“I’m real,” I said. It was the only response I could think of. Conrad tightened his grip on the pistol. Though he was skinnier and more hollow-eyed since the last time I’d seen him, his arm never wavered.
“Prove it.”
I swallowed hard against my throbbing heart. I’d never seen Conrad like this, except once, and it scared me. That time, he’d cut my throat and left me for dead. This time wasn’t looking much better. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Conrad.”
“I’ve seen you,” he whispered. “For weeks, I’ve had dreams because of that hole in the sky. Voices in my head. If you’re really my sister, then prove it.” His eyes narrowed. “You have five seconds.”
I raised my hands slowly, but there was no escape route now. All I could do was run, and then Conrad would shoot me in the back. I had no doubt he’d do it. We might be blood, but something had scared my brother, badly enough that the look in his eye was the same as it was the night iron poisoning had made him try to kill me.
We both had the conviction to follow through on our actions, and Conrad was scared. I was scared. What could I possibly say to calm him?
“Starlight,” I breathed. That night was in my mind anyway, why not use it?
The pistol dipped, just the smallest fraction. Conrad’s thin black eyebrows drew together. “What did you say?”
“ ‘Have you ever seen your blood under starlight, Aoife?’ ” I quoted at him. “ ‘When it’s quite black?’ ”
Conrad let out a shuddering breath, and then his arm dropped. He made a pained expression, as if the pistol suddenly weighed a thousand pounds. “It’s really you,” he muttered. “You don’t know how glad I am to know that.”
“Conrad,” I said, moving toward him again now that his eyes weren’t terrifying me. “What is happening here?”
“You know, you could have picked a happy memory,” he said. “One of those times I read you the horror comics Mom didn’t want you reading, or when we snuck into a showing of The Green Hornet three days in a row. You didn’t have to pick that.”
“I wasn’t exactly thinking about happy memories,” I said. “Not while my own brother is pointing a gun at me.” I tentatively walked toward him and wrapped my arms around his shoulders. Conrad was tall and thin like our father, solid under his too-small jacket, and I felt relief wash over me as I touched him and convinced myself he was real.
“It’s been a crazy couple of weeks,” he said. “Months. Time isn’t doing the same things it used to. I don’t know what the hell’s going on out there, Aoife.”
I had an idea, but I wasn’t about to throw myself on my sword and admit responsibility just yet. Tell Conrad I was responsible for all of the wrong that was happening? All the dreams? I couldn’t be sure, could I? No need to alarm everyone.
I wondered how long I’d be able to rationalize it that way.
“What are you doing here and not on Cape Cod? Where’s Dad?” I asked instead. Conrad’s face fell, and I knew that something was gravely wrong.
“He’s upstairs,” he said. “We had to come back here—the Cape, it’s not safe.… Look, you need to see him to understand. I’m glad you’re back, but you could’ve gotten here a lot sooner.”
I felt a pang of guilt. Of course I hadn’t had to linger in Thorn so long. I could have risked more to escape sooner. The desire I’d felt from the moment I’d left to come to the only place I’d ever considered home, even if living in it would slowly poison me, didn’t make up for my delay.
“How are you doing?” I asked Conrad as we mounted the grand staircase. “I mean with the iron poisoning?”
“It comes and goes,” he said. “I think not having a Weird helps. I’m doing all right, Aoife, you don’t have to worry about me.” He cast a sideways glance at me. “Do I need to worry about you?”
I could feel the pull already, the scream of the iron against my Fae blood like metal on metal, sparking and turning to slag inside me. “Nothing to worry about,” I lied.
Conrad’s raised eyebrow told me he wasn’t buying it. “Uh-huh,” he said. We went all the way to the back of the house, to the master suite, where I’d never been. That was my father’s room. Even when he’d been gone, I’d felt it would be an unforgivable incursion to go inside.
“I really am fine,” I insisted. “I’m more worried about what’s going on down there in Arkham. What’s happened, Conrad? Where’s Dad, and Valentina? Why did you leave Cape Cod?”
Conrad paused at the master suite’s double doors, which were carved high above our heads with phases of the sun and moon in great orbits.
