The Mirrored Shard (27 page)

“Do you really think you’ve fixed anything?” Nylarthotep smiled. “Do you really think you’ve stopped anything set in motion by me aeons before you were born?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Nylarthotep’s images began to burn away all around us as the Elder Sign covered more and more of him. “But I do know that everyone dies eventually.” I took another step. “Even you.”

When I turned to run, I didn’t look back. The Deadlands were burning around me and I knew I didn’t have much time.

As I fled, the chaos caused by my proximity to Nylarthotep lessened, and I had another bout of vertigo and pain. Who knew how long Conrad and Cal had been trying to wake me up?

I had only a little time to do what I had in mind before
they yanked me back into the land of the living, and so I ran faster.

The first thing I saw was the great plain of the screaming sands again, rippling and rushing along the road of bones, snaking back and forth, seeking prey.

I saw the bodies, too, black robes and skulls emblazoned with the Yellow Sign. The Faceless hadn’t lasted long once their master wasn’t around to protect them.

The road stretched just as long as before, and I wanted to let out a howl of hopelessness. I didn’t have that kind of time, not to mention a way to get back to the Catacombs, where Dean’s soul resided. Nor any way to stop the encroachment of the Old Ones. I was right back where I’d started.

I sank to my knees on the bones of those who had come before me, and I wept. The Klaxons still wailed in the city, in a metallic imitation of my own sobbing, and on the horizon I saw a line of smoke billowing into the sky, which was now the color of a days-old bruise, yellow and green and sickly.

I saw the Moaning Marsh to my left, the mud bubbling and steaming. In daytime the lost souls were sad scraps of things, and they clustered at the edge of the marsh, staring at me.

“Don’t cry.” A pair of pointed men’s shoes, covered in the dust of the bone road, came into my field of view. I couldn’t see clearly at first through the blur of tears, but I swiped at my eyes and regarded Tesla for the second time.

“And why not?” I demanded. “Now seems as good a time as any.”

“You did something I could never do,” Tesla said. “You kept this place alive, and you kept the Yellow King at bay.”

“But this place is his creation,” I said, trying not to start sobbing again. “I’ve doomed all of you.”

“No,” Tesla said softly, placing his hand on the top of my head. “No. As long as he’s trapped here, he won’t destroy this place. If he does, he’ll be floating in a void with nothing. And he’s too vain to be alone.”

“But what about Dean? What about all the other souls who’ll still be trapped here?” I said. I sucked in air for the first time since I’d landed in the Deadlands. It hit my empty lungs like a hammer, and I tried not to flinch.

“I have a feeling that with his power so diminished, this place won’t be the torment it was,” Tesla said. He gestured toward the city, where the green smog was starting to blow away in long wisps, like streaks of gangrene in the sky. “It might even be the sort of place one would want to visit after death. But as for Dean … you’d better take him and go,” Tesla said, looking truly grim for the first time. “Go right now, while Nylarthotep is still battered and confused, because that’s going to be your only chance to escape.” Tesla gripped my arms and stared into my eyes. His were pale and set far apart, but they were among the most intense I’d ever seen. Whatever life lent us the Weird, it burned behind his eyes like a living fire.

“Run for your life,” Tesla stated. “And forget this place. Never come back until the day you die.”

I looked toward the columns of smoke and wanted to sob all over again. “It’s too far.…”

Tesla shook his head and stepped away from me, into the center of the road. “Stand back,” he warned. “It’s been a while since I’ve done this.”

I watched in a mixture of wonder and horror as the air shimmered around us. White bone dust, fine and sparkling, rose in a whirlwind around Tesla’s body, and then pain spiked through my head as a clap of displaced air rolled across the landscape, and a black, swirling void in the landscape, surrounded by a mist of dust and cosmic flotsam, stood before us. I couldn’t see what was on the other side, could only hear the scream of air as the portal sucked it in.

