had to do,” I told her. “I have to find Dean.”
“Well, you’re not going to find him with your little parlor trick,” Nerissa said crisply. “The Deadlands are closed to the living, Fae, human or anything else. Your Weird won’t get you there, and you’re lucky you’re not dead from trying.”
I tried standing, and found it a treacherous endeavor. I staggered over to the statue and sat by the fallen hero’s feet. My skull was echoing, and the gravity of what Conrad had said was starting to sink in, now that I’d failed. “So, what, you came to scold me? I thought you didn’t want me going to the Deadlands, so why come?”
“Because you ran off with that piece of scum Grey Draven, Octavia is beside herself with rage and I told her I’d go make sure you weren’t colluding against the Fae.”
“I’m doing what I have to,” I repeated. “You wouldn’t help me.”
She shook her head, reaching to stroke my cheek, but I pulled away. “I told you it wouldn’t be this simple, Aoife,” she said. “Playing roulette with Death never is.”
“It’s so much worse than that,” I whispered, and felt hot tears of helplessness and panic start to flow. I couldn’t hold them back. I sobbed, and I let Nerissa rub my back and whisper soothing words, because nobody else would, and in that moment I needed it.
I didn’t tell her about the Old Ones. I let her think all my tears were for Dean. I couldn’t handle having yet another person look at me as if I’d set fire to everything they held near and dear.
“Poor girl,” Nerissa whispered. “Everything seems so big and impossible at your age. This boy—surely he can’t be worth killing yourself or melting your brains over?”
“He’s the only person I know worth it,” I snapped, and watched the pain blossom in Nerissa’s eyes. Belatedly, I realized what I’d said.
“I see,” she murmured, before I could backpedal or try to apologize. “If you’re really insistent, then I might know of another way. Even though I think it’s a foolish thing. The dead should stay dead, if you ask me.”
That sounded like the Nerissa I knew—never a mother to coddle or console, even before the madness really sank tooth and claw into her mind. It helped, in an odd way. A mother who wanted to comfort me and have a heart-to-heart? I’d have no idea what to do with that or how to react.
“I didn’t ask you, but I have a feeling you’ll tell me anyway,” I said. I didn’t care that I was being a mouthy brat—not the way I’d care if it were my father across from me. I didn’t feel the connection to Nerissa I did to him. I guessed Conrad was right. Our mother had left us long before she’d been committed.
“You really are a difficult child,” my mother sighed.
“I’m not a child,” I told her. “By this point, I think I’ve earned the right to be treated like an adult.”
“You’re not,” my mother said. “But I can see you aren’t going to give up this ridiculous idea, so I’ll tell you what I know: when I was in the madhouse another patient told me about a man in San Francisco.”
Oh, this was perfect. “Mother,” I said, slow and direct, “your one idea comes from another inmate in a mental institution.”
“I didn’t belong there,” my mother snapped. “Neither did he. He was a Spiritualist, and the Proctors locked him up for heresy. He worked with a doctor who had made a machine that could reach the Deadlands. Horatio Crawford, that was his name. Dr. Horatio Crawford.”
“And?” I prompted. One madman’s tale of a magical device that could peel back the layers of space and time when even my Weird failed was suspect, to say the least.
“You’ll probably scoff, since it’s a Fae tale and not made of math and metal,” my mother said. “But I thought there was a thread that bound souls to life, a measure of time that was only theirs, and when the thread got cut, well … Octavia always used to tell me that was what led to spirits and phenomena and such.”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to anger her now that she was talking by suggesting that Fae ghost stories held about as much water as the kind my classmates and I used to tell. The notion of the thread, though—if there was a connection between worlds via the Gates, why not a connection of the soul to the Land it had inhabited in life?
“If Crawford found a way to use his machine to tether the soul to life but allow it to be free of a body … well, that makes sense to me,” Nerissa said. “Your father always said magic was just science nobody could quantify yet.”
“That sounds like him,” I said. I desperately wanted to hear more about her and Archie’s life together, but now wasn’t the time. Now, time was precious.
“Thank you for trusting me,” I said, when she only stared up at the high windows of Graystone, which reflected the mountains beyond, gray and implacable as stone eyes.
“I just know you’re too stubborn to give up,” she said. “And I don’t want you to get hurt, or have your spirit broken worse than it already is. I do care about you, Daughter.” She pressed her hand over mine, and I tried not to start at her cold skin. The gesture was so foreign, all I could do was squeeze her fingers, because I didn’t want her to think it was in vain.
“Go to San Francisco and find Horatio Crawford,” my mother said, giving my hand a squeeze back. “If he’s still alive, then perhaps the two of you will be clever enough to cheat Death.”
She rose and smoothed her skirts. “I’ve been here too long. Goodbye, Aoife.” After a moment of hesitation, she reached out and cupped my face with her thin, cool palm. “Be careful,” she whispered, an unidentifiable expression flitting across her face. Then she stepped back and walked away, and the mist swallowed her up.
I stayed where I was. My mother had never been reliable, but when it came to Dean, could I really be picky about where I got help?
There was nothing I could do for Dean or my father by sitting on
a garden bench moping. I finally had a sliver of hope, and not to follow it just because of the source would be the worst kind of foolish.
I stood up and turned back toward the house. There was only one direction to go, and that was west, to San Francisco.
4
Winging Westward
IT WASN’T HARD to convince Cal to come with me. Cal was always up for an adventure, for bucking authority, whether it was the Proctors or Conrad. That was one of my favorite things about him.
I should have been terrified of Cal. Ghouls lived under old cities like Lovecraft—infested the sewers built before the Proctors took control—and would attack like a lightning strike made of muscle and teeth when they were hunting. But Cal had been my friend before I’d found out the truth about myself and the world, the necrovirus, all of it. And he’d kept right on being my friend after. Besides, as a changeling, I didn’t have much room to talk. If the two of us told a normal human the truth, it’d be a toss-up whom they’d turn their shotgun on first.
He procured extra clothes for both of us, plus food, money and a map of California from my father’s vast library. I waited outside my father’s room while Cal asked Bethina to look after him until we got back. I didn’t want to antagonize Conrad any more than I had to, but I also didn’t trust that he wouldn’t go running off and leave my father to his own devices. Bethina was tough and trustworthy, and I knew my father would be safe with her.
“Now what?” Cal asked when he came back and handed me my bag. The white cat watched us leave from one of the upstairs windows. I looked at the road ahead. I didn’t want to be reminded that my father was back there, insensible to the world, and that it was probably my fault.
“Airship terminal,” I said, “and hope we have enough to buy passage to San Francisco.”
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