stowing baggage.
“I’d be more worried about those Brotherhood cats,” Cal said. “I mean, how are they even still around? I thought the Proctors had ’em all rounded up.”
“Who knows if they stayed that way?” I said. “Besides, I wouldn’t put it past Valentina’s father to still have it in for me.”
Harold Crosley, Valentina’s repulsive, scheming father, deserved to be locked up. He wanted to replace the Proctors with something that bargained with the Fae, that used their power as ours, and I knew nothing could come of that except betrayal and death. An alliance between Thorn and Iron wasn’t natural.
Out of all the things the Proctors had done, locking up Harold Crosley was the one bright spot. But it appeared either he was out, or the Brotherhood had chugged right along without him.
“We have to be careful,” I told Cal. “They’re never going to stop trying to use my Weird, as long as their members are free.” They wouldn’t hesitate to lock me up and use me until my brain was mush, to further their goals. My father had left the Brotherhood, broken with the only family he’d known to protect me from that, and I’d be damned if I was going to hand myself over without a fight.
The airship bumped and jostled as it rose from its tie-downs, and I breathed a little easier.
“We’re going to be all right now,” Cal said, and patted the back of my hand. I gave him an insincere smile in response, then stared out the window as the countryside fell away below us, wishing I shared his convictions.
I made it to Cleveland, and practically ran off the ship and to the terminal’s outside area, where I gulped great breaths of fresh air. The iron caused a throbbing headache and black spots to appear behind my eyes.
If we could have crossed the country by jitney, it would have been slightly more bearable, but I didn’t have the time. Even as I relished being free of iron poisoning for a few moments, I scanned the crowd for the Brotherhood, but nobody paid Cal and me any attention. He’d kept his new shape. I’d had a hard time not jumping every time I looked at the seat beside mine and saw a pudgy brunet rather than my familiar lanky, blond friend.
The bell sounded, and Cal breathed a sigh of relief when I sat back down next to him. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d ditched me.”
“Never,” I said. “I’m just not sure how much longer I can take this.”
Iron poisoning was insidious—it started small, flickers out of the corner of your eyes, then grew to pain in your joints and skull that progressed until you could no longer tell what was real and what was the iron working on your Fae blood, and you’d do anything to make the pain stop.
Cal closed his hand over mine, surprising me. “You’ll be all right, Aoife,” he said. “You’re the strongest person I know.”
The flight to St. Louis was a little easier—the stewardesses fussed over Cal and served lunch, and the food helped settle my stomach. Once we took off for Las Vegas, I watched the plains ripple and change by the hour to mountains, spiky and so close I felt I could reach out and grab a handful of snow from their caps.
The mountains bled into desert, and I saw the carcass of an airship below, iron bones scattered across the landscape, the track of its crash cutting into the belly of the land, exposing bloodred dirt.
I saw another, and another. “Cal,” I said, and pointed.
“It’s the updrafts,” he said sagely. “Warm air from the desert and cold from the mountains. Turbulence.”
I didn’t bother to ask how he knew—Cal had an answer for almost everything. I guessed it came from being a ghoul, stuck in the sewers with nothing to do except read human books and adventure stories and dream of life above.
The airship bounced, and I gripped the arms of my seat. A woman behind me gave a small cry.
“Ladies and gentlemen”—a smooth voice came out of the trumpet-shaped speaker above my head—“we’ve encountered a little rough air, so we’re going to ask everyone to remain in their seats until further notice.”
I heard the rivets in the hull strain as the airship gained altitude. We bounced again, as if a giant child had us on the end of a string that he tugged mercilessly.
“Jeez,” Cal said, wincing. “I’m going to upchuck if this keeps happening.”
I passed him the empty bowl from my ice cream sundae. “If you throw up on me, I’ll kill you.”
“I can’t help it!” he moaned. “I get a nervous stomach when I eat human food.”
The next jolt knocked bags from their perches and slammed my head against the back of my seat so hard I saw stars. I heard a whine from the back of the airship, and we lurched, losing a hundred feet in the blink of an eye.
“Okay,” Cal said, and screams and shouts went up from the other passengers. “What on the scorched earth is going on?”
“That wasn’t normal,” I agreed, craning a glance out of the bubble-glass window next to our seat. A trail of smoke blossomed against the pale white-blue sky, sprung from a black dot that quickly resolved itself into another airship as it gained on us.
“I don’t think this is a good sign,” I said to Cal. He peered over my shoulder. We both saw the flash, and a second later the impact rocked our ship.
A stewardess clawed her way through our cabin to the cockpit, and I could hear the pilots shouting at one another as she opened the door.
The airship behind us drew closer. Half of its cabin had been blasted away, leaving the batteries and fans exposed to the open air. Noxious-looking smoke filled the rest of the skeletal cabin structure, and I could see tiny figures moving back and forth inside.
“Oh man,” Cal said. “Oh man. What are we going to do, Aoife?”
“I have no idea,” I said as our craft shuddered and I heard the whine of the fans die. “I just hope our pilot stops running before we get shot down.”
The other airship drew alongside us, and I saw the figures inside clearly. They wore masks—that explained how they could stand the high altitude and the thick smoke. Long chains with hooks on the end bit into our hull, closing the distance between the skeletal ship and ours. One shattered the window next to our seats and clasped the sill, and I shrieked as glass spilled into my lap.
Cal put an arm around me as the other ship passed a flexible gangway between the crafts, but I shrugged him off.
“Pirates,” he said, excitement bleeding into his voice. “I never thought I’d actually see pirates.…”
“This is not going to be an adventure,” I said. Inside, I was panicking. I’d heard stories of pirates lighting airships on fire after they’d stripped them, leaving the passengers to burn alive, or breaking into the cockpit and setting the planes to crash to earth.
Worse, I’d heard of passengers being press-ganged into service on the pirate craft, or sold overseas to slavers in countries beyond the reach of the Proctors.
That couldn’t happen to me. I had to get to San Francisco.
I watched as the pirates made their way across the gangplank to our airship, moving slowly and heavily, even considering the equipment that weighed them down.
I grabbed Cal’s arm. “We have to hide,” I hissed. I couldn’t be caught here, not when we were still so far from San Francisco.
“Where?” Cal demanded. “Where are we supposed to go?”
I cast my eye about and saw the door to a water closet at the back of the cabin. “This way,” I said. A clang resounded through the first-class cabin as the hatch blew off its hinges, and people screamed.
I didn’t have any money or jewelry for the pirates, which meant that all they had to take from me was myself. I couldn’t be kidnapped now.
The water closet wasn’t big enough for both of us, really, and the door wouldn’t shut completely. I squeezed in close to Cal, sharing air and heartbeats.
We heard shouting in the cabin, but it was all passengers. None of the usual screams of robbery. I peered through the tiny crack left in the door.
The pirates moved soundlessly and with purpose, snatching jewels off necks, watches off chains and wallets from shaking fingers. I felt my stomach tighten. This was all wrong. They were mechanical. They might have been automatons for all the emotion they showed.
