I scrabbled for hold and grabbed the bar at the foot of the balloon’s door, hanging on with all my strength. Conrad grappled for purchase on my other arm. The pain was worse than anything I’d ever felt, and it radiated through me. But I couldn’t let go—I wouldn’t. Conrad’s fingers found my skin, digging furrows in my wrist.
“Aoife!” Dean shouted, dropping to his stomach as the balloon swayed wildly, free of its restraints. He grabbed me by the wrist with one hand and the shoulder of my jacket by the other, trying to haul me back into the basket. “Cal, get over here!” he bellowed. Cal left the rudder of the balloon waving wildly and joined Dean, reaching out his lanky arm and catching Conrad’s free hand. With heaving and straining and a lot of swearing, they finally hauled us back in.
Conrad collapsed, shaking, and I lay perfectly still, unable to move. My right arm, the one Conrad had grabbed, felt boneless and disconnected from the rest of my body. I could feel blood from scrapes dribbling across my skin, turning cold against the air. My forehead had begun bleeding again, sending stinging red spots into my vision. All of it was from far away, though, as if I were attached to my body by nothing more than the air we were floating in.
Dean’s face drifted into my tunneled vision. “You all right?” he said. “Let me get a look at you, princess.”
Cal helped Conrad to a place in the corner of the basket while Dean turned my head from side to side. “Don’t check out on me,” he murmured. “You’re fine. We’re all fine.”
“We might not be!” Cal shouted, pointing ahead of us. The balloon was trapped beneath Windhaven’s hull like a butterfly beneath a glass bulb. The brass finial at the top of the harness holding the balloon’s gas bag in place squealed along the underside of the floating city, trying desperately to gain altitude.
I followed the sight line of Cal’s finger along our route and felt panic rise in my chest, unfreezing my body from the shock of finding myself still alive.
The great propeller fan on the rear of Windhaven pulled us closer and closer as it sucked air into its blades, turning the city at a bank so steep that metal screeched and rivets popped and flew like bullets around us. One punctured the silk of the balloon, but we didn’t drop clear of the fan.
“We’re going to get chopped up!” Cal shouted. “We need to lose altitude!”
“And how exactly do you propose we do that?” Dean asked him.
“Steer us out of here, then!” Cal cried as the balloon bounced harder. Conrad twined his fingers in the mesh of the passenger cage. Bethina grabbed me around the shoulders and held me still so that I wouldn’t get thrown around in my fragile state.
Dean snatched the rudder, straining so hard the cords of muscle in his neck stood out like the cables of a suspension bridge.
“It’s too strong,” he panted. “I can’t turn it.” Conrad got up shakily and tried to help him, but even their combined efforts weren’t moving us quickly enough.
I crawled to the front of the passenger cage, curling my fingers in the mesh and using it to pull myself to my knees.
I focused my senses on the fan. It was the largest thing in my mind, a great mechanism of gears and blades, harnessing power from the wind and using it to hold up a device that was never supposed to fly.
My Weird wanted to touch the fan, wanted to connect with it, like reaching into a flame because it burns so brightly you have to feel it against your flesh even though you know it will sear your skin.
I pushed, with all my strength, pushed against the fan, willed it to reverse its direction and allow us to escape Draven.
My head throbbed, heat blossoming across my skin as if my blood were molten in my veins. Then the wind changed direction, blew so hard that it knocked me backward, and I lost my grip on my Weird, falling out of touch with my body and into the dark of unconsciousness.
I came to on a bed of moss that was the delicate blue color of a summer sky. I inhaled its dry, earthy scent and waited for my eyes to focus. There was a bit of dried blood crusted in the corner of my eye, and I swiped at it as I took in my surroundings. We were in a dead forest, gray spindly trees reaching twisted, bare branches into fog. Everything was gray and blue and white, as if we had fallen into a world with all other color leached out.
I rolled onto my other side and caught a more vivid slash of blue: the balloon, deflated. The cage was half sunk in the black muck of a swamp, and nobody was inside.
