The Nightmare Garden ic-2

by Caitlin Kittredge

  I felt a rumble under my hands and feet and heard the subtle swoop of aether rearranging itself inside the vacuum tube, and then I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle and stand up. I jerked my hand away from the lever and stepped away from the Gate. The row of gauges below the dials vibrated to life, needles climbing toward maximum.

  Above us, I saw a bright flash of lightning and heard a crack of thunder nearly directly above my head. The ionized air all around made my skin crawl, and my Weird ran frantic circles in my mind as it sensed the wondrous, terrible machine that controlled the incalculable power of the world rift.

  The lightning flashbulbed again, brighter than anything, leaving whorls on my vision, black clouds gathering over us like ghost crows, swooping down and making my head ring with a thunderclap so loud my teeth shook.

  I gasped, drawing back from the Gate, which had become a lightning rod, making sure the others were clear as well. Nature and magic were beyond anyone’s control, even someone with a Weird. I didn’t feel ashamed of being wary of them.

  The third flash snaked a bolt of electricity from the boiling clouds and hit the Gate, punctuated by a thunderclap so loud it deafened me instantly. Dean grabbed his ears and Bethina let out a scream, though I couldn’t hear it, could only see the panicked pink O of her lips.

  Before me, in the center of the Gate’s iron arch, stood the same shimmering mirror that I’d seen when Conrad had transported us into the Mists, a wavering image of the Iron Land on the other side. It flickered, spiderweb cracks running across the glassine surface and then retreating. I could tell that the Gate still wasn’t stable, but it was open, and that was all that mattered.

  I’d kept us safe from Draven. I’d gotten us home.

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” Dean shouted at the others. “Go!”

  One by one, they hurried through the flickering hole in reality, Conrad bringing up the rear, until only Dean and I remained.

  “Now or never, princess,” he told me. I looked back at the Mists, the ruined village, and the swirling white fog that hid Draven and his men, growing closer by the second.

  “I hope this is the right thing to do.” I hadn’t meant to say anything, just step through the Gate, but it came out. I felt if it hadn’t, I might have exploded.

  Dean looked into my eyes. “I don’t know that. But I trust you, princess. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders and you haven’t steered me wrong yet.”

  I reached out and put my hand on one of his slightly rough, stubble-covered cheeks. I pressed my lips to the other, and tasted the warmth and salt of his skin. “Thanks, Dean.”

  He flashed me half a grin and skimmed his thumb across my lips. “Thank me when we’ve got your mother with us and we’re out of Lovecraft for good.” Motioning to the Gate, which had grown increasingly fractured and jumpy, he dropped his hand. “Go on, now. I’m right behind you.”

  I touched the opening of the Gate with my fingers first. It was an absence of feeling in the shimmering space the aether had created. Holding my breath, and still thinking I could possibly be making the worst mistake I ever made, I stepped through, back along the line of travel to the last location, the one the Proctors had used. Back to Lovecraft, and whatever awaited me.

  6

  The Ruins of Lovecraft

  TRAVELING BY GATE was unpleasant, a fact that I had forgotten in the whirl of more pressing problems since Conrad and I had escaped Graystone.

  I was reminded violently as I passed into the Gate and felt as if I’d been jerked by a string implanted in the center of my chest, down and sideways, spinning end over end, out of control. I caught flashes of other places, other skies not my own, mountains of a shape that no horizon of the Iron Land bore.

  It was like seeing a tiny slice of the world the shadow figure from my not-dreams occupied, spinning by at a speed a human eye couldn’t hope to process.

  I wished I knew how the Gates truly worked, how they folded in all the worlds between Mists and Iron and shot my matter across incalculable distances to reassemble it on the other end. But the only ones who knew that were the Brotherhood, and the Fae, and neither one was a group I relished asking.

  I landed on a patch of burnt earth when my journey ended, and pain stabbed up my right arm as my wrist twisted under my full weight.

  “Dammit!” I shouted, cradling my arm. I had just recovered my equilibrium when Dean came flying from the Gate and landed on me, sending me into the dirt again.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled, face buried in my hair. “Not much in the way of navigation through that thing.”

