The Iron Thorn

from the too-short sleeves. “Dammit. He never gets anything tailored.” Tears welled up, the pressure too much.

“Give it here,” Dean said. “I’ll make bandages. Get him talking—if they whammed his noggin, he shouldn’t fall asleep.”

“Cal.” I shook him, gently as I could. “Cal, say something.”

“Aoife.” My name on his lips was thickened with blood and delirium. “They brought you back.”

“I was trying to get out,” I said. “I got caught.”

“I …” Cal coughed, and dark blood appeared on his chin like inky raindrops. “I gotta tell you something, Aoife.”

“No,” I said, smoothing a hand over his forehead. “Save it. There’s time yet.”

Linen shredded as Dean ripped up Cal’s school shirt. Cal grabbed for me. His palm was slick, with blood or sweat, I couldn’t tell. “Can’t wait. I can’t wait.”

“All right, all right,” I said. “You have to stay still, Cal. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“I lied to you.…” Cal’s voice went dreamy, and his pulse under my fingers slipped away like a drop of mercury on glass.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Whatever you did, I forgive you.”

“You shouldn’t,” he said. “I’m so far away, Aoife … so far away from home.…”

My shoulder began to throb, and I clamped my free hand over the bite. “Dean, he’s not making any sense.”

“He lost a lot of his juice,” Dean said. “Probably needs a transfusion.”

“Cal.” Shaking wasn’t working anymore, so I slapped him across the face, trying to avoid the worst of his bruises. “Don’t you die on me, Cal Daulton. I’ll get you blood. Just please hang on.”

“I don’t need blood,” he wheezed after a moment. “I need …” Another coughing fit, more blood droplets scattering across the stones and my hands.

“What?” I said. “Tell me, Cal.”

“I need meat,” he rasped. “Fresh meat. Something live.”

I gaped at him. “Why in the stars would you need that?” The pain in my shoulder where the shoggoth had bitten intensified and I groaned. I’d be seeing double if I could see at all. The last time it had hurt this much was when I’d been close to eldritch creatures, as if, in a peculiar way, the shoggoth’s venom had given me an early warning.…

“Meat,” Cal whined, in a voice that echoed off the high parts of the cell. “I want to eat.…”

“Aoife.” Dean grabbed my shoulder and I yelped. His touch burned the shoggoth’s bite. “Get away from him. Now.”

“He’s in shock,” I said. “He’s hallucinating.”

Cal gave another groan like bones creaking, and then he sat up, as if someone had jammed a rod into his back. The spot on his face I’d touched was beginning to peel back, skin hanging in loose ribbons. I stared, unable to think of moving, or anything but the sloughing flesh on the face that had formerly been Cal’s.

My stomach lurched as the pain crested, and Dean yanked me out of Cal’s reach as he swiped at me. His hands were huge, and tipped with black claws that flexed and retracted.

“He’s not hallucinating,” Dean whispered in my ear. “He’s a ghoul.”

Trapped in the half-dark, I clung to Dean while Cal convulsed on the cell floor. “Cal …” I reached out an experimental hand, and Cal snapped at me. His teeth had multiplied and lengthened, and his bones protruded from under his skin like a mountain range.

I jerked my hand back. Cal wasn’t Cal any longer. He snarled at me, and I flinched as if I’d been slapped. How could I have not seen this? Cal had fooled me, more than even Draven.

“Keep away from him, princess,” Dean said. “Ain’t anything more we can do.”

“No,” I said, wriggling free of Dean’s grasp. “He’s still Cal.” I was mostly talking to talk myself into believing the thing on the floor was still my friend. I couldn’t deny he had changed. There was precious little of him left to the naked eye. Just the thing I’d been told my entire life was the embodiment of terror. Only the fact that I couldn’t see much in the dark kept me from screaming.

Keeping myself clear of his claws and jaws, I crawled over to Cal and forced myself to touch the clammy, loose skin hanging from his newly hollow ribs. “How could you not tell me?” I demanded. My voice rose, anger echoing off the cell walls. “How could you?”

Cal hacked and trembled, and reached for me. His claws put furrows in my wrist. “I had to. I had to. He came down and he found me and he told me that if I didn’t follow you, he’d burn us out of our home.”

“What?” I said. “Someone made you spy on me and pretend to be my friend?”

“Aoife, you should get away from him now,” Dean said. “If he’s changing, that means he’s going to feed.”

“Don’t tell me what to do!” I shouted at Dean. “I want to know why my best friend in the world’s been lying to me!”

“It was Draven,” Cal croaked. “He found me two years ago. The Proctors would have burned me out, but I had something he wanted. I can take human skin, and he said … he said if I went to the Academy, watched you … I had to keep you under my eye.”

“Cal, why?” I gripped his shoulders, shaking him. I could feel bone and gristle, the foreign physiognomy of a ghoul instead of Cal’s skinny frame, and it made my skin crawl. I held on, anger overriding disgust. “Why did you pretend to be my friend?” I whispered.

“Because of what you are,” Cal said. His voice wasn’t Cal’s voice anymore. It was guttural, a growl of hunger rather than the person I knew speaking. “Draven told me that if you ever found out who you really are … what you can do … it would be … a disaster.”

“You’ve been bird-dogging us,” Dean said. “The ravens on the bridge. Alouette calling in the Proctors on the airship. Every bit of bad luck since we met.” He curled a fist, flexed it like you’d pull back the hammer of a gun. “I should smash your ugly face in. Do you realize what you’ve done? It’s your thrice-damned fault we’re in here.”

“No more.” Cal’s breathing was shallow and rapid, his limbs jittering and twitching of their own accord as his nerves played their last notes. “You found your Weird, Aoife. In the crypt, when my brothers tried to stop you. I played dumb because I hoped I could still salvage this and make you go home, but I failed. Two years watching you, pushing you away from the truth, two years being the most horrid, intolerant, party-line-spouting excuse for a human being I could be to keep you in check, and I failed.” He let out a shuddering gasp, a wheeze bubbling from his lungs that sounded dire. “Draven put me in here to kill you, I expect, when he gets what he wants from your pop. And then rot away from hunger myself.”

I sat back on my heels. My only friend, the gawkish boy who loved The Inexplicables and Gunsmoke, who helped me with engineering assignments tirelessly, was a monster.

In my chest, a cold ball of iron formed and expanded and turned into resolve. I would pay Grey Draven back for what he’d done to me. If I had to die to do it, I was going to expose the Bureau of Heresy’s lie.

“I won’t hurt you,” Cal managed. “I … won’t. You don’t deserve this.”

“You’re damn right I don’t,” I said. Cal shied away from my voice.

“Understand,” he begged. “It was this, or watch my nest burn alive. My whole family. You, with Conrad … you’d do the same, wouldn’t you?”

“There’s a difference.” I hadn’t known my voice could hold so many ice crystals. “I wouldn’t have betrayed you over Conrad, Cal.”

“Doesn’t matter, anyway,” he said. “They’ll use you to bring your father out of hiding, and interrogate both of you until you forget all about me. And I’ll die, and the world will go on.”

“Star and stone, Cal,” I said. The anger trickled out, replaced by the solid ingot of defeat. “You’re just giving up. The Cal Daulton I knew wouldn’t give up.”

“The Cal you knew is fiction,” Dean said. “Just like his trashy magazines.”

“He’s not.” I kept my eyes on Cal. “He was my friend, my best friend, and he wouldn’t just curl up and die. He’d help me, because he’d know we aren’t getting out of here any other way.”