Cal and Bethina were still downstairs—I could hear them laughing. They could enjoy Valentina’s house with none of the resentment the place triggered in me. Dean’s whereabouts were a mystery, and if I knew Conrad he was probably hanging off my father and Valentina, determined to play the part of the good son.
If my mother had been safe, I would have tried to give Valentina a chance to be my stepmother and my father a chance to be happy. I would have forced myself to at least be polite to her, even if we’d never be the best of friends.
But the world was turning to ashes, and Archie didn’t seem nearly as concerned with that fact as he did with his pretty blond doll.
I’d feel better if I were clean. That was the only thing I was sure of. I rooted around in the wardrobe and found a robe made of silk so old it crumbled in places under my hands. It was the only thing remotely resembling nightclothes that fit, though, so I pulled it around me and let the musty, sharp scent envelop my skin.
The bottom of the wardrobe held a stack of old composition books, so old the pages breathed dust when I smoothed one open. Searching the drawers, I found a pencil with a little lead left. My bag and my original journal were gone, but I needed to write. Maybe if I got all these racing, swelling, screaming thoughts out of my head, I’d be able to make a new plan.
I dated the corner of the page and began.
Fourth entry:
I failed. I had a plan, I executed it, and I still failed.
My mother is not in Lovecraft and the city is gone. Lovecraft is an abattoir filled with ghouls. My father has a girlfriend who could be my sister and he doesn’t think I should have any problems with that fact. He just says I have to “trust” him, that he has the answers that will let us fix the Gates and find Nerissa. I want to trust him. I want a father, a family. I want people I can trust. But everything that’s happened since I destroyed the Engine makes it close to impossible.
The world is burning, and all I can do is watch and feel the flames on my face. I don’t have a plan to put the fires out. I don’t even know where to look for water.
I didn’t only fail my mother. I failed as a Gateminder.
There has to be a way to stop Draven and put things back like they were. To stop ghouls from roaming free, to stop the Gates from being thrown open to allow whatever can find them to make their way from world to world and cause more destruction. To restore the order the Brotherhood of Iron worked so hard to protect.
I think of the way my life was. I was so afraid of the Proctors, of going crazy, but also of getting bad grades and whether my hairstyle would get me teased. Such small worries now. Of course, that was a life built on lies, but innocent people weren’t in harm’s way.
A life of lies or a life of nothing except this vast feeling of loss inside me.
Is there another way?
I threw down the pencil and slapped the book shut. How was scribbling maudlin little thoughts supposed to save the world? Was the whole Brotherhood of Iron indolent and/or insane? Where were they? Why wasn’t Archie contacting them, trying to find a solution to all this?
What was he waiting for?
In the middle of my worrying, a knock sounded at my door, and I jumped, tearing my robe at the shoulder. I shoved the notebook under the threadbare pillows on my bed and got up to answer it.
Valentina stood on the other side, a dress draped over her arm.
I let my distaste show in my posture, something I’d learned from Dean. “Can I help you, Valentina?”
In her other hand she held a quilted ditty bag, which she held out to me. “Peace offering?”
I looked at the thing askance. Valentina didn’t have to try to befriend me—she already had my father, and Conrad was clearly smitten with her presence. What could she possibly gain from kissing up to me?
“What is it?” I didn’t take the bag.
“Let me in and I’ll show you,” Valentina told me, attempting a smile. It looked about as real as the creamy, note-perfect platinum tones in her smooth, glowing hair, which was to say, not at all. In my old life, friendly faces bearing gifts were usually just looking to trick or mock me, or make me look stupid for the other students’ amusement. I’d learned a long time ago not to trust them, so why should Valentina be any different?
A tiny, doubtful part of me whispered that I was being awfully hard on Valentina, but I told it to be quiet. “I’m very tired,” I said aloud. “I think I’m going to bed.” I started to shut the door, but Valentina stopped it with her foot. She and I exchanged polite stares for a moment, before she sighed and dropped her gaze. I was surprised—she was in charge here, the lady of the house, and she could just as easily have demanded Archie make me behave as tried to reason with me.
