The Nightmare Garden

He jerked his thumb down the hill. “So what do we do about them?”

Cal’s tongue flicked out. “Leave that to me.”

“Cal, no,” I hissed, glancing behind me at Bethina. “What about her?”

“Keep her busy,” Cal said, shrugging. “We need to get out of here, and this is the quickest way.”

“Cal,” I snapped. “Don’t be ridiculous.” I turned and pointed at Conrad. “You and I.” We were the only ones besides Cal who had the ability to defend ourselves, even if my Weird was unreliable and my fighting skills nonexistent. At least I didn’t have to turn into a long-clawed, fanged monster to tap into my particular talent. I didn’t relish confronting the Proctors again, but I had to think of the group, not just myself.

“Me?” Conrad squawked, but I grabbed his arm and tugged him along, keeping to the shadows of the ruined cottages.

We crept down the hill, and before long I could hear low conversation in human voices.

“You better at least have a plan,” Conrad hissed. “These guys will have guns.”

I stopped in the archway of what had once been a barn. Peering around the corner, I could just make out two shapes standing in the fog.

I’d seen the hexenrings the Fae used to travel between the Iron World and their own, circles of simple stones or mushrooms wreathed with enchantments that could bend space and time, but the Erlkin’s Gates were a mystery to me. I’d watched Conrad use them only once, when he’d helped us escape from the ruins of the Iron World. Not even him, really—the slipstreamers had opened the way.

After I’d broken the Gates … and presumably allowed Draven to manipulate them somehow, without Erlkin aid.

That bothered me. If the Mists were open, what was to stop a free-for-all, beings crossing every Gate between every land? The fact that we’d seen only Draven so far in the Mists made me think there was something larger going on, possibly worse, but I hoped with everything I had that what I’d done to the Gates to Thorn hadn’t rippled to the rest of the lands.

That would be worse than one destroyed city. That would be worse than anything.

Now is not the time, Aoife. I steadied my breathing, and with it, my racing thoughts.

Two Proctors stood beyond the last of the ruins, in front of a tumbledown iron structure that was hard to make out distinctly through the mist.

I crouched down and hefted one of the stones that had fallen from the cottage wall.

“Whistle,” I told Conrad. He raised an eyebrow.

“Whistle? Are you cracked?”

“Will you just trust me for once?” I hissed. I might not have had a grand and daring plan for sneaking into Lovecraft, but I could at least handle a couple of Proctors. All students in Lovecraft learned how to get around guidelines and curfew, and uniformed Proctors weren’t usually the best and brightest of the crop anyway.

Conrad’s face was marked deeply with skepticism, but he put his fingers in his mouth and let out a piercing whistle.

Instantly the Proctors snapped alert, and the closer one started toward us. “Hey!” his partner shouted. “Draven said we were supposed to stand on this spot!”

“That could be him now,” the other insisted.

“No,” the first said. “He told us to stay put.”

“You really want to be the one who kept him waiting?” said the first Proctor. “You’ve seen how he gets. Especially since he got to be a bigwig in the Bureau.”

The other sighed, but then jerked his head in assent. “Make it fast, will ya? This place is the worst. Creepy as all hell.”

“Hello?” the first Proctor shouted. “Any virals lurking, show yourselves!”

I blinked, momentarily surprised that the Proctors still believed in the necrovirus. But how could they not? I wondered what excuse Draven had come up with to bring them all here, to a place that wasn’t supposed to exist and could get you burned for heresy for suggesting that it did.

The Proctor passed the stone wall, so close I could have reached out and plucked at the sleeve of his black uniform. Once he’d passed out of sight of his friend, I stepped out from cover behind him and swung the rock swiftly and surely, connecting with the back of his skull.

Conrad gaped at me, then at the sprawled Proctor on the ground, who lay unmoving. “Well?” I said to Conrad, hefting the rock. “Whistle again.”

“Stone and sun, Aoife,” Conrad muttered. “You’re not the sister I left behind, that’s for sure.”

“You’re not the brother who left, Conrad,” I retorted. That brother wouldn’t have looked at me like I was crazy for doing what was necessary, and it made me sad. But that was for another time, when we weren’t surrounded by Proctors and who knew what other dangers. “It’s a natural progression, as far as I’m concerned.”

Conrad rolled his eyes at me as if I were unbearably childish, but he stuck his fingers back in his mouth. The second Proctor fell in much the same way as the first.

Once Cal and Dean had helped Conrad tie the Proctors up, using their own belts and some rope in Cal’s backpack, we approached the Gate.

“All right,” Dean rubbed his hands together. “Conrad, get this bad boy up and running, and get us far away from Draven and his jackbooted blackbirds.”

“Me?” Conrad pointed at Dean. “You’re the Erlkin, you get us out of here.”

“Brother, I know less than nothing about those contraptions,” Dean said. “I’ve lived most of my life in the Iron Land, just like you. ’Sides, you need a technician or a slipstreamer to work the Gates, if you don’t want just anything getting in.”

“Yeah, you’re the one who’s been going back and forth like he knows a magic trick, according to Bethina and Aoife,” Cal piped up. “How’d you do it, Conrad?”

“I didn’t, all right!” Conrad answered, clearly irritated. “I paid Erlkin to take me back and forth. Just like that square deal Skip said.” He kicked a clump of muddy earth with his shoe. “I don’t know how to work the Gates. Is that what you want me to say? It’s the one thing I’m supposed to do as a Gateminder, besides have a Weird, and I can’t. I tried, I can’t, and I never could. And now that the Gates are so screwed up even people like us can’t always use them, I’ll never get the chance to try again. You happy now?”

“Damn, man,” Dean said after a moment. “You don’t have to put your dukes up. We were just asking a question.”

“Yeah,” Cal said. “I didn’t know. And it doesn’t matter,” he added quickly. “You just haven’t gotten the hang of it yet.”

I hadn’t known either, and I looked at Conrad with a new light shining on him, surprised that he’d admitted to all of us he wasn’t perfect. I’d assumed Conrad had found his Weird, and more importantly, learned how to manipulate the Gates, long before he’d sent me the letter that started me looking for him. I had no way of knowing he’d found someone to smuggle him. That he’d never touched his Weird.

That it was all up to me.

While Conrad sighed and paced away from the group, I turned in the opposite direction and went to examine the Gate. Conrad needed his space when he got in moods like this. He always had. Bethina looked for a moment like she was going to try to speak to him, but Cal laid a hand on her arm and shook his head.

Gates were, from what little I’d gleaned from the Fae, tears in the fabric between the Lands. Call it physics, or magic, or heresy, barriers kept humans, Fae, Erlkin and the older, darker things apart. Erected after the great Storm, when magic ran unbidden through the Iron Land and nearly caused a catastrophe on a global scale, the Gates had been a human idea first, but the Fae had taken them, twisted them. The Erlkin’s physical markers for their Gates were a far cry from the stone circles of the Fae and the simple thin spaces in the fabric of the Iron Land that a Gateminder felt as a tingle down the spine. This Gate was an iron structure, a plinth that tapered to a point at the top. A network of iron lattice filled the center, and in it a small tube of aether glittered, held at either end by spindly iron arms. That much aether could flatten the land for half a mile if it made contact with the air. I drew back my hand from the iron. I had better not screw this up.

“What do you think?” Dean asked at my shoulder. I jumped and let out a small noise.

“Sorry,” he said. “But can you get us out of here?”