“Speaking of questions, where did you go, Aoife?” he said. “What happened to you? I tried my damndest to get it out of Cal, but his mouth was locked up tighter than a bank vault.”
I felt as if hours passed while we stared at each other; he was waiting for an answer. “I was in the Thorn Land,” I said at last, bracing for Conrad’s inevitable explosion. “With our mother.”
“What?” Conrad’s already haggard face took on a new crop of shadows, making him appear hard and unyielding as granite. I felt the nervous fear rise again. I knew from his expression this couldn’t go anywhere good.
“I had to,” I said.
“I don’t understand why you’d ever give that woman the time of day, never mind run away with her,” Conrad said.
“It was that or lose Dean forever,” I said softly. “I’m sorry, Conrad. Do you at least believe that?”
He heaved a sigh, pushing his hands through his dark hair until it stood straight up. “Yeah,” he said. “I believe you’re sorry. But that doesn’t mean this is all okay with me, Aoife. You know how I feel about the full-blooded Fae.”
“Will you please stop acting like I’m a traitor and tell me what the hell is going on in Arkham?” I demanded. Conrad usually just needed somebody to bite back, to knock some sense into him, and then he’d return to being my slightly pompous but generally tolerable older brother.
Conrad heaved a sigh, and before he could say anything else, the door swung open. The tall, blond figure waved his arms in irritation. “What’s all this noise? I told you that Mr. Grayson needs it quiet.…” Cal trailed off as he took me in, his pale, watery eyes going wide. “Aoife!” he exclaimed, and enfolded me into a hug that was all bony edges and Cal’s distinct, musty scent.
“Hey there, Cal,” I mumbled into his sweater. He squeezed me tighter, and his strength reminded me that I wasn’t dealing with a human boy. Cal was a shape-shifter, and had the prodigious physical abilities to go with it. I’d learned to live with the fact that his kind usually ate human flesh and lived below ground in nests. Cal was Cal, and whatever he was, he was my best friend in the world.
“I was so worried,” he said, holding me at arm’s length. He’d cut his hair, and his clothes fit for the first time in my memory. I was half sure the gray wool sweater and flannel slacks he was sporting had been my father’s at one point in my dad’s misspent youth.
“I’m all right,” I assured him, and cast a look at Conrad. He could hear it twice, and maybe believed me this time.
“Come in, come in,” Cal told me, and before Conrad could protest, dragged me into the master suite. “It’s good you’re here,” he said softly. “I hope it’ll make a difference.”
The first thing I noticed was that all the curtains were drawn. Heavy things, velvet and oppressive, full of dust that tickled my nostrils and trickled down the back of my throat. Blackout curtains, left over from the last war, or maybe the one before that.
The second was that my father was lying in bed, in his pajamas, sheets pulled up to his chest. At his side sat my friend Bethina, her copper curls in disarray, wearing a plain green dress rather than the maid’s uniform she’d worn when we first met. She held my father’s hand lightly, stroking the back of it with her fingertips. I felt a slow-encroaching sense of dread, like a rising tide.
“What’s going on here?”
Bethina looked up at me an
d blinked rapidly. “Oh, Miss Aoife. Thank goodness you’re back.”
“He’s been like this for a few days now,” Cal said quietly. “He’s fine as far as we can tell. He’s just … asleep.”
“Don’t know why, or how,” Conrad said, shutting the door and standing in front of it like an ill-tempered guard. “We’ve tried everything to wake him up, but he won’t react to anything. Until the nightmares come.”
Bethina nodded, her eyes wide. “Then he gets to screaming something awful. Noises like I never heard a man make.”
I turned on Conrad. “How could this happen?” My brother was the one acting like the leader of men. He could at least tell me how such a thing could be possible. My father wasn’t the sort to be caught by surprise, either by magic or by malady. He was strong—the strongest person I knew.
“I don’t know any more than you do,” Conrad snapped. “One minute he was fine, the next Arkham was going crazy, and the next he was like this.”
