The Nightmare Garden

I muttered.

“Oh, she has plenty of problems with it,” Dean said with a laugh drier than the dead trees all around us. “But she knows that I’m her fault, too. Stealing away and meeting a human—tsk, tsk and all that. I know it was a lot easier for her in her position at Windhaven after I lit out for Lovecraft and decided to live with my old man. She got that nice shiny captain’s promotion the minute I left.” Bitterness tinged his voice like unsweetened tea on the tongue.

“You really have a brother?” I asked. Dean had only mentioned him in passing, but I was realizing that in spite of spending nearly all my waking moments with him since we’d met, I still knew virtually nothing about his family or his life before me.

“Half-brother,” Dean said. “One hundred percent pure boring human. Older than me by a good few years—my pops had a wife before Shard bewitched his poor dumb self. The woman ditched him and Kurt—that’s my brother. Kurt was never too fond of me, even though his old lady was long gone. Didn’t blame him except when he and I were slugging it out. I wouldn’t be itching to bond with the bastard child of my father’s new girlfriend if I were him either.”

“And where’s Kurt now?” I prompted, racking my brain to remember what else Dean had told me about his past.

“Hell if I know,” Dean said. “He went MIA fighting the Crimson Guard, ’bout a year before you and I crossed paths.” He sighed, and I could tell from his twitchy gait and fingers that he wanted a cigarette. “Truth is, Aoife, I never really felt like I was part of the family. I was a wayward kid and I wasn’t at home much. But it beat the pants off staying in Windhaven and marching in lockstep like my good little Erlkin relatives.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “About Kurt.”

“It’s all right,” Dean said. “Like I told you, we were never close. Not like you and Conrad.”

“Conrad and I haven’t been that close for a while,” I said quietly. “And we’ve been apart since he ran away a year ago.”

“You’ll get it back,” Dean said. “He looks out for you, and even if he’s a cranky bastard, he cares about you. I can tell by the way he’s giving me the hairy eyeball right now.”

I glanced over my shoulder and saw that Conrad was indeed staring a hole into the back of Dean’s head as we walked. I sighed and dropped back to match my stride to my brother’s.

“Will you quit glaring? You’re embarrassing me.”

“I don’t like your friend, Aoife,” Conrad told me. “Not one bit. He’s too familiar with you.”

“He’s familiar because I want him to be familiar,” I snapped. “Stop acting like you’re our father, Conrad, because you’re not.”

He flinched, and I felt as if I might as well have smacked him across the face. “I know that,” he muttered. “But he’s not here, is he? Nobody knows where he is or if he’s even alive.”

I stayed quiet for few steps, our feet squashing into the bog the only sound besides the faint murmur of Cal and Bethina’s conversation. Conrad was right—we didn’t know. None of the Erlkin would admit to knowing where Archie had gone. And he’d made no attempt to contact us. Not that he could, even if he was in a position to. After the Engine exploded Conrad and I had effectively vanished from the Iron Land without a trace.

No matter how much I wished Archie would appear again and make it right, as he had when I’d been in Draven’s prison, he wasn’t going to, and it was time I accepted that. I bit down hard on my lip to hold back my tears. “We know where Nerissa is,” I said after a time, when I could speak without a break in my voice.

“No,” Conrad said instantly. “Don’t even think of that, Aoife. We can’t go back there.”

“Draven already found us,” I said. “He’ll find us no matter where we go, and I have to get Nerissa out of Lovecraft.” Or what was left of Lovecraft. I imagined a wasteland overrun with ghouls and pockets of vicious survivors barricaded in their homes while black-clad Proctor squads roamed the streets and their clockwork ravens swooped overhead, watching every living thing left in the desolation.

“Why?” Conrad demanded. “She was locked up in a madhouse when everything went sideways. Those places are fortresses. She’s probably safer there than on the run with us anyway. And honestly, Aoife—that woman never did one bit of good for us our entire lives. She’s crazy.”