“Look, Aoife,” she said, and her voice was no longer the pleasant trilling of a well-trained bird. All at once, she just looked tired. “I know you don’t like me. It could hardly be more obvious, really. But I love your dad, and because of that, I want the two of us to get along. Can you give me five minutes to make my case?”
I felt a tightening in my chest. Five minutes with Valentina would feel like betraying Nerissa the entire time.
“I’m not asking you to take a side,” Valentina said quietly. “I just want you to know I’m not as awful as you seem determined to make me out to be.”
I had some doubts about that, but she looked so defeated I felt the resolve to hate her washing away like the dunes outside under heavy seas. She really wasn’t much older than me—if I’d been in her shoes, I’d have been at my wits’ end trying to deal with somebody so openly hostile.
“Fine,” I said, and pulled the door all the way open. “You can come in, I guess.”
“Well, thank the stars for that,” Valentina said. “You’re even more stubborn than your father, you know that?”
“No,” I told her, sitting on the bed again and pulling my knees to my chest. “I barely know him, never mind whether he’s stubborn or not.” It made me happy to know she saw some similarity between my father and me. I felt a bit less like we’d simply been thrown together as father and daughter by fate. Maybe something other than the Weird tied us together after all.
“He is,” Valentina assured me. “Stubborn as an old goat.” She pulled a hanger from the wardrobe and put the dress she’d brought in on it, placing it on a hook inside the door and smoothing it with her neat, manicured hands. “It didn’t look like you had any clean clothes,” she explained. “You and I should be around the same size, though I’m a bit larger in the bust.” She drew a packet of hairpins from the ditty bag and put them on the edge of the dressing table. “You’ll get there. I can already tell you’re going to be a true beauty.”
I chewed on my lip, not able to think of anything to say, so I just settled for blushing furiously and staring at my feet.
“You don’t hear that much, huh?” Valentina said, raising an eyebrow. “Well, take it from me—when you grow into your face, you’re going to stop traffic.”
“You’re the only one who thinks so, I’m sure,” I mumbled. “Not even my mother ever said I was pretty.”
“Neither did mine, unless I was doing as she commanded,” Valentina said, with a crackly, dry-paper laugh. “My family places a great deal of value on beauty,” she continued, then shook her head. “That’s not exactly right. They put a lot of value on appearances. For instance, my father detests Archie, really. Can’t stand him. But they’re part of the same cause, working for the Brotherhood to protect the Iron Land from the Fae and anything else out there, so he pretends they’re great friends to keep the other members thinking he’s a genial old man, when really, it couldn’t be further from the truth.” She sighed. “What you must think of this place—a kid who grew up like you did. You must find me unbearably bourgeois.”
Valentina was making it harder and harder to completely dislike her, and that just made me feel even crankier and more exhausted than I already did. I wanted things to be simple—she was the evil stepmother, I
was the neglected daughter. Her being nice and friendly and normal made things much less cut and dried. “My father’s family isn’t poor,” I said. “But I don’t think my father is like yours.”
“The Graysons have family money,” Valentina said. “But your father and your uncle Ian didn’t do much besides working with the Brotherhood, so Grayson money’s not the fat stack of cash it once was. Another mark against him, from the Crosleys’ perspective. They’ve got that Rationalist work ethic, even if they don’t believe in any of the teachings.”
“It’s really strange,” I blurted, unable to think of a polite way to say it, “hearing about my family from you.”
Valentina drew a hairbrush from the bag as well. “Come over here,” she said, patting the seat of the dressing table.
I drew my brows together, suspicious of her again. “What for?”
“Just come,” Valentina said. “And trust me a little. I may not be an ace engineer like you, but I know what I’m doing here.”
I sat, but slowly.
Valentina sighed. “I’m not going to bite you, Aoife.”
