16
Awake
AT FIRST I thought I was in the void of nothing, the same place that contained the Old Ones. I saw flashes of their great eyes and limpid bodies, drifting between galaxies, between supernovas, on and on, until one turned to look at me and I thought if I could just hold its gaze, I would know all the secrets of the stars. But I couldn’t, and meeting the great eye burned me like staring into the surface of the sun.
I screamed, and the burning coalesced into the center of my chest, until I thrashed with pain and fell onto a hard floor.
“She’s back,” Chang said. He put away two small paddles hooked up to a battery run off the Tesla coil.
I rolled to the side, feeling my throat and guts constrict, and vomited.
“You’re all right,” another voice said, and I felt Conrad’s hand rub my back. “She’s all right, isn’t she?”
“We’ll have to see,” Chang said. “She was under for much longer than I’ve ever seen anyone survive.”
“She’s tough,” Cal’s voice broke in. My head was throbbing, and in that moment, prostrate on a cold floor and covered in my own sick, I felt miles away from tough.
“Good thing, because we have to move,” Conrad said. “Those boys outside aren’t going to wait much longer.”
Over the drone of the Tesla coil and my own blood humming in my ears, I heard a voice echo off the front of the building. “We know you’re in there, Miss Grayson! Come out with your hands up!”
Chang, Cal and Conrad jumped, but all I could do was take a deep breath and let it out. It hurt, like somebody had taken a bat and smacked me across the chest, but it was the best pain I’d ever felt. I could feel the blood moving through my veins again, my heart thrumming, electricity shooting through my nerves just like it hummed through the Tesla coil.
Tesla. He’d told me I had to endure. I had no choice now, because here I was, right back in the grasp of the Iron Land.
“Who’s out there?” I rasped. My voice sounded as if I’d scraped it across gravel, and speaking sent hot fire down my throat.
“Who do you think?”
This voice was the one I’d been dreaming about. The one that had the power to set me sobbing or inspire joy. It was for this that I’d endured all the pain and nightmares.
I sat up and looked into his eyes. “Dean?”
“Hey, princess.” He crouched next to me, brushing sweaty hair out of my eyes with his rough, sure fingers. He looked pale and sick too, but he was holding it together much better than I was. “You sure are a sight for sore eyes, you know that?”
I said nothing; I just grabbed him and wrapped him in my arms and pressed my face into his neck, smelling his sweat and his skin and feeling him warm and alive against me.
In that moment, everything was perfect, every bit of suffering had been worth it, and nothing, not even the encroachment of the Old Ones, could render me completely hopeless.
And just as quickly, it all shattered again.
“Miss Grayson!” Pounding started up on the door, and Chang shot a nervous glance toward it.
“The Brotherhood?” I guessed, looking to Cal and Conrad for confirmation.
“They showed up a few minutes ago,” Cal said. “Guess they got tired of watching the door. That’s why Chang had to shock you.”
Conrad was still staring at Dean. “How are you here? I thought you were dead, and you just—pop up here. What the hell is going on?” His brow furrowed. “You were dead. I saw your body.”
Dean gave Conrad a grim smile. “Dead as a doornail, man. And by the way, it’s great to see you, too.”
“I hate to interrupt this tender reunion,” I said, clambering to my feet. Even though I felt sick and my heart was throbbing, part of me was elated. My mother hadn’t been completely crazy after all. Dean was here, and he was holding my arm when I started to sway, and he had his time back—all of the thread that he should have had, the thread that had been cut because of me, repaired. I used him to hold myself steady. He was here, body and spirit. Here with me. “But we have a decision to make.”
“What’s the decision?” Cal said. “We’re out the back and we disappear into Chinatown. And let’s do it now, before they bust the front door down.”
“They’ll have agents at the back,” Conrad said. “Trust me, I’ve spent months with these people. They’re organized, and they’re not stupid.”
“This place have a basement?” Cal asked Chang, but Chang shook his head.