I sat up, alone for a moment in the drifting grayness, and called out. “Dean? Conrad?” My voice didn’t actually form words, just came out in a croak. What if something had happened? What if I was the only one left? My stomach clenched.
“Miss?” Bethina materialized from the fog, and I collapsed back onto the moss in relief. I wasn’t alone.
“Oh, stones! She’s awake!” Bethina called back into the nothingness. The others came running, and Dean crouched beside me.
“Easy,” he said. “You’ve been out for a while.”
Conrad crouched on my other side and pulled my chin so I was facing him. “Pupils are the same size,” he announced. “The bump on the head is superficial. We can move her.”
“I’ve got it under control,” Dean snapped. “Aoife isn’t going anywhere if she’s not in shape to walk.”
“Excuse me, but you’re not in charge here,” Conrad said. “Nor are you my sister’s keeper. I took care of her for fifteen years, I think I know when she’s fit to walk.”
“You call leaving her all by herself taking care of her?” Dean snorted. “Attacking her, putting a mark on her she can never wash off? Please. Aoife’s better off with me.”
“Listen, Erlkin,” Conrad snarled. “I know exactly what your idea of taking care of my sister entails, and that’s gonna stop right now. She’s a good girl and she doesn’t need your paws all over—”
“Stop it!” I shouted, and every one of my injuries throbbed, but I bit the inside of my cheek to stop myself from flinching. “You are both,” I enunciated carefully, so there would be no mistake, “behaving like complete idiots.”
I stretched out my hand to Cal. “Can you please help me up? We should get moving before Draven sends out men on the ground to track us.”
“Sure thing,” Cal said quickly, easing between Dean and Conrad and taking my hand. I left them crouched on the moss, glaring at each other. I wasn’t a shiny brass trophy, and I wasn’t in the mood to be batted back and forth in Dean and Conrad’s little contest to see who was the biggest, baddest boy in our group. Right now, Bethina would do a better job of leading us to safety, and she’d scream a lot less too.
There was no path through the fog, just spongy ground punctuated by vernal pools that seeped into my boots whenever I mistakenly splashed down in one. The dead forest was endless, as if a blight crept ahead of us through the fog, washing all life out of the world. This was even eerier than the ancient forest we’d come to when we crossed from Lovecraft. The creeping sensation up my spine told me we shouldn’t be here.
“What happened to this place?” I asked Dean, when he caught up with my limping steps.
“Fire,” he said. “Long time ago, before I was born. Maybe before my mother, too.”
“Big fire,” I said. The fog swirled back and forth, thinning to lace. The dead forest went on as far as the eye could see.
“The Fae set it,” Dean said. “They were looking for insurgents, some of my kind who’d set off an explosion in the silver mines in the Thorn Land. They burned the entire forest to the ground. Killed thousands.”
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. I understood then why Shard had looked at me with such coldness. It didn’t excuse her locking me up and refusing to believe a word I said, but it at least explained it.
Dean shrugged. “Not my world. I left as soon as I was able.”
“Shard and Skip,” I said, “they both call you Nails. Why do you have two names?” Cal had two names, but he was a ghoul—wholly other. Dean was more human by a mile than he was Erlkin, from what I could see, and I wanted to know
what his name in the Mists meant. I wanted to know everything about him, not that he’d tell me without a lot of effort on my part. But I was willing to try.
“Nails isn’t my name,” Dean said tightly. He fished in his pockets and pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes, crushed beyond recognition. “Dammit,” he muttered, shoving the twisted cardboard back into his jeans.
“Your mother seems to think it is,” I said. Dean shook his head.
“You have to understand, the Erlkin are a slave race. Way back in the primordial ooze they lived underground, and when the Fae dug down looking for silver, they enslaved the creatures they found. They wouldn’t give us real names, names with meaning and magic, so they called us after scraps—glass and silver, drill bits and rock crushers.”
“Nails,” I offered.
“Yup,” Dean said. “When the first generation of free Erlkin named their children, they gave them slave names as a way to tell the Fae they didn’t own us anymore. It’s tradition now.” His mouth twitched. “But I’m not Erlkin, and I don’t need to be reminded that I was ever anyone’s slave.”
