The Iron Thorn

an … an enchantment on the book doesn’t make me a liar. Cal should have trusted me.” That was the real pain of it—I trusted Cal, faithful and absolute. And all he could do in return was wring his hands over my maybe madness.

Dean came to stand next to me and slid his hand over mine. “You ain’t crazy, Aoife. I don’t care if you said you saw the Great Old Ones themselves returning from the stars, no one has the right to sling that at you.”

I looked down over the spires of Arkham, silent. Dean hadn’t heard what Cal had. He hadn’t read the book and learned about what the Graysons carried. What had my father called it? His Weird. His writings had casually unfolded a world utterly alien from my own, a world where a heretical legend pulsed through my blood surely as his.

Could he be right? I was his daughter, after all.

The village lay silent as a tomb in the night, the moon above a broach on a velvet brocade of stars. Ground fog spun over the valley, the top of Arkham’s church steeple and the twin towers of Miskatonic University thrusting upward like a desperate, drowning hand. Rooftops and chimney pots within Arkham’s outer wall vanished and reappeared, a ghostly town revealed only by moonlight’s gleam.

As I watched, a flame sprang to life at the outskirts of the village, and another. A great clanking borne on the wind echoed off the mountain, back to our ears.

The borderlands of Arkham blossomed with flame, one after the other. Green as a forest, the fire wasn’t oil or tar, but something else that sent acrid smoke up the valley toward my nose.

“What is that?” I said, waving it away. Dean flicked his cigarette end off the roof. It joined the constellation of fire for just a moment before winking out.

“Ghoul traps,” he said. “Keeping the beasties out at moonrise. That two-faced ghoul goddess of theirs hunts with the tide. Least, that’s what I heard around the Nightfall Market.”

I shuddered. I’d seen the low humps of ambulance jitneys rumbling through the streets the morning after a full moon, when even the Proctors’ nightly lockdown and extra patrols couldn’t keep the creatures from slipping in through the underground. Cal said if you turned the right way, you could hear the screams from Old Town as the disused sewer system opened and spewed forth its bloodthirsty citizens.

Cal. Cal and his look of pity when I’d shown him my palm. My heart tightened again, painful against my ribs.

“Burning aether tainted with sulfur,” Dean explained. “What I hear, the stench and the green light keeps them underground.”

“Cal called me crazy because I told him I found an enchantment on that book,” I said. Dean opened his mouth, but I held up my finger. “I need you to listen.”

“Right. Consider my trap shut,” Dean said, settling himself against the rail.

“I know I should say that magic isn’t real,” I said. That was what everyone I was supposed to trust in my life had told me.

Except Conrad. And I trusted him more than anyone. I swallowed the lump in my throat and continued. “But the ink in the book—it marked me, like a living thing leaves its tooth mark behind. And an enchantment let me see my father’s memories. I’m a rational person. I believe in science and I abjure heresy.” I sucked in a breath, the faint taste of sulfur parching my tongue. “But to hear my father tell it in his writings, it’s not heresy—nothing born of the necrovirus. Nor are all of the inhuman things in the world, the shandy-men and nightjars and the abominations … they don’t come from a person being infected. They aren’t people at all … they came from the … the Land of Thorn. Wherever that is.”

Below, Arkham was ringed in fire. The mist took on an unearthly glow, living and boiling in the cauldron of the valley. “He calls it the Weird,” I said softly. “My father. And his father. A Grayson has had it, for fourteen generations. I …”

I might not be mad after all. The thought was wishful, but I hadn’t been able to get rid of it since I’d read my father’s diary.

“Ever since I came here,” I tried again, “I’ve had a feeling that something was awake in me. That there’s something not right in this house. And now I don’t think it’s the house; I think it’s me.” I ran out of thoughts, because this was as far as I’d ever allowed my speculation—my hope—to go.

Waiting, in the cold and the moonlight, for Dean to speak was agonizing.

“Won’t lie to you,” he said at length. “I’ve been up and down the highways once or twice, princess. I’ve seen some sights that weren’t born from the necrovirus.” He nodded, as if he’d decided something final. “I’d believe in an enchanted book, I think. I’d believe in magic.”

Dean believed me. He made one person, one person in the entire world. Which frankly didn’t comfort me much. “What can I do?” I cried. “I can’t very well tell anyone besides you. I don’t know if I have this … this Weird or if Conrad does or if we’re all just … unnatural.”

“Here’s what you do, see,” Dean said. “Before you go fretting about measuring up to the old man, you gotta be sure.”

I blew on my hands to warm them, then tucked them into my pockets. I was growing used to the cold. Dean not running as far as he could when I’d brought up enchantments helped a bit. And his not recoiling from me and throwing out that hateful word: mad. “I’m sure,” I told him. “I can feel it whispering to me when I’m in Graystone. It’s like having an aethervox in my head, and you can just hear something coming across the spectrum.…”

“Then I suggest you find out what your game is,” Dean said. “Way I dig it, sorcerers are supposed to have some kind of affinity, right?”

“I’m not a sorcerer!” I snapped. “It’s not even a real thing.”

“Fine, fine,” Dean said. “But I’m telling you now—‘Weird’ don’t sound any better.” He tapped his chin. “What was your old man’s?”

“Fire, I think.” I recalled the passage about the shandy-man and its burning. “He was vague.”

Dean cocked an eyebrow. “Think you could be fire? Make you real handy at bonfire parties.”

I had to shake my head, and at once the prospect of embracing the wild, untested truth of my possessing a Weird didn’t seem so outlandish. “No, it’s not that. I can’t even get the thrice-damned coal grates in this place to go.” Now that I was thinking about the subject, it was vexing me.

“You’ll figure it out,” Dean said, hunching inside his leather against the stiff breeze that had come up. “The one thing you aren’t, besides crazy, is dumb.”

I took Dean’s hand this time and squeezed it hard, hoping my gesture telegraphed the waterfall of words that I couldn’t get out, except one sentence. “Thank you.”

His hand stiffened in surprise under my grasp. “What’s the thanks for, princess? I didn’t do anything.”

“You believe me,” I said. “No one has ever done that, just believed me. Without any questions.”

Dean brushed his thumb under my chin. “You’re all right, Aoife Grayson. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

I turned back to the vista over the valley, watching the aether fires burn. Dean stayed next to me and we watched for a long time, the only sound between us the wind and the faraway howling of ghouls.

18 The Dark Place of Dreaming

IN MY ROOM, I changed into nightclothes and turned the flow down on the aether globes, crawling into bed with the aid of moonlight. The sheets were new and scented with lavender instead of must—Bethina must have crept in when I was in the hidden library and cleaned up after me. Another first.

I turned on my side and watched clouds skate across the moon through the crack in my drapery. Wherever Conrad was, he saw the same moon. That comforted me, a little.

It wasn’t, however, enough comfort to dull my thoughts about my Weird. I’d wished for so long not to be mad, to keep the necrovirus in my blood at bay, that what I’d found in the journal seemed like a wish fulfilled rather than a hope. A wispy, intangible thing, a theory rather than a proof. The Weird might be fiction, a product of my father’s teenage fancy as easily as it might be the solution to all of my troubles.