Caitlin Kittredge - The Nightmare Garden

“No,” the first said. “He told us to stay put.”

“You really want to be the one who kept him waiting?” said the first Proctor. “You’ve seen how he gets. Especially since he got to be a bigwig in the Bureau.”

The other sighed, but then jerked his head in assent. “Make it fast, will ya? This place is the worst. Creepy as all hell.”

“Hello?” the first Proctor shouted. “Any virals lurking, show yourselves!”

I blinked, momentarily surprised that the Proctors still believed in the necrovirus. But how could they not? I wondered what excuse Draven had come up with to bring them all here, to a place that wasn’t supposed to exist and could get you burned for heresy for suggesting that it did.

The Proctor passed the stone wall, so close I could have reached out and plucked at the sleeve of his black uniform. Once he’d passed out of sight of his friend, I stepped out from cover behind him and swung the rock swiftly and surely, connecting with the back of his skull.

Conrad gaped at me, then at the sprawled Proctor on the ground, who lay unmoving. “Well?” I said to Conrad, hefting the rock. “Whistle again.”

“Stone and sun, Aoife,” Conrad muttered. “You’re not the sister I left behind, that’s for sure.”

“You’re not the brother who left, Conrad,” I retorted. That brother wouldn’t have looked at me like I was crazy for doing what was necessary, and it made me sad. But that was for another time, when we weren’t surrounded by Proctors and who knew what other dangers. “It’s a natural progression, as far as I’m concerned.”

Conrad rolled his eyes at me as if I were unbearably childish, but he stuck his fingers back in his mouth. The second Proctor fell in much the same way as the first.

Once Cal and Dean had helped Conrad tie the Proctors up, using their own belts and some rope in Cal’s backpack, we approached the Gate.

“All right,” Dean rubbed his hands together. “Conrad, get this bad boy up and running, and get us far away from Draven and his jackbooted blackbirds.”

“Me?” Conrad pointed at Dean. “You’re the Erlkin, you get us out of here.”

“Brother, I know less than nothing about those contraptions,” Dean said. “I’ve lived most of my life in the Iron Land, just like you. ’Sides, you need a technician or a slipstreamer to work the Gates, if you don’t want just anything getting in.”

“Yeah, you’re the one who’s been going back and forth like he knows a magic trick, according to Bethina and Aoife,” Cal piped up. “How’d you do it, Conrad?”

“I didn’t, all right!” Conrad answered, clearly irritated. “I paid Erlkin to take me back and forth. Just like that square deal Skip said.” He kicked a clump of muddy earth with his shoe. “I don’t know how to work the Gates. Is that what you want me to say? It’s the one thing I’m supposed to do as a Gateminder, besides have a Weird, and I can’t. I tried, I can’t, and I never could. And now that the Gates are so screwed up even people like us can’t always use them, I’ll never get the chance to try again. You happy now?”

“Damn, man,” Dean said after a moment. “You don’t have to put your dukes up. We were just asking a question.”

“Yeah,” Cal said. “I didn’t know. And it doesn’t matter,” he added quickly. “You just haven’t gotten the hang of it yet.”

I hadn’t known either, and I looked at Conrad with a new light shining on him, surprised that he’d admitted to all of us he wasn’t perfect. I’d assumed Conrad had found his Weird, and more importantly, learned how to manipulate the Gates, long before he’d sent me the letter that started me looking for him. I had no way of knowing he’d found someone to smuggle him. That he’d never touched his Weird.

That it was all up to me.

While Conrad sighed and paced away from the group, I turned in the opposite direction and went to examine the Gate. Conrad needed his space when he got in moods like this. He always had. Bethina looked for a moment like she was going to try to speak to him, but Cal laid a hand on her arm and shook his head.

Gates were, from what little I’d gleaned from the Fae, tears in the fabric between the Lands. Call it physics, or magic, or heresy, barriers kept humans, Fae, Erlkin and the older, darker things apart. Erected after the great Storm, when magic ran unbidden through the Iron Land and nearly caused a catastrophe on a global scale, the Gates had been a human idea first, but the Fae had taken them, twisted them. The Erlkin’s physical markers for their Gates were a far cry from the stone circles of the Fae and the simple thin spaces in the fabric of the Iron Land that a Gateminder felt as a tingle down the spine. This Gate was an iron structure, a plinth that tapered to a point at the top. A network of iron lattice filled the center, and in it a small tube of aether glittered, held at either end by spindly iron arms. That much aether could flatten the land for half a mile if it made contact with the air. I drew back my hand from the iron. I had better not screw this up.

“What do you think?” Dean asked at my shoulder. I jumped and let out a small noise.

“Sorry,” he said. “But can you get us out of here?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, tentatively placing my hand against the iron marker of the Gate. My Weird responded immediately, opening a vast void in my head, through which I could feel the mechanism of the Erlkin’s Gate—a machine, here, rather than a spell like the Fae’s stone circle—churning and wide open. “Holy …” I jerked my hand away. The skin was hot and pink, and I felt the telltale dribble of blood down my upper lip. “Darn it,” I said, swiping at it.

Dean handed me his bandanna. “So,” he said carefully, “not good?”

“It’s a machine,” I said. “So that’s … better, I guess, than Fae magic. But it’s open.”

One of Dean’s dark eyebrows arched above his silver eye. “Right now?”

“Wide open.” I sniffed and tasted metal in the back of my throat. My Weird was far more of a pain than a gift most of the time. And how could the Gate be open, with no one controlling it?

Because you didn’t just open the Gates to Thorn , my thoughts whispered. You broke something, some fundamental backbone, and now it’s just a matter of time until another Storm .

No. I couldn’t let my thoughts spin off track. It was just the Weird, or residual echoes from being on Windhaven and close to so much iron. That was all. I hadn’t kick-started a disaster of apocalyptic proportions.

Now if I could just believe that.

“Well, hell,” Dean said. “I’m taking the leap, then. We need to move—those two are going to wake up and Draven’s going to come back sooner or later.” He braced himself to run at the Gate. “I’ll go first, make sure it’s safe.”

“No!” I cried. Dean’s impetuous lack of forethought was one of the things that had appealed to me when we’d met, but now he was just acting insane, and it wasn’t helping anything.

I grabbed for his arm, but his leather jacket slipped between my fingers as he took a run at the Gate. “We don’t know what’s on the other side!” I shouted, frantic. Dean couldn’t get hurt. Couldn’t leave me alone. I couldn’t let him put himself at risk.

A split second later, Dean smacked into the metal lattice with a loud clang.

“Shit!” he bellowed, sitting down hard on the spongy ground, clutching his nose, which leaked a velvety trickle of blood down his square chin.

“Dean!” I cried. I ran to him and crouched at his side, using the tail of my shirt to stanch the bleeding.

“You said it was open ,” he groaned.

“It was.” I fluttered my hands helplessly, wishing more than anything that I could stop his pain, but there was nothing I could really do.