“I may be dead and without my Weird,” Tesla said, “but I still have my skills.” He stepped aside and gestured me in. “This Gate will take you where you need to go, but you need to go quickly. Take Dean, take your reprieve, and go back to the land of the living.”

I started to step through the Gate, feeling its power pulse against my Weird, then stopped and turned back to Tesla. I wanted to look at him once more, and there was a question I needed to ask—really, the only question I’d wanted an answer to since the moment I’d discovered I could manipulate the Gates. The moment I’d discovered that Tremaine betrayed me, and the moment I’d discovered that to save my family, I might have doomed the world.

The question that lurked beneath the iron madness and the nightmares and the bad memories.

“How did you live with it?” I asked him. “Starting the Storm? Changing the world forever? How did you ever close your eyes again?”

Tesla gave me a sad smile, his fingers brushing my temple as our hair whipped around our faces in the wind. “I didn’t,” he said. “It haunted me for the rest of my life, Aoife. You don’t ever stop wondering if things could have been different if you’d just turned your face away from the shadows, away from the unseen, and pretended the world is just as it appears in daylight.”

I caught his hand, feeling the pull of the Gate but needing a few moments longer. “And what did you do instead?” I whispered, somehow knowing he could hear me even over the roar of the space-bending Gate.

Tesla stared into the heart of the Gate for a moment, before he switched his gaze back to me. “I found a way to endure,” he said. “I got up and I tried to fight against the evil I had unknowingly wrought. I made it my mission to protect my world from those who would seek to destroy it, and to help my world find those who would better it and bring it forward into a new age of the supernatural being entirely normal.”

He gave me a gentle push toward the Gate, and I was powerless to resist any longer. “Endure, Aoife,” he said. “Keep your head up, even when it feels like you can’t. You survive because you must. Because your gift can break the world, but it can also save it.”

Traveling through the Gate was merely a blink of an eye, but in that blink I could feel myself spread across a vast distance, every atom of me separate and distinct. Then, just as quickly, I was gasping on the wet floor of the Catacombs as
the roof shook above and the restless spirits drifted around me, mouths wide open and screaming.

Tesla had said it would pass. That Nylarthotep could never be alone, would never destroy his world. I thought he was probably right—the Yellow King reveled far too much in his subjects’ misery to ever destroy this place.

Still, it wasn’t right, or natural. The dead didn’t belong to Nylarthotep. They didn’t belong to anyone. Someday, when I was stronger, when I was the Gateminder I was meant to be, I’d disregard Tesla’s advice and I’d come back here and make sure the Deadlands were as they should be—different for each soul, none in torment except those who brought it on themselves.

I knew it for a certainty as I made my way to Dean’s cell and shoved the bolt back on the door. “Dean?”

He came toward me at once, and wrapped his arms around me. “You can’t be here,” he said. “You have to leave, now.”

“You’re coming with me,” I said.

“No,” Dean murmured against my hair. He drew back and looked me in the eye. This was Dean, really him, and seeing his face I realized how pale the imitation that Nylarthotep had cooked up had been.

“There’s no arguing,” I said. “I came here to get you, more than anything, and I’m at least going to do that.”

“No,” Dean insisted. “I have to stay here, Aoife, and you have to get back.”

The Catacombs vibrated around us again, and a rush of souls flowed past the door like a flash flood.

“It’s not your choice,” I told Dean, and gripped his hands.
I felt my Weird tug at me and realized that the shaking was not Nylarthotep but the thin tether that held me to the living world via the séance machine. Chang had said spending too much time in the Deadlands would make me harder to bring back, decay my living soul until it died, and I could feel it happening even as I wrapped my arms around Dean, even as he struggled, protested, tried to save me.

“It’s not your turn to save me!” I shouted as the cell collapsed around us with a great roar and blinding white light seared my vision into nothingness. “I have to save you!”

