The Mirrored Shard (5 page)

The gate was ajar. That was bad. I strapped my bag across my chest—wouldn’t do to lose it after I’d managed to bring it all the way from Thorn—and soothed the cat into silence. I crept forward one step after another. I wasn’t the type to rush in, like Dean or Conrad. I took my time. I’d wanted to be an engineer, and being meticulous was part of my makeup.

It was also what had kept me alive thus far.

The one time I’d been impulsive, had flown by my instincts, didn’t bear talking about. The fallout from that
choice was all around me, in the absolute silence of the woods around Graystone, the ever-present fog that hadn’t burned away even though it was close to midday, the strange dreams of the populace.

I couldn’t clearly remember what had happened in that place on top of the world, just flashes and fragments, but I knew I’d unleashed something. I’d opened a door so long shut that it had been forgotten by everyone except me and a few beings so ancient they didn’t even have names.

The door of Graystone bore a knocker the size of my head. It was the face of a wolf, grinning at me with bronze teeth and a black iron tongue.

I raised it and let it fall once, twice, three times.

The crows were even more prevalent here. They clustered in the oak trees leading up to the gates, on the rim of the turrets and on windowsills, while hundreds more swooped and dove overhead, cawing so loudly their cries echoed off the stone walls, rolling back on my ears like a wave.

Just as I was about to go around to the back gardens and see if I could get in through the kitchen or a window, the door opened. I heard the creak of clockwork, felt it inside my skull, the low, secret place where the Weird lived. It reacted with iron and machines as well as the Gates between worlds, sensing its likeness forged from metal rather than human flesh.

“Hello?” I called, sticking my head inside. The air was dank and musty, much as it had been the first time I’d come here, looking for my father.

That time, he’d disappeared. I’d been alone, beset by the Fae.

I prayed that this time it’d be different, that I could find what I needed and go get Dean without encountering any more trouble.

I took a few steps into the grand foyer, setting the cat down to scamper off into a dark corner. Graystone was a clockwork house, run by mechanical means, and that kept it safe from the incursion of predatory creatures.

I heard a clank from upstairs and tensed. I doubted any animal could have breached Graystone’s defenses, but that didn’t rule out a person.

“Hello?” I said again, loudly. My voice rattled the long, dagger-shaped crystals in the chandelier above. “Anyone there?” A little quieter. “Say something.” The last came as a whisper. No other sound echoed, and I forced myself to keep looking around. If someone was in the house, I wasn’t going to be a sitting duck.

I started down the back hall toward the kitchen, where I’d always felt most comfortable. Graystone’s luxury was oppressive and smothering, everything incalculably old and valuable, more like the set of a lantern reel or a museum piece than a home.

The kitchen was made for living, was old and worn but homey, and unlike the rest of the drafty mansion, always warm.

As I crossed the threshold, I felt a breath on my neck, but I wasn’t fast enough. I felt a metal barrel jammed against my skin and a rough hand clamped against my mouth.

“What’s your business here?” a voice hissed in my ear.

I struggled, panic rising. The voice and the hand sounded and felt human, at least, but I had no idea whom they
belonged to; plus, he or she was armed. Maybe a shock pistol, maybe something worse, but at this range there was no way I could twist the metal with my Weird to render it harmless.

I tried to shout
Let go of me!
but all that came out was labored breathing as I struggled with the hand across my mouth.

“Are you real?” the voice grated. “Am I seeing you or am I dreaming?”

I twisted violently, and managed to catch a glimpse of black hair, pale skin and a jacket the same gray as my old school uniform, too short at the wrists, exposing knobby bones.

“Conrad?”
I managed.

He let go of me as abruptly as he’d sprung at me, but when he backed away the gun didn’t go down. It was old as the hills, metal dull, the energy bulb trapping aether at the barrel cloudy and nearly dead. Still, I wasn’t going to make any sudden moves. My brother had a temper and changeable moods, and we hadn’t parted on the best of terms. I would just as soon not have given him a good reason to shoot me.

“Are you real?” he repeated. His voice was raspy, and in the low light I saw deep circles beneath his eyes and a patchy growth of stubble on his high cheekbones.

“I’m real,” I said. It was the only response I could think of. Conrad tightened his grip on the pistol. Though he was skinnier and more hollow-eyed since the last time I’d seen him, his arm never wavered.

