had shown me that my coming here was never really about Dean, and Chang before him had made it clear too. It was about my inexorable destiny, both as the bringer of destruction and the only one who could reconstruct reality. Because of my Weird, and my position as Gateminder, that would always be my destiny.
I had made a bad bargain once. I had bargained selfishly—the Old Ones’ return for my mother. I’d been selfish here, too, but there was still time to fix it.
All I had to do was strike a good bargain with the worst creature in all the Lands, and I’d be home free.
“No pressure, Aoife,” I muttered to myself as I took another step forward.
The rifts hummed all around me. There was no sound in space, but the sheer power of the cosmos, the background music of the stars and planets, sang to my Weird, urging me to merge with the universe, become stardust.
I ignored it as best I could.
Nylarthotep had to be somewhere beyond these tears in reality. His power was distorting the Deadlands, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t still standing on solid ground. Controlling reality was a Fae trick—keep your enemy off- balance, keep control of their reactions. It hadn’t worked when I’d been in the Thorn Land, and it wasn’t going to work now.
As I moved between the star roads, I became aware of a faint sound, of black smoke and dust rising all around me.
“Is it her?”
I flinched. I hated that name, the name the rebel factions in Lovecraft had coined for me after I blew the Engine trying to make a bad deal with Tremaine.
“I want the king,” I said, loud enough that my voice echoed back at me. “I want Nylarthotep.”
Well, that was encouraging.
“I know you’re here!” I shouted. “Stop playing games with me.”
I squinted into the dust, feeling it sting my eyes. A face came into focus here and there, frozen in an expression of torment. They were like the souls and spirits I’d encountered before, but these were torn and shredded, twisted. They were just as affected by the proximity of the rifts as my Weird was.
“What happened to you?” I asked the cloud of souls. “Why are you here?”
“Wait for what?” I said, trying to be patient. If souls decayed even in the Deadlands, it must be exponentially faster.
“I want to see Nylarthotep,” I said again. “And I want to see him now.”
I sensed a shift, and the spirits drew back. I wondered if they were like me, humans with a Weird trapped by the Gates, or if they’d been tricked by Fae into walking through
It was easy to forget there’d been a world without magic before the first Storm exploded into the human world. A world where these things were just stories for children, distilled from stories for adults, to keep the darkness beyond the campfires out there, where it belonged.
But there had been, and these people were relics of it.
“You’re a rare case,” a voice said. It was textured and cultured, a rich velvet curtain of a voice, far from the rasp or growl I’d expected. “Most men would give up their lives to avoid meeting me face to face.”
“I’m not most,” I told the voice. “And I’m not a man.”
A laugh. Low, like a warm finger dragged across skin. “Then approach, girl who is not like most. Tell me why you seek the favor of the one who waits.”
I took one step, then another. It wasn’t like I could turn around. Reality was so distorted, I wouldn’t be able to find my way back without opening a Gate, and I couldn’t imagine that, in the Deadlands, a new Gate would lead anywhere good.
The distortion grew stronger as I approached, and the rifts fell away. My stomach lurched. I’d never gotten close to another being who could manipulate reality the way Tesla or I could. There was probably a good reason for that, because this was the worst I’d ever felt and still managed to stay conscious.
“Does it bother you?” Nylarthotep asked. He sat in a simple black chair with a high back, a robe similar to the ones the Faceless wore swirling to hide his figure. He wore a cowl emblazoned with the Yellow Sign. It wasn’t embroidered or painted, though—Nylarthotep’s robe was made of the universe, and the Yellow Sign was a slice of a sun, churning and flaming upon his brow.
I felt dizzy looking at him, and it wasn’t just because the vortex of unreality had grabbed me with its iron grip and refused to let go. I’d never seen anything like Nylarthotep up close. He felt like the Old Ones.
Worse, though. The Old Ones were incredibly ancient, but they were neither good nor evil. They simply existed, in the way of planets and the universe, an existence that could no more be denied than sunlight could.
Nylarthotep pulsed with malignance. If you could describe evil and malice as a figure, as a feeling, it would be this. This nausea, this panic, my hindbrain screaming that I was close to something no human was ever meant to see.
“Of course you bother me,” I said. “I’ve been dreading meeting you ever since I decided to come here, back in San Francisco.”
“I do not know this place, San Francisco,” Nylarthotep intoned. He shifted, and the stars in his robe canted and re-sorted themselves into new constellations. “I have no knowledge of the human world. When I was sent here, the Iron Land did not yet exist.”
“I want you to release a soul from your grasp,” I said. “Just one. Surely you can spare that.” I figured getting down to business might stop him from staring at me from beneath his cowl. I could feel his eyes. They felt like a sunburn—inexorable and with the sting of permanent damage.
“That’s interesting,” Nylarthotep said. “But the answer is no. The Deadlands are my domain and the souls within are my property.”
He stood, drawing to nearly seven feet tall. I got the sense that there was something inside Nylarthotep’s physical form, something incredibly large, indescribably ancient and aching to be let free. What I was seeing was the watered-down version, and my Weird kicked and screamed at the proximity of the larger thing.
“Please,” I said. “I’m here asking. Not demanding. All I want is Dean.”
