could disappear at any moment, every small thing a girl like me could do for herself was monumentally important.
“I really don’t like this place,” Bethina piped up. “I feel like something is watching us.”
I had to agree with her. This ghost-colored bit of the Mists was eerie, even by the standards of the things I’d seen recently, and my skin crawled as the drifting moisture kissed it.
“Don’t worry, Bethina,” Dean told her. “Nothing’s going to jump out and bite you.” He patted me on the shoulder. “Aoife will get us out of here.”
I didn’t say that with my spinning head, I wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry, but I grasped Dean’s hand in return. He was something solid to cling to, and I was so glad he was there.
Conrad’s lips compressed in a straight line. “If this is what’s going to happen, I’m not letting her touch the Gate again.” He fished in his jacket pocket, pulled out a dirty kerchief and handed it to me. “Clean yourself up,” he muttered to me, pressing the cloth into my hands. “Don’t like to see you bleeding.”
I swiped at my face and then shoved the kerchief into my own pocket.
“Thanks,” I whispered to Conrad. He shrugged—a gesture of kindness I thought we’d forgotten how to exchange. I felt a little less strained in that moment.
Planting my feet carefully until my balance came back, I returned to the Gate, but this time I examined the plinth itself. The Erlkin were engineers, I was an engineer. Surely I could make their machine work without my Weird. I still had a brain, at least until I fetched up against that much iron again. The plinth, not iron itself but some kind of smooth black stone, revealed a hinged door in the side, which opened into a small space studded with dials and gauges.
The symbols stamped next to each were similar to what I’d seen in Windhaven, and I called Dean over to translate. “There’ve got to be instructions for this thing.”
Dean whistled. “There’s just markings for places like the black forests, the dry wastes—not that I know why anyone would want to head there—and there’s one marked
“The Gates are made of magic,” Conrad said. “This is just their physical manifestation. The rift between here and the Iron Land is still there.”
I gave Conrad a look with a raised eyebrow, a private look that said
Conrad coughed and looked away. “I mean, according to what I read at our father’s house.”
“Right, of course,” I said quickly, turning the dial Dean had pointed out to us.
The next dial asked for directionality in pictograms, incoming or outgoing, and I turned it. All that remained was to complete the circuit, but they were all fried.
Reflexively, I put my hand against the panel and felt a flutter of life from my Weird. The figure’s words came to me, but from far away. This could be our only chance to get out of here. I put both hands against the panel and fervently hoped this wouldn’t be the last thing I ever did.
“Here goes nothing,” I murmured so that only Dean could hear. Best case, the Gate worked for me and we got to go home. Worst case, I got electrocuted.
I wasn’t nearly as strong and capable as Dean and Bethina and Cal seemed to think I was, but I could do this. I could be brave, like they needed me to be.
I grabbed the lever with my hand, and my Weird with my mind, and flipped the metal circuit to the
For a moment, there was nothing, just the sweet ache of the Weird coursing through me and into the circuit board. I didn’t try to push forward into the mechanism of the Gate, but I felt the void drop away again as the rift within the mechanism opened.
I felt a rumble under my hands and feet and heard the subtle swoop of aether rearranging itself inside the vacuum tube, and then I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prickle and stand up. I jerked my hand away from the lever and stepped away from the Gate. The row of gauges below the dials vibrated to life, needles climbing toward maximum.
Above us, I saw a bright flash of lightning and heard a crack of thunder nearly directly above my head. The ionized air all around made my skin crawl, and my Weird ran frantic circles in my mind as it sensed the wondrous, terrible machine that controlled the incalculable power of the world rift.
The lightning flashbulbed again, brighter than anything, leaving whorls on my vision, black clouds gathering over us like ghost crows, swooping down and making my head ring with a thunderclap so loud my teeth shook.
I gasped, drawing back from the Gate, which had become a lightning rod, making sure the others were clear as well. Nature and magic were beyond anyone’s control, even someone with a Weird. I didn’t feel ashamed of being wary of them.
The third flash snaked a bolt of electricity from the boiling clouds and hit the Gate, punctuated by a thunderclap so loud it deafened me instantly. Dean grabbed his ears and Bethina let out a scream, though I couldn’t hear it, could only see the panicked pink O of her lips.
Before me, in the center of the Gate’s iron arch, stood the same shimmering mirror that I’d seen when Conrad had transported us into the Mists, a wavering image of the Iron Land on the other side. It flickered, spiderweb cracks running across the glassine surface and then retreating. I could tell that the Gate still wasn’t stable, but it was open, and that was all that mattered.
I’d kept us safe from Draven. I’d gotten us home.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” Dean shouted at the others. “Go!”
One by one, they hurried through the flickering hole in reality, Conrad bringing up the rear, until only Dean and I remained.
“Now or never, princess,” he told me. I looked back at the Mists, the ruined village, and the swirling white fog that hid Draven and his men, growing closer by the second.
“I hope this is the right thing to do.” I hadn’t meant to say anything, just step through the Gate, but it came out. I felt if it hadn’t, I might have exploded.
Dean looked into my eyes. “I don’t know that. But I trust you, princess. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders and you haven’t steered me wrong yet.”
I reached out and put my hand on one of his slightly rough, stubble-covered cheeks. I pressed my lips to the other, and tasted the warmth and salt of his skin. “Thanks, Dean.”
He flashed me half a grin and skimmed his thumb across my lips. “Thank me when we’ve got your mother with us and we’re out of Lovecraft for good.” Motioning to the Gate, which had grown increasingly fractured and jumpy, he dropped his hand. “Go on, now. I’m right behind you.”
I touched the opening of the Gate with my fingers first. It was an absence of feeling in the shimmering space the aether had created. Holding my breath, and still thinking I could possibly be making the worst mistake I ever made, I stepped through, back along the line of travel to the last location, the one the Proctors had used. Back to Lovecraft, and whatever awaited me.
6
The Ruins of Lovecraft
TRAVELING BY GATE was unpleasant, a fact that I had forgotten in the whirl of more pressing problems since Conrad and I had escaped Graystone.
I was reminded violently as I passed into the Gate and felt as if I’d been jerked by a string implanted in the center of my chest, down and sideways, spinning end over end, out of control. I caught flashes of other places, other skies not my own, mountains of a shape that no horizon of the Iron Land bore.
It was like seeing a tiny slice of the world the shadow figure from my not-dreams occupied, spinning by at a speed a human eye couldn’t hope to process.
I wished I knew how the Gates truly worked, how they folded in all the worlds between Mists and Iron and shot my matter across incalculable distances to reassemble it on the other end. But the only ones who knew that were the Brotherhood, and the Fae, and neither one was a group I relished asking.
