confidence that everything was going to be all right.
The Brotherhood took us to a house high up on Haight Street, near Golden Gate Park. It was sandwiched between two other, identical houses and painted bright blue. It was such an incongruous spot for an outfit like the Brotherhood that I could barely worry when they separated Dean and me again in the hall and took me upstairs, to a study in the turret that looked down Haight Street to the Port Authority, its white spire gleaming with raindrops against the streetlights.
The young Brotherhood agent shackled me to my chair and left. I waited, watching the rain on the glass, listening to the hiss of the aether lamps and trying to do calculus in my head to keep the iron from getting to me.
Iron madness could come on slowly, over years, or all at once, depending on how much you were exposed to. The background hum of a city was one thing, but iron against my skin was another thing entirely. I probably had only a matter of hours before I started hallucinating, a day or two before I was completely mad.
I focused on the raindrops. They weren’t just raindrops, I reminded myself, but tiny prisms, each containing fractals of infinite design and possibilities. The math inside a raindrop could keep my mind from breaking down for months.
Fortunately, I didn’t need to wait that long. After barely an hour by the clock hanging above the vast chestnut desk in front of me, the door opened and a single figure came in.
“Hello, Aoife,” he said. “Didn’t think I’d be seeing you again so soon.”
I had last seen him covered in mud, running like a scared dog with his tail between his legs. I stared, unable to believe what I was actually seeing. “No,” I said. “There’s no way they’d let you …”
“The Brotherhood makes deals with a lot of unsavory folks, Aoife,” Grey Draven said. “Fae, Erlkin. I had an agreement with Crosley that if I ran across your father I’d turn him over. We both had a vested interest in keeping the Fae off our territory. Of course, they’re filthy heretics, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have the same end goal.”
“Trust a snake to find a warm nest,” I grumbled, and Draven clapped me on the shoulder.
“Aoife, I’m hurt. I thought you’d be much happier to see a familiar face.”
“Then I guess we’re both disappointed,” I said. “Now, even though I know it’s your favorite hobby, why don’t you cut out the pointless blather and tell me what you want?”
Draven sat on the edge of the desk and removed a cigarette from a gold box. He lit it, inhaled and watched as the smoke curled in the bluish light of the aether lamps. “You’re wrong, Aoife. It’s the threats that come after the talking that I actually enjoy the most.” He favored me with one of his razor-thin smiles. “I spent some time in Proctor custody after I dropped back into the Iron Land, you know. It’s not a pleasant place to be.”
I sighed and looked directly at him. After what I’d seen in the past few … hours? days? who knew how long I’d been under? … he didn’t frighten me in the least. “It’s not my problem if you don’t like the taste of your own medicine. If you’re going to kill or torture me, would you please just do it? I’m getting bored sitting here listening to your rambling stories.”
“Kill you!” He barked a laugh, before he stubbed his cigarette out in a dish that looked like it was carved from a ram’s horn. “Dear girl, I would no sooner kill you than I would kill Nikola Tesla himself returned from the afterlife.”
“You might get a shot at that sooner than you think,” I muttered, but I don’t think he even heard me. Dr. Draven was certainly a man impressed with the sound of his own voice.
“You have a purpose in life, Aoife, though you may not realize it yet. And that purpose is to serve the Brotherhood. You are a young girl, I realize, and that is why I don’t hold you responsible for your selfish actions.”
He got up and pulled a ring of keys from his vest, sorting through them until he found one that fit my shackles.
“I hold them to your father far more closely, these responsibilities. There are things you should have been indoctrinated in from birth that you never so much as considered.”
I watched as he unlocked my shackles, and felt the immense weight of the iron against my skin lift. I calculated the distance to the door. If I was fast, I’d decided while I’d been waiting, I could reach the street before anyone could stop me, and then I could start screaming if I had to. It wasn’t like the Brotherhood could gun me down in a public street. That privilege was reserved for the Proctors.
“Such as?” I said, shooting him a glare. “What exactly should I consider? That you manipulate people and cut deals with the very creatures that should be your sworn enemies? I know all about Crosley making accords with the Fae, giving them leeway in exchange for information about the Thorn Land. I know that when my father objected, you cut him out and threatened his life.”
“Harold Crosley threatened his life,” Draven said, perfectly calm. “And that had more to do with Archie’s predilection for running off with people’s daughters than his objections about our methods.”
“That’s a load of crap and you know it,” I shot back, borrowing one of Dean’s indelicate phrases.
Draven twitched an eyebrow. “I see you’re about as personable as Archie, even if he didn’t teach you anything you need to know to be a proper Gateminder.”
I sighed. “I know you’re going to threaten me or make me an offer. So why don’t we get on with it?”
Draven gave me a thin smile. “And you’re direct like him too. I miss the days when young women were taught manners.”
“I miss the days when I wasn’t being harassed by the likes of the Brotherhood,” I grumbled.
Draven laced his fingers over his knee. He looked for all the world like a headmaster relishing the scolding he was about to give. “I’m going to be frank with you, Miss Grayson—you don’t have a choice any longer. You’ve denied the Brotherhood, but your birthright is working for us, to keep the darkness of the Fae and magic and the Old Ones at bay. Why would you deny that?”
“My
“You know,” Draven said, getting up and going to the window. He watched the bob and sway of the lamps atop the Golden Gate Bridge for a moment before turning back to me. “It would be a shame if anything happened to that boy Dean. Especially after you’ve worked so hard to be reunited.”
Just like that, all the fight went out of me. I hated that the Brotherhood could find my weakness so easily. Hated that they had something to hold over me, even now.
“What do you want?” I sighed.
Draven spread his hands. “For you to do your duty, of course. To come back to the fold of the Brotherhood and give up these foolish dreams of putting things back exactly as they were before.” He leaned forward into my face, so close that I could smell garlic and whiskey on his breath.
“There is no changing what you’ve done, Aoife. There is only forestalling the inevitable.” He looked out at the sky, and at the growing dark spot, the blot on light. “And from the looks of things, that won’t be much longer.”
“You don’t want any sort of forestalling,” I said in disgust. “You just want leverage against things like the Fae.”
“Of course I do,” Draven said with a shrug. “In the scheme of things, humans are relatively powerless. Only one of us can create and use Gates, as opposed to any Fae who thinks to raise their head from the mud long enough to step into a
“Nice as it is to get a dose of xenophobia along with paranoid ramblings,” I said, “why don’t you just tell me what I’m going to have to do to keep you from hurting Dean?” I raised my chin. I might not have had any leverage left, but I did have my dignity. I wasn’t going to cry or beg. I’d done enough of that in the Deadlands.
“You’re going to do exactly as we say,” Draven told me, “until we have no use for you any longer. And you’re going to cease all contact with Dean and your family. Except for that mother of yours. She could be useful. Her feelings for you make her vulnerable.”
I almost choked on my laughter. “You think I have any influence over Nerissa? You’re even dumber than you
