Iron Cast (33 page)

Phillip was cranking the car, and Mrs. Wells herded Corinne into the backseat. She climbed in beside her. Corinne's mind was reeling with the suddenness of everything. She barely felt the metal of the car around her. All she could think was that she was leaving Ada behind.

And Ada had made her do it.

The car roared to life, and before Corinne could decide what to do next, Phillip was steering them down the gravel driveway. The iron gates flew past with a fleeting ache, and then Haversham was lost in the distance. Corinne pressed her face into her hands, trying to shake the last vestiges of Ada's melody from her head. Vaguely, she remembered Agent Wilkey in the lobby, while her brother was browbeating the desk nurse into opening the front gate. Wilkey had leaned against the wall beside the door, smiling. All trace of the damage from Ada's song was gone from his features.

“Don't worry,” he told her with a wink. “You'll be back soon.”

Corinne drove her fingernails into her skin, trying to find control of her own fear. Ada wouldn't have been able to manipulate her will so easily if a part of her hadn't already wanted desperately to leave. Corinne hated herself for that.

“This is my fault,” her mother said. Her wavering voice was barely audible over the jolting wheels.

“Don't be ridiculous, Mother,” Phillip said. “Corinne got mixed up in bad company. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's all there is to it.”

Corinne looked up from her hands to see Phillip's pointed glare in the mirror. He hadn't so much as mentioned the word
hemopath,
but he must have figured it out by now. The HPA didn't accidentally cart regs off to Haversham. That was why the iron test had been introduced in the first place.

“That's all there is to it,” Corinne echoed, not sure what else Phillip wanted her to say.

She knew he'd seen what was happening in the basement. Even in the murky memory of the past ten minutes, the room full of corpses stood out sharply in her mind, turning her stomach.
Phillip showed no signs of distress, though. He was his normal, mildly officious self.

Her mother was shaking her head with a mournful expression.

“I knew you were getting yourself into some kind of trouble when you showed up at the dinner with Gabriel Stone. I should have gone straight to your father. I just don't even know how you met someone like him.”

“What are you talking about?” Corinne asked. “How do
you
know him?” And why had her family decided tonight of all nights to stop being unfailingly predictable?

Her mother faltered. She picked nervously at the furred cuff of her sleeve. “I . . . I've seen him at certain . . . meetings. On Down Street.”

Corinne's mouth fell open slightly. “Are you . . . a socialist?”

The car swerved slightly as Phillip looked back in alarm. “Mother, what is she talking about?” he asked.

Mrs. Wells turned her face toward the window, where Boston's outer edges rolled past. The tenements and scattered storefronts were dark, with only the silver of the moon to illuminate their icy rooftops.

“I'm not a socialist,” she said.

“A
communist
?” Corinne asked.

“No, Corinne, I'm— It started as curiosity, that's all. You and Phillip were both off at school. A friend of a friend told me about these meetings, of people who just enjoyed sharing ideas. She said it was powerful.”

“So you went to one?”

Again her mother faltered. “I've been to several.”

The car swerved again. Mrs. Wells leaned forward to grasp her son's shoulder. Her eyebrows were drawn together in consternation.

“Please, Phil, you have to believe that I would never do anything to hurt your campaign. I always stay in the back of the room so that no one will recognize me. When you announce your candidacy, I promise I'll stop.”

Phillip didn't say anything. His gaze remained locked resolutely on the road.

“Does Father know?” he asked at last.

Mrs. Wells sat back in her seat and nodded. “He doesn't like it, but he's never stopped me.”

Phillip shook his head in disbelief. Corinne laughed shortly.

“An arrest scandal and socialist propaganda,” she said. “My, how the mighty Wellses have fallen.”

“Don't talk like that,” her mother said, grabbing her hand. “I don't think Gabriel recognized me, but you can't go near him again. I'm not a socialist, but I think that he must be.”

“I know.”