“Prove it.”

I swallowed hard against my throbbing heart. I’d never seen Conrad like this, except once, and it scared me. That time, he’d cut my throat and left me for dead. This time wasn’t looking much better. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Conrad.”

“I’ve seen you,” he whispered. “For weeks, I’ve had dreams because of that hole in the sky. Voices in my head. If you’re really my sister, then prove it.” His eyes narrowed. “You have five seconds.”

I raised my hands slowly, but there was no escape route now. All I could do was run, and then Conrad would shoot me in the back. I had no doubt he’d do it. We might be blood, but something had scared my brother, badly enough that the look in his eye was the same as it was the night iron poisoning had made him try to kill me.

We both had the conviction to follow through on our actions, and Conrad was scared.
I
was scared. What could I possibly say to calm him?

“Starlight,” I breathed. That night was in my mind anyway, why not use it?

The pistol dipped, just the smallest fraction. Conrad’s thin black eyebrows drew together. “What did you say?”

“ ‘Have you ever seen your blood under starlight, Aoife?’ ” I quoted at him. “ ‘When it’s quite black?’ ”

Conrad let out a shuddering breath, and then his arm dropped. He made a pained expression, as if the pistol suddenly weighed a thousand pounds. “It’s really you,” he muttered. “You don’t know how glad I am to know that.”

“Conrad,” I said, moving toward him again now that his eyes weren’t terrifying me. “
What
is happening here?”

“You know, you could have picked a happy memory,” he said. “One of those times I read you the horror comics Mom didn’t want you reading, or when we snuck into a showing of
The Green Hornet
three days in a row. You didn’t have to pick
that
.”

“I wasn’t exactly thinking about happy memories,” I said. “Not while my own brother is pointing a gun at me.” I tentatively walked toward him and wrapped my arms around his shoulders. Conrad was tall and thin like our father, solid under his too-small jacket, and I felt relief wash over me as I touched him and convinced myself he was real.

“It’s been a crazy couple of weeks,” he said. “Months. Time isn’t doing the same things it used to. I don’t know what the hell’s going on out there, Aoife.”

I had an idea, but I wasn’t about to throw myself on my sword and admit responsibility just yet. Tell Conrad I was responsible for all of the wrong that was happening? All the dreams? I couldn’t be sure, could I? No need to alarm everyone.

I wondered how long I’d be able to rationalize it that way.

“What are you doing here and not on Cape Cod? Where’s Dad?” I asked instead. Conrad’s face fell, and I knew that something was gravely wrong.

“He’s upstairs,” he said. “We had to come back here—the Cape, it’s not safe.… Look, you need to see him to understand. I’m glad you’re back, but you could’ve gotten here a lot sooner.”

I felt a pang of guilt. Of course I hadn’t had to linger in Thorn so long. I could have risked more to escape sooner.
The desire I’d felt from the moment I’d left to come to the only place I’d ever considered home, even if living in it would slowly poison me, didn’t make up for my delay.

“How are you doing?” I asked Conrad as we mounted the grand staircase. “I mean with the iron poisoning?”

“It comes and goes,” he said. “I think not having a Weird helps. I’m doing all right, Aoife, you don’t have to worry about me.” He cast a sideways glance at me. “Do I need to worry about you?”

I could feel the pull already, the scream of the iron against my Fae blood like metal on metal, sparking and turning to slag inside me. “Nothing to worry about,” I lied.

Conrad’s raised eyebrow told me he wasn’t buying it. “Uh-huh,” he said. We went all the way to the back of the house, to the master suite, where I’d never been. That was my father’s room. Even when he’d been gone, I’d felt it would be an unforgivable incursion to go inside.

“I really am fine,” I insisted. “I’m more worried about what’s going on down there in Arkham. What’s happened, Conrad? Where’s Dad, and Valentina? Why did you leave Cape Cod?”

Conrad paused at the master suite’s double doors, which were carved high above our heads with phases of the sun and moon in great orbits.

“Speaking of questions, where did you go, Aoife?” he said. “What happened to you? I tried my damndest to get it out of Cal, but his mouth was locked up tighter than a bank vault.”

