Iron Codex 2 - The Nightmare Garden (3 page)

The old Aoife would never have dreamed of disagreeing with anyone, but this new Aoife had no such compunctions. Her feet hurt, and I was glad she’d spoken up. She didn’t even care that Conrad was puffing up his chest, getting ready to chastise her like the father we’d never had. We stared at each other while the throaty call of a crow
echoed from a nearby thicket. I wasn’t going to be the one to look away. I’d been glad of Conrad’s protection in our care-homes and at the Academy, but since he’d left, I’d realized I didn’t need him. He needed to see it now too. He was my brother, and I loved him, but the closeness of our old relationship had blown away with the ash from the ruined Lovecraft Engine.

“Well?” I said at last. Dean, Cal and Bethina, who’d been a chambermaid in my father’s house before a few days ago, stopped and clustered around me. Conrad had elected himself group leader, but so far they’d stuck with me. Not that I knew where we were going, or where we were going to stay when it got dark again. These were ancient forests, night forests, and who knew what was lurking in the shadows? In Lovecraft, things like nightjars, shape-shifting blood drinkers and springheel jacks, terrifying long-toothed predators, ruled the night along with the ghouls. And those were just the creatures who’d managed to slip through from Thorn and other places. Here in the Mists, this native land of theirs so far from Iron, if they caught us we’d be so much lunch meat. I felt a small, traitorous prick of pride at that and tried not to show it on my face. I’d managed to get us as far as the Mists. I tried to believe I could see us through to wherever we ended up, but I wasn’t very convincing, even inside my own head. Conrad
did
know the Mists, and I had no idea how to even find my way out of this wood.

Conrad folded his arms. “Aoife, you’re being a child.”

“I left her there, Conrad,” I said quietly, voicing what had been bothering me since the morning dream. “I left her to whatever might happen.”

Conrad sighed, shifting his feet. “Listen, when we get
somewhere safe we can talk about this. Right now, we’re exposed and we need to keep moving.” He started walking again, until my words distracted him and he tripped.

“She’s
our mother
.”

My brother turned back to me, and his face was colder than I’d ever seen it. “Nerissa hasn’t been a mother to me for ten years, Aoife. To you either. She left us to the mercy of people who’d just as soon burn us alive, or cut us open and study us. She didn’t even try to keep us from that when she knew she couldn’t take care of us. Some kind of
mother
to do that.”

“I said I wouldn’t leave her there,” I told him. I’d promised her. No matter what she’d done, I’d promised that I’d keep her safe because she couldn’t do it for herself. That was what you did, when you had a mother, and I hadn’t managed to do anything except put her in more danger. Guilt made my stomach roil. “This is my fault,” I said, “all of it, but most of all Nerissa, and I have to—”

“Dammit, Aoife!” Conrad bellowed. The crows took flight in a ripple of glossy black against the silver sky. “Going back to the Iron Land and risking your neck won’t change what happened! You’re going to have to accept that so we can all stay alive.”

I wished he’d just slapped me. The hole that opened in me at his words was a hundred times more painful than any blow would have been. Because I knew he was right. My guilt was like a chain around my ankle, attached to a weight the size of my mother. If I couldn’t put the thoughts out of my mind until we’d reached safety, I’d drag them with me. But I didn’t know how. I swiped at my eyes, telling myself my face was damp only with cool fog, not hot tears.

“All right, now,” Dean said. “I think we’ve established neither of you is giving up this ghost, so why don’t we agree to disagree?” He helped me off the stump and put his arm around me. “And Conrad—how about shutting your big trap and not making your sister cry before I knock your teeth in?”

Conrad blinked once. “What did you just say to me?”

“Hey!” I clapped my hands. Boys could be like unruly dogs. Where was a bucket of water when I needed one? “I’ll keep going,” I told Conrad quietly. “But I’m not going to forget about this. I
am
going to get her back.”

“I’m not saying forget it,” he said. “Just focus on staying safe until our father comes back and can help us settle things.”

He started walking again, his stiff-shouldered posture evidence that he was dismissing Dean and me—and the straggling Cal and Bethina—so I spoke my last thought to his back: “You know, Archie coming back and saving the day is about as likely as a snowball surviving the heart of the Engine.” It was harsh, but it was true. Conrad was the only one who refused to see that.

I’d stopped keeping track of how many miles we’d walked days ago, but not of the day. My birthday had come and gone, and so far, I still had my mind. But I wasn’t cured. Periodically I felt the scratches and whispers of the madness, and I waited for the iron poison to awaken it fully in my blood and plunge me down an endless hole of insanity.

The road disappeared for a time, and we relied on the dim sun to navigate until it came into view again. Well, Conrad did. The rest of us were so tired we mostly just trudged. Cal had barely spoken since we’d come through from Arkham to the Mists, and finally, when I looked back and saw him stumble, I dropped back to walk with him.

“How are you holding up?”

Cal grunted. He was a head taller than me, and I watched his knobby Adam’s apple bob up and down.

Of all of us, Cal was the least what he appeared to be. I
should have been afraid of him—after all, the Proctors had filled my mind for years with warnings about the ghouls that lived in the old sewer tunnels below the streets and surged up to hunt when the moon was full.

