I squeezed my father’s hand. This was worse than I ever could have imagined. I’d been warned there were consequences to what I’d done to try to reverse the Fae’s deception and save my mother, but I’d never imagined that they would be so direct, so tangible. That they would hurt my father.
“How long has he been like this? And having the dreams?” I said.
“Nightmares, more like,” Conrad confirmed. “He thrashes and screams—it got so bad last night we had to hold him down. It started right after you left. Valentina found him on the floor of his study, asleep. Nothing on this earth could rouse him, and she tried everything, believe me.”
“It’s an epidemic,” Bethina said quietly. “All over the country. People goin’ to sleep and not wakin’ up for love or money.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered to my father. I didn’t know if my being there could have prevented this, but the plain truth was I hadn’t been. Hadn’t been thinking of anyone except myself and the thin hope that I could get Dean back and put things right via some vague notion fed to me by my mother. She was insane, and by believing her, I was probably just as crazy and desperate in my own way.
My father would be ashamed of me. In that moment,
“Can we talk outside?” I said to Conrad, and he looked as if he’d rather do anything but. “Please?” I insisted. Conrad nodded, and I’d never been so relieved to leave a room as when we stepped from the oppressive shadows back into the weak sunlight of the mist-laden day.
We walked in silence the entire length of the lawn and sat on a stone bench by the reflecting pond, the bench covered with moss and pockmarks from decades, if not centuries, of weather. It mirrored the pond, choked with algae and lily pads, speckled with the crimson shards of fallen leaves floating on the surface.
“What was it like?” Conrad said abruptly. He didn’t look at me, just at the water, which rippled as something—a turtle or one of the ancient koi that lurked below the pads—surfaced to snatch at a late-season insect.
“Thorn?” I said. “Boring, mostly. Fae are very stuffy, and very odd. I spent a lot of time with Mother.”
“No,” Conrad said quietly. “Being with her—our mother.”
I thought about that. I’d seen flashes of the old Nerissa, the one who told us stories, took us on walks to search for flowers between cracks in Lovecraft’s sidewalks, let us watch clouds in the park for hours on end rather than going home and tending to things like chores and homework, but mostly I’d seen the new Nerissa, no longer mad, but wholly Fae.
“It was disappointing,” I said, and left it at that. I didn’t tell Conrad about the parts that had been all right, the evenings when we’d sit quietly, just spending time together. Conrad felt abandoned and lost, and I didn’t blame him.
“Then why did you go with her?”
I dug my fingers into the bench, nails carving crescents into the moss and lichen. “I had to, Conrad. She promised me a way to find Dean.”
Conrad turned and stared at me. It was a stare of pure pity, as if he hadn’t realized I was ill and I’d just told him I was terminal.
“Aoife,” he said carefully. “Dean is dead.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I snapped. “I just want to be home and not talk about Thorn anymore.” I prayed that Conrad would drop the Dean business, and thankfully he did. Trying to explain I was still looking for a way to the Deadlands would just get him thinking my iron poisoning was back, that I was mad.
“It’s been weird since you left,” he said. “All around. Things are happening—it’s almost like an epidemic. Dreams. Madness. The president might have to sit for an impeachment hearing, and the Rationalists are having a fit. It’s like when things were wild all over again.”
Something clicked into place, what the old woman had shouted at me earlier. “Somebody called me a demon this morning,” I said. “A demon from hell. Nobody talks like that. I mean, if they want to stay out of Rationalist jail.”
“Ever since people started falling asleep and the Proctors got stripped of their authority, a lot of that’s been happening,” Conrad said. “I’ve heard rumors that all sorts of creatures are cropping up. People who don’t know the truth blame the necrovirus, but it sounds to me like the barriers between Thorn and Iron and … other places are easier to get past.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. It could all just be mass hysteria. People thinking the world is ending.”
“It’s not ending,” I said quietly. “But this isn’t nothing.” I looked Conrad in the eye. He had our mother’s eyes, pale blue and cloudless, like a new sky after rain. I looked more like my father, both in coloring and features.
Conrad frowned. “Aoife, what are you not telling me?”
I looked up at the sky, at the mist that roiled above our heads like a sea, ancient and birthing primordial creatures onto a phantom shore.
What I’d seen in the Arctic, in the space where dreams were born, had been real. That much was clear to me now.
I told Conrad the truth then, there in the garden. About how I’d tried to reverse what I’d done because of Tremaine, step back through the loopholes of time and undo the damage I’d done to the Lovecraft Engine and the city. How it hadn’t worked, and how I’d snapped something fundamental in the gears of the worlds, Thorn and Iron and everything in between.
“I thought they weren’t so bad,” I said. “The Old Ones. I thought letting them go was just returning the universe to its natural state. They’re not evil, Conrad. They’re just … alive. A different sort of alive than us, but not malicious.”
“But, if I believe you, they’ve done this.” Conrad’s face was pale and drawn, and he made a sweeping gesture. “It’s them, all of this. All the dreamers and the strangeness. They’re returning to the Iron Land, right? And their influence is driving the entire world insane. How is that not so bad, exactly?” His brow had that crease in it, the one that meant he blamed me, and I couldn’t argue with him.
“I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known,” I mumbled, but even to my ears, it wasn’t convincing.
“I can’t …” Conrad rubbed his hands across his face, and I waited. I’d hoped he’d forgive me, or at least understand. I’d had to do something. What had happened when Tremaine tricked me had to be undone. “I can’t,” Conrad repeated. “I’m sorry, Aoife. I’m done.”
“What do you mean?” I rose as he did, panicked, watching him back away from me. “Conrad, don’t.…”
“You did this,” he said. “It’s because of you that our father is like this. You tried to make it better, and I get that, but you’ve made it worse.”
“Conrad—” I started, but he raised his hand.
“Don’t talk to me, Aoife,” he said. “Don’t try to make this right. I can’t count you as part of my family. We can’t ever repair this.” He started back toward the house. “What’s done is done. I expect you to be out of Graystone by the morning.”
I could have screamed at him, or run after him and demanded that he hear my side of things, but I just stood there and watched him go. Conrad was even more stubborn than I was.
And he was right. I’d thought that the Old Ones weren’t the evil that the Rationalists preached or the saviors that the Star Sisters, their worshipper sect, insisted they’d be when they returned. When I’d been in the dreaming place, the center of all the worlds, I’d seen them and felt their touch in my mind. It still burned there, as if the mere contact had scarred the channels of my conscience with acid. But I hadn’t felt malice, simply ancient intelligence. Yet to human beings, with their fragile makeup, who was to say the two weren’t one and the same? The Old Ones’ return could simply be too much for the fragile barriers between worlds, and it could signal a fracture that would make them all collapse, one after the other, like dominoes.
I hadn’t known what I was doing, not really, or what I’d set in motion. I’d been trying to save my family, myself. Everything I knew. Trying to put the world back the way it was. What I hadn’t understood was that it couldn’t be that way any longer. I wasn’t the Aoife Grayson who’d left Lovecraft all those months ago, and the world wasn’t the world I’d abandoned for Thorn.
So I let Conrad go, and let the dull ache sit in my chest like a stone while I tried to think of what to do.
Dean was the only thing I could save, at this point. The Old Ones were vast beyond my imagination. There was no way I could send them back, even if I knew how to access the small nucleus of the dreaming world where I’d found them. Crow, king of dreams, who controlled that place, would not welcome me back. We hadn’t parted
