Too slow, I touched nothing. A sob wrenched from my throat.
“Aoife.” Dean’s face blurred back into view, lines at his mouth and eyes. “Dammit, I hate it when you just blink out like that.” He examined me more closely and his jaw set. “You look awful. What’d he do to you?”
I tried to speak, but all that came out was a soft, broken sound. I fell against Dean and he wrapped his arms around me to save me from falling. My tears were silent, but they soaked my face and the fabric of Dean’s shirt. All I saw was white as I clung to Dean, and all I felt was a widening black pit where my insides used to be.
29
“MY BROTHER’S DEAD,” I whispered after twenty heartbeats. “The Proctors shot him in the back.”
Once the words flew from my lips, the truth slammed into me, a weight I could never shake off. I fell to my knees, grit and old dirt digging in through my stockings, and I shook, wrapping my arms around myself.
“Oh, princess.” Dean knelt and hugged me again. I sobbed, wretched sounds ripping from my throat, as a knife of memory twisted deep in my stomach. I would never see Conrad again. Never tell him that I knew he wasn’t mad. Never tell him that I understood why he’d run away.
I could never tell him I forgave him.
I had wasted my time on the Weird, on Dean, on relishing my own freedom. I had let Conrad fall and I hadn’t been there to hold out my hand.
“Bethina said he was alive last she saw him,” Dean whispered. “That those shadow folk took him. Nothing about being shot. The Folk lie, Aoife. They’re already a lie to most rational people, so why shouldn’t they lie to you?”
“I don’t …,” I managed. “I don’t think he was lying.”
“You don’t know that for certain,” Dean said. “Nothing in this life is ever certain, doll.”
I had lost my tears, and my eyes stung, swollen and gritty. “It doesn’t matter, anyhow,” I muttered. “Doesn’t matter that he lied to start. I made my bargain. I have to go back to the city, Dean.” Before Tremaine could unleash his particular brand of sadism on everyone else I cared for. Even if I’d lost Conrad already, I could still lose Dean and Cal. And then I couldn’t go on.
Dean helped me to my feet, gently. I was fragile now, a thing that needed to be cosseted. I despised myself in that moment.
“That’s a dangerous proposition. You saw what the Proctors do to heretics who fly across their radar.” Dean rubbed out my tears, tried to clean my face off, but I couldn’t stop more tears from coming.
“I have to,” I repeated. “I have to go back.” Words had lost their weight, their usefulness. Words hadn’t kept Conrad from a bullet in his back, alone on a cold stone street.
“All right,” Dean said. “All right. We’ll work it out. We can talk about it.”
I let him lead me down the ladder and out of the library, feeling adrift as if I were floating in a vast new sea, a sea of sorrow. I had no anchor and no weight. I could float forever.
Bethina and Cal sat at the kitchen table, cards arrayed between them. Bethina slapped her hand down, victory in her grin. “Gin.”
Cal sighed and threw his cards down. “This isn’t normal. You’re some kind of cardsharp, missy. You belong back in the old days in Dodge City.”
“Kid,” Dean said. Cal turned and saw me, and his eyes widened.
“What did you do to her?”
“Shut your trap. She’s had a bad shock,” Dean said. “Bethina, you have any hot tea?”
She pushed back, scattering their rummy game. “Sure enough. Just brewed a pot.”
“With something stronger, if you have it,” Dean said. “For a chaser.”
Bethina pumped water into the chipped enamel kettle and hung it on a hook over the fireplace. “Mr. Grayson kept some whiskey in his desk in the library.”
Dean sat me in a chair and left. He had a half-full bottle of amber when he returned. I couldn’t muster the words to say anything, to do anything except sit and stare.
Cal watched us with a sharp frown. “Aoife, what in the Builder’s name happened? You look like someone walked over your grave.”
“Conrad’s dead,” I whispered. It wasn’t any easier to say, but if possible, the words tasted more bitter.
Cal slumped, like a scarecrow with all of its stuffing pulled out. “How?”
Dean accepted the cup of tea Bethina handed him, added a jigger from the bottle and put it in my hands. “Drink,” he said. “It’ll keep you upright.”
“I’m not sure she should be drinking at a time like this,” Cal said.
Dean sat with the bottle in his hands. “Cowboy, if this isn’t the time for drinking, there ain’t no time at all.”
“We have to go back to Lovecraft,” I said. “We have to go today.”
“Aoife, that’s suicide,” Cal told me. “You said so yourself.”
“That was before,” I said. The tea was terrible, bitter black tea leaves and whiskey combined to burn my throat and tongue, but it calmed the constant waves of vertigo. “Before I made the deal with the Folk.”
“What are you talking about?” Cal edged his chair back. “Are you feeling all right?”
“Dammit, Cal!” I slapped my hand against the table. The playing cards jumped. “This is not the time! And I’m not crazy! Your life and Bethina’s and Dean’s too … they’re all in this balance, so for once, Cal,
“All right, fine.” Cal made a gesture of surrender. “I’m listening.”
I told Dean, Cal and Bethina about Tremaine, my first visit to the Thorn Land, the task he’d set upon me. I told him about how I intended to go home, to the Engine, and try to awaken the queens with my Weird.
I did not tell them how my Weird reacted to even the slightest touch. To feel the Engine flowing through me, the vast and breathless power of its pistons and gears … what would that power do?
I didn’t think about it, and I didn’t say it. I kept my tale short and sparse, because talking about the Folk left a foul taste on my tongue.
When I was finished, Dean gave a low whistle. “That’s a burden to lay on you, Aoife. True enough.”
“It’s … unbelievable,” Cal said. “And impossible.”
“Impossible just means they ain’t thought of a name for it yet,” Dean answered. “What it is, is dangerous.”
“I’m going back,” I told them. “With or without all of you.” I was decided. I had never been so decided before.
“I’m just telling it like it is,” Dean said. “Think on the danger before you go running back into the iron jaws of that place, will you? For me?”
“You saw what can happen,” I said. “Tremaine isn’t a good person, but I made a bargain. My family has a history with the Folk, and I have the Weird, and it means
I stood up. The tea had flushed me, warmed me, and dulled the ache of losing Conrad. I had to move now, before I became a cripple again.
“You can help me or you can stay here. I won’t blame you either way. But I’m going back to Lovecraft.”
The Peter Pan jitney depot on the outskirts of Arkham was pockmarked with rust, chrome rubbed off, glass shattered. No one else sat on the damp bench inside the shelter. I was the only one, the old carpetbag I’d found in the wardrobe stuffed with my school clothes and my father’s journal, plus the invigorator and Tremaine’s goggles.
I hadn’t taken much. I wore the sturdy boots and woolen coat and the red dress. I didn’t need anything else.
In the end, I’d elected to leave early in the morning, silent and alone. Cal and Dean needn’t be part of this. It was my bargain to uphold and my burden to bear.