“You're not listening to me, he's— Wait.” Her mother reached out and turned Corinne's chin, so that they were eye to eye. “You know?”

“It's not as if he murders puppies or anything. Obviously you don't find the ideas all that terrible, if you keep going back for more.”

Her mother's forehead creased, but she didn't deny it. Corinne had never seen her mother in this light before. She had never thought of her as someone with ideas—other than ideas for the next dinner party. She also wasn't particularly pleased with the notion of her mother under the same roof as Silas Witcher, perhaps even speaking with him or shaking his hand. But that was a concern for another day.

“What will people say if they find out?” Mrs. Wells said softly.

“They won't,” Corinne said. “You said it yourself. We'll never speak of this to anyone.”

“She's right,” Phillip said.

Mrs. Wells looked between her two children and nodded to herself, relief settling visibly over her. “I'll just be glad when we're all home,” she said.

Corinne stared at the passing streetlights through the window. She recognized the neighborhood they were in.

“Unfortunately, the night's not over for me yet,” she said.

“What's that supposed to mean?” Phillip asked.

Corinne turned back to her mother and clasped her hand. “I'm so sorry for what I'm about to do. It's the only way, and if you don't want me to end up back in Haversham, you won't call the cops.”

Her mother's expression was disturbed. “Corinne, what are you—”

“But often, in the din of strife,

There rises an unspeakable desire

After the knowledge of our buried life;

A thirst to spend our fire and restless force

In tracking out our true, original course. . . .”

For a couple of seconds her mother only stared at her in confusion. Then a cow appeared in the middle of the road. Phillip cursed and threw on the brake. As soon as the car stopped, Corinne threw open the door and ran. She ducked through the side streets and alleys so that they couldn't follow, angling her way in the direction of the Cast Iron.

She could hear her mother's shouting, but it was soon drowned out by the rush of cold wind in her ears. She ran all the way to the
club, sliding on the icy sidewalk at every corner. She fell only once, a block away, but picked herself up before her knees and palms could even start stinging. Her chest was heaving when the red front door finally came into sight. She ducked down the narrow passage between the Cast Iron and the empty store next door. She slowed her run when she saw Gabriel in the back alley, leaning against the brick wall beside the door. His left hand was shoved into his coat pocket, and he held a lit cigarette in his right.

When he saw her, he straightened up. His features were as cool and inscrutable as always, but she couldn't stop thinking about his face the last time she had seen him, just before they took him away. Vulnerability wasn't something she'd ever expected to see in Gabriel Stone.

“Is Saint downstairs?” she asked him, resting her hands on her knees to gasp in a few breaths.

He nodded, taking in her disheveled appearance without any clear indication of what he thought about it. “He's asleep, I think. Are you okay?”

“Well, I'm not dead,” she said.

“Where's Ada?”

“Being a noble idiot. You get out early for good behavior?”

“Turns out it's not actually illegal to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They released everyone they took to the station. I'm guessing Haversham wasn't so forgiving?”

Corinne's mind flitted past the wooden door, down the dark steps, and across the iron floor. So many people dead and already forgotten. She wouldn't let that happen to Ada.

“Ada's still there,” she said. “The HPA agents are coming. We have to get Saint and get out of here.”

“Wait.” Gabriel grabbed her wrist before she could open the
door. “I should have told you sooner that I knew the Witchers. I'm sorry.”

Corinne looked at him, unsure what to do with the sudden apology. He hadn't changed out of his tuxedo yet, though he had unbuttoned his coat enough to loosen his tie. Corinne could see that the shoes and the cuffs of the trousers were ruined from Silas's sorry excuse for an escape route.

“It doesn't matter now,” she said.

She expected him to protest with another apology, but she should have known better.

“I suppose it doesn't,” he said. “How did you get out of the asylum?”

“Apparently my brother's marrying into the Haversham family grants me some privileges.”

“So what makes you think they're coming here?”

“It's a long story.”