  “It’s okay,” I managed, looking back at where we’d come from. There was no Gate on this side, nothing physical—just a weak spot that nobody except a Gateminder or a Fae would ever notice.

  Dean raised his head and smiled down at me.

  “All in one piece?”

  I managed a smile in return. It was hard not to smile at Dean when he turned the full force of his eyes and his slow, full grin on you. “More or less.”

  “Excuse me,” Conrad said loudly from above. His voice broke into the warm place I was drifting in within Dean’s eyes like a jangling chronometer alarm. “But if it’s not too much trouble for you, please get off of my sister.”

  Dean dropped me a wink before he rolled up to his knees and then his feet and offered me a hand. I took it and stood, brushing ash and dirt from my clothes. “Where are we?”

  “Somewhere around Nephilheim, looks like,” Conrad said. The slumped gray row houses and treeless vista did look like the factory town attached to the Nephilim Foundry, whose belching smokestacks I’d looked out at my entire life in Lovecraft. Now the sad little houses were shuttered and deserted, and the brick factory buildings in the distance were blackened with long streaks of soot. One of the foundry’s smokestacks had partially collapsed, and reached for the brown-tinged clouds like the jagged end of a broken spoke.

  I’d expected it to be bad, but the fact that this much ruin had spread across the river, right into Nephilheim, made my stomach drop. How far had the destruction of the Engine reached? How many people had been in its way?

  “Aoife?” Dean said, touching my shoulder. “You want to get moving?”

  “Yeah,” I said, blinking back what I told myself were tears from the ash drifting through the thick, acrid air. “The bridge isn’t far past the foundry. We should go that way.”

  We walked, keeping in a tight group, Conrad at the head and Dean at the back. I nudged him in front of me—if something jumped out at us, Dean could protect Cal, Bethina and himself. Conrad and I would just have to fend for ourselves. Dean took it with good grace, and winked at me.

  “Don’t worry, princess. I’m fine.”

  I tried to smile back, but the farther we walked and the more wrecked homes we passed, the sicker to my stomach I felt.

  “Where is everyone?” Bethina turned in a wide circle, taking in the dirt street and the empty houses.

  No one else was in evidence, and the only movement I saw was a white curtain in an open window at the far end of the block, fluttering in the intermittent breeze. It was November and the beginning of winter in Lovecraft and the surrounding towns, and I tucked my hands under my arms to warm them. I didn’t get the eerie prickle of being watched by live eyes as I had in the Mists, but that didn’t mean nothing was watching. The Proctors had plenty of ways to keep eyes all around Lovecraft without any flesh and blood involved.

  “Not here,” Cal said. He sniffed discreetly. “There’s nobody within a mile of this place.”

  Which just made me wonder where everyone in Nephilheim had gone. Foundry workers, jitney drivers, their families. There was really no good train of thought running down those tracks. I bit my lip hard, hoping the pain would distract me from my racing thoughts. It was just the iron. Whispering treacherous things to me, that I’d done this, that my stupidity with the Fae had made these people disappear.

  Just the iron. Not the truth.

&nb
sp; I walked a few steps away from the group and looked down the broad avenue. It ended at the west gates of the foundry. Beyond was the Erebus River, which I’d crossed for the first time a little more than two weeks earlier, fleeing the city where I’d spent my entire life.

  Now I was willingly going back, into the jaws of the Proctors and who knew what else, things that had slipped through the tears appearing and disappearing in the Gates.

  Reassuring myself that I wasn’t already insane was getting harder and harder. And with every step I took back toward Lovecraft, the iron of the city and the land around me whispered louder in my blood.

  On the horizon, across the river, columns of black and silver smoke rose, as if souls were drifting up from the broken cityscape, trying to find a hole in the overcast sky. The clouds were blood-red, and lightning danced between them as the smoke from burning aether formerly trapped in the Lovecraft Engine drifted into the atmosphere.