“Maybe I’m just not ready to be best friends yet.” I kept one eye on her in the mirror as she opened the bag and pulled out a Bakelite case.
“Just as paranoid as your dear old dad too,” Valentina said. “For two people who never talked but once before today, you have a lot in common.”
I dropped my eyes at that, unaccountably pleased that someone had confirmed what I’d been thinking—Archie and I were alike, if only in that we were both stubborn and cranky. But it made me feel warm inside, warmer than the cool air of the house could make me.
Valentina opened the case top, revealing twin rows of ceramic rollers, with a connector in the back to allow a small steam hob to heat them. “Your hair is a travesty,” Valentina said. “I’m going to fix it, and we’re going to talk.”
“Do I have a choice?” I asked. I wasn’t entirely opposed to the idea of a makeover, but talking seemed like it might be strained. What could someone like Valentina possibly want to talk about with me? I wasn’t rich and I wasn’t cultured. I didn’t even know the right fork to use at a fancy dinner party.
“No,” Valentina said as she picked up the hairbrush and a small tin tub of pomade and tilted my head down so I was looking at my lap. She yanked the brush through a section of my hair, and I hissed at the sting.
“Where did you meet Archie? You seem a little young for him.” If she was going to push and pull at me, I decided I could at least control the talking part.
“We met when he came to consult with my father on a matter of importance regarding the Brotherhood,” Valentina told me. “I was seventeen then—and yes, that’s very young. Archie was a gentleman, and he waited for three years, until I could return his affections freely.”
“You didn’t like boys your own age?” I asked, looking up at her from under my eyelashes. She didn’t blink, just laughed lightly, as if nothing I said could bother her.
“Your brother told me downstairs you had a smart mouth.” She’d separated my hair into a dozen or so sections, each a sharp tug and sting on my scalp. She tested the rollers with her finger. “Nearly heated. And no, Aoife. Boys my age bored me, although there was no shortage. I was pretty, and my father was rich. That’s how it goes. But they were fools, and I’d never met a man I could love until I met Archie.”
I swallowed, and then decided this might be my one chance to get an honest answer, even if it wasn’t the one I wanted. “Are you and my father going to get married?”
“Marriage is an antiquated construct,” Valentina said. I tucked that away—no straight answers on that score from her. That made me like her a little bit more. Under her manners and clothes, she was just as out of place as Conrad and me.
“What about you and Dean?” she asked, changing the subject.
My face flushed, and the heat of the rollers didn’t have much to do with it. What about me and Dean? He makes my heart beat faster. He makes me feel alive. Neither was a sentiment I was comfortable sharing with my brand-new pseudo-stepmother. I stayed quiet while Valentina carefully rolled and pinned one, then another and then a third section of my hair. It stung, like hot water droplets on my scalp. I bit down hard on my lip to hold in a yelp.
“Do you like him?” she tried again. “You two seem very fond of each other, from what I saw.”
“You know, it’s not very polite to ask me questions and not answer mine,” I told her, almost smiling. It was nice to know that Dean’s feelings for me showed.
Three more rollers and three more hot spots. Valentina’s hands were much stronger than their delicate bones implied. My head in the mirror was rapidly becoming a beehive of black and silver.
“When you’re a little older, Aoife, you’ll understand that answers aren’t always black-and-white or easy,” she said, as if she were confiding in me. “I feel like I live two lives a lot of the time. Good, demure Crosley girl, who’ll marry someone appropriate, who plays piano and knows how to fix hair in the new fashions and wears all the right clothes.”
She had used up the rollers, and she handed me a rubbery pink cap emblazoned with cabbage roses. “Put this on. In the morning you’ll have a good proper set, and we can style it.”
I pulled the cap over my head, hiding the mountain of hair sausages that my usually unruly mane had turned into. My scalp felt a bit itchy and claustrophobic under it, but I kept still and pretended my head wasn’t stinging, for Valentina’s sake. She was trying, that much was obvious. “What’s the other life?” I asked. Valentina was gathering up her things but paused for a moment and turned to answer me.