Bethina moved aside to make room for me, and I took my father’s hand. It was dry and cool, the hand of a patient rather than that of the strong man I knew my father to be. I felt the urge to cry, or scream, bubbling in my throat. I couldn’t be sure which it was.
“I think you better start from the beginning,” I said to Conrad. “Tell me exactly what’s happened since I’ve been gone.”
He sat next to me on the edge of the bed, but my father didn’t stir even as the mattress shifted under my brother’s weight. Conrad smoothed the blankets, adjusted the pillows and spoke without looking at anyone.
“It happened right after you left,” he said. “People started falling asleep and not waking up. Or they’d dream so vividly they’d think it was actually happening and they’d do things like walk into traffic or attack their loved ones.”
“The Proctors tried to control it and set up more quarantines,” Cal added, “but they’ve lost a lot of power. There’s all sorts of investigations by the government into their conduct, and without Draven, individual offices have pretty much gone off and done what they liked.”
“Riots in some places,” said Bethina, “and others are on total lockdown. Arkham pretty much got cleaned out, folks taken off to quarantine, after a bad rash of dreamers swept through and tried to light the place on fire.”
“Same thing happened on Cape Cod,” Conrad said. “Proctors were everywhere. Valentina decided to split up from us and try to find help, sympathetic folks in the Brotherhood of Iron, and she made me responsible for getting Dad back here, where he’d be safe.”
I squeezed my father’s hand. This was worse than I ever could have imagined. I’d been warned there were consequences to what I’d done to try to reverse the Fae’s deception and save my mother, but I’d never imagined that they would be so direct, so tangible. That they would hurt my father.
“How long has he been like this? And having the dreams?” I said.
“Nightmares, more like,” Conrad confirmed. “He thrashes and screams—it got so bad last night we had to hold him down. It started right after you left. Valentina found him on the floor of his study, asleep. Nothing on this earth could rouse him, and she tried everything, believe me.”
“It’s an epidemic,” Bethina said quietly. “All over the country. People goin’ to sleep and not wakin’ up for love or money.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered to my father. I didn’t know if my being there could have prevented this, but the plain truth was I hadn’t been. Hadn’t been thinking of anyone except myself and the thin hope that I could get Dean back and put things right via some vague notion fed to me by my mother. She was insane, and by believing her, I was probably just as crazy and desperate in my own way.
My father would be ashamed of me. In that moment, I was ashamed of me.
“Can we talk outside?” I said to Conrad, and he looked as if he’d rather do anything but. “Please?” I insisted. Conrad nodded, and I’d never been so relieved to leave a room as when we stepped from the oppressive shadows back into the weak sunlight of the mist-laden day.
We walked in silence the entire length of the lawn and sat on a stone bench by the reflecting pond, the bench covered with moss and pockmarks from decades, if not centuries, of weather. It mirrored the pond, choked with algae and lily pads, speckled with the crimson shards of fallen leaves floating on the surface.
“What was it like?” Conrad said abruptly. He didn’t look at me, just at the water, which rippled as something—a turtle or one of the ancient koi that lurked below the pads—surfaced to snatch at a late-season insect.
“Thorn?” I said. “Boring, mostly. Fae are very stuffy, and very odd. I spent a lot of time with Mother.”
“No,” Conrad said quietly. “Being with her—our mother.”
I thought about that. I’d seen flashes of the old Nerissa, the one who told us stories, took us on walks to search for flowers between cracks in Lovecraft’s sidewalks, let us watch clouds in the park for hours on end rather than going home and tending to things like chores and homework, but mostly I’d seen the new Nerissa, no longer mad, but wholly Fae.
“It was disappointing,” I said, and left it at that. I didn’t tell Conrad about the parts that had been all right, the evenings when we’d sit quietly, just spending time together. Conrad felt abandoned and lost, and I didn’t blame him.
“Then why did you go with her?”
I dug my fingers into the bench, nails carving crescents into the moss and lichen. “I had to, Conrad. She promised me a way to find Dean.”
Conrad turned and stared at me. It was a stare of pure pity, as if he hadn’t realized I was ill and I’d just told him I was terminal.