“I noticed your mother doesn’t have any problem with your being a half-breed, unlike her problems with me,” I muttered.
“Oh, she has plenty of problems with it,” Dean said with a laugh drier than the dead trees all around us. “But she knows that I’m her fault, too. Stealing away and meeting a human—tsk, tsk and all that. I know it was a lot easier for her in her position at Windhaven after I lit out for Lovecraft and decided to live with my old man. She got that nice shiny captain’s promotion the minute I left.” Bitterness tinged his voice like unsweetened tea on the tongue.
“You really have a brother?” I asked. Dean had only mentioned him in passing, but I was realizing that in spite of spending nearly all my waking moments with him since we’d met, I still knew virtually nothing about his family or his life before me.
“Half-brother,” Dean said. “One hundred percent pure boring human. Older than me by a good few years—my pops had a wife before Shard bewitched his poor dumb self. The woman ditched him and Kurt—that’s my brother. Kurt was never too fond of me, even though his old lady was long gone. Didn’t blame him except when he and I were slugging it out. I wouldn’t be itching to bond with the bastard child of my father’s new girlfriend if I were him either.”
“And where’s Kurt now?” I prompted, racking my brain to remember what else Dean had told me about his past.
“Hell if I know,” Dean said. “He went MIA fighting the Crimson Guard, ’bout a year before you and I crossed paths.” He sighed, and I could tell from his twitchy gait and fingers that he wanted a cigarette. “Truth is, Aoife, I never really felt like I was part of the family. I was a wayward kid and I wasn’t at home much. But it beat the pants off staying in Windhaven and marching in lockstep like my good little Erlkin relatives.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “About Kurt.”
“It’s all right,” Dean said. “Like I told you, we were never close. Not like you and Conrad.”
“Conrad and I haven’t been that close for a while,” I said quietly. “And we’ve been apart since he ran away a year ago.”
“You’ll get it back,” Dean said. “He looks out for you, and even if he’s a cranky bastard, he cares about you. I can tell by the way he’s giving me the hairy eyeball right now.”
I glanced over my shoulder and saw that Conrad was indeed staring a hole into the back of Dean’s head as we walked. I sighed and dropped back to match my stride to my brother’s.
“Will you quit glaring? You’re embarrassing me.”
“I don’t like your friend, Aoife,” Conrad told me. “Not one bit. He’s too familiar with you.”
“He’s familiar because I want him to be familiar,” I snapped. “Stop acting like you’re our father, Conrad, because you’re not.”
He flinched, and I felt as if I might as well have smacked him across the face. “I know that,” he muttered. “But he’s not here, is he? Nobody knows where he is or if he’s even alive.”
I stayed quiet for few steps, our feet squashing into the bog the only sound besides the faint murmur of Cal and Bethina’s conversation. Conrad was right—we didn’t know. None of the Erlkin would admit to knowing where Archie had gone. And he’d made no attempt to contact us. Not that he could, even if he was in a position to. After the Engine exploded Conrad and I had effectively vanished from the Iron Land without a trace.
No matter how much I wished Archie would appear again and make it right, as he had when I’d been in Draven’s prison, he wasn’t going to, and it was time I accepted that. I bit down hard on my lip to hold back my tears. “We know where Nerissa is,” I said after a time, when I could speak without a break in my voice.
“No,” Conrad said instantly. “Don’t even think of that, Aoife. We can’t go back there.”
“Draven already found us,” I said. “He’ll find us no matter where we go, and I have to get Nerissa out of Lovecraft.” Or what was left of Lovecraft. I imagined a wasteland overrun with ghouls and pockets of vicious survivors barricaded in their homes while black-clad Proctor squads roamed the streets and their clockwork ravens swooped overhead, watching every living thing left in the desolation.
“Why?” Conrad demanded. “She was locked up in a madhouse when everything went sideways. Those places are fortresses. She’s probably safer there than on the run with us anyway. And honestly, Aoife—that woman never did one bit of good for us our entire lives. She’s crazy.”