“No basement,” he said. “Too close to the bay.”
Everyone erupted into arguing and shouting, but I took a step toward the front door, and then another.
Dean caught my hand, and I turned back to him and shook my head. “Don’t try to stop me,” I told him. “You know this is the only way we all get out of here alive.”
“Wouldn’t dream of trying to stop you,” he said, squeezing my hand. “Just trying to make sure you stay out of trouble.”
I put my hand on the rough wood of the door and tried to smile at Dean. “If I hadn’t just thrown up, I’d kiss you right now.”
He winked at me. “Rain check, princess. When all this is said and done.”
Conrad realized what I was about to do, and he came bolting through the front of the store, but it was too late. I’d grabbed the doorknob and twisted, throwing the door open into a welter of raindrops, sodium lights and shock pistols pointed at my face.
Did I think it was the right decision? I thought it was stupid. I was sure I was being foolish. But I also knew it was the only way to keep my brother, Cal, Dean and myself alive. Not to mention Chang and anyone else who crossed the Brotherhood’s path.
I stepped onto the front stoop and held up my hands. Dean did the same.
“Don’t move!” someone bellowed from behind the spotlight. It hissed as the raindrops burned up against its blinding brilliance, and steam drifted around us, obscuring the rest of the street. I was in my own world, just Dean and me—and the Brotherhood, even now advancing to clap iron shackles around my wrists.
“You don’t have to do that,” I told them. “I’ll come peacefully.”
“Orders, Miss Grayson,” the man said. He didn’t sound much older than me, his face obscured by a fedora and his coat collar turned up. “I’m sorry. I know about your abilities.”
Another agent, a woman, handcuffed Dean, and when I looked back into the house, it was empty. My brother, Chang and Cal had gone. I trusted that Conrad would be smart enough to keep the rest of them out of harm’s way, especially Cal.
They put us into separate jitneys, and the last I saw of Dean before the door closed was his reassuring smile.
I sighed as I watched the lights of Chinatown recede behind the jitney’s treads. I wished I shared Dean’s confidence that everything was going to be all right.
* * *
The Brotherhood took us to a house high up on Haight Street, near Golden Gate Park. It was sandwiched between two other, identical houses and painted bright blue. It was such an incongruous spot for an outfit like the Brotherhood that I could barely worry when they separated Dean and me again in the hall and took me upstairs, to a study in the turret that looked down Haight Street to the Port Authority, its white spire gleaming with raindrops against the streetlights.
The young Brotherhood agent shackled me to my chair and left. I waited, watching the rain on the glass, listening to the hiss of the aether lamps and trying to do calculus in my head to keep the iron from getting to me.
Iron madness could come on slowly, over years, or all at once, depending on how much you were exposed to. The background hum of a city was one thing, but iron against my skin was another thing entirely. I probably had only a matter of hours before I started hallucinating, a day or two before I was completely mad.
I focused on the raindrops. They weren’t just raindrops, I reminded myself, but tiny prisms, each containing fractals of infinite design and possibilities. The math inside a raindrop could keep my mind fr
om breaking down for months.
Fortunately, I didn’t need to wait that long. After barely an hour by the clock hanging above the vast chestnut desk in front of me, the door opened and a single figure came in.
“Hello, Aoife,” he said. “Didn’t think I’d be seeing you again so soon.”
I had last seen him covered in mud, running like a scared dog with his tail between his legs. I stared, unable to believe what I was actually seeing. “No,” I said. “There’s no way they’d let you …”
“The Brotherhood makes deals with a lot of unsavory folks, Aoife,” Grey Draven said. “Fae, Erlkin. I had an agreement with Crosley that if I ran across your father I’d turn him over. We both had a vested interest in keeping the Fae off our territory. Of course, they’re filthy heretics, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have the same end goal.”
“Trust a snake to find a warm nest,” I grumbled, and Draven clapped me on the shoulder.
“Aoife, I’m hurt. I thought you’d be much happier to see a familiar face.”
