Caitlin Kittredge - The Nightmare Garden

I put my fingers on the edge of the table and slid them forward so the tips just touched the pocket watch. My Weird gave a tickle, an itch I couldn’t quite reach. The watch was complex, and I breathed in and out, shallower and shallower, focusing on the mechanism that would make the tiny hands spin backward. The only time I’d managed this was with my father, and then I hadn’t been a virtual prisoner, being stared at like a curiosity by a cadre of men who could keep me locked up indefinitely. The pressure didn’t help.

After one tick, two, three, four, the hands finally stopped. After another breath, they began to run in reverse, my Weird sending the gears spinning back and back until they stood at exactly midnight.

More. I had to do more. I had to show them the earth-shattering power waiting in the dark places of my mind.

The watch was spinning so fast now it vibrated on the table, and I picked out each individual gear and cog as my Weird flowed, not a trickle now but a flood, one that could drown me if I let it have too much more rein. I could feel every bit of clockwork in the place now.

I was the machine. And the machine was me. Just as it had been in Lovecraft.

The glass face of the clock cracked open and the hands went flying, embedding themselves in the far wall. I picked it apart piece by piece, until every bit of the watch was turning around my head, spinning of its own accord.

As quickly as it had come, the flash flood of power vanished, as I knew it would. My control wasn’t that good yet.

The gold case dropped to the floor, smoking, and a few heartbeats after that I lost my grip on the clockwork and it too fell, raining gears and brass.

Murmurs, and an excited but subdued round of applause broke out among the Brotherhood members. My mind still itched, and I felt the familiar trickle of blood from my nose. The needles on the machine I was hooked to danced wildly. “I’d like to be excused,” I told Crosley. My head was spinning, I was sick to my stomach, and I was not going to faint in front of these men if I had any say.

“Of course, of course,” he said, and rang for Casey to take me back to my room.

“You’re bleeding,” she said, but made no move to offer me a handkerchief or a rag. I wiped the blood on my sleeve, where it stood out damp and dark.

“I’ll live,” I said. The walls of the Bone Sepulchre wavered in front of me. The ice appeared to shimmer in the low light, and with the way my head was pounding, I wasn’t sure I could make it out of the room. I scrabbled against the slick walls, vision blurring, and Casey caught me.

“Whoa!” she said. “You don’t look so good, Aoife. Are you all right?”

My shoulder began to throb again, ten times worse than it had on the submarine. Tears squeezed from my eyes, and I saw that they were red when they landed on the backs of my hands.

“This is wrong …,” I choked out, my tongue feeling too large for my mouth. My heart kicked into overdrive with fear, and it exacerbated the pain in my shoulder. Hot pain, searing pain, bone-deep pain that clutched at every bit of me, held me and didn’t let me go.

The sensation of falling gripped me as well, beyond the pain, the displacement of gravity acting on my stomach, and then the vertigo of being in two places at once, neither quite here nor there.

Fae magic. The kind that could rip me from one place to the next as quickly as I breathed.

I braced myself to land, but when I opened my eyes, I was in the same spot, standing just outside the door of the library, heart pounding and my breath coming not at all.

The Fae magic hadn’t reached out to grab me, but had thrust another figure into my path.

Tremaine smiled at me, his pointed teeth gleaming silver.

“Hello, Aoife. You have no idea how glad I am to catch up to you.”

FOR THE LONGEST of heartbeats, I simply stared at Tremaine. It couldn’t be. There was no way he could have found me again after Jakob had killed himself.

Well , my mind whispered, there was no way Jakob could have survived for any length of time aboard the sub, and he did that .

Casey stared at Tremaine, slack-jawed, but she stayed crouched protectively over me. “Who in the hell are you?”

“I think Aoife can tell you,” Tremaine purred. He extended his hand and put it on my cheek. “I think she’s even been dreaming of me. Is that right, Aoife?”

I swatted weakly at his hand. It was all the energy I could muster. “Don’t you dare touch me.”

Casey shrank back a step, staring at Tremaine still. “Is he …”

“Get away, Casey,” I said. My voice sounded faint, feeble. I felt the same—I couldn’t have moved even if I’d had the chance to stab Tremaine in the heart where he stood.

She hesitated, and I gritted my teeth, tasting blood. “Go,” I snarled.

Casey backed up a step, her gaze never leaving Tremaine. “I’ll go get help,” she said softly, then turned and bolted down the corridor.

I rotated my heavy, dizzy head to look Tremaine in the eye. “What do you think you’ll do when you have me? What more could you possibly need? I broke the Gates, is that it? Are you looking to fix what you started now, and be a savior?”

“I already am a savior,” Tremaine said. “I woke the queens, you know. I broke Draven’s curse. And I used you, darling of the Brotherhood, to do it, which makes me not only a hero, but a clever hero.” He touched my face again, his sharp white nails scraping narrow lines in my skin. “And now I believe that I’ll be able to do whatever I want to do with you, Aoife, because we both know you can’t stop me.”

Tremaine took me by the hand, almost gently. His skin was cooler than the icy air around us, and it shot a bolt of nausea straight to my core. “It’s time to come back, Aoife.” He leaned down and whispered to me in the voice of a wind across a vast, empty wasteland of ice. “You are half in my world, you know. Your blood is half Fae. Did you really think getting away from me would be as easy as pretending you’re human?”

I glared up at him. In that moment, I wasn’t scared of Tremaine, only infuriated that he’d outsmarted me yet again. “I’d hoped it would be, you glassy-eyed monstrosity.”

“Hope isn’t a real thing, Aoife,” Tremaine said. “It’s a lie that desperate souls cling to as comfort.”

“You would know, wouldn’t you?” I snapped. “You’re full to the brim with lies.”

Tremaine just smiled in return, a smile that said he’d already won.

The world began to fall away around me, and this time I was moving, moving with the raw power of the hexenring , the Fae magic that bent space and time the same way Tesla had when he’d made the Gates. I wanted to scream, but nothing came out, not even air.

I fell, and then snapped back to myself on a white marble floor, choking, with blood gushing from my nose. The pain in my shoulder and the numbness in the rest of my body were gone, and I was gasping for breath. My nose still gushed, but now the droplets landed on fine marble instead of rough-carved ice, and the light around me was mellow and amber, oil lamps rather than aether. “Of course,” I sighed, watching my blood stain the stone under my knees. I was back in the Thorn Land. It was the last place in all the worlds I wanted to be, so of course I’d landed here. It was just my rotten, nonexistent luck.

“I’ve waited a long time to be standing here with you,” Tremaine said, sweeping his arm to take in the whole of the area.

This hexenring , rather than an arrangement of mushrooms or rocks as Fae rings usually were, was carved directly into the stone underneath me. I stood up, feeling the blood trickle down my face, but I didn’t move. I knew from experience that I needed Tremaine’s permission to leave the ring.