The Nightmare Garden

features and the blood that had made his parka sodden and was now spreading into the snow around us. I started to unzip my own coat as he shivered, his teeth rattling.

He stopped me, squeezing my wrist. “Don’t,” he whispered.

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’ll get you back on the Dire Raven and everything will be fine.”

Dean swallowed and tried to smile, but he was shivering too much. “Don’t think so,” he muttered. “Not this time.”

“Dean …” My face was hot despite the icy wind, and my eyes were wet. Dean couldn’t be mortally wounded. My mind wouldn’t accept it, even as the evidence stained the snow under my knees. “Don’t leave me,” I begged.

“Sorry, princess,” Dean whispered. “Looks like this is the end of the line.”

“No,” I whimpered, feeling gut-shot myself. “No.…”

“It’s not so bad,” Dean murmured, his face going slack. “It doesn’t hurt. Doesn’t really feel … like anything.”

“You’re cold,” I insisted, my mind flying a thousand miles an hour. He was cold. I had to get him warm. If I could just get him warm it would be all right. “I have to get you inside.”

“No,” Dean said, fumbling to get my bloody mitten back on my already numb hand. “Don’t waste your strength … on me. I’m not going any farther. Aoife …” He struggled with his own mitten until I pulled it off, and he put his hand against my face. “Aoife … I don’t want you to think this is your fault.…”

“It is,” I said. I was crying in earnest, and could feel the glassy half-frozen tears sliding down my cheeks. “If you hadn’t pushed me—”

“No,” Dean said forcefully. “You make your own luck in this life, Aoife, and my luck was to be here with you.” He brushed away the tears with his thumb. “I love you, Aoife Grayson, and that’s what I want you to remember. The rest …” He coughed again, and more blood trailed down his chin. “The rest doesn’t matter one good damn.”

“Things can’t end this way,” I said, although all the desperation had run out of me. I wasn’t very good at lying to myself, when it came down to it. Dean’s eyelids fluttered, and his hand dropped away from me.

“Just say it back to me,” he said. “Even if it’s not true.”

I grabbed up his hand again and pressed it against my lips. “It is true,” I whispered. “It is, Dean.” It was painful to voice, but I figured I’d always known Dean was it. Dean was for good. He deserved everything I had to give him, so I did the best thing I could think of to do. After the truth, I told him one more lie.

“It’s going to be all right, Dean,” I whispered. He looked up at me, and I could see that he knew. He squeezed my fingers once with his, light and fast, like a heartbeat.

“Yeah,” he whispered. “It is, isn’t it?”

Dean’s eyes slid closed, and he stilled. He didn’t go limp or convulse, he just went perfectly still, and except for the red stain still spreading beneath us, he could have been part of the ice.

I bent my head over his chest and sobbed until it felt as if my lungs were frozen, and then I too went still. I couldn’t have moved even if I’d wanted to. I stayed where I was, clutching Dean until ice had grown on my exposed skin, and I would have stayed there until I was completely frozen, while the Proctors loaded the prisoners and ignored one dead boy and one frozen girl, probably thinking her dead as well.

She might as well have been. After a time, the Dire Raven took off, and my hope of escape along with it, and I still didn’t care. Dean was here, and I couldn’t leave him. I’d failed him, just as I’d failed Nerissa the last time I’d tried to do what I thought was right and destroyed the Engine. I’d tried to save everyone, and I’d saved nobody, nobody in this entire world.

I would have stayed crouched in the snow until I did freeze to death, except that after it had grown dark, a spotlight framed me as turbines whirred above my head, and an airship blotted out the aurora borealis as they danced above me, wild and free.

Ladders lowered and two figures dropped down, the crampons on their boots throwing up spikes of ice. One of them raised his goggles and I saw my father’s eyes. I stared back numbly. How had he found me? Why did it matter to him whether I lived or died? I was worthless to his cause now.

“Aoife!” he shouted, above the wind and the whirr of the Munin’s engines. He came and crouched by me, his breath hot on my ear. “Thank stone you’re all right. When Conrad told me what you’d done …” He saw who I held, and trailed off. “Oh, gods.” He felt for Dean’s pulse beneath his coat, and then he gently put his hands over mine. “Aoife, you have to let go now,” he told me. “Let him go and we’ll take care of him.”

I knew that I couldn’t let go of Dean, but I was so cold and weak I couldn’t resist as Archie hauled me to my feet and slung me into his arms, carrying me like a tiny child as the ladder lifted all of us into the Munin.

While we floated off the glacier, I felt as if I were staring at myself from down a long tunnel, or through a spyglass, watching a thin-faced girl with dark hair poking wildly from under her cap letting herself be taken aboard an airship, leaving behind nothing but blood on the snow to mark that she’d ever been there.

20 Aboard the Munin

ONCE I’D BEEN settled in blankets aboard the Munin by my father, I pressed my forehead against the porthole and watched the true aurora borealis as we turned south. It was bright and sharp and unpredictable, like Dean. I could almost think he was out there, rather than strapped in the hold of the Munin.

Someone sat down across from me and pressed a mug of something warm into my hands. Eventually I looked up and saw my brother.

“So,” Conrad said. “It looks like despite your best attempts, you didn’t manage to kill yourself. Dad says you have some frostbite but you weren’t out there long enough to get hypothermia.” He took a sip from his own mug. “I know you probably hate me for ratting on you, Aoife, but …” He sighed. “I’m your brother, and I’m not going to stop looking out for you just because things change.”

“How are we flying?” I said, because it was the only thing I could think of to say. “We should be icing up and crashing and dying.”

Conrad blinked. “The Munin has a deicing system. Valentina designed it, I think.”

“Oh,” I said. Dean was dead. Dean was dead and cold and it was my fault.

Archie came and stood by Conrad, putting a hand on his shoulder. “You doing all right, kiddo?” He shook his head. “Stupid question. Of course you aren’t. You going to be okay to go back down the coast, or do we need to set down once we’re out of the Arctic Circle?”

“She’s covered in blood,” Conrad pointed out.

“It’s not mine,” I said. The words came out flat and toneless. It was how I felt, as if something had stepped on me and stopped my heart from beating right along with Dean’s.

Archie squeezed my hand. “I’m furious with you for running off like that, and for running to the Brotherhood,” he said quietly. “But that doesn’t matter now. Are you going to be all right, at least?”

I couldn’t muster the energy to outline the many ways in which I was not, so I just turned my face back to the porthole.

I couldn’t reverse the mistakes I’d made. Crow had taught me that much. But I could make up for them. From that moment on, I vowed, I would. Dean wouldn’t have died for nothing. I wouldn’t be remembered as Aoife Grayson the destroyer. I’d be Aoife Grayson the girl who tried with every bit of herself to put right what she’d made wrong.

That Aoife Grayson might have a chance. Not the liar or the deal maker or the dutiful daughter, but the Aoife Grayson who took it upon herself to move ahead, rather than trying to reverse the present into the past—that Aoife