The Iron Thorn

The door we stopped at was a real door, bound in brass, polished wood reflecting my pale face and sleepless eyes back at me. The Proctor pressed the call button on the phonovox next to it, not without hesitation.

“Yes.” The voice was high, thin, smooth like glass. It chilled me as if I’d stepped into an icebox.

“Mr. Draven. One of your flagged fugitives, sir. She surrendered to us at the jitney depot a few hours ago.”

There was a wait, while the Proctor stared at me and I stared at my reflection. Trying to stay calm was just making things worse.

“Bring her in.” The gears at the top of the door turned, releasing lock bars, and the door swung inward.

Draven’s office was enormous, a long room that took up the entire back of Ravenhouse. It was also largely empty, floors and shelves bare, windows covered by metal shutters like a war shelter. A desk and two chairs sat at one end of the vast space, underneath a mural on the ceiling of a man in a chariot pulled by a light horse and a dark one traveling above the map of the world, constellations glowing softly in the light of the aether lamps.

“Miss Grayson. Sit.” Draven rose and pulled out a chair. The Proctor shoved me, none too gently. I let out a small squeak as the hard chair impacted with my spine.

Draven narrowed his eyes at the Proctor. “Leave, please.”

The Proctor got out of the office so quickly that he left a wake of air. I kept my eyes on Draven as he walked with measured tread back to the seat behind his desk. He was tall, thin-faced, hair cropped so one could see the scalp underneath. Younger than I had imagined him by at least a decade, lines were beginning around his eyes, but his gaze still cut straight through me. They were frightening eyes, absolutely flat and yet alive. Predatory, was how I would classify Draven’s gaze, and I felt a dull chill work its way over my skin, like I’d pressed against a cold sheet of iron.

Draven took a black cigarette from a silver case and offered me one.

I shook my head. “I don’t.”

“Good girl.” Draven lit his from a tubular jet lighter and exhaled toward the ceiling. “I noticed you looking at the mural.”

“It’s very … detailed,” I said gamely. Anything but talking about why I was really here. Any amount of time for Cal and Dean to escape.

“That, my dear, is Apollo, chasing the night across the face of the world. It is a blasphemous and heretical depiction of a dead religion, practiced by a fearful, craven civilization that the Master Builder ground under his heel.”

I looked at my hands rather than make eye contact as he lectured. The shackles were beginning to burn as they chafed my skin.

Draven let out a low chuff of laughter. “Don’t look so scared. I didn’t paint it over—it’s important to remember our history.”

“Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it,” I quoted. I felt tremors all over, and terribly cold, almost like I had a touch of influenza.

Draven’s mouth curved up. When he smiled, all of his graveness disappeared and he looked like a boy at the School. One who’d delight in playing cruel pranks on girls like me.

“Aren’t you a little straight A?” he said. “I bet you make the boys in your classes furious. The bell curve wasn’t made for clever girls.” Draven smirked and I forced myself to keep my face neutral. Good thing that was far from the most insulting thing someone had said about me.

“I get along with everyone,” I lied. “A ward can’t afford to be snobbish.”

“No.” Draven stubbed out his cigarette. “But I suppose it’s difficult to keep that vapid smile on your face. Mad mother, mad brother, the bastard child of a rich man. How the barbs must fly.”

“How did you know about my father?” I said, my surprise genuine. I tugged against the shackles. They were as immobile as the other ten times I’d tested them.

“Come on now, Aoife,” Draven said. “Aoife Eileen Grayson. We Proctors are the eyes, ears and wings of the entire nation. There’s nothing we don’t know.”

There was at least one thing about all this I was pretty sure Draven didn’t know, but I kept that to myself.

A knock on the door cut off Draven’s smug smile. “Yes?”

“Superintendent Draven.” A uniformed Proctor stepped in with my carpetbag. “The girl’s effects.”

“Put them on the desk, Officer Quinn.”

“Yes, sir.” Quinn set down the bag and stepped back. Draven lifted one eyebrow.

“Something else, Officer?”

“One of the boys is giving us trouble,” Quinn said. “The skinny one.”

“Cal—” I bit back a further cry when Draven’s eyes crinkled in amusement. At least I knew Cal was alive.

“Take him to a separate interrogation room and do whatever it takes,” he ordered. “I want information from him about what he and the girl have been doing out there in Arkham. He’ll give it quickly if he knows what’s good for him.”

“No!” I shouted as Quinn saluted and backed out. “No, Cal had nothing to do with this!” I started up, to lunge for the door, to do something to prevent them from hurting him.

“Sit.” Draven pinned me across the desk, his finger hovering in front of my face. “I am not going to humor your lies, Aoife. Not when I know what you are.”

“I’m not anything,” I whispered, although I had the horrible feeling Draven knew my secret. “I ran away, I admit.” Maybe if I confessed to what the Proctors expected, I could buy Cal leniency. I started again. “I consorted with heretics and I’ve got a latent necrovirus infection, and you can do whatever you want with me, but I swear that Cal hasn’t done anything wrong.”

“You’re so sure of your good friend Cal? That’s nice,” Draven said, standing and going to the single window that wasn’t closed off by a shutter. His view looked down the hill, to the river, the bridge, the foundry. “I want you to think, Aoife. Think about the day your mother was committed. A young girl and her brother would go to a state orphanage, girls and boys in different institutions. You would never see your brother again. You knew this. You perhaps shed a few tears right there in the courtroom.”

He turned back, arms folded. “Where did you go, Aoife?”

“To … to a group home,” I said, wondering where this was leading. The house I’d gone to had been close, noisy, full of other children, who pulled my hair and taunted me with jokes until Conrad chased them off.

“With your brother.” Draven ticked off on his fingers, backlit against the windows by the endless gray of the sky. “You stayed with your brother. Your needs were met. You both went to the finest school and you both gained entrance to the Lovecraft Academy.” He looked at his fingers. “If one were a heretic, one might almost say you had a guardian angel, Aoife. But of course we know the real reason, don’t we?”

“I want to see my friends now,” I snapped. “What does this have to do with them?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know,” Draven said. “Archibald Grayson may have fathered bastards, but he made sure they’d be as smart as him. He had his clever little ways of ensuring they were taken care of.”

“My … my father?” I blinked at Draven, genuinely confused as to why he thought my childhood was so important. To my mind, it had been nothing but misery from the day Nerissa was committed.

Draven slammed his fist against the window sash. “Don’t pretend you don’t know! Archibald Grayson is a heretic and a traitor to the Iron World and you are going to be the honey that brings him home.” Draven leaned in and sucked a deep breath through his nose. “And what sweet honey it is.”

I cringed away from him. The Iron World. How did he know that term? “I never knew my father. He doesn’t give one whit about me. I can’t make him come anywhere.” That, at least as far as I knew, was the absolute truth.

Draven shook his head and laughed. I saw something else in his hard, beautiful face, a marring and a blurring. “You didn’t know him, Aoife, it’s true. But I do. And I know exactly what he thought of his filthy-blooded brood.”

I felt tears starting and shut my eyes briefly to hold them back. “My father never even spoke to me in person. All I have are his eyes and his blood.”

Draven’s lips pulled back and he gave a wordless snarl. “You think Archie’s little band of conjurers are the