“She’s not crazy,” I snarled, feeling my teeth draw back over my lips. My anger flared bright and I felt the insane urge to strike out at Conrad. I’d never wanted to actually hit him before, beyond a light smack when we were arguing over something minor. “She’s poisoned by iron, like we were. She’ll be fine if we can get her out of the city.”
“You don’t know that,” Conrad said. “She’s been exposed to iron for years longer than us, Aoife. And she’s full-blood Fae besides. Her mind could be punched full of holes, just like the doctors always said it was.” He stopped and folded his arms, brows drawing together. “Why do you care so much, Aoife? You were always more angry at her than I was for leaving us, making us wards of the city.”
“Because,” I said softly. “I left her there, Conrad. I did this, and when everything went wrong and the city got destroyed I had to leave her.” A sob bubbled out of my chest and I didn’t try to stop it. Crying was better than screaming or collapsing and refusing to go on. “I have to go back and try to fix her,” I whispered. “Fix her and try to fix what I did to Lovecraft. Mend it somehow, the Gates and the Engine and all of it.”
“People aren’t machines, Aoife,” Conrad said softly, and reached for my hand, squeezing all my fingers by wrapping his thumb and forefinger around them like he had when we were very small. “Some, nobody can fix.”
“I have to try,” I whispered. My dreams would never cease, and the weight of my guilt would never be lifted, until I was able to look at what I’d done to Lovecraft with my own eyes, until I had at least tried to get my mother out of the iron city that had turned her into someone my brother and I didn’t recognize.
Conrad sighed and then dropped my hand, shoving his through his unruly black hair, so much like mine.
“All right,” he said at last. “Say I was insane enough to go back to the Iron World—where I can’t even remember my own name once the poison takes hold—risk using the Gates now that they’ve been breached by the Proctors and stone knows what else, travel overland with ghouls on the loose, and go back into the very same city I barely escaped from a year ago—what then? How are we even going to find Nerissa if she’s not still in Christobel Asylum, never mind get her in shape to walk out of there on the kind of rough journey we’ve had? How would we evade the Proctors and Draven?”
I chewed on my lip for a moment. The sting wasn’t worse than the pain through the rest of my body, but Conrad’s questions were. “I don’t know,” I told him.
“But I will by the time we get to Lovecraft.”
I filled Dean in on the plan—if you could call it that—while we walked, and to his credit, he reacted better than Conrad had. “I can’t say what I’d do if Shard and I were in the same situation,” he said.
“You are,” I said. “Draven was boarding Windhaven. He’s not inclined to be kind.”
Dean sniffed. “My mother can take care of herself. And a city full of Erlkin is a far cry from some scared, sniveling humans hiding in a basement.”
“I hope so,” I said. “You know I feel terrible. I thought he’d never find me in the Mists.”
“Not your fault,” Dean said shortly. “Draven’s a pit bull. He’ll hold on till he’s dead or somebody else is.”
“He doesn’t want me dead,” I muttered. “He doesn’t want me at all. He just wants bait for my father.”
Dean stopped us at the crest of a hill, behind a half-collapsed stone wall. We had come out of the dead forest and were standing on the outskirts of a ruined village, small white stone cottages topped with rotting thatch, the only thing stirring in the breeze.
“Wait here,” Dean said. I looked down the slope toward where the cottages disappeared into the ever-flowing mist.
“Why? Where are we?”
“The Mist Gate,” Conrad said, nearly making me jump out of my skin. Cal joined us, and his nostrils flared.
“Humans are down there,” he muttered, out of Bethina’s hearing.
“Draven’s, likely,” Dean said. “He’ll have guards to make sure his bread crumbs don’t dry up and blow away.”
“How did he even come through?” Conrad said. “Humans can’t pass into the Mists, not even members of the Brotherhood. Not without help.” He shifted, obviously remembering the “help” the Erlkin slipstreamers had given him, crossing him over like so much contraband.
“He might have it,” I said
He jerked his thumb down the hill. “So what do we do about them?”
Cal’s tongue flicked out. “Leave that to me.”
“Cal, no,” I hissed, glancing behind me at Bethina. “What about her?”
The Nightmare Garden Page 8