“Is there any shelter on the bridge?” I demanded in the loudest whisper I could manage. The hum grew louder, filled the air and drowned out the ice.
“Not unless you’re gonna swing down among the pilings like a river rat,” Dean murmured.
“What are we supposed to do?” Cal shoved his hands through his hair. “We’re sitting ducks. We’re totally exposed!”
I started when Dean grabbed my hand. “We hoof it.” He tugged and I stumbled. “Run!” he elaborated when Cal stood, wavering between us and the way back to Lovecraft.
“Move it, Cal!” I shouted, silence forgotten. Avoiding capture mattered more than detection. Besides, nothing escaped the notice of the ravens.
Dean’s loping stride easily outmatched mine, and sharp pain shot up my arm as he dragged me along, our feet pounding on the span.
They could not drown out the sound of wings.
I knew that I shouldn’t look back, that I should tuck in and run like my life depended on it, because it did, but I couldn’t help turning my head to see what was coming.
The raven’s feathers gleamed liquid black in the cold starlight. Their eyes blazed with yellow aether, burning up the night sky like a flock of sparks. Their beaks were glass and their talons were sets of tiny gears and rods that clacked and grasped as they swooped in a low V over the river. Their feathers were hammered aluminum, painted black, and their innards were marvels of clockwork that printed everything their burning eyes saw onto tiny lanternreels.
A raven, unlike an automaton,
“Not but a hundred steps,” Dean panted. “Then we’ll be in the foundry. Those spy birds can’t spy through steel.”
I dug down, my feet clanging against the grate, my school bag slapping my hip, breath scissoring its way in and out of my lungs. Cal trailed us, his limbs flying in every direction as panic caught his feet and took him to ground.
“Cal!” I whirled, and my wrist wrenched in Dean’s grasp. He stumbled in turn, cursing.
“What in the blue hell are you doing, kid?”
I covered the two steps back to Cal, as the faint ghostly lamps atop the span of the Night Bridge winked out, one by one, covered by dusky wings.
“My ankle,” Cal moaned. “I think I broke it.”
“Aoife, we need to
Cal’s eyes were wide, his nostrils flaring in pain. I slung his arm over my shoulder. “Up. Put your weight on your good leg.”
“Just leave me,” he groaned. “Just leave me here … I swear I won’t give you up.…”
“Cal Daulton,
I’d come this far. I wasn’t turning around.
I stood, heaving Cal along with me. He was much heavier than his frame belied and I felt the rush of air along my face as the raven’s wings stirred the air.
Cal’s weight lifted all at once, and Dean was next to me, taking Cal’s other arm. “It’s a good thing I took a shine to you, Miss Aoife,” he said. “Because this is above and beyond.”
Dean muttered a swear as we dragged Cal between us. “Hard left. Head for the automaton sheds inside the foundry fence.”
The gates of the Nephilim Foundry were shut for the night, but Dean found a gap in the fence and I helped Cal through. In the shadow of the outbuildings and the loaders—the sleds that ferried the slag, the by-product of the foundry—we stumbled through a patchwork world of glow and shadow, iron and frozen ground.
I could barely breathe from our dash and Cal’s weight, but I forced myself on, staying close to Dean.
He rattled the doors of the nearest building, a machine shed with the phantom shapes of automatons waiting for repair beyond the dirt-coated glass panes. “In here,” he rasped. “Put yourself on the floor—those things are still coming.”
Spurred by the ever-present sound of wings, I skip-hopped across the open space with Cal and we ducked through the doors just as the ravens swooped over the towers and tin roofs of the foundry and banked, turning back toward Lovecraft in the same rigid pattern that mimicked life but was as cold and precise as a surgeon’s tool.
I let Cal down gently, and slumped next to him. My heart was beating on my ribs like a fist on a madhouse door.
Dean exhaled and leaned his head back against the corrugated wall. “That was entirely too near for my taste.” He pulled a flattened packet from his back pocket and a silver lighter from his jacket. “Care for one?” he said as he bit off a Lucky Strike from the pack.
“Girls with good breeding don’t smoke.” I quoted Mrs. Fortune without even realizing it, and then blushed. Dean wasn’t the kind of person who’d care what a school matron thought. He wasn’t the kind of person who put stock in girls who did, either, and the last thing we needed now was for him to think me silly. Which I was, to be worrying about comportment at a time like this.
“All right, then,” Dean said, touching the flame to the tip. “Lemme know if you decide not to be good, miss.”
I gave him what I could of a thankful smile before I crouched next to Cal, taking in his flushed face and shallow breaths. He looked like poor Ned Connors had, after Ned chopped off his little finger in a drill press during Machine Shop. I moved Cal’s hair, soaked with freezing sweat, off his forehead. “How’s the ankle?”
“Awful,” he said. He kicked off his boxy school shoe and pulled down his argyle sock. I winced at the sight of the swelling around the joint. I had barely passed our first-aid course—to treat the burns, breaks and slashes associated with work in the Engine—but I gingerly prodded Cal’s foot, and he yelped.
“Quiet!” Dean commanded. “You think the foundry doesn’t have its own bits of mean metal rolling around after dark?”
I considered being stuck here overnight, and our chances of escape in the light of day. Even with the raven patrols, the night was our only friend right now. I bit my lip, looking at Cal. “We’re just going to have to wait until we get to Arkham,” I told him. “I’ll find you a surgeon or a hospice there, I promise. Can you walk at all?”
Cal pressed his lips together. “I can try, if you help me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “But we have to keep moving.” I reached for him, tried to lever us into some kind of duet.
“I’m your guide, full stop,” Dean said quickly. “Don’t expect me to get in on that dance.”
“Nobody asked you to dance with anyone,” I snapped, helping Cal up. My shoulders protested the weight, but I let him lean on me. “Just do what I’m paying you for.” Dean Harrison might not be a heretic in the sense the Proctors understood the word, but he was certainly no gentleman.
Dean dropped his Lucky Strike and ground it under his boot. “Aye, aye, Miss Aoife.” He rolled the door back without another word and stuck his head out. “All clear.”
The narrow avenue between the long steel sheds before us rippled with fog, the aether lamps nailed to poles on each building face spitting in the moisture. In the distance I heard the whine of gears and saw a pair of blue lamplike eyes riding through the fog. I shivered, not just because of the wind on my sweat-scrimmed skin. The automatons of the foundry reminded me too much right now of everything I’d left in Lovecraft—nightjars, madmen, the looming turn of the year since Conrad had gone away. The feeling hadn’t left me that this journey into the wilds of Arkham was all a terrible mistake, and we weren’t even off the foundry grounds. There were worse things waiting for me outside the city gates than madness. Ghouls, roadside bandits, and the specter of heresy that my brother represented. If I came back from Arkham alive, I wouldn’t just be a potential infected—I’d be condemned as a heretic.
If I left the city, I might never be able to come back. Conrad had to have known when he sent the letter. He