I felt as if hours passed while we stared at each other; he was waiting for an answer. “I was in the Thorn Land,” I said
at last, bracing for Conrad’s inevitable explosion. “With our mother.”

“What?”
Conrad’s already haggard face took on a new crop of shadows, making him appear hard and unyielding as granite. I felt the nervous fear rise again. I knew from his expression this couldn’t go anywhere good.

“I had to,” I said.

“I don’t understand why you’d ever give that woman the time of day, never mind run away with her,” Conrad said.

“It was that or lose Dean forever,” I said softly. “I’m sorry, Conrad. Do you at least believe that?”

He heaved a sigh, pushing his hands through his dark hair until it stood straight up. “Yeah,” he said. “I believe you’re sorry. But that doesn’t mean this is all okay with me, Aoife. You know how I feel about the full-blooded Fae.”

“Will you please stop acting like I’m a traitor and tell me what the hell is going on in Arkham?” I demanded. Conrad usually just needed somebody to bite back, to knock some sense into him, and then he’d return to being my slightly pompous but generally tolerable older brother.

Conrad heaved a sigh, and before he could say anything else, the door swung open. The tall, blond figure waved his arms in irritation. “What’s all this noise? I told you that Mr. Grayson needs it quiet.…” Cal trailed off as he took me in, his pale, watery eyes going wide. “Aoife!” he exclaimed, and enfolded me into a hug that was all bony edges and Cal’s distinct, musty scent.

“Hey there, Cal,” I mumbled into his sweater. He squeezed me tighter, and his strength reminded me that I wasn’t dealing with a human boy. Cal was a shape-shifter,
and had the prodigious physical abilities to go with it. I’d learned to live with the fact that his kind usually ate human flesh and lived below ground in nests. Cal was Cal, and whatever he was, he was my best friend in the world.

“I was so worried,” he said, holding me at arm’s length. He’d cut his hair, and his clothes fit for the first time in my memory. I was half sure the gray wool sweater and flannel slacks he was sporting had been my father’s at one point in my dad’s misspent youth.

“I’m all right,” I assured him, and cast a look at Conrad. He could hear it twice, and maybe believed me this time.

“Come in, come in,” Cal told me, and before Conrad could protest, dragged me into the master suite. “It’s good you’re here,” he said softly. “I hope it’ll make a difference.”

The first thing I noticed was that all the curtains were drawn. Heavy things, velvet and oppressive, full of dust that tickled my nostrils and trickled down the back of my throat. Blackout curtains, left over from the last war, or maybe the one before that.

The second was that my father was lying in bed, in his pajamas, sheets pulled up to his chest. At his side sat my friend Bethina, her copper curls in disarray, wearing a plain green dress rather than the maid’s uniform she’d worn when we first met. She held my father’s hand lightly, stroking the back of it with her fingertips. I felt a slow-encroaching sense of dread, like a rising tide.

“What’s going on here?”

Bethina looked up at me and blinked rapidly. “Oh, Miss Aoife. Thank goodness you’re back.”

“He’s been like this for a few days now,” Cal said quietly. “He’s fine as far as we can tell. He’s just … asleep.”

“Don’t know why, or how,” Conrad said, shutting the door and standing in front of it like an ill-tempered guard. “We’ve tried everything to wake him up, but he won’t react to anything. Until the nightmares come.”

Bethina nodded, her eyes wide. “Then he gets to screaming something awful. Noises like I never heard a man make.”

I turned on Conrad. “How could this happen?” My brother was the one acting like the leader of men. He could at least tell me how such a thing could be possible. My father wasn’t the sort to be caught by surprise, either by magic or by malady. He was strong—the strongest person I knew.

“I don’t know any more than you do,” Conrad snapped. “One minute he was fine, the next Arkham was going crazy, and the next he was like this.”

Bethina moved aside to make room for me, and I took my father’s hand. It was dry and cool, the hand of a patient rather than that of the strong man I knew my father to be. I felt the urge to cry, or scream, bubbling in my throat. I couldn’t be sure which it was.

“I think you better start from the beginning,” I said to Conrad. “Tell me exactly what’s happened since I’ve been gone.”

He sat next to me on the edge of the bed, but my father didn’t stir even as the mattress shifted under my brother’s weight. Conrad smoothed the blankets, adjusted the pillows and spoke without looking at anyone.