only things in this world that have magic beating in the blood? You think the Graysons stood alone after the Storm and the erecting of the Gates?”
I was lost as to what he meant, but the rambling and the abrupt anger—that I’d seen before. I gave voice to what I’d recognized in his eyes. “You’re insane, Mr. Draven.” Not because he’d admitted he believed in magic as easily as he breathed—that was merely surprising. The insanity wasn’t apparent in photos and lanternreels, but up close, to a person who’d seen madness every week for nearly a dozen years, it was clear as day.
“What I am is possessed of the truth, Aoife, and being called things like insane is the price I pay. And here’s the truth of that pitiful spark inside you that gives you a pitiful little piece of power: it will only get you killed.”
Undoubtedly, that would be easier. If I confessed to heresy as the Proctors defined it, I’d be spared burning. But I didn’t want to be easy. Not after everything I’d endured trying to prove I wasn’t going mad. I met Draven’s eyes. “I’ll never renounce the Weird. It’s real. I know it and you know it. So burn me. Get it over with.”
Draven reached his hand back and cracked me across the face, faster than a snake striking. The spot where Tremaine had hit me began to bleed again and I cried out in shock.
“You walked through iron to come here,” Draven snarled. “This room may look like the lair of a soft man, but there are bones of steel running through these walls, bones charged with enchantment that will bleed something like you from the eyes.
“Now who’s speaking heresy?” I grumbled, too confused and enraged to worry about whether he’d hit me again. “A City Head using enchantments. Honestly. Tell me another.”
“The world was much younger when the Storm came.” Draven’s eyes went soft. “There have been many names for what came into our world that day since—witchcraft, Spiritualism, necrovirus. Many explanations to sate the public and make it feel safe. But they are all poison, all a filthy, otherworldly plague. And they have the gall to call it magic.” He sneered, then reached out and tucked a stray piece of hair behind my ear. “Archibald Grayson thinks differently. He believes these forces are his to use. He consorts with the Folk and endangers every human being on earth each time he passes through the Gates. He thinks the Bureau of Heresy extremists, but I
I reeled. The avalanche of information was making my head hurt. I picked out the most shocking fact of the bunch. “You … you know of the Folk?”
“Of course I know,” Draven scoffed. “The Folk, the Weird, the Mists … all of those portentous names humans before the Storm gave such things.”
“But … no one believes in the Weird … no one in Lovecraft, no one rational.…” I was sure I was going to toss my last meal onto Draven’s elegant carpet. He was telling me he knew all about the Folk, all about magic. And it was clear this wasn’t new information to him.
“People do not have the capacity, Aoife,” Draven said, as if I were a very small and stupid child. “Something called the necrovirus, something that has a specific cause and perhaps some day a cure, they can control. They can guard against infection. The Folk, magic—the truth, that ‘virals’ are really creatures crawled up from a world that only exists in their nightmares? That lands exist beside our own and some human’s very blood causes them madness or greatness, depending on a flip of a coin?” He sniffed. “If the world knew the truth, it would burn within the week. It nearly did, until a few of us took action, after the Storm.” Draven sighed. “I’m not one for telling tales, but in brief: in 1880 there was a man named Nikola Tesla. He was like Edison, but Tesla had a weakness of spirit. He saw things beyond this world, beyond reason. He created a machine, a machine that could tear the very fabric of the universe asunder. And he turned it on.”
Draven passed a hand over his forehead. “It was terrible, terrible what happened. My father was only a boy, but he spoke of the magical cataclysms, the strange creatures that flowed unencumbered through the gateway Tesla ripped open. They called it the Storm. And a brotherhood stepped forward, composed of sorcerers and scientists and madmen. They beat back the Storm. They created the gates with magic and the wonder of Tesla’s technology. But they were not good men.”
I stayed silent, not giving Draven the reaction he clearly wanted, even though my brain was racing to assimilate his version of history. His nostrils flared as he inhaled sharply. “They did not see that the only way was to cleanse the world of
He stepped to his desk and pressed his buzzer as I watched him, insensible.
The necrovirus wasn’t real.
Magic was.
Draven had known all along. He’d let it go on, the burnings and the lockdowns and people like my mother being shoved into madhouses. Why, I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter.
Everything about Lovecraft was a lie. Everything about this modern, scientific world, the ghoul traps and the madhouses and the worship of reason, was wrong.
Before I could scream, Quinn and another officer appeared. Draven jerked his chin. “Take her to interrogation and test her blood for the usual panel of infection. She’s been outside the city limits. She’s a contamination risk.”
“Let me go!” I screamed as they dragged me along. I lost one of my shoes on the thick carpet, skinned my knees as I thrashed and the Proctors wrestled me along. The truth was sinking in, and as Draven had warned, it was terrible. My head spun and I thrashed like I was a spastic in my mother’s asylum. “Let me go! I’m not contaminated! There
As Quinn and the other officer dragged me away, Draven placed his hand on my carpetbag, on my father’s journal and the goggles and the invigorator, as if they belonged to him, and then he met my eyes and tipped me a wink.
Draven and I. United in the awful, world-burning truth.
The door of Draven’s office slammed shut and then only my own voice echoed down Ravenhouse’s long iron halls.
The interrogation room was bleak and bare, entirely different from Draven’s office. There were no bones of finery here, just concrete and one-way glass.
Cal would have loved it, I thought. It was just like his novels and Saturday matinees. Sweat the villains and make them talk.
“Doctor’s coming in,” Quinn said. “Don’t you make a move, kid.”
My lip had stopped bleeding. Now it just felt swollen and sticky, like I’d let candy melt and linger on my tongue.
I counted stains on the acoustic tiles of the ceiling until the door buzzed and admitted a man in a white coat with a black leather bag. He had a cotton surgery mask over the lower half of his face, but he was taller than Quinn, rangier.
“This is her?” He reeled himself to a quick stop inside the door.
“What?” Quinn said. “You were expecting Al Capone?”
“She doesn’t look contaminated.” The doctor took an identical mask from his bag and handed it to Quinn. “But all the same, I need to ask you to put this on and leave the room.”
Quinn blanched. “I might be exposed?”
It’d serve him right, I thought. Every one of them, if they did contract something nasty from Thorn. Get devoured by a nightjar, or see what really lurked in the Mists. Every last stinking Proctor on earth fed to a corpse- drinker. That would be a start.
“Necrovirus is not transmitted through the air,” the doctor said. “As far as we know. But there are procedures the public health office must follow. Now please, for your own safety. Wait outside until I’ve drawn her blood.”
The Proctor scuttled out of the room, and the door slammed and locked.
“Oh yes,” I said loudly, to the door. “Watch out for the big, bad necrovirus.” Draven and the Proctors had lied to everyone. I couldn’t even begin to contemplate what their lie meant for me. For my madness. For my family. If there was no necrovirus, then … what? What made my mother believe dreams and visions over reality, even if some of them had come true? Because she certainly wasn’t normal. What had made Conrad transform, at least for a