His hand was still around her wrist, and she wondered if he could feel the unsteady rhythm of her pulse. The chandeliers and champagne of the rehearsal dinner felt faraway now. The world had shrunken into this dark alleyway, crowded on all sides by the terror of the asylum and the ache of missing Ada already and the feeling that maybe she should say something more to Gabriel Stone, but she couldn't think of what.

“Your hand is bleeding,” Gabriel said. His brow furrowed as he turned her hand over.

Corinne looked down at the blood from the scrape on her palm. “I'll live.”

“Cor, I didn't think I'd ever see you again,” he murmured.

Corinne's head was ducked, but she could feel him looking down at her. The last time he had been this close, they had been
in the car, and she had felt his warm breath on her lips. Corinne wasn't sure why, in this moment of all moments, she was remembering how that felt. Or why she couldn't shake the thought that if she lifted her face and stood on tiptoe, her lips would meet his without any trouble at all.

Corinne was positive that if she kissed Gabriel at that moment, he would kiss her back.

But the smell of sewage reached her nostrils, and the steel in his gun was intruding on her consciousness as a bare twinge of pain. Miles away, in the depths of Haversham Asylum, Ada was sitting in handcuffs, alone.

“I have to wake up Saint,” she said.

There was a sound at the end of the alley. When a lurching figure turned the corner at the edge of the building, Corinne was so relieved that it wasn't Wilkey or Pierce that she almost didn't react. He was hunched under an oversized coat, and his steps dipped and swayed with the roiling of an invisible sea.

It was Harry.

Corinne swore under her breath right as he saw them. He stumbled faster toward them, arms outstretched in pleading.

“You're here,” he said. “Everything is dark, and I can't see straight. Corinne, you gotta help me. I just need some blue skies and sunshine. Just need to shake the ghosts loose.”

He looked worse than the last time she had seen him. The skin was sagging around his emaciated face, and his eyes were cavernous in his skull. Corinne felt that she was in Haversham again, staring into the dying man's face as his blood trickled away, but it was the hemopath clubs that had drained the life from Harry. She shuddered when his grimy fingers touched her sleeve. It was a light touch—spectral, as if he already had one foot in the grave.

“I can't help you,” she told him.

“You won't help me.”

His fingers curled around her arm, but there was no strength in them. To her right, Gabriel moved, as if to push Harry away, but she pressed her free hand against his elbow to stop him. She peeled Harry's fingers away from her sleeve. She used to think that edgers were weak, but now she was thinking about that moment in Silas Witcher's office, when he had laid down a few words and twisted her brain into darkness. And the way Ada's song had climbed into her head and forced her to leave her best friend behind. Their gifts were a double-edged sword.

The Cast Iron and the Red Cat had given Harry blue skies and sunshine, without warning him of the ghosts that crept through the cracks. Without warning him that every song and poem he chased led him closer to the edge.

What must it be like, to crave your own destruction?

“I'm sorry,” she whispered.

Stooped as he was, his eyes were close to hers. Once they might have been a clear gray, but now they were bloodshot and murky.

“Where's Ada?” he asked.

She was still holding his quivering fingers in her hand.

“She's in trouble,” Corinne said. “I can't help you because I have to help her.”

Harry dragged his hands across his face. His fingernails were torn and bleeding. She couldn't tell if the dampness on his cheeks was sweat or tears.

“Ghosts in my head,” he murmured. “God help me, I don't know what to do.”

Neither did Corinne. She reached out, tentatively, but let her hand fall short. He would find no comfort in her touch. For the
first time, she wondered if they were wrong trying to put everything back to the way it was before. She wondered if they were any better than Dr. Knox.

“Corinne,” Gabriel said.

He didn't have to say more. Corinne remembered why they had come, how much they had to lose. She nodded, and he opened the door. She made it two steps into the storage room before she turned and walked out again, brushing past Gabriel.

Harry was on the ground with his head between his knees. His shoulders were shuddering, though he made no noise. Corinne crouched beside him and quoted into his ear.