“Then I guess we’re both disappointed,” I said. “Now, even though I know it’s your favorite hobby, why don’t you cut out the pointless blather and tell me what you want?”
Draven sat on the edge of the desk and removed a cigarette from a gold box. He lit it, inhaled and watched as the smoke curled in the bluish light of the aether lamps. “You’re wrong, Aoife. It’s the threats that come after the talking that I actually enjoy the most.” He favored me with one of his razor-thin smiles. “I spent some time in Proctor custody after I dropped back into the Iron Land, you know. It’s not a pleasant place to be.”
I sighed and looked directly at him. After what I’d seen in the past few … hours? days? who knew how long I’d been under? … he didn’t frighten me in the least. “It’s not my problem if you don’t like the taste of your own medicine. If you’re going to kill or torture me, would you please just do it? I’m getting bored sitting here listening to your rambling stories.”
“Kill you!” He barked a laugh, before he stubbed his cigarette out in a dish that looked like it was carved from a ram’s horn. “Dear girl, I would no sooner kill you than I would kill Nikola Tesla himself returned from the afterlife.”
“You might get a shot at that sooner than you think,” I muttered, but I don’t think he even heard me. Dr. Draven was certainly a man impressed with the sound of his own voice.
“You have a purpose in life, Aoife, though you may not realize it yet. And that purpose is to serve the Brotherhood. You are a young girl, I realize, and that is why I don’t hold you responsible for your selfish actions.”
He got up and pulled a ring of keys from his vest, sorting through them until he found one that fit my shackles.
“I hold them to your father far more closely, these responsibilities. There are things you should have been indoctrinated in from birth that you never so much as considered.”
I watched as he unlocked my shackles, and felt the immense weight of the iron against my skin lift. I calculated the distance to the door. If I was fast, I’d decided while I’d been waiting, I could reach the street before anyone could stop me, and then I could start screaming if I had to. It wasn’t like the Brotherhood could gun me down in a public street. That privilege was reserved for the Proctors.
“Such as?” I said, shooting him a glare. “What exactly should I consider? That you manipulate people and cut deals with the very creatures that should be your sworn enemies? I know all about Crosley making accords with the Fae, giving them leeway in exchange for information about the Thorn Land. I know that when my father objected, you cut him out and threatened his life.”
“Harold Crosley threatened his life,” Draven said, perfectly calm. “And that had more to do with Archie’s predilection for running off with people’s daughters than his objections about our methods.”
“That’s a load of crap and you know it,” I shot back, borrowing one of Dean’s indelicate phrases.
Draven twitched an eyebrow. “I see you’re about as personable as Archie, even if he didn’t teach you anything you need to know to be a proper Gateminder.”
I sighed. “I know you’re going to threaten me or make me an offer. So why don’t we get on with it?”
Draven gave me a thin smile. “And you’re direct like him too. I miss the days when young women were taught manners.”
“I miss the days when I wasn’t being harassed by the likes of the Brotherhood,” I grumbled.
Draven laced his fingers over his knee. He looked for all the world like a headmaster relishing the scolding he was about to give. “I’m going to be frank with you, Miss Grayson—you don’t have a choice any longer. You’ve denied the Brotherhood, but your birthright is working for us, to keep the darkness of the Fae and magic and the Old Ones at bay. Why would you deny that?”
“My birthright is to create and control the Gates as I see fit,” I snapped. “There wouldn’t be a Brotherhood if it weren’t for people like me, so why don’t you try another tack? This one’s not working.” I glared at him harder than I’d ever dared glare at any teacher of mine. Draven was getting on my nerves, and I wasn’t in the mood for any more of the Brotherhood’s mind games cloaked in manners.
“You know,” Draven said, getting up and going to the window. He watched the bob and sway of the lamps atop the Golden Gate Bridge for a moment before turning back to me. “It would be a shame if anything happened to that boy Dean. Especially after you’ve worked so hard to be reunited.”