  I could hear sirens faintly, the constant warning of an air raid. Those sirens were supposed to warn us of Crimson Guard attacks, but now they were screaming senselessly, echoing back from the smashed walls of the foundry.

  Something crunched under my boots, and I looked down to see what it was. The street, in addition to being covered in ash, was peppered with shards of glass—silvery window glass and also crockery, as if everything had been flung and shifted in the Engine’s great spasm.

  As we trudged on, block after block with no human in sight, and as the wreckage grew worse, some of the houses window- and doorless, merely yawning maws covered in smoke marks, I pulled Cal aside. “I think you and Bethina should stay here.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head vigorously. “I need to be with you. I have to stay close.”

  “Cal,” I said. “You know what’s over there. You know what the Proctors will do if they catch you.” Never mind Cal’s own clan of ghouls, who regarded siding with humans as an offense serious enough to get you torn limb from limb and cooked in a stew.

  I gestured toward Lovecraft. The sirens were louder with every step we took, and I imagined that on the same wind, I could hear the howling of the tribes of ghouls that had populated Lovecraft’s sewers. “You know all that,” I repeated to Cal. “And if you go across that bridge you’re not going to be able to hide what you are from her.”

  “It’ll be fine,” Cal insisted.

  “Calvin,” I hissed, anger at his stubbornness bubbling up. “It will not be fine. It will be a disaster. You’re my friend and I love you, but those ghouls over there aren’t all your family. You said it yourself when the Engine got destroyed—the ghouls in Lovecraft are on a Wild Hunt. I don’t know exactly what that means, but it can’t be good.”

  Cal swallowed, his lumpy Adam’s apple scraping at his pale throat. “A Wild Hunt is what we do when we mean to cleanse a place of all prey. It means that everything not a ghoul is fair game, and ghouls who refuse to hunt become the hunted.”

  “Then that includes Bethina,” I said. “And you, by extension. You don’t want to do that to her, Cal. If you insist on lying to her, don’t put her in danger on top of it. Please. I like her, and I don’t want her hurt.”

  He sighed, raking a hand through his stiff, oily blond hair. “I hate this, Aoife. I’ve never met anyone like her. I do want to be …” He dropped his hand, ungainly and too big for his wiry frame. “I want to be Cal, sometimes. Cal all the time. If my nest heard me say that …”

  “I know,” I murmured. “Trust me, I know the wanting to be something you aren’t. I want it too.” I stopped and faced him, reaching up to put my hands on his shoulders and meet his eyes. Those eyes could be stone cold, animal and vicious, but they’d also provided the only kind gaze I’d known in all my time at the Academy. “The best thing you could do for Bethina right now is not let her come to any more harm. And when this is over, the next best thing you can do is tell her the truth.”

  Cal’s shoulders drooped at that, and he opened his mouth, probably to tell me how crazy I was to even suggest that he reveal his true nature, but he straightened again and went quiet when Bethina caught up.

  “This place is spooky, huh?” she said, linking her arm with Cal’s. I moved away and let her have the closeness. From having Dean, I knew how important that could be.

  “It’s not so bad,” he said, trying to stand and push out his chest to look bigger. “Besides, I’m here with you.”

  “Like I was saying to Cal,” I told Bethina. “I think it’s best if the two of you wait here, in Nephilheim. Cover our retreat, sort of.”

  Cal nodded now that Bethina was listening, but his jaw was tight. I knew how much Cal lived for adventure, in fictional form and in the cheesy aether plays the Bureau of Proctors broadcast over the tubes. Being told he had to stay behind might grate on him, but if he went into Lovecraft, he’d be eaten alive. That was, if the Proctors didn’t capture and torture their former informant to death first.

  It was the truth, and Cal knew it just as well as I did.

  “Stay here?” Bethina trilled, loud enough to reach Dean and Conrad. “But this is an awful place to stay! Stone knows what’s hiding in these houses.”

  “No, this place is good,” Cal soothed. “It’s fine, Bethina. We’ll be fine.”

  “Well, of course we’ll be fine,” she said. “I’m not a shrinking violet, but I don’t relish fightin’ off viral creatures with my bare hands, either.”

