on good terms, to say the least. He’d spent millennia keeping the Old Ones at bay from Iron and Thorn and all the living worlds, and in one fell swoop, a changeling who didn’t know what she was truly doing had opened the floodgates, released these ancient, implacable things to do whatever it was they planned to do upon their return to the living parts of the universe.
So it had to be Dean. The Deadlands were my destination now. At least I wouldn’t have to go back into the house to get my things. I doubted that, in the place where the dead went, I’d need clothes or food or anything except what was on my back.
I walked around the edge of the reflecting pond, into the ragged hedge maze that made up one whole side of Graystone’s property. The thing hadn’t been cared for in years, and there were large gaps in the hedgerow that you could pass through, rendering the maze useless.
At the center was a statue, one of the heretical bits and pieces that the Graysons had kept out of view of the Proctors when the Rationalists took control. It depicted a woman holding a fallen soldier, a cowl covering her face. I scrubbed at the oxidized copper plaque until I could read CUCHULAINN AND THE MORRIGAN. I had no idea who they were supposed to be—magicians, I guessed, or old gods renounced by the Rationalists.
The crows sat all over the statue, and they didn’t move at my approach. I was close enough to touch the largest one, and it stared at me with glassy black eyes, never blinking, never moving.
I retreated, discomfited by the birds, who’d been everywhere since I’d emerged from Thorn. Dean had always said they were the watchers, the eyes of the old gods and the magic that veined the world. Even my father’s airship was named after a raven, the most famous raven of all, Munin. My father had told me the story of Odin, a god who sacrificed his eye for wisdom, and who possessed two birds, Hunin and Munin—Thought and Memory—that flew into the world each day and brought knowledge back to Odin in Asgard, where he sat on his throne.
It wasn’t so different, I supposed, from Thorn and Iron, two places connected by the dotted lines of the universe, but at the same time wholly apart. One magic, one iron, one replete with the fantastic and one rooted firmly in the earth whereon it sat. There could be crossover, but there could never be harmony.
I turned my back on the crows, focusing on the Deadlands. My Weird let me cross those lines, fold that page so that I could brush one world against the next, travel from one to the next.
My mother had lured me into the Thorn Land by telling me she knew the way to the Deadlands, but now I was sure it was simple as crossing over to a place I’d never been before. I’d managed to build a Gate to Crow’s dreamworld, and it stood to reason that if I could access that place, I could access the Deadlands.
I didn’t need Nerissa, I thought, bitterness welling in my stomach. She’d strung me along for months while my father and my friends wasted away here, in an Iron Land thrown into chaos.
Putting aside my anger at my mother and her manipulation, I focused on building the Gate, as I had with the place of dreams. Then, I’d had a focus, something to channel my Weird. This time I was flying blind.
I wasn’t the first person to be able to do this—my much more famous predecessor, Nikola Tesla, had had the gift as well, had conceived of worlds beyond imagination, and was eventually responsible for breaking the bonds between them, creating the world as we knew it.
I didn’t have anything so spectacular in mind. I just needed to make a path, a bridge I could skip across before it collapsed.
Using my Weird felt a bit like standing on railroad tracks as a train approached—a rumble you could sense in your core, a disturbance that fed through every bit of you. My head started to pound, as it usually did, and a trickle of blood worked its way from my nose.
Forming a Gate, the sort of thing that Tesla constructed out of technology and the Fae constructed with their uncanny powers, took a lot of effort. It usually left me spent and drained, racked by headaches for at least a day, but I couldn’t afford that now.
I had to find Dean, and I let that desire pull me toward the gray spots between the bright beacons of Thorn and Iron and all the places in between that I could travel.
I could practically feel him, his warm chest against my cheek, smell his smell, hear his laugh. I was so close that the tears leaking from my eyes had nothing to do with the pain I experienced as the Gate opened in front of me.
Then, as quickly as I’d felt my Weird begin to respond to my desires, everything went wrong.
A scream ripped through the empty spaces that I saw when I opened myself to my Weird, and I felt a tug against the center of myself as if a jitney had slammed into me. Light exploded in front of my eyes and panic rose in my throat, along with a scream of my own. This had never happened before, and I didn’t know what I could do except be buffeted by a wave of resistance as I glimpsed a sliver of a gray sky and a black, twisted tree in a field of brown grass. Then I saw nothing, simply black velvet cut through by pinpricks of light.
Stars. I saw stars. I realized that I was in the vastness between worlds, and they weren’t stars but spots in the fabric of space and time, worlds and destinations that I could visit if my Weird could only reach them.
The cool grasp of the Deadlands, like opening a room long locked, breathed its last and slipped away. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t connect again.
And in a sudden upsurge of fear, I realized that I couldn’t go anywhere else, either. That I was trapped in between, my Weird refusing to return me where I’d been or to move me forward, to any of the points of light.
I did scream, then. I knew that my body was still on the ground at Graystone, but my consciousness was scattered across a thousand light-years, the image I carried with me only a memory of my physical body.
Had anyone with my gift ever been trapped here? Was my fate to float forever, always in between? I started to panic. It was the worst fate I could conceive of.
Then I saw them as I thrashed in the void: great shadows that blotted out the world-lights, one by one, long and lean, square and massive, or with tentacles that reached for each point of light, closing it amidst their incalculable bulk. I stared as the Old Ones passed by me close enough to touch, if I’d had fingers. Their inexorable journey from the dreaming place toward the point of light that represented the Iron Land was fast and relentless, and I watched, breathless, as their shimmering bodies slid by me, buffeting my Weird with their vast power.
I felt their desire to return to the Iron Land, their focus on it, their hunger to touch the shores that they had not touched for a hundred thousand years—a long time even for such creatures as they. They were coming, and it was clear there was no stopping them. I knew—I’d released them from their prison, let them loose into the in- between and sent them toward the Iron Land.
“STOP!” I screamed. Their voices were shredding me, tearing this non-body of mine apart, and I saw the lights begin to dim.
I was lost. I was never going to make it out of here. It went beyond panic now, into deep, true terror. I would hear the Old Ones’ voices echoing in my head for as long as I lived. No living thing was meant to encounter them this closely. Perhaps in the ancient times when they’d last come, a primitive brain too dense to decipher their voices might have withstood it, but now? Now I felt their voices on me like physical scars, the indelible touch of the Old Ones’ minds.
“Aoife!”
The voice cut through the cacophony of the cosmos, the background radiation, the rumble of the Old Ones’ passage.
“Aoife!”
My Weird snapped against my mind like a rubber band, and all at once I knew how to reel myself back in again, how to return to the point where my flesh resided, as well as my soul.
Opening my eyes was like taking a hammer blow to the forehead, and I lurched into the fetal position, riding
