out the wave of agony as I writhed and screamed on the gravel.
Small, strong hands wrapped around my wrists, and arms pulled me against a silk dress that smelled both familiar and terrifying—the overwhelming aroma of the orchid perfume favored by Fae.
I blinked the pain tears from my eyes and waited for the face above me to come into focus.
Nerissa stroked her thin fingers over my hair, my cheeks, brushed the tears from my face as if I were five years old again. I couldn’t fathom how she could even be here, and simply stared at her.
“You?”
“I’m here,” she confirmed. “When I heard you’d run away I had to follow you.”
“But the iron …” I made myself sit up and scoot away from her. She still looked like her new, improved self. Well-dressed, hair up, cheeks flushed with life. The tinge of madness in her eyes I’d come to know as normal wasn’t there. Yet.
“I’ll be all right for a few minutes, out here where there’s no metal,” my mother said. “I had to use the
“What I had to do,” I told her. “I have to find Dean.”
“Well, you’re not going to find him with your little parlor trick,” Nerissa said crisply. “The Deadlands are closed to the living, Fae, human or anything else. Your Weird won’t get you there, and you’re lucky you’re not dead from trying.”
I tried standing, and found it a treacherous endeavor. I staggered over to the statue and sat by the fallen hero’s feet. My skull was echoing, and the gravity of what Conrad had said was starting to sink in, now that I’d failed. “So, what, you came to scold me? I thought you didn’t want me going to the Deadlands, so why come?”
“Because you ran off with that piece of scum Grey Draven, Octavia is beside herself with rage and I told her I’d go make sure you weren’t colluding against the Fae.”
“I’m doing what I have to,” I repeated. “You wouldn’t help me.”
She shook her head, reaching to stroke my cheek, but I pulled away. “I told you it wouldn’t be this simple, Aoife,” she said. “Playing roulette with Death never is.”
“It’s so much worse than that,” I whispered, and felt hot tears of helplessness and panic start to flow. I couldn’t hold them back. I sobbed, and I let Nerissa rub my back and whisper soothing words, because nobody else would, and in that moment I needed it.
I didn’t tell her about the Old Ones. I let her think all my tears were for Dean. I couldn’t handle having yet another person look at me as if I’d set fire to everything they held near and dear.
“Poor girl,” Nerissa whispered. “Everything seems so big and impossible at your age. This boy—surely he can’t be worth killing yourself or melting your brains over?”
“He’s the
“I see,” she murmured, before I could backpedal or try to apologize. “If you’re really insistent, then I might know of another way. Even though I think it’s a foolish thing. The dead should stay dead, if you ask me.”
That sounded like the Nerissa I knew—never a mother to coddle or console, even before the madness really sank tooth and claw into her mind. It helped, in an odd way. A mother who wanted to comfort me and have a heart-to-heart? I’d have no idea what to do with that or how to react.
“I didn’t ask you, but I have a feeling you’ll tell me anyway,” I said. I didn’t care that I was being a mouthy brat—not the way I’d care if it were my father across from me. I didn’t feel the connection to Nerissa I did to him. I guessed Conrad was right. Our mother had left us long before she’d been committed.
“You really are a difficult child,” my mother sighed.
“I’m not a child,” I told her. “By this point, I think I’ve earned the right to be treated like an adult.”
“You’re not,” my mother said. “But I can see you aren’t going to give up this ridiculous idea, so I’ll tell you what I know: when I was in the madhouse another patient told me about a man in San Francisco.”
Oh, this was perfect. “Mother,” I said, slow and direct, “your one idea comes from another inmate in a mental institution.”
“I didn’t belong there,” my mother snapped. “Neither did he. He was a Spiritualist, and the Proctors locked him up for heresy. He worked with a doctor who had made a machine that could reach the Deadlands. Horatio Crawford, that was his name. Dr. Horatio Crawford.”
“And?” I prompted. One madman’s tale of a magical device that could peel back the layers of space and time when even my Weird failed was suspect, to say the least.
“You’ll probably scoff, since it’s a Fae tale and not made of math and metal,” my mother said. “But I thought there was a thread that bound souls to life, a measure of time that was only theirs, and when the thread got cut, well … Octavia always used to tell me that was what led to spirits and phenomena and such.”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to anger her now that she was talking by suggesting that Fae ghost stories held about as much water as the kind my classmates and I used to tell. The notion of the thread, though—if there was a connection between worlds via the Gates, why not a connection of the soul to the Land it had inhabited in life?
“If Crawford found a way to use his machine to tether the soul to life but allow it to be free of a body … well, that makes sense to me,” Nerissa said. “Your father always said magic was just science nobody could quantify yet.”
“That sounds like him,” I said. I desperately wanted to hear more about her and Archie’s life together, but now wasn’t the time. Now, time was precious.
“Thank you for trusting me,” I said, when she only stared up at the high windows of Graystone, which reflected the mountains beyond, gray and implacable as stone eyes.
“I just know you’re too stubborn to give up,” she said. “And I don’t want you to get hurt, or have your spirit broken worse than it already is. I do care about you, Daughter.” She pressed her hand over mine, and I tried not to start at her cold skin. The gesture was so foreign, all I could do was squeeze her fingers, because I didn’t want her to think it was in vain.
“Go to San Francisco and find Horatio Crawford,” my mother said, giving my hand a squeeze back. “If he’s still alive, then perhaps the two of you will be clever enough to cheat Death.”
She rose and smoothed her skirts. “I’ve been here too long. Goodbye, Aoife.” After a moment of hesitation, she reached out and cupped my face with her thin, cool palm. “Be careful,” she whispered, an unidentifiable expression flitting across her face. Then she stepped back and walked away, and the mist swallowed her up.
I stayed where I was. My mother had never been reliable, but when it came to Dean, could I really be picky about where I got help?
There was nothing I could do for Dean or my father by sitting on a garden bench moping. I finally had a sliver of hope, and not to follow it just because of the source would be the worst kind of foolish.
I stood up and turned back toward the house. There was only one direction to go, and that was west, to San Francisco.
4
Winging Westward
IT WASN’T HARD to convince Cal to come with me. Cal was always up for an adventure, for bucking authority, whether it was the Proctors or Conrad. That was one of my favorite things about him.
I should have been terrified of Cal. Ghouls lived under old cities like Lovecraft—infested the sewers built before the Proctors took control—and would attack like a lightning strike made of muscle and teeth when they were hunting. But Cal had been my friend before I’d found out the truth about myself and the world, the necrovirus, all of it. And he’d kept right on being my friend after. Besides, as a changeling, I didn’t have much room to talk. If the two of us told a normal human the truth, it’d be a toss-up whom they’d turn their shotgun on first.
He procured extra clothes for both of us, plus food, money and a map of California from my father’s vast
