The Iron Thorn

virtue and their life as one, consuming the raw magic energy for its own ends. Dies in fire. My Weird was well used this night. One girl is safe. For two, I came too late.

I had lost track of the hours I’d been sitting on the attic floor, the dozens of snapshots of my father that appeared and disappeared as the geas on his journal took hold of my eyes. Him aging, my legs cramping. I should stir myself and let Cal and Dean know I was still alive, but the book continued to give up secrets, and I hadn’t found the one I needed yet.

1 May, 1939.

My father died this morning.

No new dusty, jostling reel of memory accompanied the entry, oddly. Only words marked the death of my grandfather.

I set that line down and watched the ink dry on it.

Tomorrow, I will stand with the grave digger and the undertaker while they measure my father for his coffin and the ground for his grave.

Tonight, I am kept by my vigil.

I did not understand when I began this record, why every Gateminder bears witness to the horrors of their calling and the toll of their Weird in these strange, grim little books. I found recounting the heat of battle and laboring on drawings of glaistig, kelpie and bean sidhe onerous. I yearned to escape the duty of my blood and go east to Lovecraft or west to San Francisco, to forge a life under the iron bridges of a city. To pretend the preaching of the Proctors is the rational truth.

Much as I despise their methods, I see the appeal of the Rationalists. Reason over madness. Visible over invisible. Truth over heartbreak.

I understand now why we keep these accounts. I understand that Minders expect to die in the field, brought low by the creatures that move in the shadow of the Weird.

Or like my father, they drop in their tracks returning from a walk to the post office. They leave nothing behind but children or merely an empty house. The next in the line has no recourse.

Yes. I understand now.

Tomorrow, I bury my father. Tonight, I await the Kindly Folk. For it is still the first of May, the ancient rite of the goat gods and their minions. A night when mortal flesh tastes sweet and mortal blood calls the Wild Hunt. The Folk and I have work to do, and when I leave this world the only way my son will understand why his father was silent, distant and hard is this volume.

No mention of a daughter. I did the math. Nerissa wasn’t even pregnant with me yet.

We fight and we bleed for this hidden world, and the world eats us alive.

The Folk say this is the way of generations past: loneliness and hate. Witch trials, Rationalists and now the Bureau of Heresy.

So I put pen to paper, voraciously. My life is this Weird, this unnatural duty to this unnatural world, and this alchemy of words. My witch’s alphabet, as they call these volumes in the Iron Codex.

I pray to any of the old gods with ears still turned to a mortal man that it is enough.

17 The Fiery Stars

I CLIMBED DOWN from the attic with the dusk, exhausted. The library was dim, but aether light gleamed from the back parlor and I heard laughter.

Dean, Cal and Bethina sat around a low coal fire, Bethina’s round face alight.

“You’re a card, Dean!” she exclaimed. “The way you tell those stories I’d take them for true.”

“They are true.” Dean spun the poker between his palms. “Every word.”

Bethina hooted again, but I’d spent enough days with Dean now to know his face when he wasn’t teasing.

“We have aether. And light,” I said, to announce my presence. It was surprising to see Graystone in the real light of the aether lamps. Cal got up and hobbled over to me.

“We thought you’d died in that dusty attic.”

“Well, the kid thought so,” Dean drawled. “Bethina and I thought that was a tad dramatic.”

“Aether pump had a loose valve,” Cal babbled. “But I fixed it up. Routes into the house and runs a real nice little generation globe for heat and light.” He jerked his thumb at the hi-fi in the corner. “And I guess Dean got that antique working, not that we get any reception up here.”

“I’d die for some dance music,” Bethina cried. “The aether hasn’t been working since … well, since the unpleasantness with your da.”

“Cal,” I said, ignoring her. She hadn’t spent the afternoon seeing what I’d seen. “Cal, I have something to tell you.”

He cocked his head. “Spill.”

“Alone,” I elaborated. Cal was my confidant and he should be first to know what I’d found. I didn’t think Dean would call me crazy, but I didn’t know him as anything except a criminal guide who wanted me to tell him secrets. With Cal, I knew, there would be no price attached.

“All right,” Cal said, his grin vanishing.

“The hallway,” I told him, stepping out beyond the door, where we’d be out of earshot.

Behind me, music filled up the parlor, scratchy and antique across the tenuous connection of the aether.

Cal folded his arms. “I don’t like the way you just let him act as familiar as he pleases, Aoife. He’s basically a member of the help, you know.”

I slid the pocket doors shut on Dean and Bethina dancing awkwardly. Dean was liquid-graceful. Bethina was stumpy, her face red and her curls loose. I hoped I’d never looked like that in dance class.

Cal sighed. “Aoife, I’m serious. It’s not right to let someone like that run away at the reins.”

“Cal, I’m not one of those spoiled Uptown girls,” I said. “And even if I was, it doesn’t mean people who work for their living are less than human. You sound like Marcos.” I mimicked his stern gesture.

“You’re better than Dean Harrison,” Cal grumbled. “At least I know that.”

“This is emphatically not what I wanted to say to you,” I said, trying to steer the conversation back on track. “Cal, listen … I found something in the attic.”

Cal’s face lit like a lucifer match. “Bootlegger’s stash? A secret chamber, like for a blood cult? I read about one in Black Mask once—”

“I found a … a book,” I said, trying to pluck up the courage to tell him the exact nature of said book. Cal sighed.

“Oh. Just like school, then.”

“Not exactly,” I said, my voice going soft and shivery of its own accord. Cal was my friend, but I was about to ask him to believe a whole lot. “Cal, I found it. I found the book Conrad wanted me to use. It’s a … journal, I guess you’d call it.” Journal was a poor descriptor of the grimoire I’d found, but it was the one that would placate Cal. “My father kept it since he was eighteen or so.”

Cal spread his hands. “So?” I’d never noticed how pale his hands were. They were long and knobby and soft —gentleman’s hands. By comparison, my scar-traced knuckles and callused fingers were rough and unwieldy. But Cal had always excelled at being delicate and careful during classes, while I nicked and cut myself on metal and hot soldering lead every time we did shop.

“So.” I stepped closer, going up on tiptoe to get close to his ear. “The ink in the book, I touched it and it … marked me. It touched me like it was alive.” I extended my palm. “Look.”

Cal’s eyes dipped, then came back to mine. A frown made a black line between his eyebrows. “Oh, Aoife. It’s started, hasn’t it?”

I glanced at my own palm. Bare, it stared back at me. The mark had vanished.

“N-no …,” I stuttered, confusion making my voice hitch. “The ink … it tattooed me. An enchantment, and my father did a geas on the journal, so I could see memories that he’d wrapped up in the words.…” I trailed off, my hand dropping as I realized what—who—I sounded like.