The Nightmare Garden

“I’m not sure,” I said, tentatively placing my hand against the iron marker of the Gate. My Weird responded immediately, opening a vast void in my head, through which I could feel the mechanism of the Erlkin’s Gate—a machine, here, rather than a spell like the Fae’s stone circle—churning and wide open. “Holy …” I jerked my hand away. The skin was hot and pink, and I felt the telltale dribble of blood down my upper lip. “Darn it,” I said, swiping at it.

Dean handed me his bandanna. “So,” he said carefully, “not good?”

“It’s a machine,” I said. “So that’s … better, I guess, than Fae magic. But it’s open.”

One of Dean’s dark eyebrows arched above his silver eye. “Right now?”

“Wide open.” I sniffed and tasted metal in the back of my throat. My Weird was far more of a pain than a gift most of the time. And how could the Gate be open, with no one controlling it?

Because you didn’t just open the Gates to Thorn, my thoughts whispered. You broke something, some fundamental backbone, and now it’s just a matter of time until another Storm.

No. I couldn’t let my thoughts spin off track. It was just the Weird, or residual echoes from being on Windhaven and close to so much iron. That was all. I hadn’t kick-started a disaster of apocalyptic proportions.

Now if I could just believe that.

“Well, hell,” Dean said. “I’m taking the leap, then. We need to move—those two are going to wake up and Draven’s going to come back sooner or later.” He braced himself to run at the Gate. “I’ll go first, make sure it’s safe.”

“No!” I cried. Dean’s impetuous lack of forethought was one of the things that had appealed to me when we’d met, but now he was just acting insane, and it wasn’t helping anything.

I grabbed for his arm, but his leather jacket slipped between my fingers as he took a run at the Gate. “We don’t know what’s on the other side!” I shouted, frantic. Dean couldn’t get hurt. Couldn’t leave me alone. I couldn’t let him put himself at risk.

A split second later, Dean smacked into the metal lattice with a loud clang.

“Shit!” he bellowed, sitting down hard on the spongy ground, clutching his nose, which leaked a velvety trickle of blood down his square chin.

“Dean!” I cried. I ran to him and crouched at his side, using the tail of my shirt to stanch the bleeding.

“You said it was open,” he groaned.

“It was.” I fluttered my hands helplessly, wishing more than anything that I could stop his pain, but there was nothing I could really do.

“Man, that smarts,” Dean said, muffled against my shirt. He closed his hands over mine. “It’s okay, princess. Not your fault. I’ll be okay.”

I reached out from where I crouched and passed the tips of my fingers over the cold, mist-kissed iron of the Gate. It was dead now—nothing pricked my Weird as working. As quickly as it had opened, it had shut again. Which lent even more credence to my theory that something was deeply wrong.

Later, I could puzzle it out, worry and fret over what I’d done, but for now, Conrad’s statement remained true—we had to go before Draven found us here.

I focused my attention fully back on the Gate. I opened my mind, just as I had on Windhaven, not able to control a slight wince at the anticipation of skull-shattering pain.

I felt the machinery of the Erlkin Gate respond to my Weird, the aether blazing across my mind. I cracked one eye and saw the lattice begin to move. The arms were mechanical, and they moved like spider legs, crimping and rearranging themselves into new formations as gears within the Gate begin to grind. For a moment I felt the Gate slipping open again, responding to the blood of a Gateminder as it should, and then all at once it was too hot, too bright, and I couldn’t feel anything except furnace-warm air. I was burning alive, turning to ash, and I think I screamed before the world fell away.

The room had turned from sunset to night, the skies replete with a million stars. On one horizon, a faint blue line of dawn flared, while above my head triple moons, in phases from swollen full to the hunter’s horns, turned and waxed and waned in time.

“It’s not just gears and aether,” said the figure standing before me in a black cloak. “It’s those things, but it’s more. It’s the same thing that puts uncanny power in your blood, and it’s what allowed the Gates to come to exist in the first place.” He turned to watch the moons, cloak swirling. “And it can’t be harnessed and controlled. It’s a wild force, Aoife. It must be bargained with.”

I looked at the spinning clockwork palace and voiced the thought echoing in my head. “Am I dead?”

“Dead?” the figure snorted. “Knocked out, perhaps. Far from the Deadlands as you are from anywhere else, in this place.”

“Then why are we talking?” I said. “I haven’t been exposed to enough iron to trigger a madness dream.”

The figure smiled at me, the darkness of its face shifting. “You don’t know, Aoife?”

“No,” I said frankly. “I have no idea who you are or where we are.” This time, it felt even more real, more present, than when I’d first dreamed of the place, and it made me want to scream. I couldn’t be mad. I’d been doing so well, trying to hold on until Conrad and I found a more certain cure than simply hiding in the woods.

The sunrise beyond the dome was growing in intensity, but it wasn’t the sun of the Iron Land—it was green and flared around the edges with sunspots. It was a dying sun, looking down on a dying universe.

Above, the black tentacles lashed and writhed in the green light, and the figure turned back toward the great gears that churned before us.

“You’re dreaming, Aoife,” he said. “Not seeing the product of iron poisoning, but really dreaming. And it’s time for you to wake up.”

“Fantastic,” I mumbled. “Not only do I visit this place every time I close my eyes, I have to leave it and go back to the real world.”

“You don’t give your world enough credit,” said the figure. “I’ve seen them all. Yours is beautiful.”

“It’s awful,” I said. “And I made it that way.”

“No, Aoife,” said the dream figure. “What you did to the Engine was not as terrible a thing as you think. The worlds were never meant to be gated. At least, not your worlds. The Fae and the Iron … they need one another.”

The figure turned away from me again. “Now it really is time for you to go.” He turned the great gear, and I saw the green sun begin to spin out of its orbit, and the tentacles to recede with it.

“By the way,” said the dream figure. “Don’t try to use your handy little magic trick on a Gate in the Mists. The Erlkin are much better at keeping your kind out than the Fae.”

He moved the gears again, and I watched as the green sun began to go nova, burning out in a flash so bright that it seared my vision.

I came back to the world with a gasp, and the worst spike of pain in my head that I’d ever endured, save the one when I touched the Lovecraft Engine with my Weird. “Did I faint?” I demanded of Cal, the first face I saw leaning over me with an anxious expression. It was embarrassing, but better than blacking out from a madness- induced hallucination by miles.

“You just kind of keeled over,” he said, and upon seeing my mortified expression hastened to add, “You were only out for a few minutes.”

“You fell like somebody cut your strings,” Dean said, frowning. The bloody mark across the bridge of his nose made him look savage, but his eyes were filled with pure worry. He put his hands under my shoulders and helped me sit up. Touching Dean calmed the throbbing in my skull a bit, until Conrad cleared his throat.

“You were mumbling,” he said, reaching out his hand for me and then pulling it back like touching me might pass the fainting spell. “Your eyes were twitching in their sockets too.” He swallowed. “I’ve never seen you do that. Are you okay, Aoife?”

“Not really,” I said. I managed to stand up by myself, so that was something. When your friends and brother