But they’d also told me my mother was crazy and had to be locked away, and that a bloodborne virus was responsible for my abilities and my madness dreams, so there you were. Cal might have been a monster before he’d come to the Academy, a ghoul who’d hunted people like me, but he’d stuck by me when everything went wrong. Draven had sent him to spy on me, threatened to burn Cal’s family alive if he rebelled, and Cal had still helped me get out of Lovecraft. Cal was loyal. I trusted him a lot more than Conrad at that moment.

Which made me feel lousy, like I was betraying my own blood in favor of someone who wasn’t even human, but the fact remained that Cal had been there for me when Conrad hadn’t. And he didn’t have potential madness lurking in the dark corners of his mind, ready to spring forward and sink its teeth in the moment he got too close to the Iron Land. I loved Conrad, but I’d never forget that in his worst moment, he’d hurt me, and hadn’t hesitated to do it. I had a scar to ensure I’d never forget.

“Cal?” I said when he didn’t answer me.

“How do you think I’m holding up, Aoife?” he snapped, thin face growing a deep frown. “Being in this place isn’t going to get us into any less trouble, and it just might get us into more.”

Regardless of the shape he took, Cal had a nearly endless capacity for worrywarting. I was just glad he’d decided
to keep his human shape for the time being, though that was a credit more to Bethina than to me. Cal was sweet on her, and she thought he was a regular boy. I just hoped she wouldn’t try to light him on fire when she figured out the truth. Bethina was bubbly and sometimes flighty, but she wasn’t stupid, and eventually all the strange bits of Cal’s personality would fall into place for her.

I’d decided at the outset that I’d cross that bridge when we came to it. Besides, how was I supposed to pull her aside and tell her the nice boy with the city manners was actually a flesh-eating beast?
That
was a conversation I couldn’t even fathom how to start. It would come up one way or another—Cal wasn’t always good at hiding his true nature. None of us were, I guessed. Dean snarled when he was angry, and I got blinding headaches when I was too close to iron. Conrad was the only one among us who could appear effortlessly human, and I was really starting to resent him for it. He’d been out of the Iron Land long enough that his madness had largely receded. I hoped it would be the same for me, but sooner or later, I’d have to go back, and if he went with me we’d both be in trouble.

“Fine,” I grumbled.

“If you say so,” Cal said, and I could tell I’d played on his last nerve. He could tell I was wishing I could just leave the lot of them, aside from Dean, in the woods and go home.

Not even that. I wished I could wind time backward until none of this had ever occurred. And if I could live that time over again, I would ignore what was happening to me, go on being a good student, a good girl, good little Aoife Grayson, who adored her brother because he was the
strong one, the charming one who could do no wrong. He was a brother she could trust, implicitly. A brother who’d never hurt her.

But then I’d also be insane from the iron of Lovecraft, locked up with my mother, and who knew what would have happened to Conrad. I could never have that little girl’s imaginary version of my brother back, and I was just going to have to live with it. If I’d done it sooner, I might not have been so easily swayed by Tremaine, or so quick to dismiss my mother’s ramblings. If I’d been more willing to accept reality, my mother would be safe and alive, instead of alone in a city overrun with creatures of Thorn.

If she’d survived. I didn’t let myself think that my mother might be dead too often, because the very idea was a physical pang in my chest. Nerissa had managed to survive for seven years in the worst madhouses in Lovecraft. She couldn’t be dead. I kept repeating that, with all the dedication of a fanatic. My mother couldn’t be dead. She had to be waiting for me when I went back.

I became aware that Cal’s skinny shadow no longer loped next to me, and I turned back. Cal was frozen, quivering, his nostrils flared and his chest vibrating like a plucked string.

“Cal?” I said with soft alarm, motioning to the others to stop.

His lips drew back from teeth that razored out of human gums, leaving thin red trails of blood and spittle on his lips. They disappeared just as quickly, when Bethina turned toward him, but the wire-tight tension didn’t leave his skinny frame. “Someone else is here.”

Dean cut his eyes toward the brush and back to me. “Get off the road.”

“What’s going on?” Bethina called tremulously from behind Cal.

“Get off the road
now
!” Dean bellowed, and grabbed me by the arm, dragging me into the brush. I gasped in pain as thorns snagged my sweater, rending skin and finding blood beneath.

I saw Cal, Conrad and Bethina go into the ditch on the other side of the path as Dean pulled me down. Mud soaked into my stockings and through the holes in my boots, and freezing water numbed me.

“What—” I started, but Dean pressed his finger against my lips.

A second later, I felt something unfurl in my mind, like a flower opening under the light of the moon. It prickled across my forehead, over my scalp and down my spine, fingers of feeling scraping across my every nerve.

Please
, I thought as panic pressed on my chest, slowing my breath to almost nothing,
not here. Not now
. I knew the sensation bubbling up from the recesses of my brain, knew it the same way I knew my own heartbeat. My blood was reacting to iron, iron that whoever Cal had scented carried, iron worked into an unseen machine. And with the machinery came something else: the power that my father, in his journal, had called a Weird. And on the heels of the Weird, because machines and iron were inexorably intertwined, the madness would bloom.