Just like that, all the fight went out of me. I hated that the Brotherhood could find my weakness so easily. Hated that they had something to hold over me, even now.
“What do you want?” I sighed.
Draven spread his hands. “For you to do your duty, of course. To come back to the fold of the Brotherhood and give up these foolish dreams of putting things back exactly as they were before.” He leaned forward into my face, so close that I could smell garlic and whiskey on his breath.
“There is no changing what you’ve done, Aoife. There is only forestalling the inevitable.” He looked out at the sky, and at the growing dark spot, the blot on light. “And from the looks of things, that won’t be much longer.”
“You don’t want any sort of forestalling,” I said in disgust. “You just want leverage against things like the Fae.”
“Of course I do,” Draven said with a shrug. “In the scheme of things, humans are relatively powerless. Only one of us can create and use Gates, as opposed to any Fae who thinks to raise their head from the mud long enough to step into a hexenring. That will not stand. Not when humans are superior.”
“Nice as it is to get a dose of xenophobia along with paranoid ramblings,” I said, “why don’t you just tell me what I’m going to have to do to keep you from hurting Dean?” I raised my chin. I might not have had any leverage left, but I did have my dignity. I wasn’t going to cry or beg. I’d done enough of that in the Deadlands.
“You’re going to do exactly as we say,” Draven told me, “until we have no use for you any longer. And you’re going to cease all contact with Dean and your family. Except for that mother of yours. She could be useful. Her feelings for you make her vulnerable.”
I almost choked on my laughter. “You think I have any influence over Nerissa? You’re even dumber than you look.”
“A mother cares for her daughter. A mother who would stay in a city overrun by ghouls to reunite with that daughter cares more than most.” Draven tsked. “I don’t think you give your mother enough credit, Aoife.”
“And I think you give her entirely too much,” I grumbled.
Draven sighed and then grabbed me by the arm. “Come with me, Aoife.”
He pulled me along, down a set of spiral stairs so tightly curled my shoulders could barely pass between the walls, and into a kitchen lit by a single bare bulb. Most of the cabinets had been ripped out, and a chair was bolted to the tile floor. I recognized it as the sort used in madhouses to keep
patients restrained.
My stomach lurched as I saw that the chair’s occupant was Dean, hands and ankles bound with leather straps, and blood running from a split lip. One of his eyes was blacked and there was a cut on his cheek. A Brotherhood thug stood to one side, flexing his hand.
“Tough nut, boss,” the thug said. “Won’t say nothing except to tell us to screw off. Trying to tenderize him a little bit.”
“That’s fine, Hobson,” said Draven. “Why don’t you leave us for a moment? We have something to discuss.”
I ran to Dean and smoothed the hair back from his forehead. It was thick with blood and sweat, and I tried not to show my anger as Draven watched us, his arms folded. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered as I cradled Dean’s head, pressing my lips to his forehead. “I tried, I really did. I thought this was the right thing to do.”
“It was,” Dean muttered. “You know they would have pasted all four of us, princess. You made the right choice.”
“Do you have any doubt, Miss Grayson, that I am willing and able to follow through on my threat?” Draven asked.
I kept holding on to Dean, and shook my head. “I know what you’re capable of. Now and before.”
Draven nodded. “Then you’ll do as we ask. There won’t be any need for more melodrama.”
He went to the door and pulled it open. I saw a plain hallway beyond. Strange, to think that all around this torture chamber there was an ordinary house on an ordinary street, surrounded by people who knew nothing of the Brotherhood. Nothing of the Fae, nothing of people like me or the creatures that stalked through their nightmares.
“No,” I said quietly. Dean looked up at me.
“Princess,” he said urgently, “what are you—”
“Just trust me,” I muttered.
Draven turned. He looked angrier than a bank of thunderheads, but I forced myself not to fall back into fear.
Draven couldn’t scare me.
He couldn’t even come close.
The Mirrored Shard ic-3 Page 21