Awake

A
T FIRST
I thought I was in the void of nothing, the same place that contained the Old Ones. I saw flashes of their great eyes and limpid bodies, drifting between galaxies, between supernovas, on and on, until one turned to look at me and I thought if I could just hold its gaze, I would know all the secrets of the stars. But I couldn’t, and meeting the great eye burned me like staring into the surface of the sun.

I screamed, and the burning coalesced into the center of my chest, until I thrashed with pain and fell onto a hard floor.

“She’s back,” Chang said. He put away two small paddles hooked up to a battery run off the Tesla coil.

I rolled to the side, feeling my throat and guts constrict, and vomited.

“You’re all right,” another voice said, and I felt Conrad’s hand rub my back. “She’s all right, isn’t she?”

“We’ll have to see,” Chang said. “She was under for much longer than I’ve ever seen anyone survive.”

“She’s tough,” Cal’s voice broke in. My head was throbbing, and in that moment, prostrate on a cold floor and covered in my own sick, I felt miles away from tough.

“Good thing, because we have to move,” Conrad said. “Those boys outside aren’t going to wait much longer.”

Over the drone of the Tesla coil and my own blood humming in my ears, I heard a voice echo off the front of the building. “We know you’re in there, Miss Grayson! Come out with your hands up!”

Chang, Cal and Conrad jumped, but all I could do was take a deep breath and let it out. It hurt, like somebody had taken a bat and smacked me across the chest, but it was the best pain I’d ever felt. I could feel the blood moving through my veins again, my heart thrumming, electricity shooting through my nerves just like it hummed through the Tesla coil.

Tesla. He’d told me I had to endure. I had no choice now, because here I was, right back in the grasp of the Iron Land.

“Who’s out there?” I rasped. My voice sounded as if I’d scraped it across gravel, and speaking sent hot fire down my throat.

“Who do you think?”

This voice was the one I’d been dreaming about. The one that had the power to set me sobbing or inspire joy. It was for this that I’d endured all the pain and nightmares.

I sat up and looked into his eyes. “Dean?”

“Hey, princess.” He crouched next to me, brushing sweaty hair out of my eyes with his rough, sure fingers.
He looked pale and sick too, but he was holding it together much better than I was. “You sure are a sight for sore eyes, you know that?”

I said nothing; I just grabbed him and wrapped him in my arms and pressed my face into his neck, smelling his sweat and his skin and feeling him warm and alive against me.

In that moment, everything was perfect, every bit of suffering had been worth it, and nothing, not even the encroachment of the Old Ones, could render me completely hopeless.

And just as quickly, it all shattered again.

“Miss Grayson!” Pounding started up on the door, and Chang shot a nervous glance toward it.

“The Brotherhood?” I guessed, looking to Cal and Conrad for confirmation.

“They showed up a few minutes ago,” Cal said. “Guess they got tired of watching the door. That’s why Chang had to shock you.”

Conrad was still staring at Dean. “How are you here? I thought you were dead, and you just—pop up here. What the hell is going on?” His brow furrowed. “You
were
dead. I saw your body.”

Dean gave Conrad a grim smile. “Dead as a doornail, man. And by the way, it’s great to see you, too.”

“I hate to interrupt this tender reunion,” I said, clambering to my feet. Even though I felt sick and my heart was throbbing, part of me was elated. My mother hadn’t been completely crazy after all. Dean was here, and he was holding my arm when I started to sway, and he had his time back—all of the thread that he should have had, the
thread that had been cut because of me, repaired. I used him to hold myself steady. He was here, body and spirit. Here with me. “But we have a decision to make.”

“What’s the decision?” Cal said. “We’re out the back and we disappear into Chinatown. And let’s do it now, before they bust the front door down.”

“They’ll have agents at the back,” Conrad said. “Trust me, I’ve spent months with these people. They’re organized, and they’re not stupid.”

“This place have a basement?” Cal asked Chang, but Chang shook his head.