stockings woeful against the frigid gloom.
Dean ran and caught up with me. “Whoa, there. Pump your brakes, kiddo.”
“I’m sorry.” I was already shamefaced, burning with humiliation. Young ladies didn’t lecture and they certainly didn’t shout. “That was rude.”
“Don’t care if the kid riled you,” Dean said. “Hell, he’d rile most anyone spent more than a hot minute with him. I can’t have you running off, is all. This isn’t the city. No Proctors keeping the critters out.”
“I don’t care,” I hissed, fierce as a wounded cat. “Let them digest me.” I was practically mad anyway. What harm would it do the world if I wasn’t in it?
Dean looked at the dark ground rippling with cold mist, to the high moon slashed with clouds, the bleak barren humps of the Berkshire Mountains beyond, and the ink stain of forest between us and them. “If it’s all the same, Miss Aoife, I’d rather keep you alive.”
I let a stanza of footsteps pass without speaking, my shoes breaking through the frost with a sound like grinding teeth.
“How far to Arkham?” I said at length. It seemed the most inoffensive topic at the moment.
“Four hours walking. Maybe a little more. We’ll set eyes on your old man’s house by dawn.” Dean yawned and stretched, popping his back like a cat. “Stay awake. Don’t let the cold get its teeth into you.”
“The Proctors will send out dogs and men to the crash site,” Cal piped up. “To be sure.” He was hopping along, and I slowed and offered him my arm. Cal didn’t know how cruel he could be sometimes, with his parroting of the Proctors and by listening to their crowing about the necrovirus, his tacit agreement with them that I would inevitably go mad.
Cal took my arm with a part-smile, and his dogged recitation of propaganda didn’t matter as much. That was Cal’s way—calm and reliable, bumbling and normal. If only he knew
“We can’t be caught,” I told Dean. “Not after what that wretched Alouette must have told them.” Behind us I saw Jean-Marc and Harry emerge from the wreckage, battered but intact. I hoped they’d make it to wherever they called home without any further trouble.
“Don’t worry your pretty brunette head, miss,” Dean said. He lit a cigarette as we marched, and puffed a smoke ring. “They haven’t managed to catch me yet.”
8
HOURS OF CHILLED cheeks and aching feet later, a sign on the mud-spattered, ice-pocked road, snugged against the Berkshire foothills, pointed to Arkham. Its wooden limbs stood akimbo, tattered from buckshot.
“Off the road now,” Dean said. “Arkham’s village police run to mean and bored, and they’ll call down the ravens on us if we go through town.”
The winding lane sat as a ribbon of darker against dark, overhung with the winter skeletons of oak trees and bound by stone. Dean hopped the low mossy wall and I helped Cal over.
The predawn field rolled and dipped, low curls of ground fog like tongues and tentacles rising from the frosted stubble of grass. The sky made a lid on the earth, a dome of silk dove clouds, and on the horizon the faintest line of blue-white fire sparked the dawn.
The ground was soft and thick as a coverlet, and I slipped in the freezing mud and fell against Dean. He caught me around the waist.
“Sorry!” I whispered. “I’m clumsy. Always have been.”
“I don’t see the downside.” His smile matched the ghostly glow of sunrise. “Care for a dance, while you’re here?”
I pulled myself free too fast and nearly fell again. Dean Harrison wasn’t my kind. He was wild-raised, no one I needed to form attachments with. If I let Dean get close, we wouldn’t go on a proper date, where I’d smile and laugh behind my hand while I lowered my eyes demurely like a city-bred young lady. Dean was trouble, and I’d be in an even worse stripe if I acquiesced to his charms. “No, that’s not happening,” I said, and felt myself flush even in the cool damp air of dawn.
Cal grumbled until Dean and I parted, and ignored my offered hand even though he was reduced to hopping on one leg with his bound-up ankle swinging.
We walked through the mist in silence, and it closed in on us like it could see and taste our presence.
“There’s a path cut in the rock,” said Dean. “Far side of this field.” He pointed at the raw gray granite climbing out of the earth. “I’m guessing that honking mansion up on the cliff is your pop’s place, since there’s not one Grayson inside the village walls that I’ve ever met.”
I had never seen Graystone, except for a curl-cornered picture my mother kept in a shoebox. The house of my father was all angles and turrets and the rough, body-sized granite blocks that gave the estate its name. Singularly unwelcoming, like an asylum or a heretic prison. Much like, I’d always assumed, the man who called it home.
Would I see my father? I could ask him how he and Nerissa had come together, what her madness first showed itself as. Cleverness, like Conrad, or her fancies about fairies and witches? Or just that sad, miles-gone stare that looked through me as if I were window glass?
Alternately, I could say nothing, and just savor my first look at the man who was half of me. There were no pictures of my father except the clues in my own face. I wanted to memorize him if I could, because the one thing you learned as a ward was never to assume the same face would open the door when you came home again. It wasn’t something to be maudlin about, just a truth, like secondhand shoes or being the last to eat at supper.
“You quit talking, Miss Aoife. You five by five?” Dean said. The mist held us in, kept our secrets close to our skin.
“Squared away,” I said, sneaking a phrase from Cal’s lexicon.
Dean slowed so we walked abreast. “Ain’t thrilled about seeing your old man?”
“You’re assuming he wants to see me.” That was the other half of the orbit of possibilities. Archibald Grayson could deny his bastard child, shut the door and send me on my way. As would be his right, as a man of breeding and good standing.
Dean winced. “I’m with you there, kid. All the way down the line.”
An owl hooted in the trees at the field’s edge, concealed by the morning twilight. Nerissa hated owls, shrieked about them watching her,
Owls carried the necrovirus, if you minded the lanternreels. I’d seen pictures of their wings, aerodynamics lessons drawn in fine, careful ink. The rounded tips of the feathers that let them fly silent. What I’d give to fly silent as an owl, unwatched by the Proctors or anyone else. Sometimes I thought that if I made my clothes colorless enough, my shoulders narrow enough, that I could round off all my edges and disappear into the air like the lantern-eyed harbingers of the night. I hadn’t managed it yet.
I watched my feet squelch into the mud instead. The mist and the morning called for silence, and even Cal had given up the challenge of talking. I was almost enjoying the quiet, haunted walk until the sweet stench of meat left in a warm place clapped me across the nose, thick and wet as a wool blanket.
Cal pressed his handkerchief over the lower half of his face like a bandit. “Stones … what’s rotted on the vine?”
The mist parted on a humped black hide with a watery sheen, and a great lidless eye that swam up from the depths of the thing’s boneless mass, bilious green and cloudy with cataract.
“Shoggoth,” I breathed, stumbling to a halt. “It’s an actual shoggoth.”
The shoggoth exhaled with a sound of pipes belching steam. Its eye roved over its hide in no particular pattern, floating like a lamprey below the surface of a dark sea.
“They swallow us whole.” Cal’s whisper came as a shout in the absolute stillness. “Digested by degrees inside that mass. You can stay alive for days, becoming a part of it. Listening to it whisper in your brain. Filthy damn thing.” He picked up a stone and flipped it in his palm.
“Cal, no …,” I started, but Cal cocked his arm and threw.
A fingerlet of skin and muscle snapped out of the creature’s mass, sprouting a mouth, round and rimmed with
