The Iron Thorn

He frowned. “Giving up ain’t like you.”

“Dean, you’ve known me for a week. You don’t know what I’m like,” I said. “Cal’s got family to bat for him— he can go back to the School of Engines with a slap on the wrist. Even you can fade back into the Rustworks— you’re clever and wicked enough.”

Dean rubbed the back of his neck. “What about you, kid?”

“I’ve got nothing,” I said. “I’d have to turn myself in and pray to the Master Builder for mercy, like a proper Rationalist.”

“Is that really what you want?” The trail looped and started back up the incline toward Graystone. It seemed much longer going up, and the fog welcomed us with open arms.

“No …” I kicked a stone. “Of course it isn’t, Dean. I want to believe that I can do things a normal girl could never dream of. I want to rescue my brother like a heroine in a story. But stories aren’t real. What’s real are the Proctors, and they’re going to find us eventually.”

“Are you afraid of them?” Dean said quietly.

“Of course I am!” I threw up my hands. “Aren’t you?”

“I think there’s worse things than being locked up for heresy,” Dean said. “Much worse. And one of them is being so scared of it that you just sit and wait for them to find you.” He stopped and seized me by the shoulders. “You’re the first person I’ve met who won’t sit and wait, Aoife. Don’t change on me now. Please.”

The mist closed, and for a moment, Dean and I were alone. In that moment, it was easy to nod my head, to promise, so Dean’s smile would come back to his lips.

Because I did believe my father. And I wanted, more than anything, to not need the life I’d abandoned in Lovecraft.

“I won’t,” I said to Dean, and gently moved his hands from me. “I won’t give up. I promise you.”

Even if not giving up meant sacrificing everything. I’d come too far now to look back.

24 The Graveyard Below

DEAN TOOK OFF to the parlor to fiddle with the hi-fi when we reached Graystone, and I went back to the library. I didn’t have any desire to read more of the journals, or converse with my father, but I felt restless and itchy in my skin, and books always had the virtue of calming me. They promised an escape for a few hours if nothing else, a brief forgetfulness of what I’d agreed to do for the Folk.

If Tremaine didn’t simply drag me into the Thorn Land and cause me to disappear surely as my father and Conrad had vanished when I, inevitably, failed to grasp control of my Weird.

“You look so sad.”

I turned from my perusal of my father’s history books to find Cal, hands shoved in his pockets and rumpled. He looked so usual I almost burst into tears. I’d lose all that, in a little less than a week. Whether from the Folk or the Proctors or the necrovirus when it came to life in my blood at the turning of my year, it didn’t matter. My life, the one that had Cal in it, was over.

“I’m fine.” I tried a game smile. Cal shook his head.

“You’re a good liar for a girl, but not that good. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing anyone can fix.” I pulled down one of the books. A History of Rational Thought. It had been heavily annotated, and rested in my hands as thick and weighty as my mind and body felt.

“Did Dean do something to make you this way? I’ll pound his face in.” Cal started for the door. “He may be big and carry that switchblade—”

“Cal, stop.” I put the book down on the desk and went to him. “It’s not Dean. It’s me. I thought … I thought I’d found something special in the library above, and then you and I had that awful fight …” I pressed my fingers against my temples, dug in my nails. Used the pain to stave off tears. “Cal, I think I was wrong about coming here. You should go back to Lovecraft. You should get on with your life.”

I expected another lecture on my relative madness, or for Cal to simply bolt like a dog freed from a kennel, back into the waiting arms of the School and the Proctors.

Instead, he nearly smothered me when he threw his arms around my frame. “I could never leave you,” he said. “Never.”

I returned his embrace, tight and hard as I could. To touch someone else with no expectation of a result, or to worry about hiding my true nature, felt like all of my burdens, for just a moment, dropped off my shoulders.

I clung to Cal until he gently let go and smoothed my ruffled hair behind my ears. “Now, it can’t be all bad. Let’s get out of this stuffy old room and you can tell me about it.”

“I wish that it weren’t,” I sighed. “Truly.”

“Come on.” Cal punched me lightly on the shoulder. “Day’s still young and there’s lots of grounds to explore yet. We can be adventurers for an hour or two and I bet you forget all about what’s bugging you.”

Even after my walk with Dean, I felt relieved at something other than my father and brother and our fate as a family to occupy my thoughts. I got my cape and Cal his coat, and we took the kitchen door, but instead of turning to the orchard, Cal chose the boxwood path that curved around the west wing of the mansion. The maze was largely dead, the walls a phantom suggestion of the winding paths that once grew on the spot.

Beyond the boxwood there was a long lawn sloping down to a pond and a few tumbledown stone structures surrounded by an iron fence.

“That’s the cemetery I told you about,” Cal said. “It’s boss. Want to see?”

“I suppose,” I said. I didn’t take the same delight that Cal did in boneyards. The dead didn’t bother much. Live people were utterly worse.

“No iron rods in the ground that I saw,” Cal said. “Hasn’t been swept for ghouls and … you know. Walkers.”

I rolled my eyes at him. “Cal, the necrovirus can’t make corpses walk. That’s a myth.”

“You don’t know that.” He shuddered. “I’ve seen lots this past week that people back home call myths.”

We crossed the lawn, agreement to visit the cemetery unspoken. “You know what Conrad used to say when things went wrong?” I asked Cal. “I’d be sad or angry, and he’d pick out whatever was bothering me, and he’d fix all the broken pieces and say, ‘There. All the stars in the sky where they’re supposed to be.’ ”

“I wish that were still true.” Cal stopped at the cemetery fence.

“Me too.” But it wasn’t, so I nudged him on the elbow because I was, all at once, fully sick of moping around. Conrad wouldn’t give up and knuckle under to his fate with the Folk.

Conrad would master his Weird, and he’d fight. And I was his sister, and in his stead the least I could do was pick up the sword. “Come on,” I told Cal. “Let’s take a look at the dear departed Graysons.”

The gate groaned when I pushed it open, and my feet sank into soft piles of rotted leaves that had gathered autumn upon countless autumn without disturbance.

I brushed the vegetation away from the nearest headstone. Wind and water had nearly obliterated the words carved into the bone-white limestone, and all I could see were the dates of birth and death, 1914–1932.

“Not much older than us,” I said to Cal. I wondered if this Grayson had died of natural causes, or if something with teeth had come out of the mists. What was the life expectancy of my family? Not long, according to my father’s book.

Cal rattled the door of the single mausoleum, tilted to one side like the earth was a deck of a ship, and peered through the gap.

“Cal, don’t,” I said. “That’s grim.”

“It’s open,” he said, sticking his head inside despite my look of disapproval. “Oh, lighten up, Aoife. There’s no pine boxes in here, just one of those whaddyacallits. The Greek things.”

“Sarcophagus?” I rose and joined him at the narrow door.

“You always aced Greek,” Cal said. “I don’t understand what an engineer needs a dead language for.”

“Archimedes was Greek,” I pointed out. Cal ducked into the crypt and poked around behind the stone coffin. It was carved with mythological scenes, a weeping willow bending over a river, while a hooded figure poled the