“Aoife,” he said carefully. “Dean is dead.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I snapped. “I just want to be home and not talk about Thorn anymore.” I prayed that Conrad would drop the Dean business, and thankfully he did. Trying to explain I was still looking for a way to the Deadlands would just get him thinking my iron poisoning was back, that I was mad.
“It’s been weird since you left,” he said. “All around. Things are happening—it’s almost like an epidemic. Dreams. Madness. The president might have to sit for an impeachment hearing, and the Rationalists are having a fit. It’s like when things were wild all over again.”
Something clicked into place, what the old woman had shouted at me earlier. “Somebody called me a demon this morning,” I said. “A demon from hell. Nobody talks like that. I mean, if they want to stay out of Rationalist jail.”
“Ever since people started falling asleep and the Proctors got stripped of their authority, a lot of that’s been happening,” Conrad said. “I’ve heard rumors that all sorts of creatures are cropping up. People who don’t know the truth blame the necrovirus, but it sounds to me like the barriers between Thorn and Iron and … other places are easier to get past.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. It could all just be mass hysteria. People thinking the world is ending.”
“It’s not ending,” I said quietly. “But this isn’t nothing.” I looked Conrad in the eye. He had our mother’s eyes, pale blue and cloudless, like a new sky after rain. I looked more like my father, both in coloring and features.
Conrad frowned. “Aoife, what are you not telling me?”
I looked up at the sky, at the mist that roiled above our heads like a sea, ancient and birthing primordial creatures onto a phantom shore.
What I’d seen in the Arctic, in the space where dreams were born, had been real. That much was clear to me now.
I told Conrad the truth then, there in the garden. About how I’d tried to reverse what I’d done because of Tremaine, step back through the loopholes of time and undo the damage I’d done to the Lovecraft Engine and the city. How it hadn’t worked, and how I’d snapped something fundamental in the gears of the worlds, Thorn and Iron and everything in between.
“I thought they weren’t so bad,” I said. “The Old Ones. I thought letting them go was just retur
ning the universe to its natural state. They’re not evil, Conrad. They’re just … alive. A different sort of alive than us, but not malicious.”
“But, if I believe you, they’ve done this.” Conrad’s face was pale and drawn, and he made a sweeping gesture. “It’s them, all of this. All the dreamers and the strangeness. They’re returning to the Iron Land, right? And their influence is driving the entire world insane. How is that not so bad, exactly?” His brow had that crease in it, the one that meant he blamed me, and I couldn’t argue with him.
“I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known,” I mumbled, but even to my ears, it wasn’t convincing.
“I can’t …” Conrad rubbed his hands across his face, and I waited. I’d hoped he’d forgive me, or at least understand. I’d had to do something. What had happened when Tremaine tricked me had to be undone. “I can’t,” Conrad repeated. “I’m sorry, Aoife. I’m done.”
“What do you mean?” I rose as he did, panicked, watching him back away from me. “Conrad, don’t.…”
“You did this,” he said. “It’s because of you that our father is like this. You tried to make it better, and I get that, but you’ve made it worse.”
“Conrad—” I started, but he raised his hand.
“Don’t talk to me, Aoife,” he said. “Don’t try to make this right. I can’t count you as part of my family. We can’t ever repair this.” He started back toward the house. “What’s done is done. I expect you to be out of Graystone by the morning.”
I could have screamed at him, or run after him and demanded that he hear my side of things, but I just stood there and watched him go. Conrad was even more stubborn than I was.
And he was right. I’d thought that the Old Ones weren’t the evil that the Rationalists preached or the saviors that the Star Sisters, their worshipper sect, insisted they’d be when they returned. When I’d been in the dreaming place, the center of all the worlds, I’d seen them and felt their touch in my mind. It still burned there, as if the mere contact had scarred the channels of my conscience with acid. But I hadn’t felt malice, simply ancient intelligence. Yet to human beings, with their fragile makeup, who was to say the two weren’t one and the same? The Old Ones’ return could simply be too much for the fragile barriers between worlds, and it could signal a fracture that would make them all collapse, one after the other, like dominoes.
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