  “Probably best,” Dean chimed in before Bethina could read the flinch on my face. I hadn’t told her about the Proctors’ lie. Escaping the Mists was already more than she could handle. In a way, I guessed I was just as guilty as Cal. “We’ll move quicker that way,” he added. “No offense, Bethina.”

  Cal pointed to a cottage that was in relatively good shape. “We’ll wait in there, okay? I’ve got a pack of cards. It’ll be like no time at all.”

  Bethina cast a wary look back at me as Cal escorted her into the cottage. I smiled and waved, feeling not one iota of the cheerful expression plastered across my face.

  “Thank goodness,” I muttered, once they were inside without more protests. Bethina wasn’t stupid—soon Cal’s and my carefully constructed tower of falsehood was going to collapse like so many blocks, and when it did, I wouldn’t blame her one bit if she smacked us both across the face. Repeatedly.

  “Yeah,” Conrad agreed. “That girl’s sweet, but she’s deadweight.”

  Dean shot me a look, but I waved him off, hoping to avoid yet another contest to see who could puff his chest out farther. Conrad didn’t know about Cal’s little skin-changing trick either, and right now that was best. I wasn’t up to explaining to my brother, especially considering how he’d been acting lately, exactly why we were running around with a ghoul to watch our backs.

  We approached the foundry gates, which hung open at odd angles, as if something large and out of control had smashed them in its mad dash for freedom.

  Dean pressed a finger to his lips, moved along the iron of the foundry fence and peered around the gate without letting anything that might be on the other side get a look at him. I pressed against his back, curling my fingers in the leather of his coat, and followed his eyes.

  Great tread tracks led to the gate from the innards of the foundry, where the forge and the assembly sheds lay, and one side of the nearest sheds was smashed, bricks lying in piles. The automatons that worked in the hottest, most dangerous parts of the foundry had vanished.

  “I don’t like this at all,” I said in Dean’s ear. So much destruction, and now the foundry was so quiet.

  I was close enough to Dean that I could smell his hair cream, like a hint of sweetness on my tongue, when he turned to reply.

  “Me either,” he said. “But like they say, princess—only way out is through. No other road to the bridge on this side of the river, and swimming’s going to get us a nice case of hypothermia and not much else.”

  “Forward, then,” I said, and I slipped my hand into Dean’s as we walked, ma
king Conrad snort as he brought up the rear. “Grow up,” I muttered at him, but he pretended not to hear me. Brothers didn’t make life easier, not even the jinxed sort of life we’d found ourselves in, I decided. They were tailored by evolution to be annoying.

  The foundry grounds were as quiet as the town behind us, but unlike that of the town, this wasn’t the silence of abandonment. It was more like walking along a darkened street at night, with the pressure on the back of your neck that let you know something was watching you from the shadowed places along the way.

  Conrad pointed to a bright spray of paint splashed along the walls, overlaying the wing-and-crucible logo of the foundry. The paint was red and black, violent slashes that depicted blood pouring from the crucible, great arrowheads through the wings. The sort of things the Proctors would have had scrubbed away immediately, before.

  “We’re gone two weeks and this place goes full-on anarchist?” Dean said. “This is nuts.”

  “Maybe we should be quiet,” I suggested nervously. The foundry was silent and felt wrong. No smoke belched from the stacks, and the resounding clang and clank of cooling ingots that used to echo across the river and into my dormitory room had ceased.

  Dean, Conrad and I formed a sort of line, Conrad at the rear and Dean at the head. I wanted to tell them I didn’t need the press of a boy’s body to keep me safe—whatever was running loose here would just as soon chew on their flesh as mine.

  We passed through the smaller wooden outbuildings, several of which had been crushed to matchsticks, presumably by the vast weight of runaway automatons. One such machine slumped in its tracks near the last shed, the aether globe in its chest that had kept it powered smashed and a broad burn mark scorching its metal torso. The scent of burnt paper was still in the air.

  Conrad approached the thing and touched one of its tracks, which had come off the wheels. Each tread was twice the span of his arm.