hauled us back in.
Conrad collapsed, shaking, and I lay perfectly still, unable to move. My right arm, the one Conrad had grabbed, felt boneless and disconnected from the rest of my body. I could feel blood from scrapes dribbling across my skin, turning cold against the air. My forehead had begun bleeding again, sending stinging red spots into my vision. All of it was from far away, though, as if I were attached to my body by nothing more than the air we were floating in.
Dean’s face drifted into my tunneled vision. “You all right?” he said. “Let me get a look at you, princess.”
Cal helped Conrad to a place in the corner of the basket while Dean turned my head from side to side. “Don’t check out on me,” he murmured. “You’re fine. We’re all fine.”
“We might not be!” Cal shouted, pointing ahead of us. The balloon was trapped beneath Windhaven’s hull like a butterfly beneath a glass bulb. The brass finial at the top of the harness holding the balloon’s gas bag in place squealed along the underside of the floating city, trying desperately to gain altitude.
I followed the sight line of Cal’s finger along our route and felt panic rise in my chest, unfreezing my body from the shock of finding myself still alive.
The great propeller fan on the rear of Windhaven pulled us closer and closer as it sucked air into its blades, turning the city at a bank so steep that metal screeched and rivets popped and flew like bullets around us. One punctured the silk of the balloon, but we didn’t drop clear of the fan.
“We’re going to get chopped up!” Cal shouted. “We need to lose altitude!”
“And how exactly do you propose we do that?” Dean asked him.
“Steer us out of here, then!” Cal cried as the balloon bounced harder. Conrad twined his fingers in the mesh of the passenger cage. Bethina grabbed me around the shoulders and held me still so that I wouldn’t get thrown around in my fragile state.
Dean snatched the rudder, straining so hard the cords of muscle in his neck stood out like the cables of a suspension bridge.
“It’s too strong,” he panted. “I can’t turn it.” Conrad got up shakily and tried to help him, but even their combined efforts weren’t moving us quickly enough.
I crawled to the front of the passenger cage, curling my fingers in the mesh and using it to pull myself to my knees.
I focused my senses on the fan. It was the largest thing in my mind, a great mechanism of gears and blades, harnessing power from the wind and using it to hold up a device that was never supposed to fly.
My Weird wanted to touch the fan, wanted to connect with it, like reaching into a flame because it burns so brightly you have to feel it against your flesh even though you know it will sear your skin.
I pushed, with all my strength, pushed against the fan, willed it to reverse its direction and allow us to escape Draven.
My head throbbed, heat blossoming across my skin as if my blood were molten in my veins. Then the wind changed direction, blew so hard that it knocked me backward, and I lost my grip on my Weird, falling out of touch with my body and into the dark of unconsciousness.
I came to on a bed of moss that was the delicate blue color of a summer sky. I inhaled its dry, earthy scent and waited for my eyes to focus. There was a bit of dried blood crusted in the corner of my eye, and I swiped at it as I took in my surroundings. We were in a dead forest, gray spindly trees reaching twisted, bare branches into fog. Everything was gray and blue and white, as if we had fallen into a world with all other color leached out.
I rolled onto my other side and caught a more vivid slash of blue: the balloon, deflated. The cage was half sunk in the black muck of a swamp, and nobody was inside.
I sat up, alone for a moment in the drifting grayness, and called out. “Dean? Conrad?” My voice didn’t actually form words, just came out in a croak. What if something had happened? What if I was the only one left? My stomach clenched.
“Miss?” Bethina materialized from the fog, and I collapsed back onto the moss in relief. I wasn’t alone.
“Oh, stones! She’s awake!” Bethina called back into the nothingness. The others came running, and Dean crouched beside me.
“Easy,” he said. “You’ve been out for a while.”
Conrad crouched on my other side and pulled my chin so I was facing him. “Pupils are the same size,” he announced. “The bump on the head is superficial. We can move her.”
“I’ve got it under control,” Dean snapped. “Aoife isn’t going anywhere if she’s not in shape to walk.”
“Excuse me, but you’re not in charge here,” Conrad said. “Nor are you my sister’s keeper. I took care of her for fifteen years, I think I know when she’s fit to walk.”
“You call leaving her all by herself taking care of her?” Dean snorted. “Attacking her, putting a mark on her she can never wash off? Please. Aoife’s better off with me.”
“Listen, Erlkin,” Conrad snarled. “I know exactly what your idea of
“Stop it!” I shouted, and every one of my injuries throbbed, but I bit the inside of my cheek to stop myself from flinching. “You are both,” I enunciated carefully, so there would be no mistake, “behaving like complete idiots.”
I stretched out my hand to Cal. “Can you please help me up? We should get moving before Draven sends out men on the ground to track us.”
“Sure thing,” Cal said quickly, easing between Dean and Conrad and taking my hand. I left them crouched on the moss, glaring at each other. I wasn’t a shiny brass trophy, and I wasn’t in the mood to be batted back and forth in Dean and Conrad’s little contest to see who was the biggest, baddest boy in our group. Right now, Bethina would do a better job of leading us to safety, and she’d scream a lot less too.
There was no path through the fog, just spongy ground punctuated by vernal pools that seeped into my boots whenever I mistakenly splashed down in one. The dead forest was endless, as if a blight crept ahead of us through the fog, washing all life out of the world. This was even eerier than the ancient forest we’d come to when we crossed from Lovecraft. The creeping sensation up my spine told me we shouldn’t be here.
“What happened to this place?” I asked Dean, when he caught up with my limping steps.
“Fire,” he said. “Long time ago, before I was born. Maybe before my mother, too.”
“Big fire,” I said. The fog swirled back and forth, thinning to lace. The dead forest went on as far as the eye could see.
“The Fae set it,” Dean said. “They were looking for insurgents, some of my kind who’d set off an explosion in the silver mines in the Thorn Land. They burned the entire forest to the ground. Killed thousands.”
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. I understood then why Shard had looked at me with such coldness. It didn’t excuse her locking me up and refusing to believe a word I said, but it at least explained it.
Dean shrugged. “Not my world. I left as soon as I was able.”
“Shard and Skip,” I said, “they both call you Nails. Why do you have two names?” Cal had two names, but he was a ghoul—wholly other. Dean was more human by a mile than he was Erlkin, from what I could see, and I wanted to know what his name in the Mists meant. I wanted to know everything about him, not that he’d tell me without a lot of effort on my part. But I was willing to try.
“Nails isn’t my name,” Dean said tightly. He fished in his pockets and pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes, crushed beyond recognition. “Dammit,” he muttered, shoving the twisted cardboard back into his jeans.
“Your mother seems to think it is,” I said. Dean shook his head.
“You have to understand, the Erlkin are a slave race. Way back in the primordial ooze they lived underground, and when the Fae dug down looking for silver, they enslaved the creatures they found. They wouldn’t give us real names, names with meaning and magic, so they called us after scraps—glass and silver, drill bits and rock crushers.”
“Nails,” I offered.
“Yup,” Dean said. “When the first generation of free Erlkin named their children, they gave them slave names as a way to tell the Fae they didn’t own us anymore. It’s tradition now.” His mouth twitched. “But I’m not Erlkin, and I don’t need to be reminded that I was ever anyone’s slave.”
“I noticed your mother doesn’t have any problem with your being a half-breed, unlike her problems with me,”
