our father, solid under his too-small jacket, and I felt relief wash over me as I touched him and convinced myself he was real.
“It’s been a crazy couple of weeks,” he said. “Months. Time isn’t doing the same things it used to. I don’t know what the hell’s going on out there, Aoife.”
I had an idea, but I wasn’t about to throw myself on my sword and admit responsibility just yet. Tell Conrad I was responsible for all of the wrong that was happening? All the dreams? I couldn’t be sure, could I? No need to alarm everyone.
I wondered how long I’d be able to rationalize it that way.
“What are you doing here and not on Cape Cod? Where’s Dad?” I asked instead. Conrad’s face fell, and I knew that something was gravely wrong.
“He’s upstairs,” he said. “We had to come back here—the Cape, it’s not safe.… Look, you need to see him to understand. I’m glad you’re back, but you could’ve gotten here a lot sooner.”
I felt a pang of guilt. Of course I hadn’t had to linger in Thorn so long. I could have risked more to escape sooner. The desire I’d felt from the moment I’d left to come to the only place I’d ever considered home, even if living in it would slowly poison me, didn’t make up for my delay.
“How are you doing?” I asked Conrad as we mounted the grand staircase. “I mean with the iron poisoning?”
“It comes and goes,” he said. “I think not having a Weird helps. I’m doing all right, Aoife, you don’t have to worry about me.” He cast a sideways glance at me. “Do I need to worry about you?”
I could feel the pull already, the scream of the iron against my Fae blood like metal on metal, sparking and turning to slag inside me. “Nothing to worry about,” I lied.
Conrad’s raised eyebrow told me he wasn’t buying it. “Uh-huh,” he said. We went all the way to the back of the house, to the master suite, where I’d never been. That was my father’s room. Even when he’d been gone, I’d felt it would be an unforgivable incursion to go inside.
“I really am fine,” I insisted. “I’m more worried about what’s going on down there in Arkham. What’s happened, Conrad? Where’s Dad, and Valentina? Why did you leave Cape Cod?”
Conrad paused at the master suite’s double doors, which were carved high above our heads with phases of the sun and moon in great orbits.
“Speaking of questions, where did you go, Aoife?” he said. “What happened to you? I tried my damndest to get it out of Cal, but his mouth was locked up tighter than a bank vault.”
I felt as if hours passed while we stared at each other; he was waiting for an answer. “I was in the Thorn Land,” I said at last, bracing for Conrad’s inevitable explosion. “With our mother.”
“I had to,” I said.
“I don’t understand why you’d ever give that woman the time of day, never mind run away with her,” Conrad said.
“It was that or lose Dean forever,” I said softly. “I’m sorry, Conrad. Do you at least believe that?”
He heaved a sigh, pushing his hands through his dark hair until it stood straight up. “Yeah,” he said. “I believe you’re sorry. But that doesn’t mean this is all okay with me, Aoife. You know how I feel about the full- blooded Fae.”
“Will you please stop acting like I’m a traitor and tell me what the hell is going on in Arkham?” I demanded. Conrad usually just needed somebody to bite back, to knock some sense into him, and then he’d return to being my slightly pompous but generally tolerable older brother.
Conrad heaved a sigh, and before he could say anything else, the door swung open. The tall, blond figure waved his arms in irritation. “What’s all this noise? I told you that Mr. Grayson needs it quiet.…” Cal trailed off as he took me in, his pale, watery eyes going wide. “Aoife!” he exclaimed, and enfolded me into a hug that was all bony edges and Cal’s distinct, musty scent.
“Hey there, Cal,” I mumbled into his sweater. He squeezed me tighter, and his strength reminded me that I wasn’t dealing with a human boy. Cal was a shape-shifter, and had the prodigious physical abilities to go with it. I’d learned to live with the fact that his kind usually ate human flesh and lived below ground in nests. Cal was Cal, and whatever he was, he was my best friend in the world.
“I was so worried,” he said, holding me at arm’s length. He’d cut his hair, and his clothes fit for the first time in my memory. I was half sure the gray wool sweater and flannel slacks he was sporting had been my father’s at one point in my dad’s misspent youth.
“I’m all right,” I assured him, and cast a look at Conrad. He could hear it twice, and maybe believed me this time.
“Come in, come in,” Cal told me, and before Conrad could protest, dragged me into the master suite. “It’s good you’re here,” he said softly. “I hope it’ll make a difference.”
The first thing I noticed was that all the curtains were drawn. Heavy things, velvet and oppressive, full of dust that tickled my nostrils and trickled down the back of my throat. Blackout curtains, left over from the last war, or maybe the one before that.
The second was that my father was lying in bed, in his pajamas, sheets pulled up to his chest. At his side sat my friend Bethina, her copper curls in disarray, wearing a plain green dress rather than the maid’s uniform she’d worn when we first met. She held my father’s hand lightly, stroking the back of it with her fingertips. I felt a slow-encroaching sense of dread, like a rising tide.
“What’s going on here?”
Bethina looked up at me and blinked rapidly. “Oh, Miss Aoife. Thank goodness you’re back.”
“He’s been like this for a few days now,” Cal said quietly. “He’s fine as far as we can tell. He’s just … asleep.”
“Don’t know why, or how,” Conrad said, shutting the door and standing in front of it like an ill-tempered guard. “We’ve tried everything to wake him up, but he won’t react to anything. Until the nightmares come.”
Bethina nodded, her eyes wide. “Then he gets to screaming something awful. Noises like I never heard a man make.”
I turned on Conrad. “How could this happen?” My brother was the one acting like the leader of men. He could at least tell me how such a thing could be possible. My father wasn’t the sort to be caught by surprise, either by magic or by malady. He was strong—the strongest person I knew.
“I don’t know any more than you do,” Conrad snapped. “One minute he was fine, the next Arkham was going crazy, and the next he was like this.”
Bethina moved aside to make room for me, and I took my father’s hand. It was dry and cool, the hand of a patient rather than that of the strong man I knew my father to be. I felt the urge to cry, or scream, bubbling in my throat. I couldn’t be sure which it was.
“I think you better start from the beginning,” I said to Conrad. “Tell me exactly what’s happened since I’ve been gone.”
He sat next to me on the edge of the bed, but my father didn’t stir even as the mattress shifted under my brother’s weight. Conrad smoothed the blankets, adjusted the pillows and spoke without looking at anyone.
“It happened right after you left,” he said. “People started falling asleep and not waking up. Or they’d dream so vividly they’d think it was actually happening and they’d do things like walk into traffic or attack their loved ones.”
“The Proctors tried to control it and set up more quarantines,” Cal added, “but they’ve lost a lot of power. There’s all sorts of investigations by the government into their conduct, and without Draven, individual offices have pretty much gone off and done what they liked.”
“Riots in some places,” said Bethina, “and others are on total lockdown. Arkham pretty much got cleaned out, folks taken off to quarantine, after a bad rash of dreamers swept through and tried to light the place on fire.”
“Same thing happened on Cape Cod,” Conrad said. “Proctors were everywhere. Valentina decided to split up from us and try to find help, sympathetic folks in the Brotherhood of Iron, and she made me responsible for getting Dad back here, where he’d be safe.”
