Caitlin Kittredge - The Nightmare Garden

“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?”

“Keep her busy,” Cal said, shrugging. “We need to get out of here, and this is the quickest way.”

“Cal,” I snapped. “Don’t be ridiculous.” I turned and pointed at Conrad. “You and I.” We were the only ones besides Cal who had the ability to defend ourselves, even if my Weird was unreliable and my fighting skills nonexistent. At least I didn’t have to turn into a long-clawed, fanged monster to tap into my particular talent. I didn’t relish confronting the Proctors again, but I had to think of the group, not just myself.

“Me?” Conrad squawked, but I grabbed his arm and tugged him along, keeping to the shadows of the ruined cottages.

We crept down the hill, and before long I could hear low conversation in human voices.

“You better at least have a plan,” Conrad hissed. “These guys will have guns.”

I stopped in the archway of what had once been a barn. Peering around the corner, I could just make out two shapes standing in the fog.

I’d seen the hexenrings the Fae used to travel between the Iron World and their own, circles of simple stones or mushrooms wreathed with enchantments that could bend space and time, but the Erlkin’s Gates were a mystery to me. I’d watched Conrad use them only once, when he’d helped us escape from the ruins of the Iron World. Not even him, really—the slipstreamers had opened the way.

After I’d broken the Gates … and presumably allowed Draven to manipulate them somehow, without Erlkin aid.

That bothered me. If the Mists were open, what was to stop a free-for-all, beings crossing every Gate between every land? The fact that we’d seen only Draven so far in the Mists made me think there was something larger going on, possibly worse, but I hoped with everything I had that what I’d done to the Gates to Thorn hadn’t rippled to the rest of the lands.

That would be worse than one destroyed city. That would be worse than anything.

Now is not the time, Aoife . I steadied my breathing, and with it, my racing thoughts.

Two Proctors stood beyond the last of the ruins, in front of a tumbledown iron structure that was hard to make out distinctly through the mist.

I crouched down and hefted one of the stones that had fallen from the cottage wall.

“Whistle,” I told Conrad. He raised an eyebrow.

“Whistle? Are you cracked?”

“Will you just trust me for once?” I hissed. I might not have had a grand and daring plan for sneaking into Lovecraft, but I could at least handle a couple of Proctors. All students in Lovecraft learned how to get around guidelines and curfew, and uniformed Proctors weren’t usually the best and brightest of the crop anyway.

Conrad’s face was marked deeply with skepticism, but he put his fingers in his mouth and let out a piercing whistle.

Instantly the Proctors snapped alert, and the closer one started toward us. “Hey!” his partner shouted. “Draven said we were supposed to stand on this spot!”

“That could be him now,” the other insisted.