“She’s not crazy,” I snarled, feeling my teeth draw back over my lips. My anger flared bright and I felt the insane urge to strike out at Conrad. I’d never wanted to actually hit him before, beyond a light smack when we were arguing over something minor. “She’s poisoned by iron, like we were. She’ll be fine if we can get her out of the city.”

“You don’t know that,” Conrad said. “She’s been exposed to iron for years longer than us, Aoife. And she’s full-blood Fae besides. Her mind could be punched full of holes, just like the doctors always said it was.” He stopped and folded his arms, brows drawing together. “Why do you care so much, Aoife? You were always more angry at her than I was for leaving us, making us wards of the city.”

“Because,” I said softly. “I left her there, Conrad. I did this, and when everything went wrong and the city got destroyed I had to leave her.” A sob bubbled out of my chest and I didn’t try to stop it. Crying was better than screaming or collapsing and refusing to go on. “I have to go back and try to fix her,” I whispered. “Fix her and try to fix what I did to Lovecraft. Mend it somehow, the Gates and the Engine and all of it.”

“People aren’t machines, Aoife,” Conrad said softly, and reached for my hand, squeezing all my fingers by wrapping his thumb and forefinger around them like he had when we were very small. “Some, nobody can fix.”

“I have to try,” I whispered. My dreams would never cease, and the weight of my guilt would never be lifted, until I was able to look at what I’d done to Lovecraft with my own eyes, until I had at least tried to get my mother out of the iron city that had turned her into someone my brother and I didn’t recognize.

Conrad sighed and then dropped my hand, shoving his through his unruly black hair, so much like mine.

“All right,” he said at last. “Say I was insane enough to go back to the Iron World—where I can’t even remember my own name once the poison takes hold—risk using the Gates now that they’ve been breached by the Proctors and stone knows what else, travel overland with ghouls on the loose, and go back into the very same city I barely escaped from a year ago—what then? How are we even going to find Nerissa if she’s not still in Christobel Asylum, never mind get her in shape to walk out of there on the kind of rough journey we’ve had? How would we evade the Proctors and Draven?”

I chewed on my lip for a moment. The sting wasn’t worse than the pain through the rest of my body, but Conrad’s questions were. “I don’t know,” I told him. “But I will by the time we get to Lovecraft.”

I filled Dean in on the plan—if you could call it that—while we walked, and to his credit, he reacted better than Conrad had. “I can’t say what I’d do if Shard and I were in the same situation,” he said.

“You are,” I said. “Draven was boarding Windhaven. He’s not inclined to be kind.”

Dean sniffed. “My mother can take care of herself. And a city full of Erlkin is a far cry from some scared, sniveling humans hiding in a basement.”

“I hope so,” I said. “You know I feel terrible. I thought he’d never find me in the Mists.”

“Not your fault,” Dean said shortly. “Draven’s a pit bull. He’ll hold on till he’s dead or somebody else is.”

“He doesn’t want me dead,” I muttered. “He doesn’t want me at all. He just wants bait for my father.”

Dean stopped us at the crest of a hill, behind a half-collapsed stone wall. We had come out of the dead forest and were standing on the outskirts of a ruined village, small white stone cottages topped with rotting thatch, the only thing stirring in the breeze.

“Wait here,” Dean said. I looked down the slope toward where the cottages disappeared into the ever- flowing mist.

“Why? Where are we?”

“The Mist Gate,” Conrad said, nearly making me jump out of my skin. Cal joined us, and his nostrils flared.

“Humans are down there,” he muttered, out of Bethina’s hearing.

“Draven’s, likely,” Dean said. “He’ll have guards to make sure his bread crumbs don’t dry up and blow away.”

“How did he even come through?” Conrad said. “Humans can’t pass into the Mists, not even members of the Brotherhood. Not without help.” He shifted, obviously remembering the “help” the Erlkin slipstreamers had given him, crossing him over like so much contraband.

“He might have it,” I said