“A member of the Brotherhood,” she said. “Even if I don’t have an ability like you and your father do, I can do my part. Now more than ever, with what’s happened.”
She must have seen her words hit home, though I tried not to flinch.
“Oh, I don’t blame you,” Valentina said. “You were manipulated. It happens more than you’d think, among those who know the truth about the Gates and the Thorn Land. The Fae are very persuasive.”
“I didn’t do it for them,” I whispered, my face hot with the kind of shame unique to being misunderstood. “I did it for—”
“For your mother, I know. Try not to drown yourself in your guilt, Aoife,” Valentina said. “We’ve all done things we wish we could take back.” She looked at her shoes for a moment, then back at me, as if she’d decided to confess. “I used to have terrible nightmares about the things I saw after I joined the Brotherhood. Some choices I had to make for the greater good.”
“And now?” I whispered. I had to admit Dean was right—I had misjudged Valentina. The pain written across her face mirrored my own in that moment.
“Now I don’t dream at all,” she said, and smiled. It was genuine, but sad. “It does get better, Aoife. Try and get some sleep. Things will seem brighter tomorrow.” She started to shut the door and then leaned back in. “And try not to squash your rollers in your sleep. You’ll look so grown-up tomorrow.”
I didn’t want to burst her bubble on that score, but I knew my unruly hair. I just nodded. “Good night. And … thank you.”
Valentina gave me another one of her sad smiles before she backed out and closed my door, the latch catching with a click. So different from the clanging doors of Graystone and the heavy, creaking hinges of the Academy. A normal house sound, for a house full of normal people. What a joke.
I sat for a long time, listening to the house tick and settle. There was a draft coming through the windows, and I burrowed under the covers of the tiny bed. It was like being back at the Academy, in my drafty dormitory under my threadbare school-issued coverlet. Not exactly comforting, but familiar.
What was I supposed to do now? Sit and wait for my father and Valentina to solve things? If I was going to be the daughter Archie had asked me to be, the trusting one, the answer was probably yes.
If I was being honest with myself, that sounded like t
rading in one set of rules designed to keep me passive and sweet for another designed to keep me obedient and not asking questions.
But before I could debate any more, my mind decided that I’d been awake for enough days in a row, and I fell asleep hearing the wind worm its way through the cracks and hollows of the house.
* * *
In the morning, I realized that I’d slept dreamless and dead to the world for the first time in weeks. My neck was cramped from lying on the rollers. I unpinned them and pulled them off my head, combing the curls with my fingers. I wrapped my head with a rag while I took a bath and then wiped the mirror free of moisture to see what I looked like.
Valentina had been right. I hardly recognized myself. My dark hair set off my skin—which until this moment I’d always lamented as too pale—as it fell in gentle waves to just below my shoulders, swooping low across my brow to partially shadow my gaze.
I’d almost call myself pretty. Almost.
I tried not to let my shock at how I looked distract me while I got dressed. I was still here, in Valentina’s house, and still had no idea what my father wanted from me beyond shutting up and doing as I was told.
The dress Valentina had left for me was plain blue wool, with a straight skirt and mother-of-pearl buttons up the bodice. It was a lady’s dress, not a full-skirted thing with a wide, round collar made for a child. This dress required stockings, a garter belt and pumps, not a petticoat and stiff, flat shoes.
I put it on gratefully. Now that I’d distanced myself from them, the clothes I’d gotten in Windhaven really did stink.
I found underthings in the wardrobe, rolling on stockings that smelled of mothballs, and when I ventured outside my door, a pair of tan leather pumps with low, practical heels sat next to my doorway in the hall. Valentina and I had the same size feet, it turned out, and the pumps gave me height that I loved, even if I did wobble crazily until I learned how to balance on the narrow heel.
The Nightmare Garden Page 16